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The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Page 72

by Bernard Bailyn


  26. Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995), 39–58, 322–27; Jameson, ed., Narratives, 374–77; Maika, “Leadership in Manhattan’s Merchant Community,” Working Paper, Atlantic History Seminar (Harvard University, 2002), 1–5. On denization, oaths to English sovereignty, and the transfer of allegiance as “more of a transition point … than a distinct end or beginning” for the leading merchants, see Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 132–35, 147, 155, 158, 348–89; Maika, “Leadership,” 16–17, 31. On figures of shipping from the Netherlands to New Netherland, see table 4.5 in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven, eds., Riches From Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden, 2003), 94.

  27. Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 158; Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 177–206.

  28. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., The Register of New Netherland, 1626–1674 (Albany, N.Y., 1865), 176; Linda B. Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from Dutch to English Law, 1643–1727 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), 33–43; Jean Zimmerman, The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty (Orlando, Fla., 2006), prologue, chaps. 1–11. Loockermans’s marital connections formed a remarkably tight kinship network. He married a niece of Gillis Verbrugge, who was a sister-in-law of Jacob van Couwenhoven. His sister married Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, his daughter married Stuyvesant’s nephew, and his stepdaughter married Leisler. Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 160.

  29. Claudia Schnurmann, “Representative Atlantic Entrepreneur: Jacob Leisler, 1640–1691,” in Postma and Enthoven, eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce, 267–73, 278; Maika, “Leadership,” 16–17, 31; David W. Voorhees, “The ‘Fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler,” WMQ, 51 (1994), 452–57.

  30. Maika, “Leadership,” 7–9, 14; Maika, “Securing the Burgher Right in New Amsterdam…,” in Goodfriend, Revisiting New Netherland, 108–16.

  31. Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce, 1585–1817,” in Postma and Enthoven, eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce, 445.

  32. Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 258; Jameson, ed., Narratives, 172ff. For Van der Donck’s sympathetic account, see his Description, passim; for De Vries’s, see the journal of his travels, in Jameson, ed., Narratives, 216ff., in Raesly, New Netherland, 174, and in Parr, De Vries, passim.

  33. Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), 171–86. As an illustration of the “intercultural alliances” that are the subject of her book, Van Zandt, developing a suggestion of Trelease (Indian Affairs, 139), argues that New Sweden, on the upper Delaware River, had replaced Claiborne’s Kent Island settlement on Chesapeake Bay as the Susquehannocks’ main trading outlet with the Europeans; that the weak Swedish settlement had become a client colony of the powerful Susquehannocks; and that in a swirl of rumors about the impending Dutch attack, the Swedes or their affiliates, deliberately or not, may have instigated the Susquehannocks’ assault on Manhattan as a diversion or in reprisal, the Susquehannocks in any case resenting the Dutch contacts with the Iroquois. The ubiquitous Isaac Allerton, she explains, in his complex intercolonial maneuvering, found himself a special target of the Indians’ attack on the town.

  34. Merwick, Shame and Sorrow, 185–92, 219–22, 225–28; Trelease, Indian Affairs, 138–48; Raesly, New Netherland, 98. For the widely shared view of Van Tienhoven’s culpability and a higher estimate of the numbers of colonists killed in the Indians’ revenge, see Capt. Nicasius de Sille’s account, quoted ibid., 299.

  35. Merwick, Shame and Sorrow, 231, 232–34, 237; Docs. Rel., XIII, 84; Trelease, Indian Affairs, 150.

  36. Merwick, Shame and Sorrow, 241ff.; Trelease, Indian Affairs, 160ff.; Raesly, New Netherland, 224–25; Edward T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York (Albany, N.Y., 1901–16), I, 534–35, 546.

  37. Trelease, Indian Affairs, 163, 165, 168; Docs. Rel., XIII, 339; Merwick, Shame and Sorrow, 249–50; RB MSS, 442; O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History, III, 70–71.

  CHAPTER 10

  Swedes, Finns, and the Passion of Pieter Plockhoy

  1. Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore, Md., 1989).

  2. Michael Roberts, ed., Sweden’s Age of Greatness, 1632–1718 (New York, 1973), 60, 104, 22, 267, 106–7, chap. 2; Margareta Revera, “The Making of a Civilized Nation…,” in Carol E. Hoffecker et al., eds, New Sweden in America (Newark, Del., c. 1995), 30; Gunlög Fur, Colonialism in the Margins: Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland (Leiden, 2006), chap. 1; on Sweden’s interactions with its own frontier peoples, chap. 2.

  3. Stellan Dahlgren and Hans Norman, The Rise and Fall of New Sweden … Risingh’s Journal, 1654–1655… (Uppsala, 1988), 47. The book includes the text, in Swedish and English, of Risingh’s Journal, 130ff., which will be cited as such hereafter.

  4. Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 1638–1664 (Philadelphia, 1911), I, 53–55, 68, and chap. 8 generally.

  5. C. A. Weslager, Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, 1609–1664 (Philadelphia, 1961), 84ff.; Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland, 1623–1639 (Baltimore, Md., 1969), 161–64; Michael Roberts, From Oxenstierna to Charles XII (Cambridge, England, 1991), 12; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 675–76, 695–96.

  6. Ibid., I, 103–7.

  7. Sten Carlsson, “The New Sweden Colonists, 1638–1656: Their Geographical and Social Background,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 173. For a listing of the voyages, based on Johnson’s Swedish Settlements, see Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 126.

  8. Ibid., 59–61; Carlsson, “Colonists,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 173.

  9. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 16, 125–26, 149–50, 239, 243; II, 699.

  10. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 62; Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 61; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, chaps. 18, 25, 26.

  11. Ibid., I, 151–54; Peter S. Craig, 1671 Census of the Delaware (Philadelphia, 1999), 18–19; Carlsson, “Colonists,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 174, 176, 180. Many of the place names assigned to settlements on the Delaware reflect specific places of the settlers’ origins. Thus Fort Tarne (Torne), erected after the abandonment of the blockhouse at Vasa (which had been named after Vasa in northern Finland), was named after Tarne at the northern point of the Bay of Bothnia: Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 328; II, 715.

  12. Ibid., I, 197, 202–3, 198.

  13. Amandus Johnson, trans. and ed., The Instruction for Johan Printz (Philadelphia, 1930), 47; Docs. Rel., XII, ix; Winthrop, Journal, 480.

  14. Instruction for Printz, 120, 3–15.

  15. Richard Waldron, “New Sweden: An Interpretation,” in Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland (Leiden, 2005), 80; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 700–10; Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 72; Instruction for Printz, 116–18.

  16. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 378–79.

  17. On Printz’s request for artisans of all kinds, as well as for bricks and other supplies, echoed by his son-in-law Johan Papegoja, the vice-governor (“there is a great cry for people, for here are few”), ibid., I, 321. The colony’s population as of Mar. 1, 1648, is enumerated ibid., II, 710–16.

  18. Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Delaware Papers (Dutch Period)…1648–1664 (New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, XVIII–XIX) (Baltimore, Md., 1981), 1–2, 7 [hereafter: Gehring, Delaware Papers]; Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 65, 69, 70; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 328.

  19. Ibid., I, 435–36, 445, 447, 448.

  20. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 73, 157.

  21. Ibid., 10; Instructions for Printz, 41.

  22. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 462–63, 243; II, 703, 714, 69;
Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 185, 78, 79. On Papegoja’s background in Västergötland and his tormented marriage with the cantankerous, “tyrannical and ill-disposed” Armegot, see Evert A. Larsson, “The Papegojas of Old and New Sweden,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 39 (1988), 64–69. Papegoja left the colony and his wife in 1656, joined the Swedish army, and retired to his native Västergötland. But he could not escape Armegot, who joined him in Sweden in 1662. He sued unsuccessfully for divorce, while Armegot devoted herself to regaining her properties on the Delaware, in which, after many years and a period back in America, she succeeded. She outlived Papegoja by twenty-eight years. For a romantic view of Armegot, including the claim that she was a champion of women’s rights, but with useful quotations from the legal documents, see Esther C. Meixner, The Governor’s Daughter (Chester, Pa., 1965).

  23. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 33, 14–15, 28–29, 64ff., 285–87; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 693–94.

  24. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 85, 92, 161, 157; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 514.

  25. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 151, 155, 87–90.

  26. Ibid., 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 181; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 515–19.

  27. Ibid., II, 560, 520–21; Thomas Campanius Holm, A Short Description of the Province of New Sweden…[1759] (Peter S. Du Ponceau, trans., Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, III [1834]), 113–15; Fur, Colonialism, 189–90, 199–200; Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 107; E. P. Richardson, “Peter Martensson Lindström … and the Delaware Indians,” American Art Journal, 12 (1980), 62. On Campanius and his catechism, see articles by Trygve Skarsten and Isak Collijn in Lutheran Quarterly, 2 (1988), 47–87, 89–98.

  28. Risingh’s Journal, 215–23, 201, and Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 511–13.

  29. Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 113; Risingh’s Journal, 253; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 604–7; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 44.

  30. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 634, 667; John H. Wuorinen, The Finns on the Delaware, 1638–1655 (New York, 1938), 79–80; Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 55, 57. For the disposition of the Mercurius, see Docs. Rel., XII, 120ff.

  31. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 57, 55; A. R. Dunlap and E. J. Moyne, “The Finnish Language on the Delaware,” American Speech, 27 (1952), 85.

  32. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 50, 40; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 528; Per Martin Tvengsberg, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation…,” New Jersey Folklife, 16 (1991), 16; M. Soininen, “Burn-beating as the Technical Basis of Colonization in Finland in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, 7 (1959), 150–66. Soininen describes several forms of burn-beating besides the common huuhta method summarized here.

  33. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 677–78; Fur, Colonialism, 38; Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 43, 46–47, 51–53.

  34. Ibid., 57–58; Fur, Colonialism, 94–95; Wuorinen, Finns, 16–19.

  35. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 58, map on 54, 229; Peter Lindeström, Geographia Americae… (Amandus Johnson, trans. and ed., Philadelphia, 1925), 173; Dunlop and Moyne, “Finnish Language,” 81–83; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 547; Dahlgren and Norman, New Sweden, 221.

  36. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 72, 73; Docs. Rel., XII, 425–26; Gehring, Delaware Papers, 319–20, 335; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 151; II, 705, 711. For a list of the Long Finn’s confederates and the fines imposed, see Charles T. Gehring, ed., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volumes XX–XXI (Delaware Papers, English Period … 1664–1682) (Baltimore, Md., 1977), 7–10. For an exhaustive account of the incipient rebellion of 1669 and also the events of 1675 and 1680, see Evan Haefeli, “The Revolt of the Long Swede: Transatlantic Hopes and Fears on the Delaware, 1669,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130 (2006), 137–80; Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province … 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), 74.

  37. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 71; Israel Acrelius, Description of the Former and Present Condition of the Swedish Churches, in What Was Called New Sweden…[Stockholm, 1759] (William M. Reynolds, trans., Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, XI [1874]), 310.

  38. Jordan and Kaups, Backwoods Frontier, 214, 88–92; Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 527–28, 533–35, 541; Fur, Colonialism, 201, 205ff., 196–97, and chap. 6 generally; Lorraine E. Williams, “Indians and Europeans in the Delaware Valley, 1620–1655,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 118–19.

  39. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 345, 348–49, 346–47, 351–52, 358; Patricia I. Cooper, “The Log Cabin…,” Pennsylvania Folklife, 43 (1993–94), 77–79; C. A. Weslager, “Log Structures in New Sweden…,” Delaware History, 5 (1952), 87; Tvengsberg, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation,” 17.

  40. Johnson, Swedish Settlements, II, 537ff.; I, 348, 358; Weslager, “Log Structures,” 84, 90–91; Cooper, “Log Cabin,” 78.

  41. Revera, “Making of a Civilized Nation,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 37; Carlsson, “Colonists,” ibid., 180 (cf. Hans Norman, “The New Sweden Colony and … Swedish and Finnish Ethnicity,” ibid., 189–90). The population figures are only approximate throughout since the sources differ and almost all figures they cite are estimates.

  42. E. B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland… (New York, 1848), II, 324, 326; Docs. Rel., XII, 233, 271; Charles T. Gehring, “Hodie Mihi, Cras Tibi: Swedish-Dutch Relations in the Delaware Valley,” in Hoffecker, ed., New Sweden, 81; Carlsson, “Colonists,” ibid., 180; Norman, “Ethnicity,” ibid., 194. On the Dutch struggle to get the Swedes and Finns to resettle, see Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 191–95, 197, 201.

  43. C. A. Weslager, “The City of Amsterdam’s Colony on the Delaware, 1656–1664…,” Delaware History, 20 (1982), 5–7; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 327–33.

  44. Weslager, “Amsterdam’s Colony,” 8–10; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 334, 336; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 97–98; Docs. Rel., XII, 163; Simon Hart, “The City-Colony of New Amsterdam…,” de Halve Maen, 39 (1965), 13 col. B.

  45. Weslager, “Amsterdam’s Colony,” 5, 11 and n34; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 337, 375, 374; Docs. Rel., XII, 231, 225, 227; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 130, 138; Hart, “New Amstel,” 8 col. A, 13 col. B. The complex character of the colony’s population is well illustrated by the geographical origins of six of the deserting soldiers: one from Stockholm, one from Jutland (Denmark), one from Winseren (Sweden), one from Antwerp, and two from the Netherlands (Utrecht and Amersfort).

  46. Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 174, 86; Docs. Rel., XII, 277, 228–229, 231, 236–37, 293, 277, 249; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 377 (for a different translation: Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 167), 380, 375; Weslager, “Amsterdam’s Colony,” 13; C. A. Weslager, The English on the Delaware, 1610–1682 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1967), chap. 11.

  47. Ibid., 163; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 214, 231; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 388.

  48. Ibid., 459, 464–65; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 188, 187, 237, 238, 244, 279, 276; Weslager, “Amsterdam’s Colony,” 12, 14.

  49. Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 274, 279, 316, 321, 309, 311, 341; O’Callaghan, New Netherland, II, 465.

  50. Weslager, “Amsterdam’s Colony,” 2, 4, 14, 12, 17, 20; Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 327; Hart, “New Amstel,” 8 col. A, 7 col. B; Docs. Rel., II, 211.

  51. Gehring, Delaware Papers, I, 321, 338, 327; Docs. Rel., II, 212, 213, 210; XII, 272.

  52. Leland Harder, “Plockhoy and His Settlement at Zwaanendael, 1663,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, 23 (1949), 188; Leland Harder and Marvin Harder, Plockhoy From Zurik-zee (Newton, Kan., 1952), 81–82. The Harders’ book contains the texts of Plockhoy’s chief writings, the two English pamphlets of 1659—The Way to the Peace … of These Nations…and A Way Propounded…—plus a translation of his Kort en Klaer Ontwerp [Brief and Concise Plan]…and the 117 articles of association in the Kort Verhael [Brief Account]…, both of 1662.

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sp; 53. Harder, Plockhoy, 16, 83, 17; Ellis L. Raesly, Portrait of New Netherland (New York, 1945), 290.

  54. Harder, Plockhoy, 108, 85; H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (New York, 1968), 251.

  55. Harder, Plockhoy, 25, 31, 109–11, 114, 27, 29. For Plockhoy’s remarkably vigorous and clear defense of freedom of religion, see especially his letter to Cromwell, which he reprinted in his Way to the Peace: Harder, Plockhoy, 113–20.

  56. Ibid., 31–32.

  57. Ibid., 103, 32, 34, 36, 37.

  58. Ibid., 48; Raesly, New Netherland, 281ff. The texts of Steendam’s poems are in Henry C. Murphy, trans., An Anthology of New Netherland… (New York, 1865), [37]–75.

  59. Craig, 1671 Census, 80–81; Harder, Plockhoy, 52–55, 57, 189, 191 (quotations from articles 1, 15, 104).

  60. Ibid., 105, 56; quotations from articles 112, 78–82.

  61. Ibid., 51, 58–59, 86, 90.

  62. Ibid., 174ff., quotation at 185.

  63. Docs. Rel., II, 176; XII, 429; III, 346; Harder, “Plockhoy … at Zwaanendael,” 197n38, emphasis added.

  64. Ibid., 188; Craig, 1671 Census, 74–77.

  65. Plockhoy’s ideas were adopted by the Quakers later in the century and through them transmitted to Robert Owen, whose utopian social programs of the early nineteenth century they profoundly influenced. They were thereafter incorporated into Marx’s labor theory of value and cited at length by the Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein. He devoted a chapter of his 1895 Cromwell and Communism (H. J. Stenning, trans., London, 1930) to “Plockboy” [sic], finding in the Dutchman’s A Way Propounded a clear anticipation of his own ideal of social reform combined with modified market economics. “Socialism,” he wrote, “has to take account of a commercialized state of society, which Plockboy is the first whose guiding principle is to anticipate developments rather than lag behind.… Plockboy may well rank among the pioneers of the modern idea of co-operation.” Subsequently the English reformer Joshua Rowntree endorsed Plockhoy’s ideas, which have also interested modern economists, and in 1934 the Manchester Co-operative Union (U.K.) declared that if their movement had a father, Plockhoy “has an excellent claim to that distinction.” In 1968, three hundred years after Carr obliterated Plockhoy’s community “to a very naile,” all of the Dutchman’s publications were translated into French at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to support a study of cooperative utopianism. Bernard Bailyn, “The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 151 (2007), 150–53, 156–57; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, England, 2001), 177. Israel explores at length Plockhoy’s influence on his contemporary, the radical free thinker Franciscus Ven den Eden, whose influence, in turn, on Spinoza may have been important.

 

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