Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time 9780812208023

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface. The Outcast
I. Duty
Chapter 1. Magistracy and Confessional Politics
Chapter 2. Conflicts and Reputation
Chapter 3. Protecting by Deterrence
Chapter 4. “The General”
Part II. Belief
Chapter 5. The Struggle to Believe
Chapter 6. Managing Conventicles
Chapter 7. Ordinances: The Needle of Sin
Part III. Loss
Chapter 8. To Suffer Loss, 1664–1667
Chapter 9. Dismissal and Return
Chapter 10. Stuyvesant Tattooed
Chapter 11. A Place in Early America
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Stuyvesant Bound

Early American Studies Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

S t u Y v es a n t Bou nD A n E ss a y o n L o ss A c r o ss T i m e

Donna Merwick

u n i v e r si t y of pe n n s y lva n i a pr e s s ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merwick, Donna. Stuyvesant bound : an essay on loss across time / Donna Merwick.—1st ed. p.  cm. — (Early American studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4503-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Stuyvesant, Peter, 1592–1672. 2. New Netherland—History. 3. New Netherland—Historiography. 4. New York (State)— History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 5. Dutch—New York (State)—History—17th century. I. Title. II. Series: Early American Studies. F122.1.S78M47 2013 974.7'02092—dc23 2012038311

To Virginia

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Contents

Preface: The Outcast

ix

I. Duty 1 Chapter 1. Magistracy and Confessional Politics Chapter 2. Conflicts and Reputation Chapter 3. Protecting by Deterrence Chapter 4. “The General”

3 20 33 46

II. Belief 59 Chapter 5. The Struggle to Believe Chapter 6. Managing Conventicles Chapter 7. Ordinances: The Needle of Sin

61 72 84

III. Loss 101 Chapter 8. To Suffer Loss, 1664–1667 Chapter 9. Dismissal and Return Chapter 10. Stuyvesant Tattooed Chapter 11. A Place in Early America

103 121 136 151

Notes 167 Bibliography 201 Index 213 Acknowledgments 221

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Preface

The Outcast

A haunting representation of Peter Stuyvesant rests among the documents relating to New Netherland. Stylistically it is similar to a line drawing. Spare, sensuous, and provocative, it is like a simple piece of graffiti. It is only fortynine words. Stuyvesant is described as a captive. He is a lone figure being driven across the land with his hands bound behind his back. Nothing indicates the cause of his enforced journeying. Whatever his past in the country from which he is being driven, it is over. His future is commented on. His journey could end in one of three outcomes. He might simply be banished. Or, should his captors become impatient and see no value in him, he might be killed. But if, wherever he finishes up, he lives quietly, that would be allowed. He could remain “in his own house and on his land, like any other man.” The tethered figure would have been known to local natives, some of whom were present to hear the description (Figure 1). He has a wooden leg. Whether this had previously inspired a sense of awe in them or aroused an uneasy awareness of something specially chosen about this figure—a strange version of a man—is hard to tell. They did notice it. And often other natives took the opportunity to refer to it. For seventeen years, the defeated and humiliated outcast had been the director general of Dutch New Netherland. The storymakers preferred to call him just “Stuyvesant.” The image of rejection and loss is an accurate one. It was constructed on January 1, 1664, just eight months before an English fleet entered the harbor of New Amsterdam and forced the surrender of the city and province. A number of Englishmen had gathered at the Long Island village of Vlissingen (Flushing) in order to convince nearby natives to sell them tracts of land previously sold to the Dutch. They warned that many Englishmen were soon

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Figure 1. Indian Warriors Returning with a Captive. Copy of Iroquois (probably Seneca) pictograph, circa 1666. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

coming from overseas in three ships. The Dutch would be made to leave. The lands would become English: best now to be on the winning side. At that point, the Englishmen personified the loss of New Netherland in the figure of Stuyvesant. “If Stuyvesant tried to do anything,” the men told the natives, “they would bind his hands on his back and send him out of the country or kill him, but if he kept quiet, it would be well and he might remain in his own house and on his land, like any other man.”1 They knew the image would evoke scorn. It would resemble the visual impersonations occasionally drawn by the natives themselves (Figure 2). The powerlessness of the man is easily read. His body wears three markers of defeat and loss. Each is within the possible experience of mid-seventeenthcentury North Americans. He is chained or bound with ropes. He is forced to be on the move. He is subjected to captors who will finalize his fate but are presently enjoying his suffering and in no hurry to do so.

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Figure 2. Indian Deed for Staten Island, July 10, 1657. Berthold Fernow, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 14. Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, 1883.

The final months of Stuyvesant’s administration had been a series of losses. Councilors and subordinate officials had lost confidence in his ability to administer the province and guarantee its security against the neighboring English and natives. In Hartford, Connecticut, officials were refusing him the right to the title of governor. And why not? They were already dismissively declaring that they “knew no New Netherland.”2 By the early 1660s, it was clear that he had lost the loyalty of English Long Islanders. In 1664, he showed himself unable to maintain his authority over outlying Dutch settlements. This was especially evident when he most needed such towns as Beverwijck (Albany) and Wiltwijck (Kingston). In the desperate days preceding the English attack, his efforts to draw together an assembly of representatives of the towns had failed. His military position was close to impossible. He had repeatedly failed to convince the West India Company that the garrison on Manhattan Island was in serious need of reinforcements should an English attack occur. When the English fleet finally arrived in late August, Stuyvesant’s efforts to mount defenses around New Amsterdam failed miserably. Diplomatic overtures to the fleet’s leaders were equally useless. They were flung back in his face. His surrender of the province was a reluctant but inevitable acquiescence to too few resources, too little loyalty, and a loss of confidence in his leadership. In its own way, the Englishmen’s bit of graffiti simplified all the history that has been made of the capitulation and subsequent transformation of New Netherland to English rule.

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In a final irony, it was Stuyvesant’s West India Company superiors in Amsterdam and the States General in The Hague who bestowed an aura of prophecy on the villagers’ description of the solitary figure. In late 1664, they ordered him home to answer for the loss of the province. Humiliated and carrying sole responsibility for defeat, he boarded The Crossed Heart (Het Gekruyste Hart) and began a journey to the Netherlands and an uncertain future. We have only shadowy glimpses of his state of mind during that time. We know that he took up residence in Holland for three years while the States General and the company decided his fate. He knew that he could either be denied all compensation for years of service to the state and the company, or, worse, face severe fines and imprisonment. In the company’s words, he would get what he deserved “on account of his neglect or treachery.”3 In 1667, he was found guilty of negligence and dismissed. His superiors conceded, however, that if he lived quietly, he could, wherever he chose to reside, remain in his own house on his land, like any other man. Stuyvesant chose to return to Manhattan Island. There he lived peacefully on his bouwerie until his death in 1672. Yet even the courage required to make that choice has gone unrecognized by a number of later historians who have preferred to foreground the magnanimity of the newly appointed English authorities in allowing him peaceful residence.

* * * In the reflections that follow, I want to offer the trope of loss as a way into evaluating Stuyvesant’s career and that of New Netherland generally. I think it positions us to appreciate the precarious zone between failure and success in which Stuyvesant continually constructed his identity and that of New Netherland. It also illuminates the inner resources he had for coping with loss—or those he lacked. Historians are now agreed that were it not for his leadership, New Netherland might not have survived for seventeen years and, in its final decade, achieved considerable stability. Their judgment recognizes the constraints and moments of defeat that bound Stuyvesant tightly over nearly two decades. With hindsight, we can accept the message of defeat the English Long Islanders shorthanded in their depiction of him. We can also, however, extend it backward in time, even to 1647 and the first days of his arrival on Manhattan Island. Hindsight is the easiest (and, by itself, the most unreliable) part of any historical analysis. But there is clear evidence that Stuyvesant himself recognized

The Outcast xiii

that he had bound himself to a career with a company that was never without its tough competitiveness, volatility, and even treachery. He had also bound himself to a precariously placed set of trading settlements where failure was an ever-present reality. His presence in North America was dependent on the sudden withdrawal of support from company directors in Holland—perhaps because of him personally or because of the profitability of their investment. It relied too on their response to the force of local circumstances, always unanticipated. In this uncertain space, Stuyvesant transformed into official practice and the dutiful performances of daily life the structures of feeling and reason available to a seventeenth-century Dutch man. They were not the lifeways of twenty-first-century North Americans. They were premodern structures, and failing to acknowledge this only adds a further dimension to loss. There is, then, something of a misconception in the way New Netherland is placed in the current historical narrative of the United States. In that account, the New Netherlanders (and Stuyvesant among them) were early modern achievers. They developed a successful entrepreneurial culture. By that, they made a positive contribution to and deserve inclusion in a nationalist narrative that accepts nation-building, capitalism, secularization, democracy, and progress as normative values. And each of these values is an element in a cultural phenomenon that we Americans think ourselves particularly well placed to celebrate: modernity. So, the New Netherlanders are precursors of us. They were not premodern. They were not the other. They were us. Bringing Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders under the mantle of modernity causes us, however, to lose sight of the fact that the affective and rational structures within which they gauged success or failure were premodern or pre-Enlightenment. Yet modernity is a powerful agent in acting as a differentiator between the modern as progressive, secular, and rational, and the premodern as regressive, religious, and therefore irrational and oppressive of others. Identifying the New Netherlanders as people who were not acting out values that would satisfy our criteria runs the risk of opening them to the charge of being a materially and morally backward community. A number of recent scholars have been troubled by modernity’s categorizations. Their studies are important. Debjani Ganguly’s work is an ethnography of the Indian caste known as the dalits. It is written from the viewpoint of theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. In it, she points out that modernity is the staple of current academic social scientific and historical readings of caste. Yet the dalits still struggle to keep alive life-forms in ways where

xiv Preface

the questions of modernity “are not central to the ways in which . . . [they] make sense of their lives.” Living in a culture that is an assemblage of secular and nonsecular practices puts them outside the “secular, progressive, rational way of being, for which the term ‘modern’ is used as a shorthand for public spheres around the world.” Their way of life is denied the moral force afforded to the modern material and moral cultures, because they apprehend being in the world differently from the modern and perform that apprehension in different religious and social ways. They remain the object of disrespect at the least and, at the most, make their eradication thinkable and admissible.4 Ganguly’s aim is not to reject modernity—nor is mine. (In a paradoxical way, a knowledge of modernity provides a significant way of understanding Stuyvesant and the narratives about him.) Her intention is to reject the way the nation-state and social sciences use its categorizations “to interpret everything in their own image.”5 David Lloyd’s concern comes even closer to my own. He analyzes modernity as it is currently used to make sense of the Irish Famine of 1845–1851. In The Indigent Sublime: Spectres of Irish Hunger (2005), he found that modernity empowered a nationalist account that distorted the culture of the famine Irish as uncivilized and pre-political in order to legitimate the modernizing way of life that left it behind. In contrast, his research into the lives of the peasantry during the famine years uncovered a material and cultural space that sustained a viable mode of agricultural organization and a remarkably vital cultural formation. He found that in multiple ways—in modes of “landholding and cooperation,” community recreations, and the “organized struggles and cultural activism that marked the century following the Famine”—the Irish retained the memory of “a richer Gaelic culture” than has been transmitted. Lloyd’s study presents a tug-of-war between an interpretation of a premodern Irish population whose vitality refuses to be laid to rest, and one that invokes modernity as the best tool for effectively denying that vitality by achieving forgetfulness.6 In reflecting on Peter Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders, I want to join Ganguly and Lloyd in rejecting the use of modernity as the consummate test for the vitality and moral worth of a people. I also want to apply Lloyd’s thesis to the modernizing process in American history—contending that it too enacted a self-legitimation by achieving forgetfulness of New Netherland culture. That forgetfulness is not erased by selectively excising out of it a trace of proto-capitalism. Doing that is, in fact, fixing one more chain to those already binding Stuyvesant to an enduring but skewed historiography.

The Outcast xv

The real test, as I judge it, should be to examine the degree to which Stuyvesant and his contemporaries lived good lives within the limits of their times. For them, those times were largely premodern. Nation building, capitalism, secularization, democracy, and progress were not normative values. In Stuyvesant’s case, the loyalties he required of himself, especially to the West India Company and the States General, were central and were more postReformation than they were modern. So too was the constancy with which he acknowledged the force of tradition and the presence of the supernatural and providential. These were binding obligations and binding beliefs that he allowed to direct his life. With them, he would have measured his own success or failure and, I suspect, would in the end have judged himself a success—as I do.

* * * Stuyvesant constructed his life on many fields of experience. I am aware that in this essay I am neglecting several possible ones—for example, his immersion in networks of family and friends or the sphere of diplomacy to which he put considerable energy. I am, however, asking you as readers to consider three. Each pressed heavy obligations upon him—especially because he was a dutiful man. They are: first, the responses to the duties his oath as a senior officer in the West India Company entailed; second, his experiences as a believing Christian; and, third, his life as encounters with loss. I am asking you as readers to consider these—duty, belief, and loss—as major narrative themes in this book. Here they are presented sequentially, but not meant, by that, to be free-standing or independent of one another. On the contrary, and as I hope you will discern, they are substantially interwoven. For the seventeen years when he was administering the province of New Netherland for the States General and the West India Company, Stuyvesant was scrupulous in his fidelity to his oath of office. He appears never to have questioned the sacredness of it. He never allowed himself to profane it. Rather, and in a way that we might find excessive, he accepted its binding power even though officials at The Hague and company directors seldom returned such loyalty and certainly deserted him in 1664 to 1668. Stuyvesant’s oath provides a way of coming to understand his seventeen years as chief magistrate in New Netherland. I write about that in Part I, Duty. From what the documents tell us, he was acutely aware of the authority vested in that role. His authority was dual in its nature. It was both civil

xvi Preface

and ecclesiastical. It was settled in a newly emergent (and therefore untried) dispensation of European Christian communities following the Reformation. He began his administration only ninety or so years after John Calvin himself drafted the last version of the Institutes (1559), that is to say, a mere four generations after the deaths of the great Protestant reformers. The 1578 Alteratie by which the rule of the city of Amsterdam was transferred from Catholics to Protestants had been invoked only thirty-two years before Stuyvesant’s birth, or sixty-nine years before his arrival on Manhattan Island. Stuyvesant’s determination to exercise his role as a magistrate, as he understood it, aroused sustained political opposition in New Amsterdam. This was especially the case during the first half-decade of his administration. This period of contestation from 1647 to 1653 requires close attention because in it lay the first and strongest ties that continued to bind him to a largely negative reputation among later historians and other commentators. From that halfdecade forward, his responsibilities as chief magistrate took him to affairs beyond Manhattan Island. There he shouldered the company’s obligation to institute successful networks of trade, settle orderly civil government, and defend the province’s people against native and European enemies. So the decade from 1654 to 1664 allowed the Englishmen at Vlissingen to locate in his person the public will of New Netherland. Perhaps this personification was a myth to be peddled as necessary—for example, to satisfy expectations of leadership held by local natives. But in many ways, it was also a reality. Stuyvesant used his oath as an enabling instrument of authority. But it would have lacked efficacy, would have had no justifying aura, had it not held a place within a wider structure of belief explored in Part II, Belief. I try to look at two dimensions of belief expression. First, there were the everyday, noninstitutional religious practices by which he and other New Netherlanders made efforts to access God in their everyday lives. In the first chapter of Part II, then, I consider the construction of a nonsecular cultural formation but focus on everyday practice, that is, personal spirituality. The evidence for individual expressions of belief is, of course, fragmentary. This is due to the character of the archives, the social construction of early Calvinist practice, and the taken-for-granted enactments of religious belief. But much can be learned. One of these fragments of belief can be found in a 1638 document. In that year, a wealthy and tough-minded Dutch merchant took up a sheet of paper. At the top, he wrote, “In the Name of the Lord . . . in Amsterdam.”7 In my judgment, the merchant was momentarily making God present to himself. He

The Outcast xvii

was trying to establish or reconfirm a relationship, using inscription to arouse presence. This performance brings to light something he took for granted. It is something about life lived in plural temporalities. From the analytic viewpoint, such a performance is mystifying. But this is so only if some modern logic is allowed to override the evidence, translating it as somehow incidental or dismissing it as if just formulaic. Or it is dismissed if everyday secular practices and religious belief are taken to be fixed opposites rather than interpenetrating. The unexpected presence of the fragment of spirituality is, in other words, an inconsistency. It either needs to be explained away as a cultural oddity or must be recognized as exceeding the generally accepted secular categories of the social sciences. The fragment opens the possibility that the merchant was neither hopelessly tethered by the obligations of belief nor burdened by religious practices. Instead, he was empowered to consider himself made whole. Second, Stuyvesant and his council issued provincial thanksgiving and fasting ordinances on a regular basis. These were political performances of belief. I introduce them in the third chapter of Part II. They were political moments made theological. In the ordinances, Stuyvesant called for a collective response to either tragedy or well-being. They activated a sense of divine presence. Each pronouncement also recuperated the force of previous proclamations. They bound his magistracy to the community in ritualizations of the inseparability of divine intervention and man-made law. He bound himself to performances that kept the distant provincial communities emotionally and spiritually connected to the sequence of dramatic events with which his administration was dealing. The ordinances should be taken seriously. They are not decorative. They are not moments of time-out between the real business of business. Nor does reference to Stuyvesant’s so-called stubborn Calvinism, I think, explain their style or substance. Instead, they present a range of meanings: medieval Catholic and Reformation survivalisms, characteristics particular to New Netherland culture, and (most valuable for this study) Stuyvesant’s intimate implication in the initiation and production of these remarkable premodern texts. The ordinances are instances of the connection between political and providential histories consciously brought together in a plurality of rhetorical forms: didacticism, Reformation devotional language, encounter narrative, prayer, practical and biblical imagery, and so on. In wording and substance, they changed little over the seventeen years. In that, they provide insight into Stuyvesant’s perception of himself, his people, and the course of New Netherland’s history.

xviii Preface

Thirdly, loss was central in the life of Stuyvesant and the history of New Netherland. There are several analytic orientations available and I offer them in Part III. Stories have been made of Stuyvesant’s life for 350 years since the Long Islanders made metaphor of him in 1664. In one respect, the narratives represent what scripture scholars call backward formation. The earliest commentators on Jesus of Nazareth’s life paid most attention to the last weeks of his life. Only gradually did they fill in and textualize the years of his ministry and, more latterly still, the birth and childhood years. So too and in many ways, it is Stuyvesant’s last months as director general that have attracted attention. It is the period when he appeared to be an outstanding failure. And that has been allowed to set the stage for questions about the success or failure of New Netherland as a whole. Only in the late twentieth century have scholars begun to register their dissatisfaction with such incomplete representations of Stuyvesant. Jaap Jacobs, for example, has given us some of his early poetry, pinned down his place of birth, and joined others in filling in biographical detail. Willem Frijhoff has written beautifully about his Dutch pietism. Most important, Frijhoff has taken seriously the ways pietism informed the young lives of men such as Stuyvesant. Like other leading historical figures, Stuyvesant has been chained to the vagaries of American historiography’s own history. As we shall see, he was tied to a paradigmatic conceptualization of American colonial history that severely limited the human diversity that marked the seventeenth century. He was also fettered to the myth-making that plays its part even in socialscientific history writing and deserves greater attention. So in Stuyvesant Bound, I am writing about loss, failure, betrayal, and misrepresentation. I am not, however, writing about the tragic. Stuyvesant’s life was not a tragedy. Being-bound, as Martin Heidegger has pointed out, is the positive meaning of human existence. The final pages of Stuyvesant Bound deal with the ways in which the many meanings of loss, being-bound, the mythic, and tragedy come together for our present-day understandings. They may be of value for American readers should they experience a sense of loss as their cherished certainties fail to “take” in the welter of today’s complex global communities.

* * * In the fragment of verbal graffiti, the abject outcast is not presented as an abstraction. The Long Island men situated his powerlessness in everydayness,

The Outcast xix

in the experiential, in the emotive, and in his body. Their words call us to witness fluid relationships—Stuyvesant bound to the captors or captor who tied the ropes, Stuyvesant joined to the known land of the past and unknown land of the future, and Stuyvesant bound together with Englishmen and natives in the tangle of a cultural performance, the description of which is

Figure 3. Peter Stuyvesant, attributed to Hendrick Couturier, circa 1660. New-York Historical Society.

xx Preface

universal—the outcast—and yet true to the tragic singularity of the moment and context of its telling. For a representation that is meant to function as an abstraction, we might turn to the seventeenth-century portrait of Stuyvesant ascribed to Hendrick Couturier (Figure 3). The painting presents him in control. It gives no hint of a man having experienced loss. Indeed it suggests command by portraying immobility. Its purpose is not to feature experience at all. Stuyvesant’s body, in which relational existence takes place, is effectively erased in order to achieve a posture of authority. It is authority beyond the reach of historicity and contingency. It resists those particularized moments that might disturb invulnerability and self-assurance.8 In this volume, I use the description I am calling “graffiti” as a recurrent motif. Its theater allures us into reflecting on the trope of loss. It points us toward a performance that makes present both the universal and the particular. In the words of Charles Altieri in 2007, a work of art should “put before our eyes a content, not in its universality as such, but one whose universality has been absolutely individualized and sensuously particularized.” If universality is emphasized only with the aim of providing abstract instruction, he continues, “then the pictorial and sensuous element is only an external and superfluous adornment.” No, the senses must be written-in as “an inseparable aspect of experiences that [then] take on metaphoric power.”9 In presenting Stuyvesant as a seventeenth-century individual undergoing the experiences of magistrate, believer, and defeated leader, I hope I have not made a pretense at understanding his life entirely. But I have attempted to offer his life as having meaning outside itself. I hope I have given it, in Altieri’s words, metaphoric power. I mean: it has given some measure of meaning in your life.

Stuyvesant Bound

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I

Duty

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Chapter 1

Magistracy and Confessional Politics

It was not an auspicious beginning. For fifteen days in summer 1646, the States General had delayed confirmation of the West India Company’s appointment of Petrus Stuyvesant as director of New Netherland. Fifteen days, of course, would prove to be a trivial period of time compared to the almost thirty months eighteen years later, when, from 1665 through 1667, he would await the same body’s decision on his guilt or innocence for losing the province to the English. Now, issuing their approval, the men at The Hague had nothing particularly complimentary to say about him. Nothing to say, really, one way or the other. They were finally authorizing his commission because he was “very urgent to depart.” In accordance with custom, Stuyvesant appeared before the assembly of the States General on July 28, 1646. Formally and before God, he “took . . . the proper oath.” In “all that concerned his office,” he held himself “bound and obliged by his oath, in Our hands.” By it, the thirty-­four-­year-­old man became, as the commission concluded, “Our Director.” An oath was a sacred undertaking. Properly understood, it made nonsecular such responsibilities as those now conveyed to Stuyvesant. He must administer “law and justice . . . civil and criminal”; direct all matters pertaining to commerce and war; promote and preserve “treaties . . . alliances, trade and commerce, and the maintenance of population.”1 Stuyvesant remained aware of the sacredness of his oath of office until he was officially relieved of responsibilities in 1667. On more than one occasion in the years after summer 1646, he called on it, pointing to a quality with sacred meaning with which, in New Netherland, he alone had been endowed. It was an empowerment that resulted from a solemn performance in which only he had been chosen to participate. Two ministers in New Netherland made the connection between his oath

4

Chapter 1

and his conduct as director over the years. Experience in New Netherland had convinced them that Stuyvesant’s loyalty to his oath was the safeguard of public order in the province and the strength of the Reformed congregations. They reported to the Classis in Amsterdam in 1653 that he would “rather relinquish his office” than (to cite their example) grant Lutherans public worship. He holds it to be “contrary to the first article of his commission, which was confirmed by him with an oath.”2 Over his years as administrator, Stuyvesant refined the meaning of his oath. He used it (directly and indirectly) as leverage against his enemies on Manhattan Island. On one occasion in a debate with colonists about land ownership, he cited his obedience to his oath—­his “instructions”—­as responding to a higher claim than following reason. He admitted that reason was on the colonists’ side. But he could not support them in their plans because, he said, it would require an act of infidelity to his oath.3 Stuyvesant also cited his oath to establish equal status with governors appointed in New England. In 1647, he reacted fiercely to what he took to be personal insults directed at him from the governor and deputy governor of New Haven, Theophilus Eaton and Stephen Goodyear. Eaton, he wrote to Goodyear, had devalued his office as director in New Netherland and trotted out all his faults “as if I were a school boy and not as one of like degree with himselfe.” Certainly Eaton was privy to the many criticisms of Stuyvesant then circulating on Manhattan Island.4 Or perhaps he knew that, over the previous years, the director had been holding junior positions in the Caribbean islands and never attained anything like the position of governor general. Johan Maurits van Nassau-­Siegen had been given that title in 1636 when appointed to Brazil (with a salary of 18,000 florin plus 6,000 florin for immediate expenses and table money). Even now, Stuyvesant had only the status of director general, with a salary of about 3,600 guilders.5 In any case and in the same letter, Stuyvesant took care to apply to Eaton—­ and implicitly himself—­his definition of a governor. They were men of more “noble worth” than others. He reiterated that by their office he and Eaton were “of like qualities.” Earlier he had reminded Eaton of their mutuality in respect to accountability. I took the position I did, he insisted, because I have to give account to my superiors and be judged by them. If I should “in the least measure” transgress in observing their commands, “you know (and I know) that my life, estate and reputation are at stake.” Writing to Eaton later, he explained his actions in language that expressed a relationship that transcended his pledge to his superiors. He was discharging his “duty to God.”



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 5

And one month before, he had written to Governor John Winthrop, again calling on his “bounden Duty to God.”6 Stuyvesant’s oath was available to him as a frequent rhetorical referent because it marked a man. A man who had taken an oath had no relief from that mark until discharged from his office. It brought into being a permanent quality. On one occasion in 1659, Stuyvesant had reason to consider the relative merits of obedience exercised because of an oath, and obedience offered as an exercise of free will. A Dutch officer on the Delaware River had put just such a distinction to him. In a letter to Stuyvesant, the officer said obedience offered on account of free will had superior merit.7 But Stuyvesant’s chosen way was to act out of individual conviction and also on the basis of derived power. In the coming years, he would come to recognize that the scope of his oath was subject to expansion and contraction. His decisions as well as changing circumstances would continue to lift an initially untested enunciation off the page of the States’ commissie-­boek and give it actuality. In the end, the final performances of it would be enactments humiliating and tragic.

* * * When Stuyvesant arrived in New Netherland in 1647, he knew something of the opposition that was about to test his steadfastness. Well before this time, the company directors had been made aware of a rising tide of complaints against its governance on Manhattan Island. They had shared these with the States and undoubtedly with him. But Stuyvesant was intelligent, sufficiently competent in the law to trust his own administrative skills and, above all, experienced. He had had cross-­cultural experiences that none of the men on Manhattan Island—­some of whom would soon be his enemies—­could match or, possibly, imagine. For almost nine years, from 1635 to 1644, Stuyvesant’s service in the company had taken him to the southeast coast of Latin America and the Caribbean. Both were among the most unstable areas in an expanding world of European interlopers eager to seize possessions and exploit the local products awaited in Europe. Had he our hindsight about the nature of this wild coastal and island world, he might have recognized that he was caught up in a long phase of world expansion when no one knew what form of colonial venture would prove stable or profitable, “so men who grasped the enthusiasm of the age tried them all.” And in that chaotic world, trade factories and other

6

Chapter 1

parasitic forms of settlement (including those of pirates and plunderers) were not the exception but the rule.8 Stuyvesant spent his nine years in such trading stations. He served the company first on the island of Fernando de Noronha and for the final five years on the mercantile island of Curaçao, forty miles from the coast of Venezuela. His promotion to director general in New Netherland was, in effect, an appointment to just another trading station. Certainly it was more complex than Curaçao and Fernando de Noronha (about which commentators can say little more than that it was rat-­infested) but similar in purpose and structure. If we stand back from the little evidence we have of those years and ask what Stuyvesant learned from his Caribbean experiences, we may safely put them under two considerations. First, as a young administrator he learned to deal with the volatility of the West India Company and to accept that he was enmeshed in the mobile and often unpredictable weave of its opportunistic policy-­making. He also learned that native populations were essentially heterogeneous and subject to their own histories and intentions. Stuyvesant learned that the company’s aims had thrust him into an inclusive world of strangers. They were peoples culturally, linguistically, and racially different. Each group intersected with the others and with him—­Portuguese, Spaniards, Caribs, English, and Africans. Just as the company sought out exploitable harbors and straits, so it reached out for strangers whom it could exploit. Some it hired as employees. On Curaçao, Stuyvesant worked alongside several Englishmen and was witness to natives being sent into the countryside on company business. Others were taken on as useful allies: the Aruba natives to whom Stuyvesant offered protection because they had aided militarily in a confrontation with the Spanish at Maracaibo, the natives of Bonaire working the salt pans, and those who passed on information about mines and minerals.9 Beyond the employees and allies were the company’s enemies (also of many nations). But all were measured for their usefulness to the company’s trading enterprises. Regarding Stuyvesant’s intellectual curiosity about the natives of Curaçao, we have only one clue. On one occasion in New Netherland in the 1640s, a group including himself and Domine Johannes Megapolensis turned to discussing the “Caracks.” Perhaps they were exploring the minister’s special interest in the origins of non-­European peoples. Perhaps they were entertaining a curiosity about the differences among native peoples then being inventoried by naturalists. This categorizing endeavor may in turn account for the name of a ship plying its trade between the two locations from 1660 to 1662, Den Nieuw Nederlandsche Indiaen.10



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 7

Stuyvesant learned to take on some of the company’s strategies. After being promoted from commissary to provisional director of the station on Curaçao, for example, he put into effect a tactic that company directors called upon again and again: turning a loss into a gain. In one instance, he identified those who were soldiers among the 450 company personnel harboring at Curaçao after the fall of São Luis in the Brazilian Captaincy of Maranhão in 1644 and sent them on to New Netherland to assist Director Willem Kieft’s hostilities against the natives there. He also learned to reward native allies. In 1643, he and his council removed a number of loyal natives from Aruba to Curaçao for protection. Two months later, he granted permission for some of them to return to Aruba to see to their livestock and families. He learned that protecting natives meant enforcing a geographical distance between them and dangerously undisciplined Dutch men.11 In short, Stuyvesant learned to identify himself as the States’ and company’s servant. Neither then nor later did he make a claim on any other binding identification. Publicly he never claimed to belong to a town in the Netherlands, nor to a province or an extended family. Jan Pietersz Coen, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, and Willem Bontekoe—­who sailed for the East India Company almost a generation before Stuyvesant set sail for New Netherland—­each boasted of belonging to Hoorn. David Pietersz de Vries, who sailed some years after them, did as well. Other near-­contemporaries such as Kiliaen van Rensselaer and Johan Mauritz van Nassau-­Siegen obviously chose to wear their identification at all times. Stuyvesant’s predecessor in New Netherland, Willem Kieft, seemed to identify himself with a broad family network that included members of the regent class in Amsterdam, and in fact he interpreted his commission as empowering him to act as a regent on Manhattan Island as well. In my judgment, Stuyvesant settled for identification with the company until about 1662, when he became a New Netherlander. That is, he realized that he was looking at New Netherland from a substantially different perspective than the company. And that conviction remained with him from that time forward. As for time backward—­biographical time before Fernando de Naronha and Curaçao—­a seemingly different young man confronts us. Stuyvesant was a university student preparing for the ministry in Franeker in Friesland. He studied theology, began to learn Latin, read the early Church Fathers, and enthusiastically embraced Calvinist pietism. After about two years and for uncertain reasons, he determined not to proceed to the ministry. At the age of about twenty-­one, he left the university and soon joined the West India Company. As we shall see, he really did not leave Franeker behind at all.12

8

Chapter 1

On Curaçao, Stuyvesant began to learn that the company directors would measure their man carefully. They let it be known that theirs was the task of devising plans and backing them up operationally. His was that of implementing those plans by his resourcefulness, youth and physical endurance, and loyalty. In each of his letters and reports, he affirmed that he understood this. The directors were also aware that governing overseas was a matter of governing emotions, those of the company’s servants and those of the native peoples they encountered. Here on Curaçao and during the seventeen years of his governing in New Netherland, they maintained a tight surveillance on Stuyvesant’s sentiments and moods as they influenced his decisions. Knowing that the two were interlocked, they chided him on one occasion, for example, for his “compassion” as against the maxim that everyone is “bound to care for himself and his own people.”13 At other times, they were quick to call him arrogant but, then again, reproach him for not being tough enough with those protesting against him. They watched for signs of insufficient steadfastness and of wavering. Stuyvesant learned to preempt any accusation of reliance on his imagination.14 Concern for his emotional compliance with their directives informed every letter from Holland. The directors recognized their own overwrought emotional responses whenever they perceived Stuyvesant’s failure to send adequate documentation about the trade or his unsatisfactory handling of individual crises. Such occurrences, they often warned, excited in them strong emotions. And indeed they did. The archive of their correspondence with Stuyvesant is certainly one of purposeful professionalism. But I have come to think that we misjudge it entirely if, by the fact of the directors being businessmen, we consider it exclusively running down the tracks of rationality. In fact, it is nothing less than a bundle of impending or half-­settled reproaches, sometimes sly, often direct, but always threatening. Stuyvesant, in his turn, constantly gauged their moods. And as a mariner looks out for the changing moodiness of the sea, he also watched for those of the colonists and natives. Of the colonists, he wrote that they could be fickle. He watched carefully for this, measuring it even to the days of the surrender in 1664. As for his reading of the natives, his advice to the Massachusetts governor in 1651 is characteristic. We need to be patient with them, he advised. Their “spirits” are not yet adequately subdued nor their “affections” yet won over.15 But, as with discerning the tempers of the sea, mastering such a reading took time and experience. His correspondence with Willem Beeckman, vice-­ director on the Delaware River, repeatedly demonstrates his awareness of this.



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 9

Stuyvesant’s identification with the company should not be construed as evidence that he trusted it or expected its loyalty. If loyalty meant provisioning a station adequately or sending sufficient soldiers for the proper defense of its men and workers, then it was not a quality the company considered a priority. In 1644, Stuyvesant found himself without the basic provisions for soldiers who were made useless without them. Here was a foretaste of his soldiers without stockings, shoes, and shirts, as he would later complain in an emotional outburst in 1659. More important, military unpreparedness was a portent of the single most divisive issue that would arise between the directors and Stuyvesant later in New Netherland since it went to the heart of the survival of the province and its settlements.16 Similarly, the directors were not expressing confidence in one of its servants when they offered the customary directive: you are the man “on the spot”; you make the decision. It was a way of removing themselves from blame should things go wrong.17 This practice is of consequence in evaluating Stuyvesant’s reputation among later historians. As only one example, in an early letter to Stuyvesant, the directors painted themselves as distant from the opposition facing him in New Amsterdam. They were prepared to leave the impression that it was entirely his acts that had, as they worded it, aroused “the hatred of the people.”18 So employees such as Stuyvesant had to learn how to protect themselves. They would soon enough discover that corresponding with the company was nothing less than a defensive craft they had to master. A subordinate needed to become adept at artful evasion. He had to find the balance between fawning and self-­assertion. He had to appear compliant with the company’s domineering and, at times, pointedly humiliating rhetoric. Getting everything in writing was a common tactic of self-­defense.19 After being wounded on the island of St. Martin and before sailing to Holland in 1644, Stuyvesant insisted that his secretary copy the Resolution Book of Curaçao of 1643 and 1644. This, he advised his councilors (not for the first time), was “for their own justification.” He carried the book with him when he arrived on Manhattan Island in 1647, and it was among his papers until the English takeover.20 In any altercation with the company, it was better to have your words thrown back at you than to have no words at all. So it was with Stuyvesant after the fall of New Netherland in 1664.

* * *

10

Chapter 1

New Netherland’s leading historians would be in agreement with Charles Gehring that all Stuyvesant’s political and military skills were needed after 1647 to hold the province together. Furthermore, with these skills, he resolved most of the problems encountered during the first five years of his administration.21 Those years presented Stuyvesant with a landscape of loss rather than some horizon of expectations. New Netherland was not a mass of possibilities but a field of disasters. His immediate predecessor, Willem Kieft, had warred intermittently against the natives for about five years. The fighting left Manhattan Island and the surrounding villages devastated. Back in Holland, the company directors were in denial about the war. They could not even bring it into coherence as an event. But the destruction was real. The loss of lives on both sides, ruination of properties and entire native villages, and disruption to previously reliable Dutch-­native trading networks and overseas trade, these were all extensive. Still, they were only some of the outward expressions of the breakdown of authority and, with that, the collapse of the possibility of vision, trust, and rebuilding that established authority puts in place. From the sources we have concerning this half-­decade, it is tempting to conclude that not Stuyvesant but sheer contingency was ruling New Netherland. It appears, first of all, that its survival depended on the energy he exerted putting out unpredictable spot-­fires and making on-­the-­run decisions: now handling the uncontrollable disorder along the South River (Delaware River), then dealing with potential breakaway English settlements on Long Island, here in New Amsterdam confronting a man determined to murder him, there reacting to the threat by a Dutch trader living at times on Staten Island with armed local natives and known to have told them that Stuyvesant would soon build a wall around New Amsterdam and come to kill them. Therefore they should “murder the Director.”22 There were blazes to put out regarding merchants who were regularly smuggling guns and liquor to the Raritan, Mohawk, Munsee, and Susquehannocks. And flames were burning at Rensselaerswijck, where he and the independent-­minded director of the patroonship were locked in bitter confrontation (Figure 4). The records also suggest that New Netherland was living under another sort of contingency, the rule of government-­by-­correspondence. In other words, compounding reliance on contingency-­driven policies on the ground was dependence on the equally unpredictable and swerving policy directives sent to Stuyvesant by the West India Company. It can seem that no nonnegotiable legal or political principles were at hand to bring into

Figure 4. New Netherland, circa 1660.

12

Chapter 1

order, prior to their occurrence, the exigencies of circumstance, the possible misjudgments of Stuyvesant himself, and the short-­sighted misrule of a distant corporation. Finally, the documents lead us to think that daily experience was the immediate cause for legislating and executing the law such as it was Stuyvesant’s obligation to enforce. In each ordinance, he sought wording such as this: “The director general and council of New Netherland, seeing and observing by daily experience . . . hereby ordain . . .” The justification for promulgating an ordinance or bylaw rested on existential evidence of its present necessity.23 Law did not rely on the weight of precedent but on the experiential. As a result, circumstance floods into the provincial records, even as it does into those of local inferior courts. Stuyvesant, however, did come to New Netherland with firm legal and political principles set in a philosophy of government at home. Discourse on the principles of “true liberty” and “the common welfare” was in the air. His papers are filled with references identifying fundamental postulates of good government generated out of political contexts historically specific to the Netherlands and regarded by him as a body of law he was ordained to institute. His words on this important matter leave no doubt that, from the beginning, he saw himself at the center of authority. He quickly pressed the point that New Netherland was a province with rights and privileges. In 1649 he designated himself “chief magistrate” of “this Country.”24 Elsewhere he claimed that executive, legislative, and judicial power resided in his person; he was (as his oath allowed) “Director and chief judge.”25 Stuyvesant repeatedly demonstrated that he had a solemn obligation to enact the same order of governance in New Netherland as existed in the Netherlands. On two occasions, he cited it as “the general civil and ecclesiastical order of our fatherland.”26 In law and in practice, the two spheres identified in the wording—­civil and ecclesiastical—­were not separate: both fell under the magistracy. Again and again, we see Stuyvesant interpreting them this way, and understandably so. As magistrate, he was bound by oath to exercise authority over both of the spheres that constituted the order of the fatherland. By this, the religious dispensation and the political order of New Netherland were both, as was intended, attached to “a relation with the sacred.”27 Stuyvesant’s implementation of this order, then, was not simply the result of a tyrannical temperament or an allegedly implacable Calvinist disposition. Both of these criticisms have been marshaled against him by historians. His exercise of the two powers of the magistracy was a juridical survivalism that derived



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 13

from the time of the Reformation and even pre-­Reformation years. Lawmaking was simply not a secular enterprise. Much more needs to be said later about these immediate post-­Reformation decades. But if we, for one reason or another, have allowed the consequences of the Reformation to slip out of mind in our analyses of Stuyvesant and New Netherland, contemporaries certainly did not. It was, of course, precisely to “the Dutch reformation,” for example, that an English minister in New Amsterdam—­someone who would have understood the dual role of the magistrate full well—­appealed when seeking “freedom of conscience.”28

* * * In his seventeen years in office, Stuyvesant was enacting confessional politics. This is a term used today to designate the political structures devised by European powers to meet the changes brought by the Reformation. Unlike the Europeans at home, Stuyvesant had no need to make religion the basis of his policies toward external enemies. Confessional politics were only a marginal concern with respect to distant Catholic Spain and Portugal. Nor was the Catholicism of New France a primary consideration in his relations with the French along the St. Lawrence River. His closest neighbors, the English of New England, Virginia, and Maryland, were indeed enemies but (for the most part) conventionally Protestant. But he did have to manage religious confessionalism within the province. Although Calvinist doctrine and practice was far from being the established church of the Netherlands and therefore New Netherland, it was the only confession authorized to conduct public worship. So colonists of other religious creeds (some of them troublesome)—­Lutherans, Jews, Quakers, and a few Catholics—­needed to be dealt with as well. What we are seeing in Stuyvesant’s administration, then, is a public official accepting the religio-­ secular character of post-­Reformation politics, an official who is expecting that reality to make claims upon him as “chief magistrate . . . of this Country.” Across the Netherlands, the religio-­secular character of magistracies such as Stuyvesant’s was everywhere in evidence. Individual magistrates and their councils delegated to themselves the power to determine the degrees of separation that would exist between the “civic and ecclesiastical order.” Willem Frijhoff has shown how the management of this separation worked (or failed to work) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in a number of Netherlands towns. His data show that, despite the determination of a town

14

Chapter 1

magistrate to absent himself from church matters or make only minimal interventions, the structure was such that entanglement was far more likely than strict separation of a town council and local governing church body, whose members were in any case likely to be the same individuals. Autonomy was a privilege neither body had or could expect.29 In New Netherland in 1628, Domine Jonas Michaëlius worried about a request that he act as a councilor. He felt that political and ecclesiastical offices “must not be mixed but kept separate.”30 From 1645 to 1647, Kieft clashed with Domine Everardus Bogardus in a bitter, prolonged, and unresolved debate about the sphere of authority over which each had primary control. The personalities of the two men and the immediate circumstances of the events certainly exacerbated the vehemence of the clash. But the origin lay in a more fundamental factor. Like the ecclesiastical sphere with which it structurally overlapped, the political order sited in the magistrates was also attached to a relationship with the sacred. Magistrates took oaths solemnizing this bond. People expected to see this worked out in their daily decision-­making. The trafficking of a magistrate into the decision-­ making of a minister or local consistory (and vice versa) was a familiar manifestation of the porousness of the boundary between civil and ecclesiastical power bases. One physical sign of that porousness in New Amsterdam was the handelskerk. The Dutch trading companies insisted that a church be erected in overseas establishments. As in other outposts, New Amsterdam’s handelskerk was situated within the fort under the director general’s direct control. Stuyvesant acted as the congregation’s churchmaster; at one time one of his councilors was church warden.31 Over many future decades of secularization, this boundary would become far more firmly settled. But it was not smoothly worked out in the civil culture of the time. This was the borderline that Domine Michaëlius feared he would be called on to cross (and he was). It was the space acrimoniously crossed by Director General Kieft and Domine Bogardus. In 1649, Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam’s preacher, Domine Johannes Backerus, traversed it in anger as well.32 When such border-­crossings were quarrelsome, they betrayed a mismanagement of a Calvinist regime and a Calvinist dispensation. To townsmen, they undercut an edification to which they felt they had a right when the two authorities intermeshed properly. Townsmen fully expected, for example, that a man or woman facing criminal charges in Stuyvesant’s court would, during its sitting, not be allowed to receive Communion. They also desired variations of the protocol suggested by Stuyvesant in 1660 for building a house for the



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 15

newly appointed minister in Breuckelen (Brooklyn). For the best result, he advised, “let the work go forward under the supervision of one member of the church consistory and another from among the town’s magistrates,” that is, “that Moses and Aaron would stand together.”33 Equally acceptable were the fusions of the secular and the religious that Stuyvesant made in citations put forward in two legal cases he undertook two months after arriving on Manhattan Island. The first case involved crimes allegedly against his legitimate authority committed by two men. In pursuing them in the court, Stuyvesant summoned both secular and religious authorities to establish his legal position: Joost de Damhouder and Johannes Bernardinus Muscatellus, but also Exodus, Ecclesiasticus, and Romans. He expected this mix of secular and religious references to be entirely acceptable. In the courts, legal and theological discourse had always interpenetrated.34 The exchange, however, had its limits. In 1660, the company expressed dissatisfaction with a judgment handed down by the authorities appointed to the city of Amsterdam’s colony on the Delaware River. The local officers had blurred the line between legal fault and sin. Allegedly, they had required a man accused of fraud to “ask pardon of God and justice” rather than face the customary penalty. This, the directors charged, broke with precedent in “our Fatherland.”35 In the breach, however, the case was a manifestation of an inseparability of spiritual and secular that was still unquestioned in a Dutch way of life of which civic culture was only one element. The decision-­making terrain, then, that Stuyvesant felt was rightfully his to enter as magistrate was civil-­ecclesiastical. He was expected to be managing Calvinist doctrine and practice in New Netherland as much as, say, customs regulations. Lawmaking was often, in present terminology, religiously inflected. As Kathleen Davis has written, following the Reformation, What is our purpose sub specie aeternitatis? was a question that politics now—­following the breakdown of aspects of the old religion—­had to ask and answer.36

* * * Stuyvesant’s management of the Calvinist (or, better, Reformed) dispensation in his jurisdiction was comprehensive in scope. This was undoubtedly because he was prepared to impose, as it were, a loose interpretation of his rights and obligations as administrator of New Netherland. But it was because, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, Calvinist clergy had chosen to divest

16

Chapter 1

themselves of governing authority in many areas and confer it on the magistracy. As other magistrates did, Stuyvesant paid ministers’ salaries and arranged for and paid the local schoolmaster. In 1652, he initiated moves to obtain a minister who could preach in English and reserved to himself as chief magistrate the authorization of a minister to preach outside his congregation.37 Cases regarding marriages, orphans, and bequests came before his bench. More substantially, he accepted Calvinism’s willingness to invest the magistrate’s court with the supervision of the laity’s morals and the extraordinary power to command obedience and, in effect, enforce morality. Stuyvesant’s management of Calvinist doctrine and practice was also exemplified in a series of decisions and pronouncements made between 1657 and 1659. In August 1657 the Woodhouse had arrived off New Amsterdam carrying a number of Quakers. In the early seventeenth century, these sectarians were among the most anti-­authoritarian dissenters in Christendom. Stuyvesant and his council made the ship move on to New England. But two women stayed behind, and their extraordinary behavior immediately disturbed the populace and resulted in their imprisonment for two to three days and subsequent banishment.38 The troubling actions of the women also unsettled two of New Amsterdam’s leading ministers, who informed the Amsterdam Classis of the disturbing events. They described the women’s actions in considerable detail, comparing them with disturbances in the churches in Europe.39 The clerics’ suggested remedy invoked one of the devices meant to prevent confrontation: sectarian isolation. A number of principalities across Europe had experienced a bloodbath during the religious wars starting in the mid-­sixteenth century. As a result, local rulers and magistrates had slowly come to accept the endurance of confessional differences and the advantages of legislating territorial isolation of the disputing parties from each other.40 This incident has been interpreted by a number of commentators. But I think the core of its meaning is to be found in a piece of correspondence received by Stuyvesant about six months later. In 1658, the governor of Canada wrote from Quebec welcoming the Hollanders to French Canada. But he forbade the “public exercise on land of their religion, which is contrary to the Romish.” He assumed that Stuyvesant knew how confessional politics was operating in Europe. “You know,” he wrote, “the order of the King about this matter.” In New Netherland, the two ministers also put the link between confessional differences and geographical separation quite simply. The New Amsterdam community had “the truth,” and only the removal of the nonconfessing individuals would “preserve” it.41



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 17

Isolation from nonconfessing individuals and groups was also Stuyvesant’s solution. In post-­Reformation times, it was achieved in two forms, and he utilized both. He implemented a form of the juridical territorialization of religion first expressed in Europe at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, reaffirmed in the 1648 Treaty of Munster in cuius regio, eius religio (whose rule, his religion), and now implicit in the ministers’ words. Individual towns in the Netherlands had, for example, the power to deny full citizenship to inhabitants unlike themselves, that is, of different religious beliefs. Similarly, it is clear that the villagers of Rustdorp (Queens) on Long Island wanted to be rid of the Quakers who had come into their village and expected Stuyvesant to remove them.42 Now, in 1657, Stuyvesant and the council were also enforcing the policy of banishment, as he had done in a number of earlier cases.43 About eighteen months before the Quakers arrived, a number of Independents among the English townsmen of Vlissingen (Flushing) were found to be meeting in public conventicles organized by an unlicensed preacher. Commenting on them, Stuyvesant described a scene that would have elicited a reaction similar to ours on hearing of someone practicing surgery without credentials. The man had not only presented an exegesis on God’s holy word, he had also administered the sacraments, offering “the bread in the form and manner in which the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is usually celebrated and given.” Stuyvesant and his council banished both him and the local enforcement officer who had allowed the meeting.44 The incident in Vlissingen illustrates a second way by which Stuyvesant, like other magistrates across the United Provinces, summoned a species of isolation. This ruling was intended to be the opposite of the more punitive measures taken against non­conformists. The fatherland had made a distinction between the public and private exercise of worship. Public worship would be clothed in orthodoxy: it would be Reformed. Heterodoxy—­the forms of worship of other believers—­would be allowed but kept out of sight.45 Stuyvesant and his council promulgated a version of this principle in February 1656. They forbade all public and private conventicles. They stressed that the “Reformed divine service” was rightfully public on legal grounds. They also assumed a right to make judgments we would take as impertinently inappropriate, that is, on theological grounds. Their judgment here was that the Reformed church was “not only lawful but scripturally founded and ordained.”46 This assumption was consistent with a judgment by Stuyvesant seven years later. He would approve local laws, provided they were found to “Concure with the Holy Scripture.”47 Outside the Reformed services, private

18

Chapter 1

reading of scripture and practice of family prayer and worship in an individual’s household according to his or her conscience was to be protected by law. But it must be carried out safely out of sight, hidden away. On this matter, Jaap Jacobs is explicit and, I think, correct. Stuyvesant did not offend against freedom of conscience, but he was obliged to act against public insubordination and its possible consequences.48 In 1663, the West India Company (for its own pragmatic reasons) offered Stuyvesant a third way of dealing with unruly non­conformists: “shut your eyes.”49 Shutting his eyes had not been Stuyvesant’s policy. Yet he too adjusted his decisions regarding toleration to circumstances and reason. He was, for example, reported to have expressed relief that the Quakers’ vessel would not be requesting permission to land at New Amsterdam, and to have acted throughout with moderation “both in words and actions.” He followed an official’s advice to have a non­conformist whipped for unlicensed preaching, but backed away, citing “compassion.” In the matter of an illegal conventicle, he lessened one defendant’s sentence but imposed the force of the law on an officer who had allowed public disobedience to an official ordinance.50 These were not manifestations of indecisiveness or religious irenicism on Stuyvesant’s part. On one level, they were enactments of a conviction expressed in 1663. “Common sense, wisdom . . . [and] carefulness” were, he wrote, essential elements of good government. But so was “piety.” Each element would sustain the others.51 On another level, they testify to the uncertain process of defining and putting in place an uneasy ecclesiastical heterogeneity within one magistrate’s limited jurisdiction. That is, we find Stuyvesant trying to establish workable power structures within the ecclesiastical and juridical order called into being by the Reformation.52 Within this order, one might exercise individual conscience but, as Michel de Certeau has pointed out, not “the individualization of beliefs.”53 Stuyvesant’s words about good government were written in 1663. Although New Netherland had been and was still under threat from natives and the English, relations between Stuyvesant and the merchant community of Manhattan Island were largely harmonious. This was not the case between 1647 and ­1653, the years we must now consider. In fact, it may be said that never again was the strident acrimony and the production of destabilizing discourse as extensive as in these years of conflict between Stuyvesant and some among the New Amsterdam merchant community. Never again would we get the intensity and public utilization of such a variety of tropes, genres, and rhetorics. Nor would we have as energized, contradictory, and negative a portrait of Stuyvesant as we do from these years.



Magistracy and Confessional Politics 19

It is possible to envisage an arc joining these early years to those after the surrender of New Netherland when Stuyvesant had to gather his papers and travel to Holland to defend his administration. In both instances, he was made a spectacle of humiliation and rejection. In the first, he was publicly at the vortex of merchants’ criticism textualized in mockery, exaggeration, street language, contempt, and treachery. The same criticisms were dramatized in such theater as merchants carrying their case against him and the company to The Hague; Stuyvesant recalled from New Netherland (and that recall rescinded); Stuyvesant’s traveling with a security guard after his life was threatened; a minister denouncing Stuyvesant from the pulpit; and merchants maneuvering to exercise free trade against the company’s enforced monopolistic restrictions.54 From 1664 through 1667, Stuyvesant was again a spectacle. Privately, he was a spectacle to himself as he prepared his defense, procuring witnesses’ depositions, correspondence, and provincial records. Publicly, he lived out the humiliation of the defeated leader: worse than defeated, one who had surrendered.

Chapter 2

Conflicts and Reputation

Arriving at Manhattan Island, Stuyvesant found a merchant clique determined to remove the West India Company from control of New Netherland and replace it with direct governance under the States General. This was nothing new. Nor was it surprising. Everyone on the island knew that the company’s rule had been an egregious example of greed, negligence, and misdirection resulting in disaster. In 1649, one merchant spoke for all: Stuyvesant’s administration “lies completely prostrate.”1 Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, in the course of his studies of Dutch-­Caribbean affairs, has offered an explanation for the company’s failure there and, indirectly, illuminates its similar prostration on Manhattan Island. He defines the trading company as in need of making profits and, simultaneously, operating as an officially governing institution required “to master the techniques of good government.” These tasks, he concludes, “were mutually incompatible.” The company’s solution was “the rigid application of certain monopolistic rights.” But it was a policy that failed to work in the face of local merchants’ demands for free trade. The company, therefore, failed in both aims. Goslinga’s conclusion is especially pertinent. Throughout the years of the company’s existence, he writes, “this conflict between the merchants and the Company government undermined a relation of harmonious cooperation and put distrust, jealousy, latent and open opposition in its place.”2 When Stuyvesant began his administration, then, he was a young director general squeezed between an opposition that wanted complete structural change and a company that knew its existence in New Netherland was on the line.3 Much of the conflict was fought out in words. Contesting parties and ordinary people blamed “words” for the morass they were in.4 The texts in which these words were meant to score points have been subjected to many analyses. They have been read for their ethnographic, psychological,



Conflicts and Reputation 21

and political meanings. They have elicited fascination and been treated masterfully by a number of New Netherland’s foremost historians.5 At the same time, they have thwarted the efforts of those searching for clear motivations. Inadequate contexts have denied certainty about which party’s accusations were the most sound.6 My intention here is not to engage in another explication de texte. It is crucial, however, to consider the repercussions of the contests on Stuyvesant’s immediate and long-­term reputation. As I have suggested, Stuyvesant was placed in an almost impossible position in early New Netherland—­“almost,” because over the next decade (about 1654–­1664), a viable political order did work itself out. He was wrong-­footed from the start and forced to be on the defensive. He was brushed with the faults of his predecessor, Willem Kieft, but (as his defamers conceded) was in no position to admit that publicly.7 He was a very different man from Kieft. He had no family connections that would support his acting the aristocrat (as Kieft did), no reason to consider himself superior to commoners. Stuyvesant’s father was a Reformed minister—­and filled that role at a time when clergy were not held to be among the upper classes. Kieft had the achievements of family members to call on, giving him reason to think he could “leave behind him a great name,” as his enemies charged.8 There were no grounds for this in Stuyvesant’s case. Yet in the major writings of the time, his reputation is linked closely with Kieft’s, doubling the condemnation and bitterness. From the testimony of the documents we have, Stuyvesant failed to put up a convincing response. He seemed incapable of fighting off the merchants’ accusations of leading a corrupt government—­after all, even ordinary citizens expected corruption of one kind or another in a place so distant from home.9 Nor could he shake off the charge of being a tyrant, though, being a Netherlander, he would have been bred on a discourse that excoriated tyranny as a distorted form of government imposed on the Netherlands for decades by the Spanish Hapsburgs.10 He undertook building projects immediately, first the church, then a wharf. But these earned him criticism since they were allegedly company buildings and not public works. He set about restoring the fort at New Amsterdam. But opponents charged that, since “all authority proceeds” from it, the fort was a site of danger and not protection.11 These examples could be multiplied many times over. Stuyvesant’s response to the accusations and obstructionism was of two kinds. First, he turned to the reconciling politics Willem Frijhoff has cited as

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characteristic of the Netherlands’ unique approach to power.12 He made conciliatory gestures toward opponents who called themselves Remonstrants—­ though without the explicitly religious meaning connoted by that term in the Netherlands. Adriaen vander Donck and other merchants were directly involved in resisting his administration and threatening to bring a detailed complaint to Holland.13 By way of conciliation, Stuyvesant offered, for example, to reinstate vander Donck and others of the Nine Men, the quasi-­legal or honorary representatives of the city. He would join them in remonstrating to the company about some of its demands on the commonalty. When he was rebuffed, he did not hesitate to abandon negotiative measures for retaliatory policies.14 He refused to call an assembly of the leading merchants in 1649, cited two citizens as traitors and sent them to Holland for judgment (he lost the case), and foolishly confirmed his opponents’ already implacable conviction that politics under the company would continue to be rigidly exclusionary and to that degree unjust.15 Second, Stuyvesant went ahead with projects and policies that advanced the recovery of Manhattan Island and looked to the protection and development of the province. Some comment about these projects is important because it allows us to see that, however crucial the clash of merchants and the company, the wrangling can divert attention from the realities of the daily interactions and occupational tasks of the settlers: all the seemingly trivial performances that contributed to the subtle shift in identity as trading centers such as New Amsterdam and Beverwijck moved away from being voyaging communities to those of settled populations. By overly attending to the confrontation, we run the risk of entering, as it were, a law court with its kind of discourse and adversarial procedures and its calling of learned witnesses (ancient, contemporary, ecclesiastical, profane). We overly attend to its particular kind of point-­scoring and studied performances while outside, all around, the laborious (and usually undocumented) construction of a way of life is going on. And so it did go on. Stuyvesant and his council brought down legislation against smugglers, naming names of leading merchants and closing down the coastal havens south of Manhattan Island regularly used by outlaw groups and individuals. They punished company soldiers for selling their firearms to natives and colonists alike. Stuyvesant was also working for a permanent border settlement with New England and, in anticipation of that, looking for ways to populate Long Island. Against the company’s advice, he approved the villages of Hempstead and Flushing as well as the purchase of large tracts



Conflicts and Reputation 23

of land from the natives between Greenwich and New Amsterdam. At Gardiner’s Bay, he envisaged cattle farmers living alongside natives and advantageously buying into the wampum trade.16 He accepted advice that the east point of Long Island could be purchased and “the whole of Long Island would be thereby secured for New Netherland.” For a start, he recommended that 250 colonists be sent over, including a clergyman, surgeon, blacksmith, house carpenters, a cooper and wheelwright.17 In 1650, Stuyvesant sent his secretary to investigate the country of the Raritans immediately south and west of Manhattan Island. Cornelis van Tienhoven returned with news that it was notably advantageous for both agriculture and trade. It is “the handsomest and pleasantest country that a man could behold,” he said, and tribes passed through it trading north to south and east to west.18 Along with these initiatives, Stuyvesant tightly regulated shipping in the harbor. He let the company know that he favored free trade as a way of increasing the population and appealed for the directors’ permission to construct a central warehouse in New Amsterdam. It would exert price controls on wampum, furs, and daily commodities. (The company refused.)19 Stuyvesant also turned his attention to the occupational rights and privileges of Manhattan Island’s tradespeople and artisans. Simon Middleton has persuasively detailed how his efforts to bring justice to the limited domain of bakers and their customers meant protecting the value of New Amsterdam’s currency, enacting prohibitive legislation against itinerant traders, and issuing ordinances setting standards for good bread and fair prices. In short, he attended to a raft of regulatory measures needed to provide resident bakers the monopolistic (or guild) protections commonly legislated in New Amsterdam for other artisans. These were regulations set in a premodern system that looked to obligations not liberties, to the ethics of corporate obligation not individualism. They were, as Stuyvesant and his opponents would have known, the foundation of the moral economy expected in any Netherlands town or city. The company, however, balked at Stuyvesant’s measures. The directors called them pernicious and detrimental to the free trade that would encourage population growth.20 From the documents, Middleton has concluded that given Stuyvesant’s “sensitive approach to baking,” he might have managed the town’s affairs better “if left to his own devices.” His daily relationships with townspeople rested on “compromise and negotiation rather than Directorial fiat.” And out of that dialogue came the regularization of working conditions.21 Middleton’s work alerts us to one of the many silences we should take

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note of. On the level of ordinary tradespeople and artisans, there was no mass outcry raised against Stuyvesant. No popular social movement formed against him.22 Even when the Remonstrants pointed to tradespeople, it was to admit that “our ordinary folk” carry on business with the Director every day.” He conciliated them, they conceded, and his “success” with them could last a “considerable time.”23 It is, in fact, political dissention we are observing—­a variation on the factional politics being experienced in the fatherland at the same time.24

* * * Despite their comprehensiveness, Stuyvesant’s endeavors during these early years did not diminish his opponents’ rejection of his administration. Nor did they effect a transformation in the politics of the province. They contributed substantially to that transformation but were not the decisive factor. For that we must return to the initiatives taken by the merchants in assembling and presenting to the States an emotional and one-­sided, but, in many ways factual, account of the company’s voracious profit-­taking and implacable stance against power-­sharing. They demanded that the States’ assembly admit that the source of the bad government in New Netherland was not—­in their own words—­a self-­proclaimed “Sovereign” (Kieft) or a “tyrannical” bully (Stuyvesant).25 The company itself was at fault. If the province failed, the blame lay in the Netherlands and, for its co-­responsibility with the company, within the walls of The Hague. As they and Stuyvesant knew, any transformation depended entirely on resolutions taken at the highest level. Those resolutions were finally arrived at. Beginning in about 1650 and culminating some three to five years later, the States reviewed New Netherland and reprimanded the directors for overseeing the near-­collapse of the province. The company, in turn, grudgingly conceded the leading merchants’ right to representative government. The concessions inaugurated a political atmosphere that had not existed before, namely, an ethos of belief. Before 1653 a political atmosphere had existed in which few if any measures Stuyvesant adopted were likely to win the allegiance of the merchant elite. In general, he could not be faulted for carelessness or ignorance in the administration of justice. He knew the law and insisted that his councilors be expert in it as well.26 He was generally measured in his judgments. There was, for example, nothing extraordinary in his request for mercy and not “the rigor of the law” for the man accused of threatening his life.27 Nor could he be



Conflicts and Reputation 25

faulted for failing to apply himself energetically and with vision to the future of New Netherland. Nevertheless, and although the company directors at one point complained that he had mistakenly trusted the merchants and was “too intimate with them,”28 the merchants remained his enemies. The fact that he was trapped in “instructions” which his oath required him to fulfill carried little weight.29 The reason for these anomalies was that politics, as one authority has put it, depends on “representations of . . . belief ” in it.30 These had not been forthcoming. The merchant community simply didn’t believe in the company. Its representations of the company’s exercise of power were universally negative—­those recorded on paper and those to be read in the journeying of the merchant delegation to The Hague. Only when a revamped structure allowed the accumulation of representations to tip in the opposite direction might an essentially harmonious political ethos be achieved. The States General’s grant of a municipal charter to New Amsterdam in 1653 created solid grounds for that changeover. Self-­government modeled more closely on practices in Holland gradually improved the lives of the city’s tradespeople and merchants. Many scholars have carefully studied this transformation. My concern here is to evaluate the repercussions of the charter on Stuyvesant’s subsequent career in New Netherland and his afterlives in historians’ evaluations of him. The charter meant that Stuyvesant was effectively stripped of his authority as magistrate of the city of New Amsterdam. This did not happen immediately or without rancor.31 He continued to intervene in the city’s affairs. In 1657, for example, he was consulted on the proper institutionalization of the great and small burgerrecht, one of the foundation stones of a Dutch municipality. There was no quarrelsome dissent when he advised that “in all beginnings somebody or something must be first, so that thereafter a distinction, and a difference may be made; therefore, also . . . [comes] the necessity of such distinction being founded on reason, in the establishment of the great and small burgher right.”32 But increasingly his role was consultative. And he knew this.33 His remained the highest court throughout the province (subject to the States General). Yet the authority vested in the court of the Burgomasters and Schepenen (aldermen) of the City of New Amsterdam drew the people to it and did so at sessions convened twice and often thrice weekly. Quite rightly, the officers declared themselves to be “rulers of the people in this place.”34 Stuyvesant made occasional appearances in the municipal court.

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Generally, however, it was to promulgate ordinances that were applicable to the whole province or where provincial and municipal law overlapped. Or he presented himself when military emergencies arose. Over the years his presence in the court was less and less in evidence. In 1656, for example, he cited his “office and duty” as the reason for his appearance.35 When he needed the advice or cooperation of the burgomasters, he often called them to the fort. By 1653, awareness of Stuyvesant’s workload may have contributed to the States General’s decision to carve a lower and independent jurisdiction out of the province.36 As we have seen, he had been dealing regularly with matters arising from such trivial items as properly signed anchorage places along the city wharves to those of significance such as settling the village of Breuckelen (Brooklyn), dealing with problems in Westchester, arbitrating matters concerning the Connecticut River, and containing the ambitions of the director of Rensselaerswijck. It is more likely, however, that, just as he had not been consulted about finalizing representative government, so his problems were a matter of little concern. In either case, he could not have been pleased to watch his authority over New Amsterdam, the jewel in the crown, as it were, legislated away from him. The space of Stuyvesant’s authority shifted. The power that had been his to exercise before New Amsterdam received autonomous status now lay outside the urban sphere. This loss was crucial in two respects. First, he retained his authority as the highest official in the province. But, at the same time, these responsibilities took him to locations beyond the city—­to what he called in 1659 “the open country,”37 the rural reaches of New Netherland, the fringes of wooded areas and banks of rivers where military encounters or, more likely, alliance-­making with natives, occurred. It also took him to locales where negotiations or confrontations with Englishmen took place.38 The space between Stuyvesant’s authority and that of New Amsterdam’s officials is most dramatically illustrated in the director general’s exchange with the city authorities in late September and early October 1659. The picture here is one of Stuyvesant beggaring himself for forces to assist in the submission of the local natives at Esopus. That is instructive in itself. More instructive, however, is the evidence of a traditionally institutionalized separation of the two domains of power. As in the Netherlands, Stuyvesant needed to negotiate the agreement of a city’s burgherguard to do duty outside its own defenses. Not surprisingly, in this exchange he dragooned two militia units but enlisted only six volunteers.39



Conflicts and Reputation 27

A much less grave but no less instructive moment occurred in 1656 when the need for defense also spatialized the authority of Stuyvesant and that of the city officials. Fearful of natives entering the city during religious services on Sunday, Stuyvesant agreed that a corporal of the city’s burgherguard would patrol the church grounds. His soldiers would protect people—­presumably including rural worshippers—­making their way to the church.40 For each of his seventeen years in New Netherland, Stuyvesant lived in New Amsterdam. He retained properties there. He enjoyed a wide network of family and friends, often drawn together for occasions such as baptisms. The charges brought against him by the company in 1665 and 1666 insisted that New Amsterdam fell because of his collusion with close friends. There he occasionally carried out provincial business in his garden and, many times outside the council room, shared his decisions with councilors as well as townspeople.41 At his home, he conducted his personal financial affairs, examining recent accounts with traders and businessmen from places such as Beverwijck.42 In his office—­presumably in the fort—­a young lad went daily to write for him.43 In New Amsterdam, his farm became a place for religious services and occasional entertainments for townspeople, and, of course, to New Amsterdam he returned in 1667 to live out his remaining days. These few fragments of information about Stuyvesant’s daily life we know from the records. Being-­urban he obviously was. But the volume of empirical evidence that would fix him in the city’s ongoing life is not in the records. This matters. It matters not because during most of the 1650s New Amsterdam was a wellspring of urbanity, though it was recognized as such in the 1660s. It is significant because not being-­urban, not having displayed (in the documents) the qualities gathered under the term urbanity, has subtly allowed historians to deny him those liberal values that have been, rightly or wrongly, conceived of as seeded in cities. A case in point is the positive effect of city formation on the rise of humanism. In the case of the Netherlands, it is possible to find a rivalry expressed between the burgerlijke (civic) virtues of its people, on the one hand, and Calvinism, on the other.44 From this distinction, it is perhaps easy to make an interpretive move concerning Stuyvesant: since his role in New Netherland both before and after 1653 occupied him with concerns essentially outside New Amsterdam, the civic humanism that was given expression in the clashes of the late 1640s and early 1650s is to be found in the writings of his opponents. They were, after all, the city’s merchant elite. So, in them resided the humanism and civil spirit of tolerance and pacifism, in short, the

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admirable virtues of the “True Freedom” of contemporary Holland. Credit for enactments made on the basis of humanist reason is entirely theirs. Stuyvesant, on the other hand, is depicted as humanism’s antithesis. He is a rigorous Calvinist (or Reformed) with all of its (supposed) negativities. Yet, in fact and at the time, his piety—­spirituality, religiosity, belief system, call it what you will—­was never alluded to. It was neither raised as a sign of reproach nor taken to be a cause of the allegedly arrogant or tyrannical carriage of his administrative duties. This may have been the case because all parties to the debates were, to one degree or another, Calvinist as well. Theirs was civic, not religious, discourse. I think it is our Enlightenment triumphalism that plays out here. Our analytical orientation to New Netherland’s troubles in the pre-­1653 years is expressed in categories constructed in modern times—­that is, as secular humanism/reason versus Calvinism/un-­reason. This is a false dichotomy. In the seventeenth century, a Calvinist was an individual who accepted Calvin’s teachings as “a marker of denominational identity.”45 That did not mean he or she thereby opposed the new humanistic sciences and arts embedded in the broader culture in Holland. In 1657, for example, Stuyvesant appointed Jacques Cortelyou surveyor general and gave him, in one scholar’s judgment, “the full support of a director” who was not opposed to scientific innovations and who therefore “understood the importance of competent surveying work.”46 Elsewhere Christian belief was as strongly and gracefully appealed to in one of the Remonstrants’ writings as in any public pronouncement in the New Netherland records.47 And reason was appealed to again and again by Stuyvesant.

* * * The documents of these early years are, in large part, the source of the myth that has distorted the historical portrayal of Peter Stuyvesant. They are the origin of him as stubborn, autocratic, foul-­mouthed, and destructive of the values for which Netherlanders were universally praised in the first half of the seventeenth century. Such myths cannot be erased by marshaling contradictory empirical evidence.48 John Romeyn Brodhead, in the mid-­nineteenth century, correctly wrote that Stuyvesant’s correspondence demonstrated his scholarship and intellectual capabilities. Jaap Jacobs has written that Stuyvesant could write eloquent prose and that his enemies’ much-­vaunted publication, the “Remonstrance,” was a “diatribe” that could not but have “created the impression of rebellion against the legal authority.” In his opinion, “the



Conflicts and Reputation 29

conflicts in New Netherland remained within the frameworks common for the Netherlands, and the administration of justice was as effective in New Netherland as it was in the fatherland.”49 Middleton too has reminded readers that the rebellious citizens who took themselves to The Hague as delegates of the merchant elite identified themselves dishonestly as “burgomasters and (in vander Donck’s case) President of the Commonalty” of New Amsterdam.50 On another issue, Carla Pestana has explored the mythologies surrounding the persecution of Quakers in mid-­ seventeenth-­century New England and New Netherland. She finds that three historiographies have treated the matter very differently. In Quaker historiography, an undeserved persecution prevailed. In New England historiography, the Quakers are treated as a dangerous religious aberration—­though they strengthen the myth of its own religious origins. In one unquestioned account of New Netherland history, Stuyvesant is erroneously blamed for personally legitimating an intolerance that would not otherwise have prevailed.51 These judicious opinions should carry weight against prevailing and entrenched myths. But they will not. Nor will a study that asks for attention to the binding power of Stuyvesant’s oath or the dysfunctional structure of the trading company to whose service he had pledged himself. In 1649, Stuyvesant addressed his councilors. He collapsed into one statement his two reasons for denouncing his opponents. His words were almost identical to the oath of office of a magistrate. He stated that his opponents were openly and with seditious intent defaming and injuring his “Sovereign.” And duty called him to be seen both “notic[ing] them” and “punish[ing] them.” The oath taken by a local magistrate reads: I shall use my best endeavor “for the Suppression off . . . Sedition . . . whatsoever I shall heare, may be Prejudicial to the . . . Lords & their Government here Established.”52 This kind of reasoning has never been quoted in a major publication. Writing in 1977, Robert Ritchie rightly drew attention to the fact that immediately after 1664, Colonel Richard Nicolls, acting in New Netherland for the crown, made it known that to slander the sovereign’s representative was punishable as “High Treason.” Historians have lived quietly with this.53 It was taken for granted. But Ritchie did not make the point that, for the same claim to impose punishment for open “rebellion” in 1649, Stuyvesant has been criticized as a tyrant and his opponents’ words and actions justified. Nor is the question likely to be raised, given the power of myth-­making. In the case of Stuyvesant’s oath, the context for such late medieval/Reformation expressions of loyalty (very possibly involving loss of life) has gone

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out of mind. And unlike historians writing on colonial New England, no New Netherland scholar has, to my knowledge, seriously considered Stuyvesant under the theme of “the good ruler.”54 To understand the structure of the West India Company requires reflecting deeply and broadly on the nature of Netherlandish culture. Only a few have cared to do this. It is easier, and more popular, to construct a narrative that scapegoats Stuyvesant or characterizes him in 1664 as a tyrannical maniac bent upon getting himself and his New Amsterdammers, “all of us killed.”55 Far more important and destructive than these bizarre (but accepted) personal representations of Stuyvesant are those that draw him into narratives seeking causes for New Netherland’s alleged backwardness or, less dismissive, inconsequentiality. I need to discuss these issues in a final chapter. But their logic can be presented here in compressed form: New Netherland’s backwardness or failure was caused neither by the presence of a feudal social structure nor by a primitive economic structure. Its political structure kept it impaired (and in need of the reforms set in motion by the English after 1664). The province lacked democratically elected assemblies, individual legal rights protected by common law and the Magna Carta, the opportunity for commercial success based more on individual rights and less on guild privileges meant to serve the common good, and an effectively established legal system. It lacked all the allegedly cohesive structures of the New England town. No government evolved “comparable to the assemblies of Virginia and Maryland and to the Court of Massachusetts Bay.”56 And insofar as Stuyvesant oversaw this structure as a “despotic official” and presided over its continuation for seventeen years, the blame must fall on him.57 In the short-­range view of this, the backward state of New Netherland called for the reforms implemented by the English after 1664. This view was adopted even though the conquerors of 1664 were, as one historian has put it, intent on laying “the foundations of Kingly Government” not republicanism, and putting an end to the rebelliousness on Long Island that Stuyvesant has been criticized for doing.58 From a longer-­range perspective and theoretically, only with 1664 did there occur the political development that is now one of the marks of modern values and therefore a justification of the conquest of that year.

* * * The founding of New Amsterdam is the exception to the narrative of failure. By 1664, it was one of the fairest cities in North America. The English were



Conflicts and Reputation 31

eager to have it. But, as the point was made in a 2004 publication, Stuyvesant was, of course, not its founder. If we look to the granting of the charter, that is so. We can, however, revisit a letter of the company directors specifically to Stuyvesant dated April 4, 1652 and consider its words. “We . . . agree with your proposition,” they wrote, “that a court of judicature shall be established there, similar as far as possible to the court of this city [Amsterdam].”59 Equally important, if we look to what was there to be founded, Stuyvesant’s contribution comes emphatically to the fore. The city’s survival to 1653 was due to his efforts. In January 1664, when the Englishmen of Flushing, Long Island, constructed their portrayal of Stuyvesant as cast out from New Netherland, they personified the province in him. They took his person as an object embodying the public will of its people. That recognition was grounded among Dutch men and women, English Long Islanders, and natives before 1653. In one instance after another during that time, a moment of danger or need for arbitration elicited a request for his presence.60 Or he traveled to a locale in order to literally give voice to his authority. Willem Beeckman, vice-­director along the Delaware River from 1658 to 1663, begged for his “personal presence” in 1659 and reinforced in the minds of the Minquas that he, Beeckman, was treating with them on behalf of Stuyvesant personally. The same river natives took the Dutch traders and settlers to be “the people of the Honorable Director-­General.”61 In 1660, Stuyvesant encountered this personification in news that natives near Manhattan Island were fearful of being killed “by your Noble Worship,” and that Esopus natives were ready to march against him.62 And so we arrive at January 1, 1664, in Flushing, Long Island. In large measure, Stuyvesant’s oath had brought him to this. Yet not once during the months and days preceding and including the surrender in late August–early September will he call upon it. The opportunity was there in any of the verbal and written exchanges he engaged in with his English enemies. But he did not allow his honor to be at issue. At issue was the rightful possession of New Netherland by the United Provinces and only secondarily his place as director general “commissioned,” as he stated, “to be the government of the . . . States-­General of the United Netherlands.”63 In 1660 and at a conference at Fort Orange, the Seneca had (probably disingenuously) acknowledged Stuyvesant to be “the chief of the whole country, to whom we all look up.”64 But in the Dutch Long Island village of New Utrecht in February 1664, Captain John Scott was drawing verbal graffiti of Stuyvesant similar to those of the Englishmen of Flushing. “Ye shall not any

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longer” he warned the Dutch villagers, “look upon Pieter Stuyvesant [as] your Governor, but only as a private man, for he is a General no more.”65 These English characterizations have a common desideratum vis-­à-­vis New Netherland. They desire absence. Thus, in the same year, the authorities at Hartford combined the negation of Stuyvesant and New Netherland more universally and decisively than the locals. They “knew no New Netherland.”66

Chapter 3

Protecting by Deterrence

Stuyvesant lived in an Indian world. He and other New Netherlanders often conceded this. Why would they not? In the mid-­1640s, they probably numbered less than 2,000, with only 450 men, women, and children in New Amsterdam. This was against 14,000 natives in the territory of New Netherland.1 In the mid-­1660s, they were about 8,000 men, women, and children, widely scattered in four locations: Manhattan Island and Long Island; Beverwijck, Wiltwijck (Esopus, later Kingston); and two primitively fortified settlements on the Delaware River. Against them, the Seneca were reportedly able to summon 1,600 warriors in 1663. At least 800 Black Minquaes (Susquehannocks) were in evidence on the Delaware River in 1662. In 1660, the Esopus were reported as about 1,800 men “willing to march,” while Susquehannocks to the west were 1,000 in 1671. Munsees were a presence on Manhattan Island until 1656, with groups numbering as many as 300 regularly trading at New Amsterdam.2 Studies of King Philip’s War in New England (1675–­1676) have taught us to be cautious in presuming that the asymmetries governing relations between native Americans and European intruders were always in the intruders’ favor and everywhere profound. We now know that in eastern Massachusetts, Metacom and his followers were certain that they could drive the English out of their lands and that they came close to achieving that goal.3 The Mohawks were the strongest of the New Netherland peoples and mighty among the Five Nations. In 1670, they numbered perhaps 8,600.4 There is no evidence to suggest that they were entertaining the idea of similarly annihilating the Dutch intruders. Still the Five Nations had, by one historian’s calculations, undertaken 51 wars against other native peoples and the French between 1640 and 1667.5 Intertribal wars were intermittent and, though generally contained, dangerous. Hostilities involving the Dutch

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occurred on four occasions (and almost engaged the Dutch at several other times.) For each of Stuyvesant’s seventeen years in New Netherland, he had to anticipate a possible insurgency from one quarter or another.

* * * Stuyvesant’s oath required him to manage this world. He was “bound and obliged by his oath” to exercise his office in regard to “war . . . treaties . . . alliances, trade and commerce. . . . [and dependent] populations.”6 The extant documents provide a pattern in the policies that he brought to bear in executing his office in respect to this native world. It is one that Frank Ankersmit identified after considering the records and live TV coverage of the efforts of the Dutch forces to keep the peace in Srebrenica in 1994–­1995. The cases, of course, differ in many important respects. What makes them comparable, however, is the nature of Dutch aims in the endangered Balkan city. These were, as Ankersmit writes, “to deter  .  .  . [violence] by presence.” The presence of two hundred lightly armed Dutch soldiers would be sufficient (it was wrongly thought) to keep the bitterly divided Muslins and Serbs out of the city and out of each other’s deadly grasp.7 Deterrence is also the pattern we discern in Stuyvesant’s aims in New Netherland. In the face of Dutch and native antagonists threatening violence against each other, he could never offer anything other than weak protection to the province. Deterrence was an ideal and a necessity. It was a policy of fear—­fear remembered from a violent past, fear of a possible future of violence and loss, fear in an uncertain present. In order to establish deterrence in New Netherland, Stuyvesant first needed to exert authority over the New Netherlanders themselves. He needed to work toward the creation of nothing less than moral communities where Dutch men and women, all of whom were within reach of the communal holdings or trade routes of nearby natives, would, however they achieved it and out of whatever motivation, either interact peacefully alongside the natives or leave them alone. Along with the other ethical modifications of freedom that c­ommunity-­ building required, the settlers had to accept adjusting their behavior to the presence of the native Americans and to interpretations of that presence demanded by Stuyvesant and his council. Stuyvesant, then, had to make it clear that the supervision of native-­Dutch relations was his prerogative. His government would assume responsibility with regard to war and, with or without the colonists’ approval, with respect to any matters it considered necessary.



Protecting by Deterrence 35

Second, Stuyvesant was responsible for devising strategies that would deter native aggression toward the colonists. This meant bringing natives to recognize (or pretend to recognize) his authority. No one, neither he nor the sachems with whom he dealt, entertained the notion that this recognition was anything other than transitory, pragmatic, insincere, and wildly unpredictable. Yet for each of Stuyvesant’s seventeen years as director general, these were the cross-­social and cross-­political contexts in which he administered New Netherland. He was tied to a policy that asked for equipoise but could not promise closure in relationship to peace—­and certainly none had been achieved by mid-­1664. The company directors put it their way as late as February 1663. If only, they wrote, the settlements were secure, “in order to be beyond apprehension of the Indians.”8 The hundreds of Mohawks and Senecas: these were the Indian world writ large. In reality, the experience of the average New Netherlander was much like Stuyvesant’s own direct experience of natives. Leaving aside rare exceptional circumstances, he met them regularly but individually or in small groups. The archives—­council minutes, New Amsterdam court records, provincial and municipal ordinances, letters and reports to the West India Company and States, correspondence with subordinate officials, and journals—­are a record of such constant if not daily encounters. In 1647, he met with two Susquehannock chiefs in his house. From about 1656 to 1663, he regularly received runners arriving with official communiqués from the Delaware River and others whom he co-­opted as needed. In 1658, he sat outdoors near a hedge at Esopus to negotiate with about fifty local natives. Elsewhere he joined small groups of indigenes approving land transfers. And along with other New Amsterdam­ mers, he saw natives—­the word used again and again—­“daily.” Willem Frijhoff summarized the comingling of Dutch and natives in the city in the late 1640s. It was, he wrote, intense.9 And what was true for the 1640s was accurate for many subsequent years in all the Dutch settlements. The regularity of the exchanges between individual natives and settlers was precisely the grounds for the vigilant policy of deterrence. In the circumstances I’ve just described, Stuyvesant’s conduct toward the natives he encountered was (with two recorded exceptions) cautious. So the records attest. This was not the case with the colonists. Nor was it the case with the bands of Indians who either angered them or were enraged by them. From 1647 onward, Stuyvesant recognized the need to defuse this potentially explosive situation by legislating the physical separation of the colonists and

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natives. He put his position in a directive to the newly installed burgomasters and schepenen of New Amsterdam in 1656. “Set off and enclose the city with palisades,” he directed. “This having been done, the good burghers shall be out of danger and better able to keep the Indian barbarians outside.”10 Four months later, he issued an ordinance that drew together the key elements of deterrence: news of a possible native attack, Dutch military weakness in the face of it, and the need for measures preventing all settler-­native contact. The ordinance broadcast this warning: rumors are abroad about some natives “plotting some evil”; we cannot “order nor apply a remedy against it”; we must take some preventive measures such as (where possible) our people speaking to natives “in the most civil and becoming manner . . . solely to prevent all mischief between Christians and Indians.” Stuyvesant’s words here were only one eruption in archives that are testimony to a policy consistently put in place for seventeen years.11 The policy of deterrence requires explanation. Conceptually and in broad outline, it was not of Stuyvesant’s making. In one form or another, it had already existed as an expected Dutch way of knitting together power and cultural exchange. Still, consistency in the peace-­keeping policy arose from Stuyvesant’s steadfast determination to see it implemented and the ever-­ present danger of massed Indian aggression. Both factors were at work and crucial. The origins of the policy lay in earlier North American circumstances and European imaginings of them. Starting in the early seventeenth century, accounts of the military power of resistant indigenous Americans had been fed continuously back to Holland. The natives’ implacable and “domineering” actions (as the company’s chief officer on the Delaware River used the term) had been accepted as fact.12 This, in turn, fed into an always comfortable pragmatism. That is, deterrence provided the best (and cheapest) protection for the survival of the trading stations. And, in that, it secured the delivery of profits from the trade in furs, wampum, and later grains. There was a substantial degree of truth in a friend’s advice to Stuyvesant that he and his people should quit living among the natives in “feigned friendship.”13 But the reality was that, short of abandoning the enterprise, they had little alternative. The West India Company directors were therefore determined that Stuyvesant enforce deterrence. In one wording or another—­for example, telling Stuyvesant to handle native affairs “by the most gentle means”—­the prevention of conflict was a mantra written and rewritten on the pages of their correspondence with him.14 In urging this, they were following the equally



Protecting by Deterrence 37

pragmatic wishes of the States. Stuyvesant made deterrence his own policy. Regarding the rebellious Swedes and English on the Delaware River, he wrote to Amsterdam that his policy had been “a lenient method of governing . . . to win their hearts and divert their thoughts from a hard and tyrannical form of government.” He depended on Willem Beeckman, vice-­director there, because Beeckman was “a person of peaceful character.”15 Following the same reasoning, he passed the need for deterrence down the ranks. In 1655, as an example, he was entrusted with writing a constitution for the Dutch government of Curaçao. The wording he chose regarding the natives suggests the usual coexistence of a moral and pragmatic concern. The director must not “treat the natives of the island severely . . . or in an unchristianlike manner.” He must consider encouraging them to perform service “through appropriate persuasion and promises.”16 Stuyvesant’s responsibility was to give New Netherland a moral and geographical presence that would do nothing to contradict the nonaggressive policies he so often asked one or another native peoples to believe were his. He was well aware that natives expected to see him apply the rigor of Dutch law when colonists defied it in known cases of physical assault or the murder of natives. On one occasion, native elders pointed to their young men’s misdeeds against the Dutch and their determination to curb the young men’s tempers. They expected Stuyvesant to do the same. On other occasions sachems, whom Stuyvesant had urged to avoid taking revenge, expected that as director general he would punish those among his people who took retaliation into their own hands. Often, however, his hands were tied. Cases of brutality against natives failed to come to his attention (until it was too late). Lawless men and women went either undetected or unreported in each settlement, and the company directors gave him no support if it meant seriously compromising trade. Strategically, Stuyvesant invoked a self-­regulating containment policy regarding territorial expansion. American natives in the Northeast were careful for the boundaries of their lands. Contrary to nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century mythology, their holdings were marked out in relation to cross-­tribal alliances, histories, and memory. They were carefully calibrated to family needs.17 The lands were not the transitory way stations of nomadic peoples. Repeatedly, then, Stuyvesant needed to enforce the company’s right to keep the acquisition of Indian lands under its strict control. A number of his angriest confrontations arose from denying Indian lands to groups of townspeople or individuals intent on land speculation or on

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setting up as out-­livers in order to elude surveillance on their illegal trading schemes. Each practice ran the risk of violence and then reprisals on nearby settlements, Dutch, English, or indigenous. Cases in point are Stuyvesant’s disputatious exchanges with English Long Islanders in 1653. They were, he found, maintaining the same stance adopted by them back in 1643, namely, rebelling against having to “keep paying off Indians to maintain peace in New Netherland.” A dispute on the same issue also arose with the company concerning Nevesink lands in 1652.18 The administration on Manhattan Island made colonists well aware of measures adopted to fill out the policy of deterrence. They repeatedly issued warnings about the legal consequences of disregarding them. In a sense, Stuyvesant and his council were legislating fear—­at least to the extent that not to act out of a prudent fear of the natives was treachery. In 1660, Stuyvesant issued a commission to Willem Beeckman, vice-­director along the Delaware, making this point perfectly clear. Beeckman was to bring two Dutch men to trial for “the dreadful murder committed on three savages.” We, and “the whole country and its inhabitants,” Stuyvesant ordered, must have an interest in this “murder.” For the natives will take revenge on private parties or wage a war on the community. The crime, he continued, is therefore one of “High Treason.” Were it not for present circumstances, the trial should be “carried out by the highest court, that is, on Manhattan Island.”19 This case dragged on for two years and deserves further mention. During that time, Stuyvesant wrote the directors condemning the murderers for “the damnable desire for wampum” and equally declaring the resident officer guilty of failing to punish the accused. The company directors, however, criticized Stuyvesant, writing that they could find no reasons for his “bitter . . . expressions” regarding the officer and “tak[ing] the matter so much to heart.” Stuyvesant would not let the matter rest. In summer 1661, he directed his complaints to both the city officials of Amsterdam and the directors of the West India Company: “the murder of a man, a woman and a boy, the heinousness of the affair, speaks for us.” It was not, he continued, committed because of liquor or out of revenge. It was “deliberate intent.” He challenged the directors on the grounds of morality. “Unless a distinction is made between the murder of savages and that of Christians,” the deed “demands capital punishment.” Concluding, he invoked his oath: we meant to “administer law and justice.”20 We intended nothing, Stuyvesant said, but what was “just, equitable, and our duty. God the Omniscient is the witness for it.”21 In New Amsterdam, threats of physical punishment or fines were



Protecting by Deterrence 39

regularly set for such practices as entertaining Indians in inns, housing them overnight, or selling them liquor in one’s house.22 In issuing the ordinances, Stuyvesant and his council agreed in 1656 that, yes, “there will be a loss of ordinary freedom . . . [but] our nation shall live in more security.”23 Two years earlier, fear of “greater dangers and misfortunes” had been given as the cause for an ordinance putting before colonists the extent of the problems with which the authorities were dealing. They had to forbid the sale of spirits to natives not only within the city but “on the rivers, streams, and kills, out of sloops in any manner.” In a 1648 ruling, Stuyvesant cited international law as a reason for threatening to fine colonists refusing to pay wages to Indians in their employ. In issuing the threat, he was undoubtedly also articulating a fear that daily complaints made to him by the natives might escalate into something more consequential.24 During the next year, a settler was murdered near Manhattan Island. At Pavonia, scattered Dutch dwellings were nearby Indian huts. In customary fashion, rumors of Indian guilt spread. Stuyvesant and his council moved to “dampen . . . [them] down, bury the [murdered man’s] body . . . properly” and notify the Christians not to “show any signs of vengeance.”25 As a measure of the success of deterrence and if reports can be believed, during the decade 1645–­1655, natives killed only fourteen “Christians.”26 Stuyvesant legislated deterrence in one prescriptive pronouncement after another. On two significant occasions, he also enforced it by refusing to put the full force of his government behind retaliatory actions that colonists felt were wholly justified. In 1655 and 1658, settlers on Manhattan Island and the upper Hudson River were clambering for a major military response following Dutch-­native altercations. Stuyvesant and his council refused. Investigations had revealed that, in both cases, Dutch men were instigators of the violence. A just war could not be pursued. The Dutch had not been victims of an unprovoked attack, nor had they the forces to ensure a probable successful outcome, as just war theory required. Furthermore, revenge was not an adequate justification for an offensive attack. In both cases, settlers and native villagers had been endangered by the drunkenness of a few Dutch men.27 Nonetheless, one-­off acts of wanton violence against natives were frequent and continued. They could result in Stuyvesant and local officials lying to the natives or taking other measures to conceal guilt for fear of renewed discontent and possible hostilities.28 When such incidents occurred, Stuyvesant and native sachems were left, as they say, to clean up the mess.29 In Esopus in 1658, Stuyvesant was harsh in his rejection of the settlers’

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demands for an offensive war against the neighboring natives. He reasoned that they were the cause of the natives’ devastating attacks on them and that, in one way or another, they would continue to be provocative—­fearful after the fact rather than before. “You want me,” he charged, “to take revenge for a murder, the burning of two small houses and the other complaints about threats.” But before now and elsewhere, “massacres, incendiary fires, sustained losses, injuries, and insults have given us much more reason for immediate revenge which we have nevertheless deferred to a better time and chance.” He concluded, “you know very well that this summer bears the prospect of a good harvest.” It is not the time to “make bad moves.” And as long as you persist in living in isolated houses, “it was not in our power to protect them.”30 He therefore personally assisted in a boundary-­drawing exercise. Along with sixty soldiers, he erected palisades for an enclosure that would provide separation of the two peoples who, like the Muslims and Serbs at a later time, could not imagine living peacefully together.

* * * I have already suggested that Stuyvesant’s loss of his role as chief magistrate of New Amsterdam heightened his identity as an outsider. It was an exclusionary act that, as we shall see, resulted in negative consequences for his overall reputation. On the other hand, the reorientation of his energies allowed him to focus more comprehensively on provincial demands that he had already been meeting since 1647. Until 1659, Stuyvesant’s application of deterrence kept a reasonable equivalence of power firmly in place. After that time, however, he judged that the balance was shifting in favor of the natives (and English), and he altered his perception regarding the present and future state of the Dutch settlements in North America. His perspective was splitting off from that of the company directors in Holland. He began to see the province as a New Netherlander. This shift did not entail the dishonoring of his oath or a stance of disloyalty. But it introduced a new perspective. As from the early 1660s, it was one that neither he nor the company could have failed to recognize. It told decisively against him after 1664. Slowly after 1653, both built-­up areas of settlement, New Amsterdam and Beverwijck, became communities providing a sense of belonging and identity. Daily practices were incrementally resulting in the establishment of local courts and churches, the rise of distinctive social and political hierarchies,



Protecting by Deterrence 41

the recognition of unique sites of memory, and the adoption of systems of internal commodity exchange that moved beyond dependence on fleecing the natives for furs. Differentiations were also solidifying identity and belonging. In New Amsterdam, for example, the 200 to 300 burghers who, together with their families, populated the city by 1660 came to define themselves against English interlopers, commercial competitors in Holland, recalcitrant nearby natives, and company directors who still thought they could dole out morsels of independence as they saw fit. In Beverwijck, the same causal factors applied, though one would want to add to the list the symbiotic relationship with New Amsterdam, the dynamic interplay with the Mohawks (and less so with the French ­Canadians), and the initial contestations with Rensselaerswijck. These were towns that Stuyvesant would have crossed into often. Generally, he was someone made welcome, but who was known to be crossing over from a larger epistemological and far more complex experiential world. Unlike local burghers whose occupations took them deeper and deeper into the interstices of their towns, he was a man whose duties plunged him more and more fully into the commercial and diplomatic networks of New Netherland. While townspeople were learning to improve their small properties, he was learning to particularize the geography of the “open country,” a place synonymous with native occupation and activity, as well as sudden and explosive violence. While locals were learning to write a variety of legal papers ready for deposit with the town secretary or notary, he was composing reports to Holland, logging page after page of information about meetings in native villages or, less frequently, planning raids against their forts. While burghers were developing local loyalties, he was measuring the unreliable loyalties of distant natives—­and calculating how unreliable he might safely allow his own loyalties to be.31 While townspeople were coming to live with familiar presences, Stuyvesant was dealing with the ominous and unmanageable presence of the entangled Dutch-­native world and the fear felt by each participant trying to survive in it. With some native peoples, his policies were successful. Paul Otto, writing as an expert on Stuyvesant’s relations with the Munsees, concluded that Stuyvesant deserves credit for winning their cooperation. Pragmatic and open to negotiations, he “earned the trust of many of the Munsees” and stabilized relations between the two sides.32 But it required vigilance. Every Dutch man and woman in North America lived in a cross-­cultural world. But few Dutch men came to know the New Netherland natives better

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than Stuyvesant. His correspondence with the company directors is a massive, if unintended, autobiographical tome making that fact abundantly clear. It is a record of his knowledge undergoing day-­to-­day modifications in a relational world where stability was always provisional and knowledge the result of aggregating fragments of information into patterns with no more permanence than the shifting political and social identities and hybridities surrounding him. If only from prior experience in the Caribbean, Stuyvesant was under no illusion that the frontier was a divide between Dutch civilization and native barbarism. Nor was it a divide between the Dutch and undifferentiated natives, with one tribe or sachem identical to another. Now in New Netherland, journeys taken in the 1650s to Curaçao, Esopus, Beverwijck (Fort Orange) as well as innumerable meetings with Iroquois, Hackensack, Esopus, and eastern Long Island chiefs were reinforcing that reality. He learned to traverse at least some of the dangerous linguistic frontier of outer Manhattan Island. With respect to lands and trade, he seemed to learn how to lay Dutch cultural ways alongside the council cultures so valuably described by James Merrell. By the late 1650s, he had met with natives frequently enough to distinguish what he called their long speeches made according to their “custom” from the circumstantial ones.33 He had assimilated enough of their reasoning to make it work for his own purposes. Stuyvesant had arrived in New Netherland with the implicit aim of imposing a Euro-­Netherlandish tradition of commercial formalities on native trading partners. He meant to put in place the diplomatic formalities that familiarly accompanied hostile or irenic international affairs in Europe. But he found himself encountering native Americans who also intended to impose traditional ways of formalizing commerce and cross-­tribal and cross-­cultural encounters. Diplomatic protocols were, for example, set as securely within Iroquois traditions as they were within those of the European powers. And they were as carefully calibrated. They ranged from short-­term alliances to a league with the Dutch meant to provide advantages over a considerable period of time. One colonial historian has explained this two-­sided exchange as the Dutch “follow[ing] native protocols in their diplomacy and trade, [and] setting a pattern that Indians expected the French and English to observe as well.” Another has personalized it, arguing that Stuyvesant’s generally “patient diplomacy with Indians contrasts sharply with the more popular image of him as an irascible hothead.”34



Protecting by Deterrence 43

More than others, Stuyvesant had the responsibility of reading the moods of the natives. These were emotional energies set in unaccustomed temporalities and languages. They were expressed in oddly framed and paced rituals and curious body languages. They were buried in the genres of the encounter zone that Mary Louise Pratt has identified for Europeans in “Arts of the Contact Zone.”35 Overseas Europeans had boasting stories, lamentations, tricksters’ tales, captivity narratives, sung prayer, and speeches troped and memorized for occasions of diplomacy. The same variety of narratives can be found among the New Netherland Amerindians. Their performances required listeners with an ear for tone, timbre, silences, and repetitions. They asked for an eye for gesture, color, and ritual sequences of movement. We who study the documents worry about the misperceptions and misinterpretations that speakers and listeners had to confront in cross-­cultural encounters. This concern was fully shared by men such as Stuyvesant. His informants did not lack intelligence because they filled their reports of natives’ intentions and movements with inexact words—­descriptions of tribes or tribal members who seemed “uneasy,” “warlike,” or “afraid.”36 But this meant that he was regularly making decisions and policy only on the basis of probabilities. In the 1656 ordinance quoted above, he and his council warned of uncertain reports from some natives of “some sort of evil design” to kill Christians in outlying areas. Stuyvesant and the council admitted that they were, however, unable to discover whether the warning pointed to a “general intention of that [entire] tribe” or what other sense to make of “warnings” from some among the tribe and other natives. They could only require that everyone be on guard.37 Stuyvesant was also responsible for reading his own emotional responses to the natives’ actions and movements. The ordinance quoted above adopted a tone of prudential judgment and hoped for a similar kind of forbearance. Only watchful waiting would prevent troubles between Christians and native antagonists. The records do not suggest that Stuyvesant lived in a state of high emotional tension about possible insurgencies. In 1654, he expressed the view that the number of natives was “vast” and that they sought widespread ruin and destruction. These words, however, were written to the Puritan authorities in Connecticut. In uncharacteristic attention to the “American wilderness” and “waste wilderness” in the same communiqué, Stuyvesant may have adopted a tone suitable to the Puritans’ customary rhetoric.38 Still, on one occasion, he allowed himself to make a foolish judgment. In 1658, he humiliated a band of young Esopus men by boasting that he would pit his

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men against them at any time. Well into the next year, the boast still rankled with them and the sachems as well.39 In two other instances, it was possibly that his serious misjudgment of interfering in trading alliances crucial to the Susquehannocks in 1655 and breaking his promise in the early 1660s to see to the release of a number of Esopus leaders held in Dutch captivity resulted in tragic consequences. The first event (as we shall see) led him to reassess the depth of the company’s ongoing concern for New Netherland’s people. But certainly Stuyvesant experienced extended periods when anxiety spread itself over many days and months. In any number of situations, the records show him holding himself in check when faced by allegedly undisciplined natives or ignorant colonists. In 1658, for example, he offered a memorably angry response to the Esopus settlers’ calls for military assistance while they were simultaneously provoking nearby natives, making false accusations of murder against them, and blatantly manipulating him into taking up arms. He reduced their call for a war to a whinging complaint: do not, he charged, disturb us in future with your “reproaches and complaints.” You want me to take revenge. There are not sufficient reasons. At best and for “prudence’s sake,” we have to defer it.40 Stuyvesant’s approach to war and peace with the natives mirrored tactics adopted at roughly the same time by the continental European powers. Theirs were also attritive encounters: fighting until the resources of both sides ran out, then a truce allowing time to rebuild manpower and treasuries, then once again the resumption of hostilities. Wars could be adjourned with the crack of the gavel, sending diplomats scurrying to pursue new negotiative schemes while searching out untried allies in anticipation of the next round of hostilities. A truce was, as one Dutch officer dryly defined it, “a knife that the other is holding in its sheath.”41

* * * Jeremias van Rensselaer lived in the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck along the upper Hudson River from 1651 to 1674. He had many dealings with Stuyvesant as an occasional business associate and director of affairs concerning the Mohawk and other native peoples of the region. He referred to him simply as “the General.” In identifying Stuyvesant as “the General,” van Rensselaer was using an identification that had seemingly come into popular usage. He used it affectionately.42 Perhaps other townspeople used it dismissively. Whatever the



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case, it implied an essential dissimilarity. Although a simple “Pr Stuijvesant” might appear familiarly in townspeople’s account books, it pointed to someone whose position set him at a distance from ordinary townspeople.43 By 1656, when van Rensselaer first began to use the term, Stuyvesant had indeed been performing that role for nine years. And on the basis of that performance much of his reputation and standing among contemporaries in Holland and New Netherland, as well as among later commentators, has largely rested. In the execution of his responsibilities as director general, we are able to observe the widening distance between him and the West India Company, and what might be called the structure-­of-­distance between him and the Dutch townspeople. In that respect, this distancing was some preparation for his final isolation as an outcast, an abandonment drawn so harshly and powerfully in January 1664.44 I suggest we look closely at “the General” in two ways. First, by today’s measurements, he was a strange kind of general. And, second, for him the consequences of fulfilling that role were, more often than not, moments of inconclusiveness and, rather than gratification, outright defeat.

Chapter 4

“The General”

Every general on active duty operates in a liminal physical and mental space. By the nature of his responsibilities, he occupies a place between his people’s homeland and daily experiences, and those of the enemy. It is that place, with all its multiple meanings, that Jeremias van Rensselaer shorthanded by calling Stuyvesant “the General.” In Stuyvesant’s case, this place in-between was shaped by the policy of deterrence. It was also given form by the constraints put on him as a military leader by the company’s blundering tactics in applying that policy. Stuyvesant was never at the head of a standing army or even companies of men. This was not unusual for a military officer in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. In the United Provinces, for example, the States General relied on calling up troops as necessity required. The same men, or most of them, were then dismissed when their services were no longer needed. In 1654, the States held only about 33,000 men in reserve, a buffer against the possible renewal of war with Spain. In relation to northeastern North America, Europeans had learned well before Stuyvesant’s time that massing men in formations anything like an army would have been useless against native fighters, even if it were feasible. Stuyvesant’s soldiers were men in the pay of the West India Company. Their loyalty to him was, therefore, tied to the company’s loyalty to them. They were quasi-­mercenaries. Their numbers never exceeded 250 and generally fell far short of that. The numbers are best understood by disaggregating them. The best estimate of their presence comes by considering their overstretched geographical dispersal across the province and their continually changing profile as new men entered the ranks and others left. In the very dangerous year 1659, Stuyvesant recorded the “scatter[ing]” of his men: 50 at Esopus; 15 or 16 at Altena along the Delaware River and the same number



"The General" 47

at Beverwijck; 8 or 10 at Haarlem; 5 or 6 on Staten Island; and only 50 others on Manhattan Island.1 The deployed men were like movable figures on a chessboard. They were subject to Stuyvesant’s need to relocate them to places of unanticipated native insurgency.2 There they took orders from a company appointee. They looked to a vice-­director or commissary, who was expected to run a trading post but also required to act in a military capacity if necessary. Only rarely was a long-­serving officer within their own ranks head of command. Stuyvesant could count on a small number of skilled and loyal men to lead the soldiers, officers such as Marten Kregier and Dirck Smit. There was, however, no permanent chain of command reaching down, as it were, from Stuyvesant through the ranks to an officer permanently stationed in a distant garrison. When Stuyvesant went upriver to Beverwijck, he might seek accommodation at Jeremias van Rensselaer’s home, not necessarily Fort Orange.3 The soldiers under Stuyvesant’s command were not in New Netherland to bring honor to Stuyvesant’s reputation as a commander. Neither he nor they—­nor the populace—­would have expected it to be so. From the company’s perspective, they were simply objects whose wages were a costly drain on its treasury. This was in keeping with the directors’ tight oversight of expenditure on its military establishment as its test of the quality of its overseas administrators. In 1660, for example, Stuyvesant received a directive at a time when the settlement at Esopus was under native attack, the makeshift forts along the Delaware River were threatened by both the English and natives, and tribes around Manhattan Island were uneasy as well. It read in part: “It is utterly unnecessary to keep 250 soldiers in the service. . . . We charge you, get rid of as many soldiers as possible.” Furthermore, don’t tell us that we have to pay remittances to the men. They’ve been paid. Besides, the “indolent” use their wages on riotous living. You are indulging them. “The more you indulge the soldiers, the more indolent they grow.”4 Earlier, the directors had taken the opportunity to congratulate themselves on their military decisions and forward planning. We have sent twenty-­ five to thirty soldiers, they wrote Stuyvesant in 1658. “You see therefore that nothing is left undone by us, but that we contribute as much as we can, so that it only and principally depends upon a good administration and government there, of which we entrusted to your management. . . . Economy must always be to you a matter of the greatest importance.”5 In such an atmosphere, it was inconceivable that the directors would share

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Stuyvesant’s concern for the perilously low number of soldiers or the well-­ being of those he managed to retain—­and they never did. By the 1660s, the directors were in fact searching for a way of getting out of the long-­standing obligation to furnish military protection to the settlers, as agreed with the States in 1639.6 Stuyvesant’s soldiers regarded their service as temporary. They served under the customary five-­year contracts that, in effect, acknowledged them to be transients with little commitment to the present or future state of the province. As some among them put it to him and his council in 1656, they wanted dismissal “the better to be able to seek their fortune.”7 He, in return, had little to offer them other than the low level of expectations found among troops in the Netherlands. They faced negligence, miserable living conditions, strife among themselves over insufficient clothing and equipment,8 the example of comrades deserting, and animosity from freemen. To offset some of these conditions, there were occasional off-­duty opportunities for a day’s farm work or employment in towns.9 They also had the chance to supplement their monthly wage of eight guilders (when it was paid) by searching out the illicit rewards of pillaging friend and foe alike. They would have known, as Stuyvesant did, that among the Netherlanders generally, the military and its rapacious adventures were treated with the greatest suspicion. Stuyvesant harbored no illusions about the general character of the men. Nor did they. Treat us properly, they warned his officers at the Delaware River in 1659, or watch us become “villains and deserters.” In the same year, he acknowledged that the men at Fort Amsterdam were “of the worst kind.” And the soldiers could be as dangerous when discharged as in the ranks.10 Still, they were never present in sufficient numbers to be rebellious against his administration. Nor would it have entered their heads to be, any more than it would have occurred to them that their commanding officers would look to them as a source of personal honor. We have a clear picture of Stuyvesant’s estimate of his soldiers from plentiful references in the records. He depended on them for the security of the growing settlements and, under certain circumstances, found them to be reliable. He allowed them to inspect incoming ships for smuggled goods such as guns, lead, and powder, and to act as interpreters and informants on such matters as the intentions and movements of natives, their numbers of fighting men, and the inauguration or dissolution of alliances. As required, he authorized junior officers to negotiate with native sachems and generally expressed satisfaction with their results.



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On two occasions, he kept a journal of expeditions he led to Esopus. He made the first journey from May 28 to June 28, 1658. His intention was to reaffirm the peace then in place with the Esopus natives. The other Esopus expedition was from October 3 to 10, 1659. It was undertaken to prevent native raiding parties aroused by murders committed by the resident Dutch. Neither occasion gave him reason to berate the soldiers. In May–June 1658, he disembarked at Esopus with 60 men transported in the company’s yachts. He exercised particular caution, for fear of causing the natives to be unsettled by the number of armed men and flee. He commandeered the men to build defensive barricades for the settlers, admitting it was difficult work for himself and the men and rewarding them with an anker, or about ten gallons, of brandy. He left 24 men behind for security and delayed his departure because of adverse winds and to “let the men rest.” Reporting at Fort Amsterdam, he took care to tell the directors that the Manhattan community publicly approved the journey.11 At the same time, there was no gratification to be had from the soldiers’ endemic insubordination. It went hand-­in-­hand with drunkenness. Because of that, disobedience was seldom focused on superior officers—­a corporal, lieutenant, or Stuyvesant. Rather than showing itself as the insubordination of the disenchanted or mutinous, it was the dereliction of duty of the befuddled, but no less dangerous, drunkard: a man (or small group of men) sharing a pail of spirits somewhere with natives, then becoming violent, and perhaps brandishing weapons or trading them away for more beer or liquor. Or it was the action of a stupefied trooper deliberately provoking natives, selling them drink or stealing from them: looking for trouble, even committing murder.12 As Stuyvesant knew, the soldiers could not be trusted because, whatever else, they could not be expected to abandon the habit of excessive drinking. He would not have been surprised to learn that within five months of leaving the men behind at Esopus, they were drinking and assaulting the natives.13 Generally Stuyvesant mentioned soldiers in his correspondence because the settlements were growing in population and so were threats from native and English opponents. Whatever the reports of the men’s uncontrolled behavior, he required them in greater numbers. The directors, he wrote, had to understand this. Yet evidence suggests that throughout the 1650s, they continued to think that garrisons of 16 to 18 men were sufficient at the dispersed locations, while Stuyvesant was increasingly desperate for considerably higher numbers, ideally between 50 and 60.14 In September 1659, he warned the directors that his forces were too weak to give military assistance to the

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Delaware River settlements then under threat from the Swedes and English and, at the same time, keep Manhattan Island properly garrisoned. Again, he hoped to be provided “with timely help.”15 Overwhelmingly, his requests were noted and dismissed. It was when he was pleading for a greater number of forces that Stuyvesant’s papers show the widest range of his emotions. On the one hand, his anger, frustration, and severity with the company directors scald the pages again and again. On the other hand, no group elicited more compassion than the soldiers. Unlike the company directors, his comments about them were not in terms of expenses. They were about the consequences of a numerical inadequacy that he was beginning to put in the context of his own growing intellectual possession of the province and fear of losing it. When ordered by the company to pay all the debts and salaries of officers out of New Netherland revenues in 1660, he responded that it was impossible. Furthermore, the accompanying directive to enforce a policy of retrenchment would, he insisted, endanger “the existence of the colony.” The realities were: “low market prices, war with the Indians, fear of invasions by our neighbors, complaints of the Military and other burdens.” Concerning the military, he went on, “the poor soldiers stationed at the Esopus [where native-­Dutch hostilities were still in progress], here, and at the Delaware River, make many marches now and are completely without socks, shoes, shirts and other pieces of necessary clothing.” The directors had made promises of assistance, but he had “waited from ship to ship.” Later, he returned to the subject of marches. He reminded the directors that the men faced nothing less than the possibility of massacre on the treacherous march overland from Manhattan Island to the Delaware River.16 Writing in 1660, he was not the first official to ponder the company’s neglect of its men. Two years earlier, a thoroughly disheartened vice-­director on the Delaware River had learned what it was to be bound to the ambitious merchants of Holland: “what was required for the soldiers and civil officers was little thought of.”17

* * * A number of factors, then, put military honor out of reach. Not the least of these was the blindness of the company to changing realities in New Netherland. Such honor might well have come to Stuyvesant on one occasion, but again the company deserted him. In 1655, he cooperated with officers



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of a fresh contingent of soldiers sent directly to New Netherland by the City of Amsterdam to displace the Swedish from fortified settlements along the Delaware River. The complex expedition was a swift and total success. For Stuyvesant, however, it was bracketed by the company’s fury with him on the eve of the expedition and, afterward, its callous reluctance to address the tragic events that occurred in New Amsterdam and around Manhattan Island at the hands of natives during his absence. Before the military action, Stuyvesant had made a voyage to Curaçao. The directors fulminated that it interfered with their plans. Moreover, it was undertaken without their previous knowledge and approval—­a specious accusation given that the island was within Stuyvesant’s jurisdiction and was a sailing destination with which he and his council therefore had continual intercourse. On this occasion, it was a region in which he conducted important and successful business arrangements.18 After the military expedition when he and his council needed to consider taking retaliatory action against natives who had killed possibly 50 or 60 colonists and were not yet convincingly pacified, they were looking for advice and permission to follow such a course. The directors, however, refused to give direction. They offered that they could reach no “final conclusion” about the affair: perhaps Stuyvesant should “make some arrangement” with the natives, perhaps “revenge the bloodshed.” They would be more decisive “in due time.” Six months later, they confirmed their indifference by advising that their situation was such that they could not send troops or other necessities.19 A 1657 letter from Holland indicates a widening rift between the directors and Stuyvesant. In it, the directors refer to their previous letter of December 19, 1656, where, among other things, they had expressed their undisguised distrust of his reporting of New Netherland’s finances. There was considerable foundation for their concern. Early in 1656, Stuyvesant too was worrying about his depleted treasury and his bookkeeper’s delinquency in preparing records for examination in Amsterdam. But the directors’ 1656 letter was both unusually harsh and personal. We do not, they had charged, know at what price goods are being sold at or how people are being taxed. With respect to the company’s income, “the books are withheld from us.” Corruption, fraud, and Stuyvesant’s blindness to extortion—­all these were cited. “We leave it to all sensible statesmen,” they warned, “to judge just what connection there can be between such proceedings and a lawful administration.”20 It is difficult not to think that, coming in the immediate aftermath of the native depredations on and around Manhattan Island and the colonists’

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continuing sense of vulnerability, the accusations intensified Stuyvesant’s sense of abandonment by the company. The directors’ words referring to his response to that letter are worth quoting at length. “We have read your lengthy debates, verbose complaints and far-­fetched excuses in reply to our letter of Dec. 19, 1656 showing that you do not intend to give in or submit, and we might give you a satisfactory answer if we considered it necessary or worth while, but we’ll say that in future you’d better keep aloof from such reproaches and challenges, and take greater care not to give cause for just complaints.”21 Five months later, the directors compounded these serious accusations by offering a solution to the military crisis based, once again, on their estimate of Stuyvesant’s allegedly abundant treasury. Surely, they wrote, your treasury ought to be in good shape. Send money, we’ll invest it, and, with the profits, finance the sending of troops. Seven years later, Stuyvesant still held this series of betrayals in his memory.22 A confrontation between Stuyvesant and the directors emerged again in 1662. Again it concerned the province’s defenses. Now, however, the directors were insisting that New Netherland’s security be given a complete change of direction. They were determined to free the company of its contractual agreement with the States to provide military protection to the province. Once again, they were ordering that the military be further reduced and the inhabitants made to defend themselves. As Stuyvesant summarized their policy in a July 1662 letter, they were seeking the “total abolition of the military and [mandating] reliance on the inhabitants alone for the offensive and defensive maintenance of this territory.”23 This was the same policy decision he had been forced to confront the year before. Then the directors had first suggested the advantage to be gained by following the examples of the French and English in North America who, they (wrongly) pointed out, “never employed or kept soldiers for their preservation or protection.” In both instances, Stuyvesant made it perfectly clear that the company’s subjects were well aware of its unannounced plan, but had repeatedly insisted that the company had “engaged itself by the Exemptions [of 1639] to protect us and reserve for it[self] the export and the import duties and the excise.” He had put their case forcefully. Then he cut his own arguments short to avoid, as he wrote, unpleasant feelings and reproaches. Now he was repeating that this policy could only come to a bad end.24 He advanced two arguments. First, while the inhabitants fully understood that they must do their best and support the military in pursuing the natives



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when required, they were unwilling and reluctant “to attack the savages in the open field, and in relieving or bringing help to other outside places.” He called upon the honored tradition of privileges and freedoms that individual cities had won in the Netherlands and of which the directors would have been entirely aware. Referring to urban citizens marshaled to engage an enemy on an open field of battle, he wrote, “We do not remember . . . that citizens and inhabitants in the Fatherland were held or compelled to do it.” Furthermore, he wrote, those who were urging the new direction “have little dealings or interest in this country.” They care little “for the keeping or loss of it.” As he had in 1659, he described his forces as a “scattering” of men, their actions a gesture of mere “bravado” to outsiders and himself. Stuyvesant then turned directly to the divide that now existed between the New Netherlanders and the directors. He recalled the directors to his own and the people’s past and ongoing experiences. “If your Honors had from your own experience a perception of the interests, losses, sudden attacks, unexpected murders, manslaughters, different incendiary fires, [that] happened to the inhabitants before and during our time, as we your Honors’ faithful officers and good inhabitants have experienced them, and if your Honors knew, that the wild barbarians have so far only been somewhat held in check by the dread of the few soldiers, then . . . you would with us deem it better . . . to think of some convenient means, whereby for their greater security a larger number of soldiers could be maintained, than to reduce and discharge the small number at a greater risk.” He then put to them his memory of 1655–1657. Seven years ago, he wrote, the damage here “could have been prevented.” It would not have occurred if we had had twenty-­five or thirty soldiers remaining in garrison. We will not, he concluded, “go farther in these inferences.”25 It would sound a dramatic note to cite this letter as a turning point in Stuyvesant’s relations with the West India Company. However, while his disaffection with the company direrctors—­and their distrust and disrespect of him—­had been intensifying since 1655 and can be tracked in several exchanges, there is no evidence that a recurrent edginess had escalated into a decisive break in their contractual ties. There is conclusive evidence that Stuyvesant was continually taking firmer intellectual and emotional possession of New Netherland. Independent of the company, he was deriving from that a sense of the real dangers to the province about which they were at loggerheads. To that extent, it exposed a critical moment in New Netherland politics.

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Meanwhile deterrence was becoming an illusory goal, and loss of the province a real possibility.

* * * Stuyvesant was by no means persona non grata as general in the Dutch New Netherland towns. But he faced a structure of distance when forced to seek military assistance from New Amsterdam, Beverwijck, and less populated settlements. Supplementing his forces meant beggaring himself for volunteers. The town magistrates might readily refuse. This was not because of personal dislike of Stuyvesant or a questioning of his military objectives. Rather, they were adhering to custom and tradition regarding military affairs as these had guided the decisions of a burgerij (civic communities) in other Dutch cities such as Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Dordrecht for decades. In a pre-­nationalist localism that went unquestioned, individual communities expected to act—­and be allowed to act—­with their own interests first and foremost. This premodern particularism had nothing to do with democratic aspirations. It was a variant of the civic corporatism identified by Middleton in relation to the urban guilds mentioned above. It was symbolized in a highly self-­conscious burgherguard (schutterij) trained (except in extraordinary circumstances) to act defensively (not offensively in the “open field”) and under local command. The structure was one that Stuyvesant would have honored and, as we have seen, defended to the company directors in 1662. But for a commander it meant tough negotiations and the probability of coming out second best. It meant being bound to conventions that compromised his ability to suppress widespread insurgencies or meet trans-­local crises of proportions that required significant numbers of men. The native attacks on Esopus in 1659–­1660 presented such a crisis. Following a number of assaults, Stuyvesant needed to establish control over an undefined geography of native plantations and fortified strongholds. In September 1659, he laid plans for an expedition and called for volunteers. “Esopus” is not as recognizable a place word to us as “New Amsterdam” or “Beverwijck.” But the insurgency there was the most threatening and prolonged crisis of Stuyvesant’s administration. It easily exceeded the confrontations on and around Manhattan Island in 1655–­1657. In addition to the hostilities of the Esopus natives, the attacks threatened to include the Raritans, Nevesinks, Catskills, perhaps various Susquehannock tribes, and the



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Mahicans and Hackensacks. The province’s leading burghers shared Stuyvesant’s opinion that the situation of the country in late 1659 “has not been more dangerous for years.” Members of his council spoke of a possible “general war.”26 Stuyvesant answered the seriousness of the threat by leading a contingent of men up the Hudson River on at least three occasions between May 1658 and July 1660, and immediately encouraged the Mohawks to broker a peace with the Esopus and pacify tribes that might otherwise offer support. Nevertheless, by spring 1660, 12 or 13 local men and soldiers had been killed, and he had been forced to deploy 100 men there to act defensively. They were to organize raiding parties, if necessary, and protect settlers trying to plant seed for the late summer harvest. Stuyvesant began negotiating with the burgomasters and schepenen of New Amsterdam on September 30, 1659. The city’s leaders greeted him with resistance. They began the belligerent sparring customary in the fatherland between urban magistrates and military commanders seeking citizen-­soldiers for extensive campaigns—­often for the locals’ own defense. The resolution would be of a contractual nature, with Stuyvesant negotiating for his volunteers. After two days of wrangling and cajoling, he was able to enlist only six volunteers and commandeer two reluctant militia units. His mustering of the men and river journey to Esopus took place from October 3 to October 10. On the evening of his departure, a sense of fright prevailed. As he and the men were embarking, New Amsterdammers panicked at a dog’s sudden barking. Citizens took to the water, fearing that natives were about to swarm over the island. By October 10, Stuyvesant and the troopers had scrambled ashore near the river landing at Esopus. For about ninety minutes, they trudged from the strand up to a plain where the stockade stood. The natives had left two and a half days earlier. The land was drenched with rain.27 Stuyvesant had led an ineffectual expedition that turned into more of the same: prolonged negotiations with the natives for the exchange of prisoners and for terms of a peace almost certain to be short-­lived. As it happened, the peace was disastrously lost in a renewed Esopus insurgency in 1663. He was unable to restore it. Hostilities were a serious threat in 1664, when he faced the English flotilla and surrendered the province. In the affair, Stuyvesant lost more than the successful outcome of an expedition and the safety of a riverside village. The venture showed once again the weakness of his forces. It identified the ineffectualness of what he himself

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in 1664 called his government. It was a painful counterpoint to Indian aggression and the political agitation of English Long Islanders, both on the upsurge in the early 1660s.28 It could be and was used against him by Dutchmen, Englishmen, and natives, certainly in August–September 1664. In the year before that time, Stuyvesant was well aware of the intentions of the Connecticut leaders at Hartford to displace the Dutch and “proclaim . . . another government.” Nevertheless, his advice to the Dutch Long Islanders of New Utrecht was to maintain deterrence. Don’t believe them, he counseled: “keep and continue quiet and peaceable as . . . [you] have done hitherto.” The same town was near the place where John Scott was grandstanding in January 1664. There he shouted, “Let Stuyvesant come over with a hundred men. I shall wait for him here, and run him through the body.” There was more than a morsel of truth in his taunt. Stuyvesant’s military vulnerability was more than obvious.29 Scott belittled Stuyvesant’s honor in this performance. But he did not mock his oath. Neither did Stuyvesant call on it. Nor did Stuyvesant do so when negotiating with Colonel Richard Nicolls seven months later, in the final days of August and early September 1664. The exchange was conducted on the level of the customary legal protocols—­the presentation of commissions authorizing the representatives of the rival sovereign states to perform the rituals of negotiating a surrender. Stuyvesant was practiced in this kind of diplomatic discourse and steadied himself within it for almost nine days. As proof of the legitimacy of his government, he presented Nicolls with a commission bearing the date of his oath-­taking on July 28, 1646. He also introduced the sacred into the tangle of necessary legal language. He allowed it to explain the course of the present political circumstances. He placed the weakness of his forces and the resulting precariousness of the Dutch just possession of New Netherland within the dispensation of a “merciful and no less righteous God” who upheld all things “as well by small force and means, yea, even by no means, as by a great army.”30 In Holland two years later, he returned to these enigmatic words. Responding in 1666 to the West India Company’s case against him, he defended himself in the dozens of documents and thousands of words suitable in a court of law or, in this case, an official investigation. Once again, he took the occasion to deliberately splice together the sacred and political. To him, the surrender was essentially not a secular happening. He used the Gospel of Luke to defend his decision to surrender Fort Amsterdam and the province. He drew attention to his insufficient forces and cited his several



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requests to Nicolls for conditions of compromise and peace. The Gospel reads, “Or what king who is going to wage war with another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace” (Luke 14: 31–­33, New Revised Standard Version). Stuyvesant had used the Lucan passage before. In 1660, he had written to the Massachusetts General Court warning them about known English incursions on New Netherland lands and invoking God as defender of the rightful owners. God alone, he wrote, “is able to maintain our just possession either by small or great power and means, even by none at all.”31 In 1666, he was addressing a committee of the States. For the first time, he spoke directly of possession and loss. He was asking them to consider the biblical story even though he knew that the analogy ended with the message that renouncing “all that one possesses” was sometimes a required good. Now he was adding that his “honor”—­or fealty to his oath—­“forced” him to say that, in truth, the fort was indefensible and surrender unavoidable.32

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Part II

Belief

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Chapter 5

The Struggle to Believe

On the last Friday in June 1658, Peter Stuyvesant was finishing a report following a month-­long visitation to Esopus. Sixty or seventy villagers made up the settlement there. They were farming and trading on land midway up the Hudson River between Manhattan Island and Beverwijck. Serious troubles had allegedly broken out with local natives, and the settlers, as we have seen, were requesting military assistance from Stuyvesant and his three councilors, Nicasius de Sille, Pieter Tonneman, and Johan de Deckere. On May 28, he had accepted his councilors’ advice that he carry out an investigation of the allegations and make whatever arrangements were necessary to settle the matter. On the same day, he assembled a bodyguard of sixty soldiers. With them, he left New Amsterdam and began a journal of about 4,500 words. It would constitute his report. I have read the journal many times. On my first reading, I knew it was important. It was, after all, one of Stuyvesant’s longest extant pieces of writing. For those of us interested in encounter history, it was also invaluable as a revelation of how one set of natives and Europeans could get themselves so disastrously and murderously entangled in one another’s lives. It was also a compelling account of Stuyvesant giving what was very much a command performance during the thirty days when he tried to establish order in Esopus. As expected, Stuyvesant logged his actions day by day, meticulously correcting himself at one point for failing to mention something at the proper chronological place. So I was, as it were, with him “On Monday, the 3rd of June, in the morning,” when he oversaw the digging of a moat in which defensive palisades would be erected to enclose a village, “On the 13th, 14th and 15th” when he and his men commandeered the settlers to build a village guardhouse, and “On the 25th, about noon” when he and his men “embarked on the Company’s yacht” and sailed for home.

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In my early reading-­journeys with him, I was curious about other words that were clues—­just traces—­of how he was making sense of the days as they unrolled during the month of June. I noted these but set them aside. They were markers such as: “On the morning of the 30th [of May], Ascension Day, we marched to the bouwery of Jacob Janse Stoll . . . where on Sundays and the other usual feasts the scriptures are read. After this had been done on that day in the forenoon, the inhabitants who had assembled there, were directed either to remain or to return in the afternoon.” Another entry was inscribed during the brief time when he was upriver in Beverwijck: “On the 9th was Pentecost. On the afternoon of the 10th I left [for Esopus] after divine service [on Whitsuntide Day].” And another: “The 16th was Sunday, and after divine service, I inspected . . . the land on the Esopus . . . and found it suitable for about 50 bouweries.”1 These were obvious references to Stuyvesant as the religious man we have already encountered. Now, writing the chapters of Stuyvesant Bound, the notations that I had dismissed have come to interest me greatly—­as I hope they will you. They come to us as fragments. Taken together, they are less than a hundred words out of the report’s 4,500. We might say that they beg to be disregarded. They can, however, do more work for us than might initially seem possible. For they are like the sails in the statement, “Twelve sails appeared on the horizon.” The sails clearly stand for twelve ships. They are a metonymy. Along with metaphor, metonymy is a figure of speech that gives us readers and writers literary depth, reach, and beauty. In this case, the sails speak for themselves: the words signify their presence above the surface of the sea. The same words, however, also give presence to what is implied but absent. That is, they give presence to the reality of the twelve ships—­their gunwales, crews, quarterdecks and flags, anchors and ropes, their cargo holds. And the sea around them. In Stuyvesant’s journal, the references to Ascension Day, Pentecost, and attendance at divine services in Beverwijck are similarly parts to a whole. The whole pointed to is an absence and presence. In this case, the whole is an orientation to the world that is (like the ships) surely present but radically inconspicuous.2 It is a worldview that the fragments in the journal allow us to understand—­and to understand in this way: belief in that worldview required continual effort. The fragments record acts of volition. Up in Esopus, Stuyvesant chose to celebrate the meaning of Ascension Day and affirm it as a “feast” day. In



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Beverwijck on the second Sunday in June, he made the effort to celebrate Pentecost and delayed his return voyage back to Esopus until he had attended divine services. On the following Sunday, he took the opportunity to participate in church services before making an inspection of the Esopus lands suitable for farming families. These were efforts to access God. Like the act of the seventeenth-­century Dutch merchant I presented in “The Outcast”—his inscribing of “Laus Deo in Amsterdam” on a folio of paper—­or Stuyvesant’s call upon his oath, they were efforts to confirm and continue to generate a relationship. They were public affirmations made to sustain a relationship that lay at the heart of a worldview that, more convincingly than any other, explained change, the meaning of the transcendent and immanent, and the meaning of selfhood. They offered the “possibility of  . . . expectation[s].”3 This providential orientation to the world—­however we may look back on it—­did not sustain itself automatically. It required effort. It asked for binding oneself to a literally endless commitment. It required public performances that constituted belief, tales told, and gestures made that were one’s own to observe alongside those of others. The New Netherlanders recognized that belief in God was always an immersion in an unstable process. It required reinforcing performances. These were not unlike the small, routine, and inconspicuous performances Stuyvesant recorded in his journal. The New Netherlanders also speak to us about performances. Again and again, they tell us of their desire for edification. This was an emotion that Stuyvesant shared with them and bound him to them. He knew the two men whom I introduce to you here. I present Domine Johannes Polhemius and Domine Henricus Selijns because their fragmented biographies illuminate the spiritual aspects of his life. First, their lives suggest that the desire for edification—­Stuyvesant’s desire and that of other New Netherlanders—­was fundamentally an individual need, and people recognized this. Investigating the yearning for edification helps us identify the effortful process by which, for long years, Stuyvesant remained a pious and active member of the Reformed Church—­someone faithfully bound to its truths, values, and obligations.4 Second, the preachers’ actions point to edification as an expected aim and outcome of public policy-­making. Stuyvesant was expected to play a central role in answering that demand—­and would have asked nothing less of himself. His office required him to stabilize the ecclesiastical world of New Netherland in order to satisfy so seemingly incidental but actually so central a

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responsibility. Third, by giving this single emotion exceptional attention and then returning to the ordinariness of daily life, we get some understanding of how it worked alongside the nonreligious aspects of culture.

* * * Suddenly in 1654, Domine Johannes Theodorus Polhemius became one of Stuyvesant’s responsibilities. Stuyvesant had not written the Reformed Church governing body in Amsterdam requesting the minister’s services. Rather, Polhemius was aboard a ship that had encountered difficulties making its way from Brazil to Holland and landed him at New Amsterdam. The village of Flatbush and other communities on the western reaches of Long Island quickly sought Stuyvesant’s approval to call Polhemius as their minister. He lived among them until his death in 1676.5 Polhemius was an insignificant man. His affairs are, for example, lodged colorlessly in the minutes kept by Stuyvesant and his council between 1654 and l658. They are also in three or four personal letters written by Stuyvesant, and two or three brief notations in the records of the Reformed Church’s Classis in Amsterdam.6 He was a disappointment to the churches he served. He had moments of eccentricity that lifted his actions above the level of the everyday. Reportedly, at one point he wanted to “preach in the public street in the open air.” This would have been particularly fascinating were it a deliberate reintroduction of the early Reformation hedge preaching or the disruptive anti-­Catholic psalm-­singing then carried on by Protestants through town and city streets. The threat, however, appears to have been meant to offend the Breuckelen villagers who were denying him a proper salary and a house for services.7 In general, then, he was simply ordinary. But it is the ordinary that his life valuably illuminates. For down there in the everyday, as it were, spirituality takes place. And, within that mode of living, we discover the New Netherlanders’ need for edification. It came about this way. In January 1657, the magistrates of Breuckelen complained to Stuyvesant and his council about Polhemius, who was then serving Flatbush, Amersfoort, and Breuckelen. Their intention was to put a convincing case for avoiding their village’s share of paying his salary. The tone of their petition was firm but measured. It was, in fact, marked by a notable degree of charity toward the minister. They presented a landscape of poverty and then a landscape of belief. They were, they began, representatives



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of a farming community impoverished by Indian attacks and other disasters. Abandoned farms now marked the land. These were everywhere to be seen: on the strand, on the Poor Bowery, and, among other places, on the vacant lands of Elbert Elbertsz, Pieter Corneliszen and Black Hans, and Pieter Manist. Other farms were occupied but by “very simple and poor” people “of whom there were quite a number.” Contributing the 300 guilders Stuyvesant had calculated as their fair share of the minister’s annual salary was therefore an “impossibility.” The landscape of belief or spirituality was equally bleak. Polhemius, they wrote, had given them “meagre and unsatisfactory” service. He comes here from Flatbush only for two weeks, they said, and chooses to be with us for only a quarter of an hour on Sunday afternoons. Instead of a sermon, he gives us only a prayer “from which we learn and understand little.” In all, “he gives small edification to the congregation.” On the Sunday before this past Christmas, they continued, we expected to be offered a sermon. Instead, “we had to listen to a prayer so short that it was over before we had collected our thoughts.” The preacher had then hastily returned home, to Flatbush. “And this was all the edification—­little enough—­which we have had during the Christmas holidays.”8 By this account, the Reformed believers were not looking to Polhemius for theological instruction. They were not asking for instruction in Calvinist dogmatics. Nor were they concerned for apologetics. They were simply asking him to be with them longer. They wanted him to play out the usual liturgies more abundantly and more often, and to reinforce their belief by all the actions that made up his presence among them. Similar to the work done by “twelve sails,” an edifying minister was meant to be an embodiment of the Spirit’s wider presence. They were, in short, seeking behavior that would authorize their own acts of belief, acts that are at all times notoriously insecure and were especially so at this time in New Netherland. They expected of Polhemius what individual belief acts require: not incidental but continuous evidence that, alongside their own assertions of belief, were those of others. Nothing required more effort on the part of those New Netherlanders who were Christians than retention of religious belief. I think there are two reasons for this. First, the act of belief is itself a continuous struggle. It involves the intellect and will. Second, seventeenth-­century New Netherland was a mission landscape. It was an unstable religious terrain. One of its major features was kinesis—­preachers and meetinghouses, deacons and

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schoolteachers, churchgoing members, all in motion. For Christian believers, the New Testament had its way of redeeming such a landscape. The Acts of the Apostles, for example, furnished New Netherlanders with an imagination that gave its blessing to preachers moving over great distances: to local churches as improvisations, to a crude table for meals turned into a place for the celebration of the Eucharist, to the makeshift, the making-­do, the moving on—­to uprooting oneself for a cause, pushing farther for a harvest of souls. Still and just as evident in the Acts of the Apostles and elsewhere, there was sectarian division, with Paul writing to the Corinthians that he had been informed about their loss of faith and “contention.” The struggle of New Netherland churchgoers to believe was no less fraught than the comparable effort made by medieval Christians in the so-­ called Age of Faith. Both took upon themselves the discipline of maintaining a commitment to a series of reputedly true propositions. But, by that, they found themselves continually needing to accommodate truths often, as one writer has put it, “repellent to their natural dispositions.”9 The Christians of Breuckelen longed for edification not because they were at rest with the certainty of their belief but, on the contrary, because they lived with “imperfect certitude.” In belief, the self is always “talking to itself, confronting assertion with doubt and doubt with certainty.” Edification is sought because belief needs to be reaffirmed again and again. Each individual needs to reach for props, as it were, to avoid her or his own skepticism. It requires prodigality, not a fifteen-­minute prayer and an otherwise absent minister.10 Breuckelen’s magistrates were correct in sensing a corporate longing for edification among the village’s Reformed congregation. Stuyvesant was also aware of this corporate need. For example, he agreed with the ruling of the Breuckelen church elders that a man or woman engaged in a case before his court could be denied the Eucharist during that time if it avoided “an offence to the congregation.”11 He also ordained annual days of thanksgiving or penitence across the province. But the struggle was set in the individualized experience of faith. In this light, a decently long sermon, an offering of something to “learn and understand,” a preacher’s demonstration that Christmas services were special—­that he needed them too—­these were not too much to ask. Polhemius’s appearances in the provincial records are those of a poor man desperate to have his salary settled and his church built. Across Stuyvesant’s table came papers about sums of money denied him, the theft of planks that Stuyvesant expressly provided for a church-­house—­possibly like the one



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planned for Midwout, that is, 60–­65 by 28 by 12–­14 feet high12—­and back pay still owed him by the West India Company. From what we can tell, here was a man forced to plead for his own and his family’s decent survival. If, however, we turn our attention away from Polhemius and toward the environment with which he was struggling, we are led not away from the seemingly petty world of unpaid contributions and purloined wooden planks, but deeper into the unsettled mission landscape of which those realities were a part—­and which he, and Stuyvesant in a much more entangled way, had to manage.

* * * Wherever he went in New Netherland in the 1640s and 1650s, a preacher carried the sign of impermanence. Polhemius’s biography tells us this, and so do brief accounts of preachers and comforters of the sick (ziekentroosters) on the Delaware River, ministers in Esopus and Beverwijck, and even the domines more settled (by the mid-­1650s) in New Amsterdam. Aspects of that mobility presented testing, if not dangerous, challenges for an overseas administrator who might find himself blamed, as Stuyvesant was on one occasion, for allowing religious “innovation and turbulence.”13 The preacher was, in the first place, a mobile figure on the land. By his calling and because of service required to a widely dispersed set of local church communities, he could make close surveillance of his orthodoxy—­and his honesty or morality—­difficult. A man claiming to be a preacher might, for example, suddenly “intrude himself ” into a village’s religious community—­ this was a complaint once made against Polhemius. As happened in 1661, he might be a man dishonorably dismissed as a minister in a place such as Curaçao and then appear in New Netherland, where he might be employed by Stuyvesant and elders unaware of his dismissal and long history as a petty thief. Or he might be a rogue similar to Michiel Zyperus, who was reported to have been preaching on Manhattan Island while drinking, cheating, and forging the papers of others. Having finally been exposed as a criminal, he took off for Virginia.14 From at least 1555–­1556 forward, Reformed Church officials in Holland were aware of the dangers of unsupervised itinerancy. They moved strenuously to confront its consequences whenever they could. Again and again, they reminded would-­be itinerant preachers that they were not “apostles.” They were men settled in specific local churches. With good reason, Stuyvesant too distrusted those he called “scatteringe preachers.”15

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Second, the preacher also generally held services in a domestic church (huis-­kerk). These were not unlike the early Christians’ house churches of the post-­Resurrection and Pauline period. But whereas Reformed churches in cities such as Amsterdam or Dordrecht were becoming readily distinguishable architecturally from the private houses or schuilkerken (hidden churches) where conventiclers such as Lutherans, Catholics, or other unorthodox sectarians were meeting, in New Netherland the structures of Reformed gatherings were indistinguishable from conventicles of “heretics” where dissenters would (unsuccessfully) hope to hide their aberrations within the walls of inconspicuous houses among inconspicuous villagers. These were the people who Stuyvesant was responsible for identifying, searching out and, if necessary, disbanding by banishment. De zending is the Dutch word for mission. The “sending-­out” was a perfect word for the spatial and temporal imagination at work in the establishment and operation of the Reformed mission in New Netherland. In a powerful way, it situated the North American landscape in the world of post-­ Resurrection figures. These were men whose pious practices, visions, and restless carrying forth of the Gospel dominated an age that—­in the eyes of the Reformers—­preceded the superstitions and worldliness of the medieval Church. The being-­sent was to pagans and non-­Christians—­even as in North America they were missioned to convert the natives. In its vigor and organization, de zending was meant to mirror an early apostolic era when devout local church communities existed for the mission and their own sakes. It was a time yet to be corrupted by the universal church of the Catholic papacy, and its selfless and edifying figures were meant to be replicated in the preachers who would stand in not as “saints,” but (literally) as embodiments of the true Christian religion. In this respect, Stuyvesant’s customary call for the Reformed churches in New Netherland to be “pure” churches was the invocation of a word purposefully lifted out of a specific and specifically historical Protestant imagination.16 The historical element in this imagination explains why Stuyvesant never referred to himself or fellow-­believers as Calvinists but as “Christians” or members of the reformed church. The letters of the Reformed church’s governing body (Classis) in Amsterdam to the churches in New Amsterdam give us some insight into how the Christian church’s distant past was being transmitted into their shared present. The Classis’s words frequently strive for the style of the apostle Paul. More important for the New Netherland churches, they fill out the Classis’s



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understanding of early church structure. In a letter of 1642, the Classis adopted the exhortatory style of Paul and his mode of individualizing letters to the emerging Christian communities—­now to the Romans, later to the Corinthians, then solely to the church gathered at Thessalonica. So the ministers addressed themselves as writing to “The Church of Christ at Manhattan.” As Paul would, they continued by establishing a familiarity with some of the conditions that were either a source of suffering for the fledgling Christians or cause for rejoicing. So they write: we know of your circumstances there in New Netherland and rejoice that God has given you a reasonable degree of prosperity. We are sending you Johannes Megapolensis. “You are . . .exhorted” to receive him with kindness so that the kingdom of Christ may be “more widely extended there.”17 Elsewhere the Amsterdam Classis called upon the overseas believers’ awareness of the bitter division created between Paul’s missionary work and the control claimed by the church in Jerusalem. They did not emphasize this distinction in terms as explicit as Jerusalem versus, say, Antioch, or between the conflicted demand of the Jerusalem leaders that Christians be circumcised as against Paul’s innovation in accepting uncircumcised gentiles. But neither were they slow to adopt the role of Jerusalem and make their hegemony clear. For example, it must have been difficult for Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders not to hear the voice of the Jerusalem church in the Classis’s rejection of the proposal of Stuyvesant and others to introduce the catechism of Domine Megapolensis in New Netherland. No, they wrote in 1656, such an innovation would “war against the general order and usage of our church.” Abide by the “general Formula, the doctrines which are good, tried and established by long practice, to which old and young have everywhere become accustomed.” This assertion of doctrinal control was ignored in this case, but queried just two years later. Here they were saying that doctrines “which have been used with much edification should not be lightly changed.”18 The transmission of the church’s distant past into New Netherland’s present was in evidence in Stuyvesant’s continual efforts to see that preachers were adequately supported financially. Certainly such efforts were his responsibility as chief magistrate. Nothing mattered more to the success of a mission territory than a magistrate giving some promise of providing ministers with facilities for divine services and enforcing among settlers “a way of life in keeping with the positive image of a Christian community propagated by the missionaries.” But in 1654, Stuyvesant made clear his reason for carrying out those duties. He drew upon the days of the apostolic church. It was the

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teaching of “the Apostle Paulus,” he argued, “that he, who serves at the altar, shall live by it.”19 For this reason, he supplied ministers to local congregations—­even procuring an English Presbyterian minister for a Long Island Puritan community. He oversaw local collections for church-­houses and used provincial funds to supplement locals’ salary payments. He donated company properties to assist church elders and forbade bringing in a harvest until the local minister’s salary was paid. Following consultations with local town officials, he fined recalcitrants for nonpayment of church contributions. Where necessary, he carried on an extended and often personal correspondence or series of meetings to see a minister settled.20 The records tell us that he and the council kept a Book of Petitions and that a preacher’s appeal could be made directly to him on the grounds of compassion. In Esopus in 1658, for example, a young man, Andries van der Sluys, begged Stuyvesant to be installed as a substitute for the local minister, that is, as a precentor called on to lead the singing of the psalms. This, van der Sluys pleaded, would help him make his way through the world “by these means and with God’s assistance.” How Stuyvesant responded is uncertain, but similar appeals from Polhemius had resulted in successful outcomes. He identified himself as responsible for the supply of “able and orthodox Minister[s] to the Edification of Gods (sic) glorie” and the townspeople’s spiritual well-­being.21 The Breuckelen community would have had no quarrel with the Classis’s expectation that adhering to traditional doctrine would result in edification. For them, however, edification meant not just looking backward to tradition, but looking forward to practical outcomes and their own more satisfactory agency as believers. For this they counted on the leadership of the preacher and the theater of belief he was empowered to create with them. The New Netherland records are a melancholy report on both the desperate efforts of believing communities to have a minister among them who would administer the sacraments and regularize religious services, and Stuyvesant’s efforts to bring this about. Some of the residents were descendents of the immigrant settlers of the late 1620s. A number had failed to bring certificates that proved them to belong to a church congregation at home because they came “not thinking that a church would be formed or established here.” So the appearance of a preacher, any apparently qualified preacher, was a boon. In 1666, Stuyvesant received news about an elderly minister’s untiring efforts to serve some of the dispersed Reformed congregations. His case is not unusual. “Father is old and weak,” a friend wrote, “preaching by turns in the outside villages does not help him much.”22



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Lacking preachers, improvisations evolved. Some were legal. Others skirted the margins of legality that it was Stuyvesant’s job to police. The biography of Polhemius is again valuable. In the same letter to Stuyvesant in which the magistrates complained about Polhemius, they concluded that with his dismissal they now intended to secure “more edification” by taking an option that others, facing the dearth of preachers or dissatisfaction with them, were taking as well. We will manage, they wrote, by “appointing someone of our own midst to read a sermon from a book of homilies (huis postille) every Sunday.” In that way, we will receive “more edification” than “hitherto received by the person or prayer of Do. Polhemius.”23 That entailed meeting in someone’s home (as it would have meant meeting in Polhemius’s). In was the very thing that gave Stuyvesant some of his gravest problems—­and historians some of their most serious grounds for criticism.24

Chapter 6

Managing Conventicles

Reformed domestic churches in New Netherland—­or, as I’ll call them, legalized conventicles—­derived their legitimacy from at least two sources. First, they were assemblies for religious worship that replicated the Christian gatherings that had appeared in the two great periods of church history, the apostolic age and the early years of the Reformation. And second, private homes were the only answer to a dire need of sites for religious services. As in New Netherland, domestic “churches” dominated in the days of the early Church and Reformation and were noted for their variety. In the first and second centuries C.E., teachings about Jesus and the celebration of the Eucharist were attended by small gatherings of Christian Jews, or mixed families of Jewish and gentile neophytes, or Johannine households, all perhaps in the same city. Variation also marked sixteenth-­century conventicles. Some were convened in homes in the evenings while others were in deserted houses. Some sheltered groups concocting propaganda and organizing fund-­raising. Some attendants limited themselves to Bible reading, psalm-­singing, and catechism recitation, while others included a meal and perhaps the Lord’s Supper. In both periods, laymen were prominent as leaders. And because of the independence that characterized them in both eras, they were allowed, but observed with some degree of anxiety by secular authorities and religious leaders alike. In New Netherland, a variety of huis-­kerken also came into existence. Varying in format, personnel, and intention, they continually tested Stuyvesant’s powers of discrimination as well as surveillance. The intention of most participants was to stay within the governing ordinances. But for a few non-­licensed ministers, the kinetic nature of the mission landscape and the relatively undifferentiated venues of legal and nonlegal gatherings offered the (improbable) chance to hide their heresies within the walls of ordinary houses and among ordinary folk.



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In the face of these conditions, Stuyvesant’s task was similar to that identified by Phyllis Mack Crew in the days of the initial Protestant reformers. He needed to prevent a “wide-­spread . . . [and undisciplined] popular Reformation, while preserving the integrity of the original, elitist Reformation.”1 A momentary return to Stuyvesant’s treatment of the Quakers is relevant here. It impinges importantly on his later reputation. He did intentionally treat them harshly. To him and to others, Quakers were far more dangerous than other sectarians. Alexandra Walsham, who has studied the period closely, argues for the need to recover how “terrifying” to early modern governments the “specter of anarchy” they introduced was.2 On this account, I would suggest that even banishment may have sat uneasily with Stuyvesant. For he was aware of the sect’s danger to the wider good, that is, their poisoning of a landscape far wider than New Netherland where the worldwide extension of the Protestant cause was meant to bring about a pure reformation of Christian and non-­Christian peoples. In an ordinance calling for a Day of Prayer in 1658, he singled them out as a “Spirit of Error,” a “new unheard of, abominable Heresy, called Quakers, seeking to seduce many, yea, were it possible, even the true believers.” Also it may well be that his apparent disregard for the Netherlands ruling disallowing public conventicles but not private meetings—­and therefore accepting Quaker meetings in private homes—­ arose from the fine line separating the public from the private in New Netherland villages, where houses were few in number (forty in a place such as Flatbush in 1664). This would apply to New Amsterdam as well. For example, in one documented case, Stuyvesant received reports from villagers that one among them had opened his house to a Quaker preacher. The neighbor was not inviting villagers in secret. Rather, he was “warning people from door to door to come to his house” for meetings, urging that the Quaker visitor was “a learned man.”3 This was in open violation of the law. More than Stuyvesant’s concern for the heretical content of Quakerism, he was concerned for the repercussions of open insubordination to his secular authority. So, on one side, the Classis was instructing Stuyvesant to police the private conventicles of “divers sects” so that they were “not able to lift their heads.”4 On the other, he was responsible for the growth of the Church, which meant accommodating a number of scattered church-­houses. Frequently a legal conventicle emerged unintentionally. This might happen when a qualified preacher left the community and a replacement simply could not be found. One such case came to Stuyvesant’s attention in 1656, a year before he read the Breuckelen magistrates’ complaints about Polhemius.

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The serving minister in Middelburg (Newtown) had left. As a result, some inhabitants had “ventured” to “hold conventicles and gatherings, and assumed to teach the Gospel,” while others were complaining about giving a bad example but willing to accept the selection of a layman “fit to act as reader.”5 In Holland, ziekentroosters were frequently found ready to act as self-­ appointed prophets and leaders of conventicles. Treating the sick involved preaching to the infirm person. A ziekentrooster may well have known Latin and perhaps ranked among the least accomplished of the theological students in Holland. He was meant to be passive before the Word, that is, merely to apply it from a prescribed sermon book and not presume to interpret it. In New Netherland, he might simultaneously be a miller, supercargo (on the voyage out to Manhattan Island), or a schoolmaster.6 Dangerously, he might be addressed as “domine”—­dangerously because such a mark of ambiguity, especially in the absence of a minister, made even easier his drift into assuming the role of surrogate for a licensed preacher. In these early to middle decades of the seventeenth century when doctrinal positions were still being hammered out, the appearance of an uneducated man or woman preaching about complicated theological matters was universally possible and doubly disturbing. The force of necessity constituted a second reason for house-­gatherings. The meetings described below are typical, though one is legal and the other is not. In December 1656, Stuyvesant sent his secretary and councilor, Cornelis van Ruyven, on official business to Oostdorp (Westchester). On December 31, van Ruyven took the opportunity to observe the form of worship in a local house. As he reported it, fifteen men and ten to twelve women had gathered in the afternoon. They had, he noted, no clergyman. So, one man “made a prayer,” then another read a sermon “from a printed book.” The first man read a final prayer and all “sung a psalm and separated.” Afterward, van Ruyven saw no problem in accepting an invitation to share a meal with the layman who had read the sermon. In this instance, there is no reason to suspect that Stuyvesant had sent his secretary expressly to spy on the meeting. But on other occasions, he did not hesitate to take such measures, often handling such matters personally.7 One month earlier and in Flushing on Long Island, conventicles and gatherings were occurring as well. Here again a layman was leading the meetings. The man was a poor cobbler. He and his listeners had, however, moved their meeting beyond the practices authorized by the ordinances. However it was discovered, the case came before Stuyvesant, who acted quickly to disband



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the gatherings. For unlike the layman in Oostdorp who was reading a sermon from a book and not administering the sacraments, here the unqualified cobbler was both preaching his own sermons and presuming to administer both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.8 A longing to receive the two sacraments and yet the widespread absence of licensed ministers must have added to the temptation to somehow accept a man who (for whatever reason) wished to administer the sacraments and did it in an edifying way. Or it drew people to a preacher who falsely claimed to have credentials issued somewhere in the faraway Netherlands, or they came to a zieckentrooster or deacon almost credentialed to act as a minister. In 1661, a member of the Breuckelen congregation made known what must have been a common desire among believers. He desperately wanted to receive Communion at the Lord’s Supper. (After deliberation, he was given permission.)9 In the same year, one of Stuyvesant’s closest friends, Willem Beeckman, wrote him expressing his sorrow at not being able to have his newborn baby “enjoy a Christian baptism” for want of a minister.10 He presumably waited. Others did not.

* * * The last six years of Stuyvesant’s administration give us some final glimpses of the ways in which he individualized belief and incorporated it into broader social practice. They also tell us how he drew belief into the present by bringing to mind carefully selected historical images and how he spatialized belief in a huis-­kerk that brought its private and public domains together. For in 1659 or 1660, he opened his house on his bouwerie about two miles north of New Amsterdam as a place of religious gatherings. Services were held there probably between 1660 and 1664 (and perhaps later). This was the farm to which he returned after the three years following his defeat and long period of disgrace in Holland. At about the same time, Stuyvesant and others wrote almost a dozen letters concerning Lutherans in New Netherland. Together they tell a story about ambivalences—­about the untried New Netherland Calvinist churches and the Classis in Amsterdam, about Johannes Megapolensis’s bona fides as a loyal Calvinist minister, and about Stuyvesant’s relations with the Manhattan Island Lutherans. Above all, the letters tell of a Reformation history still able to arouse contradictory interpretations. In summer and early autumn 1658, Stuyvesant was entangled in a dispute

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over two words, “here” and “church.” Others were as well. The company directors in Amsterdam (informed of the problem) were not so much concerned about the meaning of “church” as “here.” The Classis worried in much the same way, especially with “here.” The New Amsterdam Lutherans had made known their displeasure with the use of both words. This and the fact that some of them had been attending Johannes Megapolensis’s sermons but were now disgruntled and absenting themselves also entangled the minister of the city’s Reformed congregation in the task of sorting out the meaning of the two words. In Tristes Tropiques, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss thought he had made a strong and convincingly critical point when writing about the Calvinist community in Brazil in 1566. In his judgment, they were nit-­picking over words. They should have been working to keep themselves alive, he wrote. Instead “they spent week after week in insane discussions. How should one interpret the Last Supper?” One historian has retorted that the community were not insane and would not have traveled to Brazil in the first place had they not considered the Last Supper “to be of ultimate importance.”11 “Here” and “church” were not on the same plane of importance as “the Last Supper.” Those words referred to an issue whose disputed meaning, as much as any other, irrevocably tore the “old church” apart in the sixteenth century. Yet, no more than Lévi-­Strauss had properly understood the Calvinists in Brazil can we understand Stuyvesant if we fail to recognize that insane as it might seem in this modern age, “here” and “church” were of the utmost importance to him. Whether he would have traveled to New Netherland because he had hoped to play some part in a missionizing project we cannot say. But neither need we deny it, given his early theological and philosophical studies and his later religious persona. He would have accepted the Calvinist belief that the end of the world awaited the extension of Christ’s Kingdom throughout it, and on one occasion he referred to being “called” to a mission “wilderness.”12 Although Stuyvesant and the company directors often disagreed violently, they were of one mind regarding church matters. They considered these matters critically important and brought to them a patience not always evident in other circumstances. At the same time, this did not deflect the directors from countermanding Stuyvesant’s decisions on church affairs if it meant satisfying critics at home. Now in 1658, the directors were complaining to him about having to face a number of criticisms from Lutherans in Amsterdam. The critics had heard



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from some of their co-­religionists who had been attending Reformed services on Manhattan Island—­undoubtedly sharing the services, it should be noted, with Stuyvesant and members of his council. But now the Lutherans were “separating” from the congregation. The words in the Baptismal formulary in use in New Netherland were those set forth in the Synod of Dort (1619), they reported, and they found them “offensive.” The words required a child’s parents and witnesses to be “here” in the church for the administration of the sacrament. The directors sought to appease the complainants. Would Stuyvesant, they wrote, consider the issue in this way: “Here . . . [in Holland] the church does not lay such great stress on the presence of the parents and witnesses.” The “old formulary of baptism is still used in many churches here.” It is “less offensive and more moderate than the new  .  .  . [formula of Dort].” Recall, they advised him, the initial years of the Reformation. The formulary was deliberately used then “to attract people of different beliefs.”13 We ask you too to “use the least offensive and most tolerant means” to draw “people of other persuasions” to the “public Reformed Church.”14 About two weeks later, they wrote again. This time they were not requesting Stuyvesant’s cooperation, but issuing a directive. Use the “old Formulary of baptism, and omit the words, ‘present here in the church’.”15 Stuyvesant refused to let the directive settle the matter. He would certainly have been aware of the oath that magistrates such as those in Beverwijck had been expected to swear just two years earlier, that is, to service undertaken specifically “according to God’s word and the regulations of the Synod of Dordrecht [Dort].” So rather than acquiesce, his response was to defend New Netherland’s position by referring the matter to one of New Amsterdam’s ministers, Domine Samuel Drisius. He also called upon Domine Johannes Megapolensis, a man whose friendship and erudition he had trusted for years but about whom the city’s Lutherans had recently written to Holland identifying him as “formerly . . . a Jesuit” and therefore untrustworthy in his ministry.16 In late August, the ministers shared their findings with Stuyvesant and his council. The Lutherans’ charges, they held, were the false accusations of ignorant men and women. The ministers then called on the denomination’s Reformation heritage and continued: “none . . . [of them] has any proper acquaintance with the teaching of Dr. Luther.” They only remain his followers because their parents and ancestors were. Let it be clear. The Lutherans object to the fundamental meaning of “church” as much as “present here.” Our baptismal formula uses the word “church” in its singular form. They want it

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pluralized, that is, altered to “Protestant and Reformed churches.” Failing this, they charge, our liturgy is invoking “the Papal church.”17 The significance of this debate should not be dismissed lightly. Equally important, however, was the escalation of a disagreement over word meanings and rubrics into a more fundamental point of difference between the church of the fatherland and the newly emerging church in New Netherland. For Stuyvesant and others, it was a moment that made that distinction real. As the ministers put it to him and his council, the circumstances of “the church of Christ here” mean that its practices might well be different from those of the church at home.18 For this, the ministers were able to find an analogy that empowered them to modulate liturgical forms on the basis of local needs—­however contentious this might appear to the home church in Holland. To validate the differences, they called upon the ministry of the apostle Paul to the gentiles. Because Stuyvesant shared this early Christian imaginative framework, the ministers’ words are, I think, worth hearing. The men referred to “the apostolic churches” established by Paul and their customary practice of yielding to the demands of local circumstances on minor matters. But—­and here Megapolensis and Drisius were clearly referring to the aggrieved Lutherans—­ the same churches would not yield “one iota” in the face of those locals “who came to spy out the liberty of believers.”19 They quoted Paul’s letter to the Galatians at chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. The passages would have provided Stuyvesant and his council with an analogy between the apostle’s stand against the church in Jerusalem and their own stand against altering local practices because of critics at home—­in this case, Lutherans in Holland. Paul writes: “I went up again to Jerusalem.” I introduced Titus to the church leaders there, and nothing negative was said about my receiving him as a Christian even though he was uncircumcised. Indeed, Paul continues, no problems would have arisen but for “false believers . . . who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus.” But “we did not submt to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you [the gentiles of Galacia.].” Our mission, he reminded the Christians of Galacia, is “to the gentiles, and theirs . . . [in Jerusalem] to the Jews” (Galacians 2: 1–­5, New Revised Standard Version). Only after a full two years was Stuyvesant’s disagreement with the Lutherans (and the company) brought to a conclusion. Fourteen months after the initial exchange of correspondence, the ministers were able to inform the Amsterdam Classis that “all is now quiet.” The Lutherans were again attending Reformed services. A leading Lutheran dissident who had begun holding



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illegal meetings at his home was now among the most punctual attendants and “has his pew near the pulpit.” Ten months later, in July 1660, the Classis was able to state with approval that the word “here” had been dropped from the formula of baptism in New Netherland.20 In the course of the debate, the directors faulted Stuyvesant for failing to curb innovation and turbulence allegedly caused by unsupervised preachers in his jurisdiction. But in a letter to the directors in April 1660, he dismissed their charge that by accepting two (unnamed) ministers to serve in the province, he had allowed a “leaven of innovation” to be introduced into the colony’s affairs. Mindful perhaps of Selijns, Megapolensis, Drisius, Schaats (in Beverwijck), and Hermanus Blom (in Esopus), he felt justified in writing that preachers under his authority were men of “zeal in teaching, admonishing and punishing.” Their “edifying life and conduct” is agreeable to me and the whole community, who were praying that God may give them long life. I have, in fact, withheld “your expressions” from them and shall continue to do so “in order not to discourage them in their good and faithful service.” Meanwhile, it would be helpful if some formularies of baptism could be sent over in which the words, “here present” are not used.”21 Willem Frijhoff has studied the degree to which ministers in New Netherland were giving good and faithful service. He has compared the reputations of the Jesuits of French Canada in the early seventeenth century and the Reformed ministers in New Netherland during the same decades. In the French records, the Jesuit Fathers were nothing less than heroic unto death in their sacrifices to convert the natives. This portrait was painted with the brush of the high baroque of French Catholicism and that of the consciously—­not to say propagandizing—­“self-­incensing style of the Jesuits.” Contrast that with the Dutch records that present the Reformed missionaries as weak before petty obstacles and often “lazy, drunk, disinterested, often spurned and humiliated by their flocks.” Frijhoff points to the excesses of both characterizations. Admitting the shortcomings of the Dutch ministers’ missionary efforts, he nonetheless stresses the influential role of pietism in Dutch Protestant culture, its emphasis on godliness and the extension of the kingdom of God, and especially its attraction for the zealous Calvinists in the West India Company. He finds zeal in missionary work to be its “logical and necessary compliment.” Doctrinally, pietists and other Christian societies generally believed that native conversion was not merely a sign of the Last Days. It was a necessary precondition, something requiring every effort to achieve.22

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Frijhoff ’s conclusions are further supported if we shift the object of investigation slightly. That is, if we move it from questions about the ministers to those concerning a population generally accepted as being a notably irreligious community. The acceptance of this view rests on several disputable factors. First, within his courtroom or council chamber, the magistrate of a Calvinist government had to contend with and record breaches of civil law but also “crimes” of immorality. Together they make the records of criminality a more copious body of evidence than might otherwise be the case. Second, religion in New Netherland has been treated as a set of practices allegedly imposed ultimately by Stuyvesant more than a way of life to which believers struggled continuously to adhere. Religion is denied as having independent agency. It allegedly lacked depth in a population the majority of whom entertained it only because of the imposition of punitive measures. Related to that, the largely secularized worldview by which the West understands itself has resulted in a reading of the archives that, in any case, satisfies today’s description of belief in the supernatural as baseless credulity.

* * * Beginning in the late 1650s or early 1660s, Stuyvesant offered the community of New Amsterdam a venue for public worship. The huis-­kerk on his farm north of the city was a place of weekly evening services. The first meetings may have coincided with the arrival of Domine Henricus Selijns in 1660. Stuyvesant had requested that the Classis send a minister to serve in the village of Breuckelen. They answered by appointing twenty-­three-­year-­old Sel­ ijns. Stuyvesant’s representatives installed him in September 1660. Selijns and Stuyvesant seem to have become friends. In 1660, Stuyvesant contributed 250 guilders to Selijns’s salary of 1,200 guilders, possibly as remuneration for officiating at prayer meetings to be held at his farm. Stuyvesant’s opening of his house for meetings was consistent with early apostolic church practice, when it was not unusual for a wealthy Christian householder to make his or her home available as such a gathering place.23 Stuyvesant’s huis-­kerk was, by virtue of it being his, obviously distinctive among the other domestic meeting places in the province. Still, it was a site within the mission landscape I’ve already described. In 1660 and when not serving at the farm, Selijns was preaching in Breuckelen in what he called a “grain barn.” It may have been a structure on his property. The local elders



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noted that the present room for worship was in his house and promised that, “if possible,” they would soon build a separate place for it. He preached in Breuckelen, but also in several smaller Long Island settlements. Journeying was something to which he had to give attention, calculating his travels from Breuckelen to Manhattan Island, for example, as 2,000 paces to the Hudson River and then 4,000 to cross it.24 The faithful who gathered at the farm were itinerants too, some from the city, others from the hamlet around the farm. The liturgies would have been the improvisations made in other domestic churches. Until summer 1664, Selijns celebrated the Lord’s Supper at the farm and, at other times, conducted services limited to prescribed prayers and psalm-­singing.25 Roman Catholic liturgies of the time—­those carried on both inside and outside the churches—­were far more dramaturgical than those of the Reformed churches. Yet like the Catholic dispensation, Reformation literature placed notable emphasis on grasping the supernatural world through the senses, that is, on the externals of piety. Selijns, for example, was careful to follow the Reformers’ call for rituals in preparation for the Lord’s Supper by instituting the day before the celebration as one of reflection and abstinence. And there is no reason to think that the believers at Stuyvesant’s huis-­kerk were different from those who earlier looked to Polhemius’s sermons for emotionally fulfilling experiences. The enjoyments of the evenings were of two kinds. The farm, Selijns wrote, was “a place for recreation and pleasure in Manhattan” and a place “where people from the town come for evening prayers as well.”26 This example of the intermingling of piety with recreation and pleasure is metaphoric of the ways in which the struggle to believe intersected with the demands of everyday life. For Stuyvesant, occurrences during six weeks of summer 1659 are fairly typical of the problems he had to address (while presumably attending weekly services). On July 23, all this happened: he was made aware of smuggling on the Delaware River and the English and Swedes turning the area there into one where the Dutch “could be conquered.”27 In New Amsterdam, he had to deal with the depreciation of the price of wampum, difficulties between Manhattan and Curaçao (especially regarding salt imports), complaints about inaccurate accounting, and English moves to renege on Long Island boundaries supposedly settled in the treaty made at Hartford. He was overseeing the near-­completion of Fort Amsterdam and hearing expressions of dissatisfaction with his administration from the patroon of Rensselaerswijck. He installed a master for the Latin school (who

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would soon be full of complaints), and dealt with Polhemius’s salary. Also on July 23, he listened to rumors about an impending war with the Esopus natives. Six days later, Stuyvesant had to consider what action to take against Lord Baltimore’s claims to ownership of the Delaware River area. A week later, on August 4, he suffered the onset of a violent fever that lasted a month. Still, he had to attend to a decline in the fur trade at Beverwijck and the sudden threat of an English settlement upriver and just east of the Hudson River. During all of August, he was unable to oversee affairs at Esopus due to illness and attention to a “great mass of business.” Around August 11, he had to defer his intention of partaking in the Lord’s Supper on Manhattan Island. Maryland’s claims continued to fester during the summer. So did the Esopus’s alleged preparations for war and the dispute with the Lutherans. He had to watch the collapse of plans for a thriving Amsterdam-­backed colony on the Delaware. Domine Hermanus Blom had arrived in New Amsterdam, and he needed to arrange for his installation as minister at Esopus—­where Blom would quickly cause contention.28 These were difficulties offered to Stuyvesant in the day-­after-­day passage of time. The ordinary men and women who joined him for worship at the farm would have faced their everyday problems as well. They were of course real. But expectations about them were set within a providential worldview about which they were reminded every Sunday evening. We cannot know exactly how this worldview put into place the occupational, familial, and political affairs of everyday life. But unexpected scraps of evidence of its presence keep startling me—­and I hope you—­in the course of examining the records. In spring the same year, 1659, for example, sergeant Andries Lourissen sent Stuyvesant the usual military report about affairs at Esopus. He included details about the natives’ disquiet and the Dutch soldiers’ intention to erect a fort near the settlement. The build-­up of aggression on all sides could not have been more serious. But the account was not what we would regard as the usual military report. Lourissen headed the letter “Laus Deo semper.”29 And considerably later, the records include Stuyvesant’s account of Dutch prisoners finally released by the natives. His interpretation of their captivity was “they were torn away from the lands of the living.”30 Elsewhere, a year later and after that exchange of letters, a young man in Rensselaerswijck, Jeremias van Rensselaer, prepared to stand or sit alone in his room and, especially on winter nights, sing the Psalms that he had learned



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“by himself.” He could now sing “nearly all of them,” except a few, which he was still busy learning.31 These are documented episodes that only hint at an off-­stage reality.

* * * Times changed. And Stuyvesant’s kerk-­huis was lost along the way. Under the English, its replacement was a more respectable-­sounding building. It was a token of the new politics of aristocracy that subtly sidelined the ways of Dutch spirituality in order to legitimate its own. It became a “chapel”—­a designation Stuyvesant and Reformed believers would have excoriated as smacking of episcopacy and papacy.32 The chapel is now on the property of St. Mark’s Anglican Church. In the nineteenth century, it was believed to be haunted. Stuyvesant’s ghost paced the aisles, wrote one author, “eternally ill at ease from having to relinquish his settlement to the English.” In 2004, the same writer laid down another myth, one of his own and far more powerful. When Stuyvesant arrived on Manhattan Island to claim authority over the Dutch settlement, this author argued, his job was to establish a military and legal order “all shot through with a heartfelt Calvinist focus on sinners groveling before a stern God.”33 I, on the contrary, do not find in the records a landscape of psychologically groveling believers. I do not find men and women open to the irrational and therefore ready for victimization by God and his director general. Again and again they constructed representations of the supernatural. They lived with mysteries that we perhaps do not. But their living present had a spaciousness in which those mysteries about human existence helped shape their lives.

Chapter 7

Ordinances: The Needle of Sin

There will be two more ordinances calling for days of prayer and thanksgiving before the government falls to the English. Stuyvesant’s ordinance on March 1, 1663, however, is his most expressive. The drama of God’s covenant with the Israelites is presented, just as it had been in each of the eight other ordinances from 1648 to 1663, and will be presented again through to the final proclamation in June 1664. But here in 1663, Stuyvesant’s customary call for a day of thanksgiving is richly elaborated on and framed in unprecedented ways. There are now more ministers in New Netherland and, for the first time, they are called peace-­ delegates. There is a province consciously set within a biblical time span of forty years. There is the sudden introduction of “the needle of sin,” a metaphor for describing the ways of man’s rejection of God. The image was called upon by twelfth-­century medieval theologian and churchman Bernard of Clairvaux. It seems to appear here as a survivalism from the treasury of medieval spirituality. In this chapter, we will soon come back to it. More than any other New Netherland texts, the prayer and thanksgiving ordinances mirror the complexity of Christianity in the first half of the seventeenth century. That complexity can be characterized in an image borrowed from Michel de Certeau and used by him in a different context. Christianity was a force of enormous energy. It was an energy conducted into the 1600s out of a monastic and mystical tradition laid down in the practices and grammar of the medieval period. It was a reality still drawing its force from active demonological and astral-­theological traditions and, in direct relationship to God, from an insistent anthropomorphism. The energy was further fueled by an eschatological future posited as an intellectual concept, but also as something already lived in by the waiting of devout believers. For both Catholics and Protestants, miracles still happened, relics were



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collected, visionaries were taken seriously, and magic still had an audience. The heavens were still read theologically, and a Catholic saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, could be found mixed into the piety of Holland’s Reformed Church. And perhaps at this time, Christianity’s theologies were energized more by disputes over their claims than by their resolution. In any case, they could not be kept out of politics. They could not be distanced from thrones, made to stay outside town council rooms, or prevented from seeping in under a magistrate’s door. Historians have pointed out quite rightly that Christianity still exercised hegemony over the meanings of conquest and of the unknown native peoples of overseas lands. Stuyvesant was bound to all this. His ordinances, in their own way, actualized the energy that magistrates elsewhere were also exerting in administering Christianity. The proclamations were planned and drawn up in his council room in New Amsterdam and sent on their way to the province’s towns and villages where local officers were required to read them aloud to “Respectable, Dear . . . Special People.”1 They were then delivered to the local minister and elders for execution on the designated day of thanksgiving, fasting, and prayer. Ordinances were written in a discourse with which Stuyvesant felt at home. Or, better yet, he was at home with the several kinds of discourses they presented. They were the words of the lawgiver and the believer who could read the scriptures familiarly, picking out powerful typologies. They were also an administrator’s tool, working to unify the province under a figure of legitimate authority. Claiming oversight of fear or gratitude, they helped a magistrate construct group identity and a moral consensus out of a strongly localized population. They provided a way of unifying a geographically and occupationally loose network of towns and agricultural villages and, by that, did useful work of which Stuyvesant could not have been unaware. Finally and for us trying to understand Stuyvesant better, the ordinances were set in a language of self-­disclosure—­again, something of which Stuyvesant would have been fully conscious. Today perhaps the ordinances make no sense. Unless they can be seen as one important way by which a society made sense of the changing events in which it was immersed, they are tedious to read. Or perhaps they conjure up “the dark theological horror of Calvin.”2 For us, that is, they read like the documents of fear. But to the seventeenth-­century residents of New Netherland,

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they were one among many ways of packaging and receiving a believable account of what was going on.

* * * Each ordinance pointed to two dramas. The first dominated the structure of the proclamation, creating a powerful presence throughout it. The drama could not have been anything other than powerful, since it narrated transcendence and immanence, universalized virtue and vice, the fury of an angry God, the distortion of creation by that fury, human disloyalties—­and then the patience of God, the return of creation’s bountifulness, and man’s acts of faithfulness—­until the chosen community’s next fall into disloyalty. The drama worked as much by silence as by what was said. For we are considering a community—­audience and writers alike—­for whom only a single word or phrase was needed to conjure up entire biblical stories and moral lessons held in memory. In the second drama, the colonists were given their roles to play as they assembled for the days of fasting and thanksgiving prayer. This is the ordinance promulgated by Stuyvesant and his council for a Day of Fasting and Prayer on April 16, 1648. Its distinctive quality is that prayer is sought because of the extraordinary distortions of the natural order in Europe as well as Brazil, Curaçao, and here in “the northern . . . parts of America.” In the future, Stuyvesant will legislate public thanksgiving and fasting solely in relation to local occurrences. But they will all have a common theme. They will unfold the biblical drama of God’s relationship with his Chosen People and apply it to the New Netherlanders. It is because the New Netherlanders were chosen—­yet ungrateful in their transgressions—­that his anger falls upon them. Neither the calamities nor the blessings are in any sense capricious. God’s covenanting is not over. He remains the God who intervenes. For the same reason, the structure of the ordinances is a dialogue between God and his people. The 1648 ordinance begins with New Netherland’s immersion in “doleful tidings and rumors.” From Europe, the Caribbean islands, and the province itself come messages of floods, pestilential fevers, possible war, the heavens behaving strangely with hurricanes and tempests, and death so sudden that “scarcely enough healthy persons remain alive to bury the dead.” “Only one conclusion can be drawn.” We, like the Israelites, have been beneficiaries of God’s “mercy, patience and forbearance.” We have, however, spurned these favors, breaching a covenanted relationship. Unlike the (uncovenanted)



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Ninevites, we have broken a binding contract by allowing countless abominations similar to theirs to be “in vogue”—­“blasphemy, drunkenness, rioting, swearing, lying, cheating, and profanation of the Sabbath.” Therefore, his anger has been “justly incited” and ferociously demonstrated in the disordered nature of his creation. Look up to the angry skies. We are already experiencing heavens “laden with vengeance,” poured down in a torrent “on us and our posterity.” In Curaçao, we have “all-­devouring pestilence  .  .  . famines and infertilities.” We, your government, ask for fasting, prayer, and the admission of fault. These obligations lie upon us as well as you. We must “conciliate ourselves and our subjects with God by the means . . . [of prayer and fasting] ordained by God himself and . . . [thereby] continue to receive His gracious and merciful favors instead of His just punishment.” With these words, the prelude gives way to the second of the proclamation’s dramas. Stuyvesant and the council outline how the colonists will keep the day of prayer. In this case, they look to Wednesday, May 6, that is, the first Wednesday of the month. They legislate for a penitential sermon on that day and the first Wednesday of each month thereafter. They lay out the blessings for which men and women are expected to appeal. “Turn our sadness into joy,” they begin. “Change the sad rumors reaching us from everywhere into glad tidings and bless the fruits of the earth with early and late rains.” “Turn aside storms . . . prevent shipwrecks,” sustain the faithful observance of the Gospel and sacraments, and “protect the present government,” especially the person of the honorable director general, his council, and local officials. In all their deliberations, let them have God’s assistance in planning and deciding only what will serve his glory, their salvation, and the welfare of the country.3 The people are expected to set aside a day for prayer. Stuyvesant foresees it as a day when a change of heart will be set within private reflection and the gathering of the community for public worship. The time for divine services will be in the morning and afternoon. The place will be the huis-­ kerken scattered over the mission landscape we have already encountered—­ the ordinance words it as “the church or where it is customary to hold divine services.” Prayerfulness will need to be safeguarded by freeing the day from such work as fishing, hunting, sailing, mowing, and plowing, and recreations including golf, tennis, gambling, and drinking.4 Local officials and ministers will need three to four weeks for preparations. Stuyvesant issued at least eleven of these days of prayer ordinances before his surrender of the province. Each one demonstrated his way of combining

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politics and belief, and his efforts to draw New Netherlanders to a certain way of interpreting themselves. The catalyst for each was a historically specific train of events. But the same narrative structure provided continuity. Stuyvesant also relayed details about floods, epidemics, and shipwrecks in other narratives. He referred to them in correspondence with company directors, in consultations with councilors, meetings with New Amsterdam’s officials and ministers and, where relevant, local townspeople, villagers, and (through interpreters) natives. Some events universalized in the ordinances had their origins in the courts. There they were recorded in the discourses of jurisprudence, ethics, and the ordinary words of daily decision-­making. Like the correspondence and meetings, the court hearings were the surrounding context of the ordinances. In the mid-­April 1648 proclamation, for example, Stuyvesant listed certain frequent abominations. The preceding court cases may have been prompted by his list of transgressions. On February 1, for example, he and the council looked at evidence in the suspicious death of a sodomist. On February 11, they considered facts in the case of the culprit having sodomized a black boy. In the following week, they took evidence in a case of child abuse; on March 9, they heard testimony in a case of adultery, and on March 30, they revealed that one-­fourth of New Amsterdam houses were taverns and grog shops where smugglers gathered alongside those illegally plying natives with beer and spirits.5 Seventeen days later, that is, on April 16, the violations presented in the courthouse may have shifted to the ordinance and been reworded there. Both kinds of narratives had their own forceful voice and emphases. But in the ordinances, the violations were translated into moral lessons and given wide distribution. They were the way Stuyvesant wanted them to be ultimately understood. In 1654, Stuyvesant appointed August 12 as a Day of Thanksgiving for the conclusion of the Anglo-­Dutch war in Europe. God, he declared, has secured the gates of the Dutch and blessed their possessions with peace. He has also favored us who are well away from Europe, he wrote, but we were nonetheless “where the torch of war was lighted, where the waves reached our lips, and subsided only through the power of the Almighty.”6 In 1655, Stuyvesant sought God’s blessings on a naval expedition against the Swedish forces considered to be settled illegally along the Delaware River. As in 1648, he first invoked God’s many blessings. Peace had been recently declared between the United Provinces and England. His voyage to Curaçao and back had been successful. The customary rituals should now be observed, with special attention given to asking protection for himself and other officers together with their men and ships.7



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Three months later and after a few Dutch men had provoked natives into serious depredations and loss of life in and around Manhattan Island—­and the colonists’ guilt had now been confirmed—­he took advice from the council on how to proceed. The way forward was uncertain, he stated, but it could not include an aggressive war against the natives. There could be no doubt about the causes of the loss of life and property. They are our private and public sins: such as drunkenness, swearing in public “done even by children on the streets,” and “meetings of sectarians.” Since these and other sins are the very fountain-­head of provoking God’s punishments, he wrote, we must begin our plans here, that is, with public notices forbidding such “irregularities.”8 He then ordered a day of fasting and prayer, adopting a language filled with striking detail and biblical metaphor—­for many, a rich rhetorical language not available elsewhere. We have received “special favors”: an increasing population, gracious protection against a threatened and feared war with our neighbors, greater prosperity and commerce. We’ve had “fruitful and blessed harvests, and continuing health.” But due to our ingratitude, a sudden native attack has made us “a hut in the vale of tears.” So, let “God’s servants” shape their sermons to arouse fasting and prayer.9 Stuyvesant again ordained a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer in late January 1658. More than in other ordinances, the initial list of God’s blessings was a detailed and wide-­ranging one. It was filled with confidence about the province’s future. The words were notably different from the recitals of war and betrayal that he would be forced to enumerate later, in 1659, 1660, and 1663. He acknowledged 1658 as a time of “health, peace and prosperity, abundance, a remarkable increase of population and trade, and . . . valued above all, the free and public exercise of the pure worship of God.” He ventured a favorable perspective on the province. Blessings and benefits have been ours, he wrote, “during the last year, yes, in the whole course of our lives.” Nevertheless, we have responded with ingratitude, thus occasioning deadly diseases and, more forbidding, the appearance of “the Spirit of Error” in the poisonous agents of the Antichrist cited in the First Letter of John from Ephesus to the Christians of Asia Minor. Specifying the Quakers as a sign of the evil Spirit and possibly future punishments, he set a Day of Fasting and Thanksgiving for March 13, the second Wednesday of the month.10 By the time he issued the next ordinance in 1659, Stuyvesant had more than dissenting sectarians to contend with. A war with the Esopus natives was threatening. (He would quickly discover that Dutch men were again the cause.) For the first time, he introduced the natives into an ordinance’s

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pleadings. To do this, he described God’s anger in a familiar biblical metaphor, that is, as a terrible drenching poured out on unconverted people. “Pour down  .  .  . [your] wrath,” the ordinance read, “on the Heathen who know not . . . [your] name.” But even saying this, the three lengthy sentences that constituted the comparatively brief ordinance identified the natives’ presence in New Netherland ambiguously. He pointed out that before this time “peace and quiet” had marked their mutual relations. But it was now God’s will that there existed the threat of a “devastating Indian war.” Also for the first time, he alluded to the province’s English neighbors, citing “evil-­minded men who seek  .  .  . [the province’s] ruin.” He concluded by referring to those suffering from the past summer’s “painful and long, lingering sickness” (from which he himself was still recovering) and then petitioned God for an increased number of ministers. Finally, and perhaps anticipating an expedition against the Esopus or prolonged peace negotiations with them, he asked for the gifts of “understanding, wisdom, foresight and godliness” for himself, the council, and other magistrates.11 The call to prayer issued on February 23, 1660 offers a clear contrast between a terrible future we know with hindsight and what Stuyvesant and his council could only anticipate with uncertainty and dread. For them, five months had passed and the expected hostilities with the Esopus had not, the ordinance reads, eventuated.12 What they could not know was that the uneasy peace experienced between 1660 and 1663 would break apart before the force of the native massacre of June 7, 1663, and that there would be months of unresolved hostilities. The danger to the province from “threatened invasions and attacks by . . . [English] neighbours on . . . territories, streams and rivers” was also only a set of ominous portents. Stuyvesant was, however, not blind to the realities of it all. A month after fulfilling the day of prayer required by the February ordinance, he found it necessary to share with the General Court of Massachusetts the same passage from Luke’s Gospel that he would one day share with Colonel Richard Nicolls at the time of the surrender. We are aware, he wrote, that God “alone is able to maintain our just possession either by small or great power and means, even by none at all.”13 But we know today that before the next half-­decade was out, the governor of Maryland would be challenging Dutch possession of the Delaware River area, Massachusetts traders would (with official approval) be planning to settle a trading post near the Hudson River opposite present-­day Albany, borders with New Haven would remain unsettled, and rebellious English colonists in the Long Island villages



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would grow in strength and a determination to break away. The government of Stuyvesant would collapse. Prevention of this unclear but frightening future lay in recognizing that only with penitence and prayer would such misfortunes be averted. The history of the Israelites had provided a cautionary image. We who are in this newly established province, he warned, shall suffer as the Israelites did when the Tower of Siloam, during its very construction, crashed to the ground killing its builders, or when the anger of God fell from Heaven upon the Israelites and enveloped them in fire—­even as the recent sight of a comet’s fiery tail still promises to punish us with flames.14 In the Thanksgiving Ordinance of January 26, 1662, Stuyvesant dissolved any contradiction between God as a just judge and an indulgent father. He offered his summary of the previous year. It was a time of blessings. God’s protection had been “received against foreign and domestic enemies.” Nevertheless, our ungrateful acts caused us to be afflicted with “hot plague and unheard-­of fevers” and “unexpected rains and summer floodings, rendering the apparent crops entirely worthless to the inhabitants.” Elsewhere in the province, people have experienced excessively hot weather. Produce is now “scarce and almost worthless.” Such were the signs of God’s justice. “On the other hand, however . . . a merciful and clement father” remembered to take pity on this province, warding off our illnesses and continuing “the desired calm and peace amid so many enemies.” In some places, produce is scarce but in others we have had a “good and rich harvest.” In terms of the Gospel, we are like the candlestick described in the words of Luke. We are now free of religious persecution and able to light a bright flame atop our candle of belief. To maintain these benefits of health, peace, and good harvests, we ordain a Day of Thanksgiving for Wednesday, March 15.15

* * * On April 1 the following year, 1663, the local court of Breuckelen handed Domine Henricus Selijns an ordinance drawn up by the director general and councilors a month earlier and meant to be read to his congregation.16 Selijns was an energetic, gifted, and pious young man, recently trained in theology and, as we have seen, well known to Stuyvesant. I suggested above that the language of the ordinance is notably expressive. For this reason and considering customary practice in the Netherlands, I believe that there is cause to think that Selijns had a hand in the wording of the ordinance.

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This call to prayer introduced a discernible emphasis on Christ and the consoling phrasing of the New Testament. It had a metaphoric richness and more gentle tone than evident before. The ordinance was still tied to the fearsomeness that pervaded the earlier ordinances, despite references to God as a loving father. Still present were the Old Testament metaphors of God’s Word sounding as a trumpet thundering over his people and his anger as a threatening cloud from which no escape was possible. He still randomly dealt out death from smallpox and sent people to their graves “under the very eyes of the living before they even realize[d] it.” Overbalancing these images, however, were those derived from the New Testament. Christ and the ministers of his word were given a central place. This emphasis on the New Testament and the wording of specific passages suggests that Selijns cooperated in the composition of the ordinance. He was probably behind the design to locate it in a social setting of the ministers working in New Netherland. This community of preachers and their congregations were new to him and he approached them enthusiastically as a messenger preaching, as the ordinance stated, the Gospel “on Christ’s behalf.” Previous ordinances had pleaded with God to send ministers to this new province. Now ministers were present and described as central to what the ordinance called each individual’s “conversion of life.”17 The ordinance opens in an unexpected way. It identifies the province within other provinces in the Netherlands, suggesting an author recently familiar with the home country. God summons all of these communities to penitence. They are called by the proclamation of God’s Word through the work of his “loyal ministers.” The preachers are more than loyal. They are “peace-­delegates” sent to beg people “to reconcile themselves with God.” Concerning New Netherland, the call to reconciliation is evident in God’s prodigal blessings cast over them. He has rescued this country and people from the threat of wars with neighbors and massacres “at the hands of the barbaric natives.” We have been granted “fruitful times,” filling our hearts “with food and joy.” He has bestowed on us the same bountifulness that had inspired the Apostle Paul to exclaim: “Don’t you know that it is God’s loving-­ kindness that leads you to repentance?” The ordinance puts a date on the span of time that a loving God had kept his part of the covenant. It was from the province’s very beginning. From then onward, God has been calling this people by manifesting his blessings for “almost this entire period of forty years.” The authors apparently felt no need to describe the province’s beginning in 1623 when the States General had



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conveyed New Netherland to the West India Company and declared a Day of Thanksgiving, praying that God would deliver success and progress to a land new and in need of many blessings.18 The other typological meanings could also do their own work: the forty days of the Jews wandering in the desert; Jesus’ days in the wilderness; Antiochus’s second campaign against Egypt in 168 BCE; or a battle fought in the heavens above Jerusalem for forty days. But now the Lord’s hand has fallen on those afflicted with smallpox throughout the province. We who are healthy but unrepentant may be touched as well. Then, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux’s metaphor: for “wherever a short and hasty needle of sin is passing through (without sincere penitence and conversion of life), a long thread of heavier visitations . . . will follow.”19 Is there anyone, the writers then repeat, who does not notice the Lord’s punishing hand, “tearing people away from the land of the living?” The ordinance designated the first Wednesday in April as a General Day of Fasting. Prayers were to be offered for the continuance of peace with the province’s neighbors. They were needed for the continued blessing of “the fruits of the earth with early and late rain,” and an increase in “the fear and knowledge of His Name, and the hatred of our sins.” In the call to gather in the churches, the ordinance took a double perspective for the first time, that of the minister and of the faithful. They were to meet in the churches “wherever one is accustomed to preach or read the word of God.”20 Stuyvesant’s final ordinances were those of June 26, 1663 and May 31, 1664. Each might be read as a brief history of events at Esopus. Couched in the customary biblical images, they came after the Esopus’s massacre of twenty-­four settlers there on June 7—­or, as the writers phrased it, “the capture, murder and burning of our friends.” A General Day of Fasting and Prayers on July 4, 1663 would now allow each man and woman to call upon the Lord’s name with a submissive heart and beg that the captives be liberated.21 Stuyvesant and his councilors looked to the future. They knew they must strenuously thwart any further attack. “On the other hand,” they prayed that God would confer “common sense, wisdom, carefulness and piety upon the government” in order that we may pursue and execute whatever may be for the province’s well-­being. A full week after the day fixed for prayer, Stuyvesant wrote to the magistrates of Beverwijck admonishing them for failing to send volunteers to the aid of the Esopus settlers and warning that one day they too might desire speedy assistance. His language was unchanged from that of the ordinance and was again a public affirmation of belief: “the golden lesson of Christ requires, Do as thou wilt be done.”22

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Although the threat from rebellious English-­speaking Long Islanders was discussed during the autumn months of 1663, it was not directly mentioned in the ordinance. A year later, however, Selijns told his Breuckelen congregation that, in addition to asking prayers for the prisoners, there had been another reason for the ordinance. It had been promulgated “especially on account of the English who with flying banners had claimed our village with all of Long Island for the king.”23 By the time of the 1664 ordinance, months of prayer had gone forward and so had intense and successful Mohawk and provincial negotiations with the Esopus natives. On October 21, 1663, Stuyvesant was told of the imminent release of the captives and wrote to the negotiators, commending them “to God’s grace, from whom alone a good result must be asked and expected.”24 In a lengthy letter to the company directors a month later, he wrote that he was “expecting the end of the war.” The “mercy and blessings of the Lord are  .  .  . remarkable,” he explained. In fact, they are “beyond the hope and expectation of all.” For he has granted “such a result in so brief a period, and that in the summer at a time when the Indians have the greatest and most advantage in the woods.”25 The ordinance of seven months later was Stuyvesant’s last. Issued on May 31, 1664, it carried the same message. Again: peace with the Esopus has come “against all human expectations.” We are close to having the captured Christians freed and “in addition to the liberation . . . [we have achieved] an honest and profitable peace.” We must praise God for the freed prisoners and “every single person who remembered the prisoners in his prayers for such a long time.” As a consequence, “we ordain an end to the monthly day of prayers and a concluding Day of Thanksgiving.”26 They had no certain knowledge that three months before the issuance of the ordinance, Charles II had secretly approved the Duke’s Charter. In effect, he negated the existence of New Netherland. And less than a month later, he presented Richard Nicolls with deeds to the lands of New Netherland. Structurally, the final ordinances were re-­presentations of those issued since 1648. Stuyvesant was still testing his authority, still putting his personal beliefs in the public arena. He continued to stand behind the symbiosis between religion and politics, continued to support a political culture where the spiritual and the civil were the guarantors of each other’s legitimacy and power. He was also testing belief in himself. In the ordinances, Stuyvesant was still connecting New Netherland’s present and future to an ancient Hebraic past. In them, he was still claiming the



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right to normalize law as existing on a transcendent covenanted level and on the practical plane of his own man-­made law. In this sense, New Netherlanders would not have thought it illogical to see the two spheres converge in legislation that declared nonattendance by Reformed church members at services on Days of Thanksgiving a violation of the law. Were he to have continued as director general after 1664, Stuyvesant’s ordinances would undoubtedly have remained largely unchanged. They would have continued as a genre free of artificialities and riddling obscurities. They would have continued being intensely emotional presentations of God—­and not himself—­in the principal performer’s role. They would have remained texts capable of bringing spirituality to the surface. Incidents would still be made into mysteries. The ordinances would have continued to stand as undertakings that a modern political scientist might dismiss as politically inadequate in the face of serious challenges. Still, they would have continued to assume intelligibility within a surrounding mentalité in which familiarity with Christian belief was a condition of normal social life and effective activity in it. They would expect a mindset where a select body of cultural references had been so internalized that a man might refer to the Book of Oblivion and expect others to know what he was talking about.27

* * * The ordinances calling for days of thanksgiving and prayer, I believe, offer a way of reaching a deeper understanding of how Stuyvesant strove to live in the world he confronted. They add a sentence—­maybe only a phrase—­to the larger story of his relations with the natives and the province’s settler populations. We have seen that there were many kinds of discourse about the native Americans. Stuyvesant used the language of deterrence and (much less so) talk of bringing about native conversions. He talked with others about the indigenous peoples’ ancient origins. He located them in the Dutch language but perhaps also in Latin. In council meetings, he debated the subject of war or peace with them. Stuyvesant parleyed with Esopus and Mohawk chiefs. He corresponded with New Englanders about the natives’ unsteadiness as allies. He was involved in inquests into natives’ murders at the hands of Dutch men. His correspondence referred to a Dutch yacht with the mysterious name, Den Nieuw Nederlandsche Indiaen. And there were spaces of silence below words where memories and presence were latent.

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Alongside these, the ordinances offer their own limited way of suggesting how the natives were regarded within the relationship of God with the New Netherlanders as a chosen people. In the ordinances, the natives were not the transgressors. They were certainly the enemy. As enemies, they were variously evaluated—­sometimes as peaceful, sometimes not; sometimes as pagan barbarians, sometimes not; sometimes they were unnatural men, sometimes they had recognizable natural impulses. Always and only interpreted. They were described as agents of God’s punishing anger. Rhetorically, they were always separated away from English “neighbours,” however more menacing those European neighbors might be. 28 Unlike the threatening English, they appeared as part of the natural environment. They were always an important source for arousing emotions. Like all enemies, and especially in times of war, they served to externalize God’s reality. But like Catholics, Lutherans, and even the English neighbors on Long Island, the natives were not the ones with whom God was contending. Nor did Stuyvesant make the ordinances into narratives of Indian-­hating. It was the Dutch—­the we—­who were at fault. We are the transgressors. In us, and not in the natives, lies the origin of our misfortunes. In issuing the ordinances, Stuyvesant did not bind himself or his people to a theology of war. He did point to the natives as an ever-­present threat, and he used that to underwrite the legitimacy of the proclamations and dramatize their urgency. But the ordinances were not programs for making war and then justifying them by recourse to theology. For some sense of the phobic direction in which the ordinances’ language might have led their audience, we might listen to the lamentations of Domine Hermanus Blom writing several months after the massacre at Esopus. He described it first to ministers of the Amsterdam Classis and then to Stuyvesant in early May 1664, that is, about three weeks before the provincial ordinance of May 31.29 His excessive language is perhaps understandable given the fact that he had experienced firsthand the killing of twenty-­four men, women, and children. I only present it as one man’s effort to draw others to an imagination that included Indian-­hating. Stuyvesant and his councilors also had the opportunity to bring that imagination alive, but chose not to. In Blom’s account, the natives were heathens prepared to destroy the congregation at Esopus (later Wiltwijck) and, like animals, “devour it alive.”30 They were by nature fundamentally different from the innocents they had slaughtered. Human commerce with them was impossible. In their wake,



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they left “burnt and slaughtered bodies”—­elsewhere “people . . . smothered in their blood.” The “dead bodies of men lay here and there like dung heaps on the field, and the burnt and roasted corpses like sheaves behind the mower.”31 There were “those wounded by bullets and axes,” “last agonies,” and “moans and lamentations  .  .  . dreadful to hear.” Death had come in “unexpectedly by the windows, and cut off the children from the highways, and the young men from the streets.” “O! my Bowels—­my Bowels! I am pained at my very heart.” He laments with Jeremiah, “‘O that . . . I might weep for the slain of my people’.” But God will “avenge this blood on the heads of these murderous heathens.”32 “No man helped us, for men’s assistance was far from us, though they got the credit for it and our delivery.”33 There is no point to be made in asserting that one minister, Hermanus Blom, was ready to initiate a war of revenge upon the Esopus. It was, however, Stuyvesant’s responsibility to know that such language was out there and to contain it against the probability of inciting unpredictable violence. It was his responsibility too to smooth the angry outburst of the directors who wrote him four months after Blom’s words. The entire Esopus nation, they wrote, should be “rooted out and, if possible, utterly exterminated.”34 My point has been that, for a range of traditional and pragmatic reasons, Stuyvesant’s program for Dutch-­native relations was one of deterrence. It could find a place in one of the most powerful and persuasive sets of imagery in Dutch culture: religious discourse. For the ordinances turned responsibility for misfortune inward and, in that way, modulated the inclination of an understandably uneasy population to hold others responsible for such misfortunes and seek ways of retaliation. In their own way, the proclamations preached staying the course.

* * * There is no way of knowing how many New Netherlanders took the ordinances to heart or received them willingly and enthusiastically. Stuyvesant’s councilors over the years did so, as well as the chief magistrates and leading merchants of New Amsterdam. Satisfactory data, however, is not available. Regarding church membership, Jaap Jacobs has offered the cautious estimate that in the 1650s and 1660s, about 20 percent of New Netherland’s population were members of the Reformed Church. For 1664, that would put the number at about 2,000 across the province. To this number, however, must be added those who attended worship services regularly. These men and women had

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not taken out official membership, but were present in considerable numbers. Using the Membership Book or Register of Members of the New Amsterdam congregation, Jacobs has ventured that the membership was 170 in 1648, and 300–­400 in 1666 (with a slight but consistent preponderance of women). Beverwijck’s membership was 130 in 1652 and (according to the resident minister) 200 in 1660. In Breuckelen in 1660, 24 of the 134 inhabitants were church members; in 1664 the number was 96.35 If we ask whether the ordinances were imposed upon an uncomprehending and resistant population, I think the answer is no. In the Netherlands as in all western European countries, days of thanksgiving, fasting, and prayer were commonplace and frequent. In Holland, Old Testament figures and God’s chosen people were familiar characters in a history repeated again and again in many forms: street drama, literature, and iconography. The dramatizations of their stories in thanksgiving and fasting ordinances were the recurrent obligations of legislators, men and women both more and less powerful than Stuyvesant. Like his, their ordinances would reach most communities from a considerable distance. They too would prescribe hours of prayer interrupting trade, farming, and family routines and recreations. As happened in New Amsterdam in 1644, local officials might also take it as their responsibility to improve their citizens’ behavior by ordering a week’s preaching.36 Furthermore, the ordinances complemented the fundamental features of Dutch culture. In a society where contractual agreements were a dominant cultural form, the God presented in the ordinances was bound to his people by contract. Or he was presented as a judge, much like the provincial and local judges whose raison d’être was also to dispense justice (and punishment) and mercy. The ordinances also did nothing to oppose Dutch commercial pragmatism or the forms of seventeenth-­century humanism that believers felt themselves able to embrace.37 Stuyvesant’s ordinances extended to the New World a prophetic tradition in a religious ritual from which Netherlanders had drawn meaning even before the Reformation.38 On a practical level, they would have made their contribution to what one historian has called the “good mutual relationship” that was “the bond between Director-­ General Stuyvesant and the Dutch settlers before 1664.”39 The desire for edification and the repeated promulgation of the ordinances demonstrate that there was a spirituality—­a religious sensibility—­abroad in New Netherland yet to be fully investigated. In “The Outcast,” I suggested that reasons for this lay in the taken-­for-­granted nature of spirituality, Calvinist



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liturgies that expressly moved away from the elaborate dramaturgies of Catholic Christianity, and a scarcity of records. Also, historians have generally not been comfortable with the subject of spirituality. They have been satisfied to take a position of neutrality. In the past twenty or so years, however, this position has been called into question. Finally and in the case of New Netherland, the figure of one man, Peter Stuyvesant, has been allowed to loom over the elusive subject of the depth of people’s spirituality. This may be unique in American colonial history.40 Too often the presence of religious belief has been reduced to measuring it against the exercise of Stuyvesant’s power as a so-­called stubborn Calvinist. His living out of his religious beliefs would undoubtedly have remained a matter of indifference had he not—­as alleged—­seen fit to impose upon the populace the repressions that such stubborn adherence to religious belief sets in motion. Russell Shorto’s 2004 description of Stuyvesant as arriving on Manhattan Island in 1647 with the expectation that he needed only to dominate sinners already accustomed to “groveling before a stern God” seems to satisfy popular belief.41 Leaving Stuyvesant’s reputation aside, one consequence of this position is that, because he was in authority from 1647 forward, evidence of genuine spirituality has been sought less vigorously. He is, in short, an obstacle to the historical retrieval of sincere popular religious belief and practice. I have tried to set Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders within the political culture of other emerging post-­Reformation societies and their shared premodern worldview. The New Netherlanders were not passive sheep to be led mindlessly by a stubborn director general. As Stuyvesant did, they struggled to maintain religious belief. They kept alive a uniquely worked-­out scriptural heritage. And, in that, they created a unique variant of Protestant culture in seventeenth-­century North America.

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Part III

Loss

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Chapter 8

To Suffer Loss, 1664–­1667

The surrender of New Netherland may be said to have begun here. On February 2, 1664, a concourse of New Amsterdam citizens gathered before the town hall on Wall Street. The age-­old rituals of municipal elections were being set in motion. Four days before, the city’s law-­enforcement officer had called for nominations. The burgomasters and schepens had assembled and offered the names of men “peace-­loving and . . . fit for that office.” Now it was Saturday and they were meeting in the presence of Peter Stuyvesant’s secretary. They were merchants holding the power of the city seated alongside merchants holding the power of the province. The voting was completed and the crowd played its part as an enthusiastic audience to the news of the new city officials—­or, if not enthusiastic, at least loyal. Yet on this occasion, there were rumors of bloodshed from an impending English invasion and news of other costs that allegiance would require. In six days’ time, on February 8, Stuyvesant was bluntly warning of “bloodshed” before an assembly of his councilors and municipal officials. The defensive preparations that independent cities such as Leiden had been forced to adopt against enemies at home were now New Amsterdam’s and Fort Amsterdam’s to make: decisions that would have to be made over many months, then men quarrelling among themselves—­and some testing the winds to secure the best personal future—­then lapsing into passivity and finally trying to negotiate while preparing for what Stuyvesant would later call siege warfare. Unless the enemy could somehow be reasoned with or bought off, armed hostilities and loss of life must come.

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So in late August and early September, Stuyvesant will be writing his enemy with “the utmost respect and civility.” He will cite Grotius on the Dutch right of possession to New Netherland based on “first discovery, uninterrupted possession and Purchase of the land.” There will be reasoned suggestions that the matter be settled by the two governments in Europe. But for now he was saying to his councilors and the burgomasters that the walls, bastions, and waterpoortjes—­all notoriously inadequate—­must be reinforced. The city’s population will swell as Dutch outlivers will flee the countryside and come inside. All must be defended. The military will station itself at whatever outer defences can be thrown up, but every burgher must defend his place within the city walls. The English will mount their attack directly at New Amsterdam. They have long had “the desire to plunder [it] or obtain booty.” Back in mid-­February, the burgomasters were pointing this out to one another. By their own exertions, the residents had made it a place of “so many fine houses” that “it surpasses nearly every other place in these parts of North America.” It is the capital of a veritable granary of cereals, a favored land of “many villagers, hundreds of farms, with houses, grain, cattle and nearly ten thousand souls, mostly Dutchmen and some Frenchmen, who in the course of years and with God’s blessing” will “grow into a great people.” Now, for its safety, the city needed to be encircled. The inner line of defence was obvious. From a bastion erected at the water gate near Pearl and Wall streets, a line of palisades had to be driven into the water south and then around to the bulwark in front of the town hall. Palisades must then be put in place to the southernmost points of the strand. Then a battery was needed and more palisades to prevent the landing along ‘t Noordt Rivier (Hudson River). Another bastion would be needed and more palisades running down the river’s edge, and finally a stone wall across the island. As usual, the merchants and richest burghers must carry the costs of these fortifications. They must lend the city money and await repayment in not less than a year and, more realistically, closer to five. Stuyvesant and his secretary set the example—­each offering at least a thousand guilders—­while the municipal officers did the same. By the end of February, more than a hundred loans were arranged. It gave the city a treasury of about 28,000 guilders.



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So it went on. By early March, contracts were let for the building of the fortifications. No one knew that on March 12 the English king, Charles II, had already bestowed New Netherland on his brother James, Duke of York. Yet everyone knew by mid-­March that, give or take some accuracy, “the English . . . [would try to] take and possess this place, Fort Orange and the Manhattans within 6 or 8 weeks.” War preparations continued to be put in place. In April, Stuyvesant wrote a brief letter to the directors. It lacked any sense of animation. He gave them a strangely unelaborated account of the province’s finances. We shall have a deficit of 40,000 or 50,000 guilders, he said. And there he ended. On April 21, the Company directors sent Stuyvesant and his council reasons why, regarding the English, negotiations in Europe should go forward “without any difficulty.” On April 23, Charles II wrote to the governors of New England urging their subjects to “join and assist” the reduction of the Dutch to an “entire obedience.” By June, it was known that there would be an amphibious landing of English troops. In July, ships’ captains had been put on alert. On August 4, Stuyvesant wrote to the Company directors informing them of the news that an English invasion was probable and he was “very circumspect, anxious and guarded to keep the entrusted military together as much as possible, increase the height of the fort and furnish all around with gambions.” By late August, the inhabitants were required to labor at throwing up earthworks, one-­third of the available men rostered each day. Now it was known that the invasion would come in the form of four frigates. On August 28, Dutch Long Island towns rejected Stuyvesant’s request for “every third man” to help reinforce New Amsterdam. On August 29, one and then three men-­of-­war showed themselves at Sandy Hook and then anchored up the bay closer in, at Nyack. Stuyvesant sent a delegation, proposing the usual conciliation. “Why does the English hostile fleet . . . [lie] in the bay before New Netherland?” In respect to the government of this place, they are out of order in arriving without announcing themselves. What is “the intent and meaning of their approach and continuing in the harbor?” Conciliation failed. Stuyvesant received a letter on the following day. The king of England considered them, “fforraigners” and usurpers

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who had “seated themselves” in his dominions. Their choices were the centuries-­old ones. They must surrender all possessions into the enemy commander’s “protection” or expect death (the “effusion of Christian blood”) and “all the myseryes of Warr.” Stuyvesant and the merchants took measure of their situation. They summoned the ten bakers of the city to discover the number of days that the stocks of grain would allow them to hold out against a siege. Meanwhile, someone did the calculations on manpower: there were enough burghers to post all along the inner defensive line, but even if every man were used, they would be fifty feet apart and useless. Officials in non-­Dutch settlements on Long Island wrote saying they could not assist but, on the contrary, felt obliged to support the invaders. The frigates, they hinted, carried about two thousand men: with themselves added, that made thousands more. On September 4, the warships excited terror by coming to the island under full sail. They trained their cannon on the city and positioned themselves for an immediate assault. Two days later, Stuyvesant and the magistrates began the process of surrender, he for the West India Company and the merchants for the trading city of New Amsterdam. They must do what countless other Dutch city regents had done before them: exonerate themselves of responsibility—­and get it all in writing.1 There are two sets of experience here. There is Stuyvesant’s and the citizens’ experience of impending bombardment, the loss of life, probable defeat and, for many, descent into poverty and dislocation. There is also our experience of somehow sharing their sense of fear, treachery, and loss. It is easy for historians to contextualize such experiences. Establishing explanatory contexts is what we do best. In this case, for example, one could readily situate the expectations of loss within Stuyvesant’s long-­standing anticipation of an English conquest. Only a year before the surrender, he and the city magistrates had rehearsed some of the formalities of the year later. Fearing an English attack, they had discussed defensive measures in the face of their neighbors’ encroachments and the “mutinous revolts of some English subjects.”2 They considered summoning a provincial assembly, but decided in favor of gathering local magistrates in a landts vergaderinge. They would take advice from them and appoint a delegation to carry a petition regarding settling fixed boundaries to the West India Company and, if necessary, the States General.



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The event is illuminating. But it is just that, a single occasion. It is one knot in an unbroken seventeen-­year string of anxieties that can be unspooled backward to the first months of Stuyvesant’s arrival on Manhattan Island: Englishmen illegally buying native lands within the Dutch possession; an English assault planned for 1653 during the first Anglo-­Dutch war; London promising peaceful cooperation in 1657 only to win time for a range of coastal attacks; Augustine Herrman traveling as Stuyvesant’s emissary south along the Delaware River in 1659 and submitting his journal. He wrote of meeting with one of Virginia’s leaders, Philip Calvert, and hearing him express a geopolitical logic that was now in the air. Calvert was saying that Virginia and New England were meant to touch. Then Herrman was asking, “Where then is New Netherland?” and Calvert replying, “He knew not.”3 Herrman had then met with Governor Josiah Fendell of Maryland. He asked whether Fendell intended to enforce Lord Baltimore’s claim to the west bank of the Delaware River below the 40th parallel and whether the Dutch needed to retain troops in the Delaware area against an English attack. Fendell answered, “do as you think best.” Hermann’s response was to seek recourse in the same watchful waiting that commissioners appointed by Stuyvesant announced to New England intruders four years later: the Company’s servants “were not authorized to show any hostility to the . . . English.” Hermann put it this way to Fendell: “we shall remain on our defensive.” We hope you will not be guilty of “any clandestine attack and treachery . . . but in neighborly and public peace and alliance between nations first give notice and warning that friendship is at an end.” Reporting to Stuyvesant, he summarized the situation in a covering letter. “Retain our forts,” he advised, for a “sleeping enemy is not to be trusted.” He need not have warned Stuyvesant about trusting the English. Stuyvesant had already determined that, lest it give them any information, he would not cooperate in the printing of the areal map Herrman had meticulously constructed.4 As we shall soon see, the West India Company directors will adroitly turn all this against Stuyvesant in their final exchange in Holland. An alternative context for the experience of suffering defeat might well be the West India Company’s years of failing to provide adequate forces to defend New Netherland. In January 1664, Stuyvesant had vainly requested 300 to 400 men, but only 180 were serving when New Netherland fell. A month later, when he and the magistrates were soliciting loans for the fort’s and city’s defences, they were aware of the threat of mass desertions and pleaded with the Company for at least clothes for their “almost bare and naked soldiers.”

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The intermittent and ultimately unsuccessful Dutch efforts to fix firm boundaries with the neighboring English colonies could equally well situate the impending experience of surrender.5 Or it could be more fully understood within the policy of deterrence. The experiences could be located within theorizations. To offer only one example here. Stuyvesant at one point theorized the coming surrender as a “conjunction.” Presumably he was thinking of the unprecedented coming together of determined English uprisings on Long Island; the inability of the General Court at Boston to bring Connecticut into line regarding illegal encroachments; inaction resulting from the attempts of the United Provinces to establish peaceful relations with the English Crown; the recent news of a surprise attack on the Delaware River planned by Swedish authorities; and the continuing raids by natives. Considered geographically, he had to consider English enemies to the east (and moving into New Jersey), threatening natives to the west, Swedes to the south, and northern native insurgents demanding the attention of Fort Orange and Beverwijck.6 Contextualizations matter. They are the sinews with which historians lift the traces of the past into intelligibility. However, Stuyvesant’s experience of loss also profits from being considered alongside Gyanendra Pandey’s critical assessment of the history of violence in India. Pandey discovered that a history of violence has been notably absent in the wider historiography of modern India. It has been captured and re-­presented “only with great difficulty.” The narratives are “almost always about context—­about everything that happens around violence.” As he put it, the violence itself is taken as “known.” With its contours and characteristics “assumed,” what Johan Huizinga called “the grace of historical experience” goes undescribed.7 So it is with Stuyvesant’s supreme experience of loss in 1664. Because the surrender would appear to be known (or sufficiently known) within the context of the progress of English colonies in American history, it can readily go undescribed. Questions such as these go unasked. What was it like for Stuyvesant to experience loss of a province that even the West India Company admitted had grown under his administration from a “little Colony” to a “rising Republic;”8 loss of a fort that was his headquarters for seventeen years; loss of a reasonably cooperative relationship with the Mohawk and with a still-­valuable fur trade and developing trade in grains? What was it like to lose the power enjoyed in exercising the administrative skills on which he prided himself, or to lose the occasional opportunity to enlarge his identity by acting in court as attorney? To lose the familiar ground of orientation toward a future?



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Stuyvesant had always guarded his reputation fiercely. On one occasion in 1653, he considered prosecuting a New Amsterdammer because he had written personally defamatory letters to Holland. The accused man had concocted “sinister and false accusations, not so much here as in Amsterdam” where, Stuyvesant said, his “honor was. . . [brought into question] not only by some few, whom I know, but also by diverse others, who do not know me well and therefore might entertain a bad opinion of me.” The damage to his reputation was, he summarized, “very public, and an equivalently public recantation needed to be made.9 Now he faced the loss of respect in northeastern North America, Holland, and probably his home province of Friesland. He also confronted the loss of an honorable future in public office in all these places. He looked at the loss of possibilities and options at which we can only guess.

* * * Within this notion of the ease with which the intimacy of experiences is unintentionally lost, I would like to take us to Stuyvesant’s experiences in the years 1665 to 1667. They were years when he was in Holland defending his surrender of the province. Following him back to the Netherlands, we step outside the customary linear narrative of New Netherland as it became New York: English and then Anglo-­American. For three years, we follow him to Holland and somewhere into Netherlands history. During those years, Stuyvesant immersed himself in his papers. He also confronted those of his adversaries, the West India Company. Taken together, the documents put him in the presence of about 70,000 words. Of these, 52,000 (including appendices) were his. There were those inscribed in scores of documents written by him and others and copied from papers he had gathered to prepare his defense. He also read 18,000 words the Company directors and lawyers had prepared as their rebuttals to his presentations. Our story is of his experiences, week by week, with his papers and words. Both parties presented their papers to a standing committee of the States General in The Hague. They were committeemen attending to West Indian Affairs. In this instance, they were meeting as a quasi-­judicial body. They were not a court-­martial, but were certainly a group aware that a man was under investigation for the most serious charges the state might bring against one of its citizens. M. van Ommeren chaired the committee, joined by other deputies of the States General. They were expected to read the almost 70,000

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words that would be inscribed on two legal submissions put forward by each party. Stuyvesant submitted defenses in 1665 and 1666. The Company’s papers came in twice in 1666.10 Generally van Ommeren’s committee reported to the States General only after two months of investigations and consideration. How they read the documents—­what meanings they took from the pages, what passages were most persuasive to them, which side, in their judgment, got convincing control of the narrative of New Netherland—­is unknown. In certain circumstances, petitioners were allowed to appear before the committee. The States General did not extend this privilege to Stuyvesant. We will recall that in 1646, he was welcomed to appear before the assembly of the States General to take his oath of office. That was nineteen years ago, when he was thirty-­four and had his future ahead of him. Now his papers introduce him as “your petitioner” and he is—­as he tells them—­of “advancing age.” He is fifty-­three. He has no friends we know of in the States General assembly. Nor, to our knowledge, is he about to have a face-­to-­face encounter with any member of the government. Stuyvesant’s fixation on his papers (and those of the Company) was a necessary occupation. (At one point, he wrote that it had quite exhausted him.) Because he is the object of our reflections, we too are fixed on his papers. Like the committeemen, I have also read the 70,000 words. Allow me to venture that in your reading of some of them via this narrative, your experiences would be like mine and will keep overlapping with his. So, like Stuyvesant, we endure the tedium of reading data about New Netherland that he must now present: already familiar correspondence with the directors dating back to 1647 where he repeatedly pleaded for soldiers and urged awareness of English incursions and therefore the settlement of boundaries: letters of 1660, 1663, and 1664 asking for 300 men and at least one frigate. Or letters where he begged simply for advice.11 We experience his moments of dismay in the present process: his distress that one of the committees lost a report that he had submitted and he now had to get it copied again; his anger (and perhaps surprise) at the ferociousness of the Company’s allegations; his ultimate sense of desertion and injustice when the directors tell him in mid-­1666 that they no longer intended to be parties to the matter. Try, he was told, to get relief from the Grand Pensionary, Johan de Witt—­and he writes, “I am now ignorant who my opponents are.”12 With him, we hope for some answer to one of his two appeals to return to New Netherland and bring over his wife, family, and property. He also asks twice for his dismissal. The requests are neither answered nor even addressed.



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He waits and we wait, thinking that closure lies at the bottom line of the thousands of words we have let ourselves experience. It does not. Neither he nor we experience closure. No official pronouncement tells him or us the reasons for the conclusion of the hearings. No verdict and its reasoning gives resolution to the emotion we surely share with Stuyvesant. Was he found guilty or innocent? And why? Which points did he make that were ultimately persuasive? Or on what grounds, if it did, did the West Indian Company win out? The issue came down to this. New Netherland was unprepared for the threatened English attack. Who was responsible, Stuyvesant or the Company? Which way did the States General go? Or did they, as has been suggested, simply let him return to Manhattan Island because they had tired of an unimportant contest and, in the face of negotiations with England at the Peace of Breda and dangerously unstable relations with France, allowed the matter to drop?13 In Chapter 3, I referred to Srebrenica and Dutch efforts at deterrence, what one writer has called their “obsessive impartiality.” Was this also a case of “stubborn refusal to pronounce judgment”?14 In a way, we are back in the period 1647–­1653: a matter of your case against mine and no adjudicating voice. Maybe we have to settle for undecidability, take an ironic stand toward a drama with no resolution. We have to settle for the States General’s formulation of the words of the men from Flushing on Long Island in January 1664: Stuyvesant could, wherever he finished up, if he lived quietly, reside “in his own house and on his own land, like any other man.” From early spring 1665 until late July 1667, Stuyvesant was in Holland. He was in Amsterdam on three occasions: when he arrived on the Crossed Heart in 1665, when he departed for Manhattan Island in 1667, and once in August 1666, when he appeared before the Company directors still hoping to justify the surrender or, as they put it, “receive what he might have deserved on account of his neglect or treachery.”15 To attend the August meeting, he probably made his way to West India House near the shipping harbor—­but he could have been summoned to chambers in The Hague where the Company also regularly did business. He was in The Hague twice. On October 16, 1665, he followed the States General’s instructions to appear before it and deliver his report. On that date, he submitted “Report of the Honble Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director-­General of New Netherland, on the Causes Which Led to the Surrender of that Colony to the English, 1665.” The Company answered with “Observations of the West India Company on the Report of Ex-­Director Stuyvesant.” Stuyvesant

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presented a rebuttal in “Answer of the Honble Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director-­ General of New Netherland, to the Observations of the West India Company on His Report of the Surrender of the Country to the English. 1666.” Finally, the Company responded with “Reply of the West India Company to the Answer of the Honble Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director-­General of New Netherland; With Appendices. 1666.” Beyond this, all is conjecture. In many ways, the space the records allow us to enter, then, is that of Stuyvesant’s papers. We can neither place him in a particular social group in either of the two cities, nor locate him in a geographical community. We have no evidence that he made himself part of a Reformed Church congregation, but surely he would have done so. Perhaps the “few” men and women in Amsterdam he mentioned as knowing back in 1653 when he was concerned about his reputation were still in the city. Perhaps their numbers had grown. Some New Netherlanders had made their way to Holland in autumn 1664 and early 1665, and he may have contacted them. But they too appear to have been few.16 Their numbers grew by 1666, when he was then able to call upon a small network of countrymen ready to testify in his defense. He was not, however, entirely alone. He brought his son Nicolaes with him on the Crossed Heart, as well as two of the fort’s soldiers whose testimonies he would present to the committee regarding the fort’s low and useless stock of gunpowder at the time of the surrender. In 1666, he cited “many . . . people . . . who are now in Holland” and who would testify on his behalf.17 His closest friends and supporters—­Johannes Megapolensis and his son, Samuel Drisius, Martin Kregier, Cornelis van Ruyven, Olof Stevensz van Cortlandt, Nicasius de Sille, John Lawrence, Thomas Willett, Cornelis Steenwijck, and Jacques Cousseau—­basically remained on Manhattan Island; Willem Beeckman was in Beverwijck. He did have copyists in his employ. He seems to have taken responsibility for inscribing the 1666 “Report” to the States General, but the 1666 “Answer” required the work of copyists. Given the volume of papers copied, this task must have required hours of selecting, excerpting, and cross-­checking documents as well as discovering New Netherlanders willing to make supporting statements before notaries. The expenses would have run into hundreds of guilders—­a single page might easily cost 1 or 1.5 guilders in mid-­seventeenth-­century New Netherland.18 Stuyvesant was not an impecunious man, and he did not complain about expenses. But he was a keen businessman and it must have been a concern. Before considering more closely the contents of papers that Stuyvesant must have thought would deliver him a positive verdict, it is worth taking



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a moment to reflect on the archival process in which he was engaged since the fall of New Amsterdam and his departure for Holland. He was in fact his papers’ first archivist. He spent months gathering the documents that, as we noted in Chapter 1, a practiced servant of the West India Company preserved for just such an occasion as now presented itself so dangerously to him. He must let the folio pages of incoming and outgoing correspondence perform in such a way as to save his reputation, livelihood, and perhaps freedom. So must the accounts, journal entries, inter-­colony letters and agreements, and a certificate of seventeen years of good deportment signed by the magistrates of New Amsterdam. He also made himself into something of a historian. In searching through papers accumulated over seventeen years, he experienced the same archival encounter as a historian. And, as it is for any historian, the encounter was an emotional one. But Stuyvesant’s meetings with his past were heightened in their intensity because he was encountering a depository of his own social and political memory as well as searching with the prior knowledge that each of his sources was potentially vital to his survival. He had to make the past present. He had to use the archive to make his re-­creation of the past intelligible and persuasive to an unknown committee. He had to convey to them the sense of impending loss to the English, and the anxiety that was his for most of his seventeen years. Its data needed to operate like a businessman’s factors, that is, work for him to bring good results in a space (a committee room) he himself could not enter. He would know from experience how committees read petitioners’ cases—­in 1649, a similar committee of the States General had examined charges brought against him for improper execution of the law, and he had lost. The committeemen would know full well how the politically charged reports, observations, answers, and replies that come before them are constructed. So, Stuyvesant will strive for objectivity in what they know will, in fact, be his purposeful selection of sources and shaping of rhetoric. Like him, they will recognize that his evidence is fashioned out of uncertain knowledge—­and they will rearrange it anyway. The Company’s knowledge is the same. And protocols about objectivity notwithstanding, each of the submissions will be intensely subjective.19 The committeemen must read all the memories, voices, and histories—­ whether of dead-­ends or achievements—­that Stuyvesant is now encountering in his papers and they must be convinced of his critical and dispassionate perspective on them. Their emotions must be given a firm direction. After

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all, they must come in the end to have faith in him. Or more correctly, they must come to have faith in his role as an administrator, for personalized testimonial has no place here. Stuyvesant will tell them only once that he has a “loyal heart.”20 The documentation now being retrieved, then, is not meant to constitute a backward-­moving journey through his life. It charts a journey through his administration and the politics that shaped one of the States General’s jurisdictions. The men must be made into his witnesses to the events before and during 1664, even as he is, in gathering his evidence, re-­witnessing his own experiences.

* * * A brief Memorial introduced the “Report of the Honble Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director-­General of New Netherland on the Causes Which Led to the Surrender of That Country. 1665.” It is evident that Stuyvesant knew he was reaching an endgame with the West India Company. The documentation he had spent months gathering and writing up was now his hope. From years of experience adjudicating cases before his own court, he knew what was required for a favorable legal outcome. There had to be inscribed documents as corroborating evidence, not “proof ” based on oath-­taking. In them, he needed to achieve a balance between a forced humility—­the identification of himself as “your petitioner”—­and a righteous confidence. He knew that the Company would exercise a right of reply. They would use skilled advocates to undermine his evidence. Unlike him, they were not petitioners. But they needed to ensure that their every word unerringly shifted blame for the loss of the province from them onto him. At this stage, his attack upon the negligence of the Company was not a direct one. Surrender, he explained, occurred on five accounts. The city’s militia was unwilling to cooperate in a proper defense. The burghers threatened to riot. The fort was structurally indefensible and provisions and munitions of war entirely inadequate. The soldiers were far too few.21 In his “Answer,” he will put the Company more directly in his sights. Stuyvesant submitted his “Report” on Monday, October 19, 1665. On Saturday, December 19, van Ommeren handed his findings to the States General. On the same day, Stuyvesant petitioned to return to New Netherland to accompany his wife and others back to Holland. A ship was lying ready to sail. His request was ignored or denied. A full year will pass before he will put to



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the States General that he had discovered his “Report” was accepted by some as a sufficient defense. And on that basis, he will again ask in vain for his dismissal.22 Stuyvesant began his “Report” by stating that he meant to set the record straight. His first gestures were neither toward the Company nor the States General. They were to the many individuals in Holland who—­as he had been informed earlier in New Netherland—­did not know “the truth of what had happened.” Many others were ready to think the worst of him, determining that he had come to terms with the enemy “through treachery or cowardice.” Here, then, was “the true state of the case”: the loss of New Netherland “could not . . . be imputed to me.”23 He then carefully led the committee through an outline of how he had arranged the facts of his presentation and why the appended testimonials were vital to his defense. The “Report” was his first experience of narrating the history of New Netherland in terms of his own achievements and the persistent problems in making the province a success. He dealt quickly with his achievements, declaring that he meant “to avoid self-­glorification.” He took the opportunity to point out the province’s “flourishing condition” under his administration but added that it was “not through any wisdom of mine, but through God’s special blessing.”24 Turning to how much more flourishing New Netherland might have been were it not for the negligence of the Company, he took the committee back to earlier decades, tracing three of the five causes for the loss of the province. There would have been no surrender of the colony if it had been “protected from time to time by a suitable garrison” and if the Company had not been “retarded so long” in answering the repeated calls for proper munitions—­ especially powder that did not require, as had come regularly to be the case in the fort, a double-­cannon charge.25 In 1666, he will build an even stronger case for the Company’s obligation to defend the province as legally contracted with the States General. The Company had recognized its responsibility and acted when it cooperated in 1655 with the City of Amsterdam in financing not only useable munitions, but also a flotilla of ships to eject the Swedes from the Delaware River. In his 1666 “Answer,” he will make clear the Company’s failure to meet that responsibility in 1664. He will present occasions in 1653 and 1654 when, “by personal delegation and beseeching letters,” he had asked for “3 @ 4 frigates, 3 @ 400 soldiers, and train-­bands.” Without the ships, it was impossible to defend the mouth of the Hudson River, the fort, and the city.26 So, at this point in the “Report,” he placed before the committee the

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testimony of the fort’s gunner, a soldier who had accompanied him to Holland and who probably looked after one of the casks of defective powder that Stuyvesant had brought to Holland for inspection by experts. Regarding the defense of Fort New Amsterdam, the gunner testified, “Why should the General begin [defensive actions]”? There was “powder to do harm to the enemy, but ‘tis no good; were I to commence firing in the morning, I should have [it] all used up by noon.” Testimony later tabled in “Answer, 1666” corroborated this statement, the witness adding, “the Director will fight and has given orders to fire, but ‘tis no use for the powder is short and bad.” Regarding low stocks of grain (Stuyvesant’s voice again): yes, we sent some to Curaçao. But the directors had first assured us that intelligence from England led us to believe that, among other things, Charles II was intending to impose bishops on New England and therefore its residents would flock to live under the Dutch authority rather than in any way get “rid” of it. We shall, the directors had continued, maintain our possessions “without difficulty.”27 Stuyvesant then moved the committeemen forward to the rebellious temperament of New Amsterdam’s populace and militia immediately preceding the surrender. He used the Company’s indifference as a way of explaining the threatened revolt (oproer), especially its refusal to even answer a November 1663 remonstrance of the Manhattan Island and Long Island burghers and farmers carried by their delegates to the Company and the States General detailing their desperate plight. Because the Company gave “no advice” and “sent not one ship,” the populace had given up on it. As one of Stuyvesant’s supporters later recalled—­pointing to two meanings of the word—­the West India Company “had no credit here.” Their own Dutch soldiers were threatening to plunder the city, as were Long Island Englishmen and (offered in later evidence) the English troopers aboard the frigates. The Dutch soldiers (as Stuyvesant reports he heard) were saying that they knew where the rich merchants lived, and one troop of men had in fact attempted to attack the house of the merchant, Nicolaes de Meyer. So, he concluded, we came to terms.28 As Stuyvesant intended, seven appendices further strengthened his defense. The sworn depositions of two of the fort’s officers argued for his repeated efforts in 1663 and 1664 to get provisions outside Manhattan Island. Next a letter of nineteen magistrates from five Long Island towns disclosed panic, as the menacing posturing of John Scott and others hit home. People on Long Island were entertaining the growing belief that perhaps they were settled on the king’s soil since the Company seemed not to have “a sufficient title.”29



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Alongside this letter, Stuyvesant tabled one written to the directors on May 9, 1665 and obviously selected by him for its detail and forcefulness. In it, his secretary, councilor, and friend, Cornelis van Ruyven, testified to the dissolute behavior of soldiers and some inhabitants intent on plundering and inciting panic in the days leading up to the surrender. He concluded with a plea for understanding his, Stuyvesant’s, and other councilors’ position by appealing to the emotions the directors would have felt if they had been able to imagine the residents’ impossible position. (We can recall that Stuyvesant had put the same hypothetical argument to the then-­directors in 1662.) “Had you been personally here,” van Ruyven wrote, “and seen no hope of any relief or reinforcement,” you too would have agreed to some conditions.30 Finally, Stuyvesant presented a copy of the leading New Amsterdam burghers’ and farmers’ complaint directed to the Company for its long history of neglect. He would not have laid the document before the committee had he not agreed with its tenor. We have long been facing our neighbor’s threats, they wrote in part. But we would put no faith in them were there forthcoming from you “the smallest aid or succor.” In fact, we are surprised that until now we “have been granted so long a reprieve” from their invasions.31

* * * Stuyvesant remained in Holland. The Company responded to his “Report” and, on January 11, 1666, van Ommeren handed the States General their “Observations on the Report of Peter Stuyvesant, Late Governor-­General of New Netherland.” They began. Following the States General’s instructions, they had called Stuyvesant to Holland either to justify the surrender or “receive what he . . . deserved on account of his neglect or treachery.” They admitted that his administration had made of the “little Colony” a “rising Republic.” They proceeded, however, to build a case that would allow the committee to judge that in 1664, “he hath acted wrong.” And more: let the States General realize that his wrongdoing, if not punished, could have serious consequences for its government at home and abroad.32 Stuyvesant would have anticipated that in building this rejoinder, the directors would attend forcefully to each of the points he had made in his report. Their correspondence with him had always been one in which issues would be taken ad seriatim and meticulously addressed. He would also have found familiar their harsh personal criticisms—­as here: “it is nonsense that,” “a mere pretext,” “a child will be able to judge,” explanations are invented.

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Now they were asking why he looked outside Manhattan Island and New Netherland for provisions when the province was itself so bountiful. Why did he not procure gunpowder from Dutch sources on the Delaware River? Why not seize the small supplies of local traders or even ship captains? He and his council could have done these things but, no, they “designed willingly and willingly to surrender the place.” They resiled from anything that would oblige them to maintain it.33 Furthermore, Stuyvesant should have defended the fort even if the burghers would not defend the city. He had, did he not, “180 brave soldiers.” Agreed, they were too few to act offensively, but they could well have acted defensively. In estimating the soldiers and marines aboard the frigates, the directors were apparently unaided by intelligence that would have told them that the ships were carrying three hundred soldiers and mariners. Instead, they maintained that the invasion force consisted of “only a few military,” so few that “the garrison that marched out was stronger than that which marched in.”34 Why then surrender? Stuyvesant and his supporters were both treacherous and venal. They were worried about losing their properties. “Suspicion” must be cast on him and his entire government, who were so much interested in farming land there that “they let the country be lost.” We hope, the Company concluded, that you, the States General, will find the surrender scandalous and consider Stuyvesant’s actions a dangerous example for possible future actions “detrimental to the State.”35 The directors also needed to think that a successful defense of their oversight of New Netherland would save the Company’s reputation—­a corporation, in fact, then only eight years from bankruptcy. In this very year, the Hollantsche Mercurius was already suggesting the Company’s negligence, characterizing New Amsterdam as a place where, in the face of English “warships, . . . no relief was in sight.” And there were “twenty Englishmen to every Dutch man”—­odds that were even more overwhelming than those Stuyvesant had cited.36 The next day, January 12, the States General turned the “Observations” over to its deputies. For one among the many times in these two years, they enacted their own kind of delay. Stuyvesant watched as a committee convened itself to “inspect, examine and report.”37 He had also obtained the “Observations” by April 1666 and found the directors’ savage rejection of him dismaying and the degree of their disloyalty worse than he had expected. On Friday, April 2, Meynheer Huygens, deputy from Gelderland, and other deputies



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received his petition to sail for Manhattan Island and return with his wife. Theirs was a committee on Naval Affairs. They reported on Saturday, April 17, ignoring his request but, rather, placing the “Observations” in his hands for a response, if he wished to make one.38 Between that date and late October, Stuyvesant composed his response. On October 29, 1666, the States exhibited his “Answer.” It was Stuyvesant’s last exchange with the trading company to which he had bound himself for about thirty-­four years. Stuyvesant had met with the Company directors one last time about two months before this, some time in the middle of August. It was a humiliating and troubled encounter. Because it is perhaps the low point in his moments of rejection and because he was a man who took pleasure in being in control and was now so painfully made a suppliant, it is worth considering in detail. Stuyvesant had written a letter to the directors and, together with his “Answer,” was now delivering it personally. Upon arriving at their chambers, he was made to wait outside their rooms for “some time” and then “called in.” In the letter, he had recapitulated his defense of his actions and expressed the hope that his explanation would be accepted and his employment with the Company continued. Their response took him by surprise. His case was now, they said, entirely in the hands of the States General. They were now “no parties in the case.” Stuyvesant replied, “Of whom, then, and how is a termination of the matter to be obtained?” One of the directors reiterated that they were no longer parties—­perhaps he, Stuyvesant, should appeal to “the Grand Pensionary, de Witt.” Stuyvesant replied, saying what they knew would be the case. He had no acquaintance with Johan de Witt, a man whose position involved him in more pressing occupations and “almost constant absense.” He dared not trouble de Witt “with matters of such trifling “interest.” He was now, he said, “ignorant [of] who his opponents are.”39 Stuyvesant shared this experience with his friend of many years, Cornelis van Ruyven. We might recall his confidence in van Ruyven’s wisdom in breaking a tie regarding an important legal case in New Amsterdam in 1656 and the same deference shown to his judgment on the validity of a just war against the Esopus in 1660.40 Now, in his friend’s response, we have the only firm evidence of a close friend with him in Holland offering consolation during his years abroad. “I knew,” van Ruyven wrote, “that there would be difficulties for you in the beginning.” But I did not expect them to persist and that you would be subjected to them even after offering your explanation. “But it is nothing new for good servants to be paid in such wages. I cannot myself

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imagine on what pretext the loss of the country can be laid to your charge.” I have written to one of the Company directors telling him that “honor and thanks are due to you for sustaining the government so long by your prudent administration.” I said to him that “to rob a man of his good name or, if slandered, not to defend him” is “equally bad.” I am prepared to testify on your behalf.41 Perhaps the encounter led Stuyvesant to submit his “Answer” to the “Observations” in a more determined frame of mind. He could also draw hope from new evidence now available from New Netherland.

Chapter 9

Dismissal and Return

We might think of Stuyvesant’s words as performers meant to act for him in certain theatrical ways. In the “Answer” of late 1666, we can see him giving supplementary lines to some actors who had taken the stage for him in the “Report,” and adding other characters to them. Now, for example, he was asking the committeemen to put themselves in his place as he read the reassuring letter of the directors dated April 21, 1664, just four months before the English attack. It told him of the English king’s impending appointment of bishops to New England and therefore English Long Islanders and resident New Englanders preferring to “live free under us.” It told of the real possibility of fruitful negotiations of boundaries. Just imagine, he put to the committee, the “hope servants residing so far off can draw from such and similar experiences.” We had only local knowledge. But the Company had the advantage of direct news from Old England. It is “so near to them,” he wrote, while we “so far from them . . . [had news] from a third and fourth hand.”1 As to his new sources of supporting evidence, more people, he wrote, are now in Holland who were in New Amsterdam when the frigates arrived. They are prepared to make sworn depositions as to his proper conduct. Their testimonials can be set alongside earlier arguments, now supported by stronger documentation. He has copied folios from a book containing his annual petitions for powder. He can produce proof from pages carrying roughly 12,000 words. He is able to table pages from the General Powder Account for the final four years. He can now present pages from three volumes from a Book of Monthly Payments (10, 11, 13) and from Equipage Books, Nos. 9, 10, and 12, forwarded to him by van Ruyven. He was now in a position to hand over excerpts from the Gunner’s Delivery Books of 1661 to 1664, and the Book of Equipment and Munitions of War, 1663, No. 11, folio 24.2

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He had four further testimonials confirming the unserviceable condition of the fort’s powder. One was deposed about six months earlier, on April 8 here at The Hague. Another was notarized eleven days later in Amsterdam. He could table a testimonial of the late principal of the New Amsterdam Latin School as a third statement confirming the uselessness of the powder. These statements were confirmed by two English officers who accompanied the frigates and found the powder to be old and decayed. Jacques Cousseau, an elected official of New Amsterdam and a reputable wholesale merchant trading between Holland and the Manhattans, had now testified that in 1664 he heard merchants pronounce it unfit for use. In his opinion, the powder was not considered “worth half price.” Eight additional declarations reached the committee, as did the signed memorandum of three leading New Amsterdammers, including van Ruyven.3 With this substantial evidence, Stuyvesant focused the committee on two arguments. He addressed the Company’s contention that his responsibility was to defend the fort and allow the city to be reduced. But consider the fort’s geography. It was, he implied, like those you gentlemen know of in Naarden or Leyden. It was a “citadel” within a built-­up city. It was not a structure intentionally set apart from a dense population and intended to repel an open enemy. Perhaps, he conceded, someone “more experienced in war . . . [and] better versed in offensive and defensive siege operations” could have done better than he did.4 But in his judgment the fort would have fallen to the estimated 500 men within 72 hours, probably sooner. He cited here the passage from the Gospel of Luke that he had offered to Nicolls and that we have already encountered. Now he put it to the States General as a “lesson” to be learned about entering into warfare. “What king about to go to war against another King does not first sit down and think whether he is able with ten thousand, to meet him that with twenty thousand cometh against him.” So “our force was inferior to that of the approaching enemy.”5 He drew a second argument from that consideration. His exact words are important. Your “Petitioner did not command nor order the gunner to fire . . . owing to this circumstance, viz, It had been unanimously agreed and resolved . . . that we should not be the first to begin hostilities and bloodshed.” I had, he added, “observed and put . . . [this] into practice heretofore in the attack and conquest of the Swedish forts on the South River and . . . [it was] approved of at the time by the Honble Directors.”6 With these and other points of argument, together with tabled



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documentary evidence, he concluded. But not before he had presented the committee with additional proof of New Amsterdam’s incapacity to survive anything like a full military confrontation. The committee, he said, must examine the testimony of four burghers on the inadequate defences of the city and fort as well as the depositions of five citizens stating that he animated and encouraged the populace to put up a defense rather than exhibiting cowardice. They must consider the statements of fifteen Dutch Long Islanders describing the unprovoked violence of Scott and other armed Englishmen, and an affidavit confirming that he used “his own private property and credit” to buy grain from New England. He handed them copies of a letter of his to the directors written about nine months before the surrender. It stated, “I am apprehensive of bloodshed.”7 He did not descend into arguments about the Company’s charge that he acted to save his farm or conspired with clergymen to allow the city to be reduced. He ended, pleading fatigue from having spent the past twelve months carefully duplicating and reduplicating his earlier “Report” and pertinent documents. He noted that they had somehow got lost in Huygens’s committee. Might the States General now give him a “speedy dispatch.”8

* * * Stuyvesant learned of the Company directors’ rejoinder on March 12, 1667. Their “Reply of the West India Company to the Answer of the Honble Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director-­General of New Netherland; with Appendices, 1666” had not come swiftly. It was tabled only on March 8, 1667. But then it came forcefully. The directors confronted Stuyvesant and the committee with a far more personalized submission than their earlier presentation. They continued to maintain the grounds on which earlier arguments had been mounted, but intensified their condemnation of his abandonment of the fort and New Amsterdam as premeditated treachery. Whereas in 1663 and 1664 correspondence with him they were writing that the hostile English Long Islanders were an inconsiderable number of men easily thrown back, now they were recognizing that they constituted a serious danger and condemned him for letting their power get “so far advanced.”9 They excoriated his lack of foresight and carelessness as “scandalous”—­invoking the word twice in the first paragraph. The directors isolated two time periods. First, they moved point by point through the months and days leading up to the arrival of the English frigates.

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They let the evidence here constitute the bulk of the submission. Confining themselves to a tight and detailed chronology of the final days, they presented a narrative that wholly contradicted Stuyvesant’s version of the same events. Doing this, they chose to depict weeks when affairs were at their most confusing, when rumor and uncertainty were at their height, and reports were most unreliable and contestable. Not surprisingly, they could, for example, call on Harmen Martensz van der Bosch as a firsthand witness. The soldier was now prepared in late 1666 to support their accusation of Stuyvesant’s negligence whereas earlier in 1666 he had testified in his defence. Martensz delivered the lines exactly as the Company would have wanted: Stuyvesant had made no preparations for defense until two or three days before the arrival of the frigates. We soldiers felt we were “sold” out by the cowardly burghers. The troops aboard the frigates were only 400 “very feeble and inexperienced” men.10 Second and by this tactic, the directors were able to isolate, or rather, erase decisions made in the years preceding these final months. They chose to ignore the archival work that had engaged Stuyvesant since the surrender. In their words, “we pass over” the “long detail the Director makes in his . . . writing of other events in the foregoing years . . . as both irrelevant and immaterial.”11 Yet the erased years demand our closest attention. For had the directors taken the committee back in time, they would have found that the policy of deterrence, watchful waiting, and conciliation that Stuyvesant adopted in 1664 was the same as the set of strategies he had implemented over the past seventeen years and which the directors had themselves consistently adopted, insisted upon, and applauded. The directors worked the first point hard. We told him to be on his guard, they insisted. He should have “acted earlier and not waited” until overwhelming danger from the frigates. He was fully informed that the frigates were coming. Self-­interest, however, carried the day. He and his councilors were primarily determined to salvage their properties. He accepted the support of clergymen who, like him, were also prepared to lose the province for the sake of their assets and “private farms.”12 Yes, he made repeated requests for military assistance and munitions. But they were insufficiently detailed, and one allegedly sent in 1663 was missing. The directors left unaddressed Stuyvesant’s two warnings in October 1663 that although his situation was perilous, “not a ship was sent to our relief notwithstanding we had so frequently solicited and warned . . . [the directors] that it was impossible . . . for us to preserve the fort, much less the country.”



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Instead they pressed on. They referred to him as a culprit: a man who had failed to observe his “oath.” They expressed the certainty that “when the States General may resolve to prosecute said Stuyvesant,” their facts would all become clear.13 Meanwhile, the committee would come to see that he acted like a pawn of the burghers, that is, “like . . . [the city’s] militia captain and not a servant of the Company.” Their conclusion: he should have defended the fort even though the city would have been reduced. In their words, “it ought to have been defended until the English had reduced it [the fort and the city] by their overwhelming force.”14 In final paragraphs, the directors hinted at a familiarity with the States that they could presume was theirs, but that Stuyvesant was, of course, in no position to dare call upon. They offered advice—­as they had so often done in the past. We hope, they counseled, that “your High Mightinesses” will “take care that the remembrance of . . . examples . . . [such as Stuyvesant’s] could in future act as a precedent or justification to others.” They took the tone of a statement made in the first paragraph of their submission. Having seen our “Reply,” “your Honble Mightinesses . . . may dispose as you see fit of the said Stuyvesant.”15

* * * A close inspection of the documentation back to 1647 would have seriously weakened the directors’ case against Stuyvesant. Taking in the whole picture would have revealed three historical realities. They are underlying presences in both his submissions. First, in each of the seventeen years, Englishmen—­almost always described as “neighbors”—­were encroaching on or alienating lands in New Netherland. The movements were not an enemy’s orchestrations of a clear design. Rather they were, as Stuyvesant quite correctly characterized them, “daily incursions” reducing “this and then that place” under our jurisdiction. Far from tempering these provocations, the governments of the United Colonies of New England, Hartford, and Maryland were either indirectly or openly testing the strength of the Dutch authorities’ responses and looking to the future. The hostile movements were common knowledge among the Dutch settlers and often immediately felt in their communities. By early 1664 and with Stuyvesant’s knowledge, the Company was conceding that Westchester and the English towns on Long Island as well as the islands in the city’s harbor might have to be released to Hartford Colony, though it “would not satisfy the

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latter.”16 English actions on Long Island were no longer incursions in “this, and then that place” but an increasingly coordinated insurgency. These accumulating disturbances were known to the States General, the West India Company in Holland, and the city of Amsterdam whose magistrates had invested time and money in the colony on the Delaware River. Yet time and again, the Company and the States General had answered the English threat with what I have called a policy of deterrence. This policy is the second historical reality that the committee would have come to recognize. Decisions not to decide had shown themselves in various forms of vacillation: in the Company’s setting aside of actions that might run counter to the States General’s determination to ensure peaceful relations with England; in arranging conditions of truce; in waiting (and waiting) in the expectation that England and the United Provinces would settle a boundary for New Netherland. On the eve of the invasion, the directors tried to judge English threats about New Netherland as empty posturing. They half-­heartedly (and tardily) considered locating and sending more colonists. They blustered that you, Stuyvesant, are the man on the spot. You must not endure such intolerable proceedings and must oppose them in every way. Or: you must mollify the neighbors: for example, write to Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, pointing out their “improper and hostile proceedings.” It will “demonstrate . . . the righteousness of our cause.”17 These were admirable improvisations. In the majority of cases, they were undoubtedly motivated by both irenicism and economic cunning. And, in the case of New Netherland, it is not an exaggeration to say, survival. The consequences of adopting this policy, however, were the same. Concessions were made and resolutions postponed in the hope of a future settlement of differences. This was clearly not “irrelevant and immaterial.” Rather, actions to avoid confrontation compromised the Company’s oversight of New Netherland and, more importantly, contributed decisively to Stuyvesant’s decisions in August–September 1664. A third reality went unsaid in the Company’s presentations. Stuyvesant pointed to it on three occasions. The attack of the English on New Amsterdam was European-­style war brought to North America. It was of an entirely different quality from a local insurgency. Stuyvesant knew that it called for a different response and would lead to an entirely different outcome. Above I pointed out that in all the argumentation surrounding the surrender, the issue came down to: who was to blame for the unpreparedness of New Netherland in the face of the English threat? The introduction of war as a reality



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changes that assertion. It came down to: was Stuyvesant correct in avoiding the initiation of a war involving England? This recognition best clarifies a declaration of Stuyvesant’s about engaging the English enemy off Manhattan Island. It is one from which he never backed away. “We did not,” he stated, “want to be the first to begin hostilities and bloodshed.”18 The resolution to avoid being the initiator in a major military engagement ought not be dismissed. Were Stuyvesant to have found justification for doing so—­that is, acting, as the directors wished, “earlier and not waited”—­his actions would have constituted, at the least, a break with past policy. They would also have endangered negotiations with England still (as far as he knew) expected to bear fruit in Europe. He would have faced far greater difficulties had he attacked and somehow come out victorious—­and humbled England—­or had he lost and borne the responsibility for the deaths of citizens and soldiers on both sides. In the past—­a very long past—­he had let restraint direct policy and govern events. The possibility of war, as the directors posed it in 1649, was a danger to him. At that time, they had warned him that the States General would hold him personally responsible for any breach of the peace with the New England colonies. You, they threatened, will be judged “the cause of such a war.”19 Evidence of Stuyvesant’s practiced forbearance repeatedly washed into his records. For example, in 1663, English residents of Gravesend were seeking to purchase native lands in today’s eastern New Jersey. When Dutch officials were sent to investigate, they had Stuyvesant’s orders not to exhibit “any hostility toward either the Indians or the Englishmen.” Late in 1662, a Long Island Englishman from Westchester was found to be inducing Dutch settlers to rescind their oaths of allegiance to the Dutch authorities. The Company informed the States General of this outrage. Still, “in consideration of the close alliance between the Crown of Great Britain and the States-­General . . . [we] have not dared to offer any opposition . . . [until] your assistance and direction be invoked.” Eight months later and observing no action taken in Europe regarding the disputed boundaries, Stuyvesant warned of bloodshed unless active diplomatic opposition was offered to the English.20 January and February 1664 were particularly explosive months. We need only consider one experience of Stuyvesant with Hartford officials and English Long Islanders, and a stormy exchange of letters with the Company directors. In January, Stuyvesant offered a truce to Captain John Scott, the unpredictable self-­appointed leader of Long Island’s disaffected English settlers.

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With considerable patience, he wrote to Scott denying the captain’s accusation that his men had used provocative language. In a recent incident, he said, he had “expressly charged . . . [his lieutenant], both verbally and in writing to exhibit no hostility toward either Indians or Englishmen.” To prevent further mischief and bloodshed, however, we are willing to submit your “complaints and pretensions” to the General Court of Hartford and our commissioners (then engaged in futile talks) and accept whatever shall be negotiated by them. On the same level of trying to believe that an amicable future was possible, the commissioners had reported to Stuyvesant that Hartford’s officials had information that England’s duke of York had been granted Long Island and “would obtain it by force.” The commissioners had responded by denying that possibility, saying that “when properly informed of New Netherland’s status,” the duke “would come to a proper agreement with the States-­General.” Three months later, Stuyvesant proposed to Scott that a twelve-­month truce be kept while each side referred matters to its principals.21 On January 20, the directors wrote Stuyvesant a disingenuous letter about the source of insurgency and why it was less their problem than his. They insisted that the difficulties in New Netherland were local, and that he and his council should be the ones to deal with them. Against the realist assessments Stuyvesant had been forwarding, the directors countered with ill-­considered plans set in a distant future. His insistence was that the directors had to think militarily. For eleven years, he had asked the Company to supply a frigate for the province’s defence. Each time, he reiterated the dictum that whoever was master of the coasts and major rivers controlled the land.22 At all costs, then, the mouth of the Hudson River must now be held against an English enemy. The directors countered by ignoring the point. Instead, they advised him that they were seriously considering the planting of colonies. They went on to express their surprise at the proceedings begun at Hartford that were freighted with “strange and dangerous consequences.” But they, the directors, could not imagine that their maneuvers were “encouraged from this side” of the Atlantic. In any case, they said, we must “wait patiently for that time” when present efforts to settle boundaries are completed. Stuyvesant then read of the directors’ disappointment at his unsuccessful journey to Boston seeking assistance in curbing Hartford’s expansive ambitions. Closing, they reminded him that he and his councilors were the men “in loco.” In what must have seemed both a frightening and infuriating deduction, they wrote, “The subject is then absolutely referred to you.” But, they



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added, since Hartford appears to be intent upon taking “the entire country,” we are sending sixty soldiers (of whom only 48 or 42 were sent). We also intend to communicate the situation to the States General for their advisement and action, and will write “in serious terms to the English towns on Long Island.”23 Stuyvesant would not have read the letter until March or perhaps April 1664. However, in late February, he sent the directors a long letter with four appendices. The tone is one of anger and mounting concern at Scott’s increasingly fevered calls for rebellion. Received by about April 21, the directors responded to it as a “complaining letter.” Don’t “accuse us” of causing your sense of abandonment. We have sent sufficient military men. As to Scott, we are convinced that the disturbances on Long Island are a “game” played by nothing more than a rebellious band of one hundred and fifty men “whom you are fully able to resist.” Moreover, other than Hartford, the English colonies will not help Scott’s efforts because they consider them illegal. Only on July 26, three months later, did the Amsterdam magistrates pass a resolution approving a Company request of the previous week. They would provide warships and soldiers for New Netherland, but only with the proviso that they not be used in “any other offensive acts.”24 Were the ships somehow to have sailed immediately and encountered favorable weather, however, the men would have still arrived too late—­that is, in early or mid-­September. But back in February, Stuyvesant was playing the same game as the directors. Either fix the boundaries, he demanded, or “for what happens, we hold ourselves blameless and guiltless of all further damage, mischief and losses.” He hinted that he and the populace no longer trusted the Company. You knew that a Swedish vessel was heading for the South River, but chose to leave us “in ignorance of it.” This “excites in us a strange emotion.” Why did you not “counteract so ruinous a design?” Regarding Long Island, we have steadfastly observed a policy of not commencing a military engagement. As he put it, “Up to this time, not a drop of blood has been shed, little damage done, and . . . [we have] not lost a foot of ground.” That good result is why we have “exhibited so much patience.”25

* * * Patience was never going to deter the restored monarchy in England from seizing New Netherland. Once set in motion, the plans that culminated in the August-­September attack were not to be reversed. It was an act of war,

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spelling the end of incursions in “this and then that place,” and any peace to be derived from misapplied strategies of deterrence. “War” seldom appears in the submissions to van Ommeren’s committee. Nor do “warlike” or “act of war.” The Company avoided the words altogether, as indeed was necessary since, from 1665 to 1667, England and the United Provinces were negotiating to settle the war that in fact emerged in March 1665 in what we call the Second Anglo-­Dutch War. Stuyvesant used the word “war” twice in his correspondence. In three allusions and images, he introduced war as the reality he was now facing and as he was now imagining it. In offering the images, he also constructed scenarios in which he pointed to himself as a leading actor. The first reference was in the biblical analogy I have already cited. Another appeared in the reference to siege warfare that we have also encountered. The final reference was in an image drawn from historical memory—­that is, his recollection of the role he played in the 1655 attack on the Swedes along the Delaware River. In it, the States General, the West India Company, the city of Amsterdam, and his administration cooperated in what could have been an open act of war had not terms of peace been achieved. Stuyvesant chose the passage from Luke deliberately. It set out the dilemma of a leader facing a superior enemy “coming against him.” It is difficult not to think that on September 2 when Stuyvesant cited the passage to Richard Nicolls he had, for days, been literally seeing the progress of the enemy’s warships sailing toward the Hudson, coming against New Amsterdam’s defenses, anchoring in the Bay of Nyack, and observing himself as a ruler, in Luke’s words, “about to go to war.”26 This was not an insurrection. Once begun, it would not remain local. Rather, it was the possible beginning of a war that would envelop Englishmen and Dutchmen in Europe and North America and usher in consequences with widespread repercussions, none of them desirable to the United Provinces. The recourse to deterrence was still being appealed to during the final days of the surrender. In its “Observations,” the Company appeared to be entirely serious in asserting that the English would not have attacked the place had they seen Stuyvesant adopting “a posture of defence and having the courage to repel them.”27 For his part, Stuyvesant composed a conciliatory letter to Nicolls within the scenario that he allowed Luke to set out. The embattled king “sits down and think[s] whether he is able  .  .  . to meet him” who is coming against him. Stuyvesant sat, took a realistic measure of his situation, and wrote Nicolls an appeal for peaceful conciliation. He set it in a European



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context. In the letter, he presented himself as a leader qualified to have arranged the twelve-­month truce with Scott to prevent bloodshed and who was now in a position to make the same offer to achieve the same result. Such a truce, he argued, would also prevent “further trouble in Europe which will follow consequent and unquestionably on any hostile aggressions and differences between England’s Majesty and their High Mightinesses.”28 But Nicolls’s response was that Stuyvesant and the city magistrates had twenty-­four hours to capitulate. In Stuyvesant’s reference to Fort New Amsterdam as an urban citadel and to siege operations in his letter to the directors, he imagines war as it was then conducted in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Europe and about which he admits he had no direct experience. Siege warfare on the continent was frequent and, for the populations trapped inside a city, terrifying. Stuyvesant imagines himself directing a population and soldiery defending themselves against a siege but, acknowledging this, adds that “perhaps someone more experienced in war . . . and better versed in defensive and offensive operations” could have done better.29 Again, this was not a reference to Scott threatening to run him through with his sword or Hartford’s officials endorsing small and incremental movements of settlers. His image is of a city engaged in open warfare. The third image Stuyvesant offers us—­as he offered it to the committeemen—­is a vision of the Dutch flotilla of warships closing on the Swedish forts along the Delaware River in 1655.30 Certainly it was analogous to his present situation, but with one exception. In the previous case, the Company had approved of his not firing the first shot against the enemy. And, as he and the council stated at the time, “a threatened and feared war with our neighbours . . .[was] unexpectedly transformed into a desired and agreeable peace.”31 In this new case, however, the directors were calling his same determination treachery. Stuyvesant’s analogy arose in the context of his unanswered appeals for military assistance and especially the need for ships to prevent an enemy’s entrance into New Amsterdam’s harbor. The Company, he argued, had a palpable example of this need for military assistance in the success of their expedition to dislodge the Swedes from their Delaware River fortifications. He narrated the episode from his point of view aboard the Waagh (“Balancing Scales”). where he was in command of 32 pieces of artillery and about 150 sailors and soldiers. He left the engagement undescribed, except to say that the victory was “quick and executed without firing a shot.” So, he continued, my

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deduction is conclusive: “whoever is master of the water is, in short, master of the forts.” Had the Company seen fit to reinforce us in 1664 with “one or two similar ships,” “our “misfortune” would not have overtaken us.32

* * * We leave behind the unended ending of Stuyvesant’s time in Holland. I regret that we did not overhear more conversations, see more places, go with him to his church, have a look at where he was living. One day, I think scholars may uncover the documents to fill in these silences. Meanwhile, we leave behind his papers. Stylistically, they are flat and repetitious, perhaps boring—­maybe like most papers fed to a committee. We find they lack irony, metaphor, and interesting idiosyncrasies. His language is unfailingly vigorous but shaped like that of the Company—­that is, it is legalese meant for verbal assault and evidential demolition. It is, for example, not the language of the ordinances we have encountered. In their own way, both sets of texts called for individuals to be miniaturized. But being finite before God was one thing. Being made finite before a committee of inquiry was quite another. In Holland, Stuyvesant was essentially writing folio after folio about his subordination. He was repeatedly acknowledging to the committee the power of the Company’s restraints on his governance. But he fought off finding any merit in it. He continued to say, I am what I have achieved. His will seemed not to have been broken, nor do the papers suggest a man whose character was undergoing a radical change. He remained the self-­ assured man of earlier years, continuing to extend loyalty. In 1667 and after he had read the West India Company’s second submission to the committee, he requested permission to enter a third set of submissions, continue his defense, and hope to win some acknowledgment of that loyal service. Sometime in 1667, Stuyvesant returned to the place of the ordinances, New Netherland (by then, New York). The hiatus of three years’ absence has afforded historians and commentators an opportunity to draw what might appear to be a straightforward contrast between the magistrate and general who left Manhattan Island in 1665 and the supposedly humbled and powerless man who returned in 1667. Over the years, the dichotomy has helped organize the thinking about his life both before and after 1667. The dramatic potential for exploring the replacement of one persona with another has been exploited by many historians. It has fitted nicely into interpretations about the larger replacement—­namely, that of Dutch rule with English.



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The supposedly willingly subdued Stuyvesant—­his personal acceptance of loss, the end of his career—­has offered itself as a metaphor for, or at least not a negation of, the allegedly ready acceptance of the Dutch population to English rule.33 It seldom goes without notice, for example, that Stuyvesant developed a harmonious friendship with Governor Richard Nicolls.34 For the first time, historians come to entertain the notion of him as able to establish close friendships. They are narratively gracious to him—­as many had not been able to be in their interpretations of his years as governor. But acceptance of a peaceful life as Stuyvesant’s appointed role is as freighted with subtly negative interpretations of his career as is the allegedly easy compliance of the Dutch to the English conquest. His prefigured destiny of loss and powerlessness on a sheltered farm is New Netherland’s same destiny writ small. This is especially the case when his retirement to a bucolic existence at the bouwerie is given dramatic emphasis by inventing a contrasting warlike personality before 1664. One example of this interpretation from an American college textbook of 1985 and another from the historical account of 2004 will stand in for many others. The textbook example is particularly meaningful because such volumes are recognized as distillations of the broad state of accepted interpretations at the date of publication. The text of The Great Republic (1985) on the unit, “The Failure of the Dutch” is accompanied by a well-­known illustration of Stuyvesant (see Figure 3 in “The Outcast,” the Preface to this volume). The caption relies for its persuasiveness on contrast. It draws a dichotomy between his quiet retirement and earlier years describing him as a “storming . . . war veteran.” (Stuyvesant had not served in a war.) This “storming, peg-­legged war veteran,” it reads, “swore that he would rather die before surrendering New Amsterdam to the English, but in fact he gave up the fort quietly in 1664 and retired peacefully to his farm in New York City.” The text continues, stating that in 1664 the Dutch could only look to the new English authorities with hopes that had never been stirred by the West India Company “or by such storming, hard-­ drinking martinets as William Kieft and Peter Stuyvesant.”35 A 2004 reconstruction of these events presents a story that also proposes a transformation. Stuyvesant, as we have seen, took care to bring a gunner with him to Holland in 1665. In this narrative, the gunner is introduced standing alongside Stuyvesant before the English attack on New Amsterdam. The two men observe the English enemy. Stuyvesant considers firing the cannon. He thinks it would “unleash a rain of violence, a storm that would swallow the place, ending the torment, ending things the way they ought to end, in good,

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quenching blood and fire.” He delays. But when 93 burghers present him with a petition requesting surrender, his personality is such that he can think that “he had been right all along: this rapid willingness to give up, this spinelessness, this absence of patriotism, was what came of a mongrel society.”36 In the same narrative, we next see Stuyvesant through the eyes of the New Amsterdammers during the days when Articles of Capitulation were signed in mid-­September. The documents included concessions made to the population. In this account, the people think Stuyvesant dictated the articles and are grateful. They have a moment of epiphany. It may be—­the author, phrasing their thoughts—­“that despite the unending turmoil of his years as director of the colony, he cared about it and its people.” Only after 1664 and with the surrender had Stuyvesant “finally won himself the welcome of his fellow colonists.”37 Stuyvesant is presented here as a man enlightened too late about the leadership he should have sought and enacted over the earlier seventeen years. The condemnation is both subtle and telling. I have stated that provincial responsibilities took Stuyvesant into activities and decision-­making that set him apart from the day-­to-­day routines of individual settlements in New Netherland. The traditional urban particularism of the Dutch did as well. That disjuncture was not, however, total. Here the implication is that it was. No historian has challenged the proposition that in conquering New Netherland, England received into its first empire anything other than a set of ethical communities cognizant of the social and legal mores required of a good society. The implication in this 2004 account, however, is that somehow the New Netherlanders had been able to form themselves into ethical communities without any input from Stuyvesant, either individually or as provincial administrator. Even in this basic social achievement, Stuyvesant played no part. As I have pointed out in Chapter 1, a writer could “take on” these interpretations. Stuyvesant as a “war veteran” is anachronistic. His irrationality and inhumanity in hungering for “good, quenching blood and fire” is without evidence and unsupported by the consistency of his policies toward hostile natives and European neighbors. The notion that Stuyvesant despised his society as “mongrel” is contradicted by his total silence on such a matter and by his urgent advice sent to the Company in 1659: let some of our lands be opened for settlement. Carry it out expeditiously by arranging “that some Polish, Lithuanian, Prussian, Jutlandish or Flemish farmers (who, as we trust, are soon and easily to be found during the Eastern and Northern war) may be sent over by the first ships.” For our part, he continued, we shall “endeavor to



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provide them with cattle and necessary provisions . . . and in order that these people need not be delayed upon their arrival here, I hope, if it pleases God to give me life and sufficient health, to go there during the coming autumn, view the land and buy it from the natives.”38 But offering contrary evidence will not dislodge a myth. For a myth’s articulations ride the air of a deeply embedded cultural formation or, better yet, a sequence of cultural formations that are its history’s anthropology. Even articulations of its rejection give it air. Few historians have captured—­and contested—­the heart of this myth better than Oliver Rink in Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (1986). For at least a generation of historians, Rink wrote, “the surrender of New Netherland symbolized more than a military conquest—­it symbolized the triumph of Anglo-­American culture.” Peter Stuyvesant and his predecessors, he went on, “became tyrants, their careers examples of the age-­old failure of tyranny to overcome the forces of liberty, and the failure of the Dutch colony, a moral lesson anticipating the great struggle of the American Revolution.”39

Chapter 10

Stuyvesant Tattooed

For about 350 years, Peter Stuyvesant’s career and reputation have been tied to changing cultural formations in the United States. His life history has swung on shifting trajectories of interpretation and on changing disjunctions and recombinations of philosophical and theological systems. It has been affected by movements in literary and art traditions, and fluidity in the nation’s ethical, ethnic, and political grounding. Intellectual and imaginative resources for interpretation changed and were unpredictable. It was, however, wholly predictable that when attending to Stuyvesant at all, he would stand for what we required of him. Over the past decades, modernity’s pressures have influenced how Stuyvesant would be remembered and forgotten, found to be useful, or suffered loss. American historians have been a sounding board of the culture with which modernity has come to be identified. As they have done with other earlier cultural formations, they have revealed its symptoms and contributed to its force.1 Stuyvesant’s story sits within New York’s historical tradition. Elements of modernity have pressed on that tradition and, for that reason, on interpretations of him. Broad claims have recently been made about modernity having “a particular problem with forgetting.” Our times, it is said, have slowly but inexorably lost touch with a past that was “once the inspiring and nurturing source of its own identity.”2 It is alleged that even the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment has disappeared from cultural memory, with late capitalism as the cause.3 Much in this argument is overstated. But there is a danger of our forgetting that for many decades in America, countless men and women lived out a late Reformation or premodern worldview and that it was the reality in which Stuyvesant also made sense of his life.

* * *



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Interpretively, New York has a unique historical past. The events of 1664 caused a clear break in the province’s history. However the causes are described and the outcomes debated, there were those who gained and those who lost. Something that had been was gone. Pre-­1664 was another time. Out of events that made real a segmentation of time, lives, and cultures, a sense of loss has been a haunting presence in the investigations that have made up New York’s historical tradition. Stuyvesant Bound is not the first study to comment on the historical presence of loss. The dominantly Anglophile commentators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized the breadth of that disappearance. They took delight in celebrating the descent of Dutch ways of life into quaintness and the stuff of children’s folktales. Some counted the Dutch as risible and, under certain impulses, disposable.4 Nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century specialists on the early history of the state have disagreed about the costs of loss for New Nethelanders in the post-­ 1664 years. They have asked whether there was predominantly continuity or radical change, acquiescence or rebelliousness. To what degree was the culture of the New Netherlanders like that of the English or different from it? Was the transformation from stability and a Dutch corporate identity into Englishness speedy or slow? Was the English conquest broadly beneficial—­a feather in the cap of progress? Should we not try to see the big picture?5 Looking to fellow professionals outside the field, such specialists have regularly noted a deathly silence about the significance of New Netherland in the United States story of its past. Not only was something gone but, for most authorities across the colonial field, the loss was negligible. New York’s historians have generally not denounced this silence as an injustice. Nor have they belabored the distortion of New Netherland as a failed and inconsequential colonial project. They have generally adhered to the belief that professional historians prudently write up the results of careful research. They have patiently respected the conclusions of other objective researchers, stated their contrary positions, and got on with their histories of early America’s alleged losers. Disrespect, distortion, and silence concerning a colonial enterprise is one thing. But the same distortion and silence in regard to an individual is an injustice. Stuyvesant, in my opinion, has suffered such an injustice. In the narratives of New York, he is a presence alongside that of failure. Sometimes he is installed directly as its symbol. What he wrought in his administration is taken to have been the obverse of the slow but sure progress into nationhood that the rest of the American colonial world managed. “He,” summarized one

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historian, “stood for principles of government that have become discredited.”6 At other times, Stuyvesant is an unnamed figure who must bear inclusion in depictions of the New Netherlanders as somehow lacking basic civilities and a capacity for vision. They are incidental outsiders to an Anglo-­American world to whose development they had little constructive to contribute. But there were moments in the last 350 years when Stuyvesant was summoned to play a major role in the political discourse of the United States. Two literary events from the first half of the nineteenth century, for instance, gave him such a place. With the publication of the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, he and the New Netherlanders were made central to writings intended to achieve the same goal as today’s poststructuralists. As one writer has described these recent practitioners, they intended “to create a potential for political liberation by decentering, dislocating and disrupting conventional understandings.”7 In the national event that was the publication of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York in 1809, Stuyvesant was bound into questions about the destiny of America. Irving expected that by elaborating on the dichotomy between the modernizing nineteenth-­century Americans and the seventeenth-­century New Netherlanders, each would make the other more real. And from the early Dutch history, the Americans would come to realize the availability of alternative political structures to those in which they were choosing so perilously to live. Irving was not writing to do justice to Stuyvesant, but to advance a more just American society.

* * * Cooper and Irving drew the Dutch of New York directly into a critique of the pulsing energies being unleashed in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. They used them to problematize the uncertainties then being expressed about the emerging character of the American nation. Cooper wrote repeatedly about the catastrophic and irreversible effects of European civilization on America’s indigenous peoples. He mourned a disappearing “natural” way of life that Americans were showing themselves incapable of understanding and which they were willing to sacrifice to the gods of greed, ambition, and an illusory pot of gold they were calling “the spirit of improvement.” Robert A. Ferguson has joined others in writing extensively on the legal and fictional literature of the days of Cooper and Irving. Much of the American literary output of the early Republic, Ferguson argues, constituted



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“an anthology of devices for self-­persuasion.” It was replete with the reassuring notion that history was on the Americans’ side. Should any deviations from the Founding Fathers’ ideals arise, history would be “full of answers.”8 Cooper, like Irving, was not convinced. Neither his Leatherstocking novels and Tanglewood Tales nor Irving’s Knickerbocker History were about the virtues of untrammeled gain, riches to be got, the continent as a vein of silver waiting to be exploited by nouveau riche, men and women bold enough to grasp the meanings and mechanisms of unregulated individualism. Their tales were about loss. They described loss of an only partially interred past and a contemporary loss of direction that could only lead to the collapse of the nation’s republican ideals. Two disappearing civilizations—­the native and the Dutch—­were available to warn Americans that the country’s destiny was not as secure as many intellectuals dreamed it would be. A receding native and Dutch past was still around to haunt the present and betoken an imaginably unviable future. Cooper’s invention of the Dutch character Andries Coejemans gave him things to say about all of this. In The Chainbearer; or, The Litlepage Manuscripts, edited by the Author of “Satenstoe,” “Spy,” “Pathfinder,” “Two Admirals,” etc, in Two Volumes, 1845, Coejemans is an old-­fashioned surveyor living in upstate New York. He is counter-­modern, a figure, Cooper writes, from “the good old time of the colony.” In an age when education was being heralded as a necessary ingredient for success in the new American democracy, he was uneducated. But that, Cooper told his readers, was “of no great matter.” For the old man was honest, practical, and averse to artificiality.9 Ominously, however, Cooper’s kind of schooling and work excluded him from the conflicted, but seemingly advanced, civilization offered by men like the Vermonters. Here were people avidly putting knowledge to the service of self-­aggrandizement, and excusing their encroachments on New York lands by saying they were listening to the call of progress. Coejemans’s lifestyle, however, fused him with the remnants of the abused and detribalized native populations of upstate New York—­Stuyvesant would have called them naturellen. Coejemans learned from the wilderness. And he did the natives’ kind of work. Forty years of training had made him a “capital woodsman” and a leader. But his leadership as “Chainbearer” was among “chainbearers, hunters, trappers, runners [and] guides.”10 These were men filling the menial tasks left to premodern peoples whose presence would soon be—­and deserved to be—­spectral. At one point, Chainbearer is offered an assessment of his future by a

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native, Susquesus. Cooper uses it to underscore the reality of the Dutch becoming lost in modernity. He situates the two men in an exchange about losing out to modernity. It is both intimate and fatalistic. Susquesus tells the old man that he too will soon be reduced to “women’s work.” Like the Indians, he will be “making brooms.”11 In The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper allowed the disappearing Indian world to function as a trigger for reflection on the possibility that the emerging republican culture in New York might be as unviable as those of the natives or the Dutch, whose disintegration was occurring before their very eyes.12 In this, he articulated the uncertainties about American society being expressed by other commentators. He joined them in questioning modernity and American delusions in embracing its excesses: capitalism (in the hands of upstarts and the new monied classes), democracy (in the control of factions unable to recognize that the present system was coming to have no moral limits), nationalism (in the proclamations of jingoists), and secularism (in the vulgar politicization of religion.) To these, Cooper added modernity’s disregard of those who did not fit in. These included people like himself, those who were experiencing the disappearance of the traditional privileges of property ownership and the moral values they had (supposedly) underwritten.13 As Irving had done earlier, Cooper excoriated “the body politic  .  .  . governed by its tail.”14 He reinforced his point by making use of the Dutch soldiers’ role in the American Revolution. On one hand, they were crude incorporations into the predominantly Yankee rebellion facing the British forces. Their slowness as companies on the move opened them as much to parody as did Irving’s portrait of Peter Stuyvesant’s laughable “army” of the mid-­seventeenth century. Dutch commanding officers along the Mohawk River appeared in scenes of “much military negligence” and facing hordes of Canada Indians “bold as lions but drunk as lords.”15 Both Cooper and Irving picked up on something that denied full inclusiveness to the Dutch in the struggle of the revolution. The war of independence was now being praised as an epic moral act. They were essentially marginal to its achievement. On the other hand, Cooper made a leader such as Philip Schuyler stand out in admirable distinction to the yeomen soldiers of New England. Schuyler exhibited greater “ingenuity and self-­sacrifice.” The preponderance of Yankee troopers did nothing to ensure that their decisions were wiser than those of a single leader such as Schuyler. It simply made a larger, Cooperesque truth more obvious: the “great error of democracy” is in fancying “truth to be proved in counting noses.”16



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Cooper was able to adorn time and space with his genius. Along those coordinates, he lodged lives that symbolized the dying and the emerging (but haunted) civilizations in northeastern North America. The timeless wilderness of the Otsego country and Edenic locations like Lake Glimmerglass produced a figure such as Deerslayer. He is a man of anarchic freedom. His essential ambiguity is that of American society itself: “pass[ing] his time between the skirts of civilized society and the boundless forest.”17 And in exploring the dangers held in these ambiguities, Cooper lodged a dead and dying past refusing to be put to rest, and a portentous future refusing to look idyllic.

* * * Peter Stuyvesant appears in Washington Irving’s delightful and unhurried preface in Knickerbocker History. The “Account of the Author” is the first of two introductions to the History. Stuyvesant had already made an appearance on the title page of the book. There he made his contribution to Irving’s gentle mockery of the many contemporary historians who seemed incapable of narrating a current field of study without tracing its origins back to unrelated ancient times and trumpeting their pedantic studies as the best accounts “ever published.” The title page reads: The History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty Containing Among Many Surprising and Curious Matters the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter; The Disastrous Projects of William the Testy; And the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong; The Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam; Being the Only Authentic History of the Times That ever hath been published. By Diedrich Knickerbocker.18 In the “Account of the Author,” the old antiquarian writer singles out Stuyvesant in a way that he will seize on at every opportunity throughout his history. “According to his own request,” Irving writes, Diedrich asked that his bones be interred “close by the bones of his favourite hero, Peter Stuyvesant.” In a second preface, “To the Public,” Diedrich explains the purpose of his History. It is to rescue “our Dutch progenitors” from “the night of forgetfulness [that] was about to descend forever.” This meant laboriously researching “many legends” and documents in “family chests and timber garrets” as well as listening solemnly to the “well authenticated traditions from divers excellent old ladies.” It meant answering a devouring curiosity that took him away from New York City to the far reaches of Tappan Zee, even up the Hudson to Kingston (a place we encountered earlier as Esopus.)19

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But in this exhausting work, the old man wrote later in his History, I was like Homer salvaging from extinction the noble deeds of Achilles. “Such too had nearly been the fate of the chivalric Peter Stuyvesant but . . . I fortunately stepped in and engraved his name on the indelible tablet of history, just as the caitiff Time was silently brushing it away for ever.”20 Rescuing Stuyvesant from oblivion in order to do justice to him was not Irving’s principal purpose in Knickerbocker History. Nor was it to burlesque historians. He set Stuyvesant within the history of New Netherland and sacrificed him to the trope of comedy and the device of caricature as the most effective way of giving his “fellow-­citizens . . . good advice.”21 His advice was that they should think carefully about modernization and how they were allowing its disciplines to dictate the rhythms of their lives. Those disciplines were now apparent to him in four modes of behavior: acceptance of a frenetic economic, geographic, and psychological mobility; adoption of a work ethic that left little time for leisure and defined it as nonutilitarian in any case; an inclination for aggression in vicious factional politics; a popular distaste for negotiation in favor of warfare; and an uncontrolled thirst for territorial expansion, even to the point of finding it thinkable to exterminate rightful indigenous owners. In Chapter X of Book Sixth, Irving was explicit about his admonitory advice. Aware that giving his American readers good advice would, as he wrote, forfeit their “good will,” he limited his concluding didactics to four pages.22 In the preceding 308 pages, he would let the honored ghosts of Stuyvesant and other New Netherlanders materialize. They would say and perform what he wanted said and enacted. They would dramatize what a just society might be or, better yet, why a flaw in a just society’s makeup might bring it down. In Knickerbocker History, Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders are comically out of step with the disciplines of modernity that Americans were constructing and coming to accept as natural and indeed lofty ways of behaving. The Dutch characters’ incomprehension of nineteenth-­century folk is seen in a tranquility stubbornly lived out in a contrary set of behaviors. Irving develops this dichotomy in complex and subtle uses of irony, metaphor, and satire. He engages in adroit play between an unfolding American culture and a Dutch past that was sometimes almost authentic, but generally pure fancy. More blunt and therefore worth a moment’s attention is a similar contrast drawn between the disciplines of Polynesian peoples and those of the Europeans and Americans who were encountering them at the time of Irving’s (and Cooper’s) writing. Again and again, American navigators, traders, and



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missionaries found themselves looking for civilization’s disciplined behaviors in Polynesia. Discovering no evidence of them, they excoriated the natives as primitives living without discipline, existing from day to day without any structured order. They had no work ethic, no concern for time. They were insufficiently serious about warfare: too few were killed; skirmishes were fought in laughable battle dress and too attenuated; negotiations were reached all too often and quickly. Nor were the natives sufficiently possessive. To the Europeans, they wanted—­as both Irving and Cooper wrote of the American Indians and Dutch—­too few things. As Irving described the Indians, “they were so much the more savages for not having more wants.” In not having more desires, “they were very unreasonable animals.” So, “it was but just that they should make way for the Europeans who had a thousand wants to their one.” In a similar vein, Cooper’s Andries Coejemans declares that he would rather take a job in a Dutch settlement at half the pay than run a line between two Yankees for twice the price. “Among the Dutch, the owners light t’eir pipes, and smoke whilst you are at work: but the Yankees are the whole time trying to cut off a little here, and to gain a little t’ere.”23 Like the Polynesians, the few remaining natives and Dutch were seen to be living in the unmediated everyday. They were primitive because they lived sensuously and lazily in their bodies. They were disturbing because they raised the question of what a civilized life was. Among the Polynesians, an honored chief might wear a full-­body tattoo. In its iconography, he carried on his person the community’s legends of gods and heroic events, the history of life and death over hundreds of years. Irving carried out that artwork on the person of Stuyvesant. He allowed the administrations of his hero’s predecessors, Wouter van Twiller and Willem Kieft, to fill a full half of the History. The pages were significant to him, however, for establishing the Dutch way of life whose contrasting modalities with American life ways he would then elaborate upon more fully when writing about Stuyvesant. For considerations central to the History, Irving needed to introduce the motif of languid and rotund Dutch men endlessly drawing on clay pipes in tranquil unawareness that they were enveloping themselves in smoky clouds of indecision while “cunning . . . [English] neighbours” were repeatedly stepping into the province of New Netherland and “pick[ing] its pockets.”24 He presents scenes of men of inaction. They enjoy the sensuous occupation of pipe-­smoking in drugged indifference to the demands of a work ethic and in

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sleepy aversion to the decisive military action that English incursions should have prompted. The excess of this irenicism—­what I have elsewhere called deterrence—­is the flaw that Irving identified and mourned in New Netherland’s history, and in Stuyvesant’s career in particular. Yes, he wrote at the end of one such scene, we may ascribe all the early woes of this “great province” to the “unfortunate honesty of its government.” Its governors sat in trusting peace while “a horde of strange barbarians, bordering on its eastern frontier” ceaselessly took lands and made themselves at home.25 But it was in describing Stuyvesant’s career that Irving took greatest delight, found the most meaning, and watched the flaw tragically work itself out. Irving did not find the flaw in Stuyvesant’s personality. He was willing to identify him as headstrong and authoritarian. But he favored presenting him as a many-­sided leader—­a “tough, sturdy, valiant, weather-­beaten, meddlesome, obstinate, leathern-­sided, lion-­hearted, generous-­spirited old governor.” Or he was a governor whose authoritarianism served as the surest safeguard against the extremes of democracy. Nor did the flaw lie in the nature of his hero’s subjects. Occasionally they thought themselves to be “the sovereign people” and failed to recognize the purposeful leadership of Stuyvesant. And from time to time, the political spokesmen among them proved to be like those of Irving’s own day—­that is, carrying on a war of words, or, worse, calling for war and the adoption of a “martial” attitude toward other nations. But generally, these gentlemen slumbered quietly as a “truly pacific people” in a carefully ordered society.26 To Irving, Stuyvesant’s enforcement of a restricted participation in politics promoted a harmonious social order. The flaw lay in a government’s or society’s failure—­in the seventeenth century as in the nineteenth—­to achieve the proper balance between a considered desire for peace with its neighbors and an impulse for aggression against them. Irving found his fellow Americans to have notably “inventive minds.” But they were turning them to militarism and the advancement of “the powers of destruction.” Stuyvesant’s citizens were the opposite, living “under the mild moonshine of peace.” Or, as I have interpreted it, they lived with the years of anxiety and possible loss recorded in the papers Stuyvesant gave over to the States General’s committeemen. The documents set out “the grim tranquillity of awful expectation.”27 The issue of peace and war is a recurrent theme in Irving’s history of his gallant leader’s administration. He is quick to parody Stuyvesant’s and the city



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burghers’ underlying reluctance to engage in adventures for territorial expansion and therefore their failure to educate themselves to the arts of war. Three sets of scenes carefully move the narrative to its climax. First, Stuyvesant and his fellow warriors are presented in moments of martial clumsiness borne of a disregard for marching swiftly into the territory of neighbors and executing the maneuvers of destruction that conquest requires. Next, Irving presents the Dutch attack in 1655 against the Swedes along the Delaware River. Finally, in a critique about wars of aggression, he asks readers to consider the significance of the 1655 attack. Irving’s imagery excels in mocking Stuyvesant and his “band of warriors” readying themselves against a possible attack on New Amsterdam. Twice yearly, Diedrich’s hero put the militia under the command of “very valiant tailors and man-­milliners, who  .  .  . were very devils at parades and court martials.” Under the supervision of these “periodic warriors,” the gallant train-­bands reached marvelous proficiency in the “mystery of gunpowder.” But truth be told, they were so little interested in war that during the intervals which occurred between field days, “they generally contrived to forget all the military tuition they had received.” When necessary, the old governor put New Netherland in a posture of defense. But generally, the burghers were found smoking their pipes unaware of “the tranquil end toward which they themselves were hastening.”28 Diedrich’s Stuyvesant had no “veneration” for the military attitude of his predecessor, Willem Kieft. He soon gave up on the city militia. Nor were his fellows ready to take on an “attitude” of war. Here Diedrich reminds his post-­Revolutionary War generation that before the rebellion, the Americans were just like the Dutch settlers of New Netherland. They were also a peaceful people, uninterested in and unprepared for an unwanted and unexpected war. One of the continental armies was exactly that way “at the breaking out of the revolution.”29 Irving describes Stuyvesant’s attack on Fort Casimir on the Delaware (known after 1656 as New Amstel) in order to continue his dissection of the culture of his times. He puts thoughts in Stuyvesant’s mind about adopting the ways of “iron war,” entering combat using the “machinery that seem[s] to reach the limits of destructive invention.” But his hero rejects them. The hostilities he initiates in 1655 are, on the contrary, so pusillanimous that Diedrich must apologize to readers expecting a sufficiently appalling battle. Instead, he must present them with, alas, a peace treaty.30 Diedrich’s whimsy takes his readers to the “simple folk of New Amsterdam

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as they gaze upon Peter Stuyvesant, their “prodigy of valor.” They hear his “patriarchal address”—­needless to say there was none—­as he prepares to depart for the dangers of war and uncertain victory. Once arrived on the Delaware, the brave Dutch dash forward and leap about “as neither history nor song have ever recorded a parallel.” It’s “bang,” “wack,” “thwick-­thwack,” “storm the works” from valiant Peter. Swedes run away in “breathless terror.” A consummate victory is won. But, alas, there is “not the least slaughter, not a single individual maimed.” I am, Diedrich must write, left in a “most embarrassing predicament.” For “having worked my readers up into a warlike and blood-­thirsty state of mind, to put them off without any horror or slaughter was . . . a bitter disappointment.” But the truth is, “I had not a single life at my disposal.”31 In the last four paragraphs of the History, Irving returns to the Dutch attack on Fort Casimir. He cites its worldwide significance, describing it as a “treacherous surprisal” on the settlements of New Sweden. And here he begins his comic variation on a domino theory, beginning with the Dutch assault on Fort Casimir and ending with the expansionism of France under Napoleon Bonaparte. Irving proceeds in this way. By the conquest of New Sweden, Stuyvesant aroused the claims of Lord Baltimore, “who appealed to the cabinet of Great Britain who subdued the whole province of New Netherlands.” In achieving this, Britain extended its territory from Nova Scotia to the Floridas. The once-­ scattered colonies, now consolidated, “shook off their bonds” to become an independent empire. The successful revolution in North America produced a bloody revolution in France which, in turn, produced the despotism of Bonaparte “which has thrown the whole world into confusion.” Irving went on to parody his own overblown thesis: “thus have these great powers been successively punished for their ill-­starred conquests,” all of which originated in the capture of “the little Fort Casimir, as recorded in this eventful history.”32 Thus did Diedrich Knickerbocker (as Irving would word it) put Peter Stuyvesant at the center of world affairs. The old man made him make history. I think, however, that Stuyvesant never intended to make history. In the papers he submitted to the committee of the States-­General, he called upon various sources as reasons for his actions: legal, scriptural, and the exigencies of business and politics. But he would not have followed Irving in turning to history as the sovereign arbiter on the “renown or infamy of his fellow-­ men.” Irving imagined a scene where the “shades of the departed and long-­ forgotten heroes anxiously bend down from above” to watch the historian’s



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pen pass by their names while inscribing those of others on “the pages of renown.” Stuyvesant’s sense of transcendence was different. History did not serve as a primary mode of orientation in the world or as a universal judge. He perceived reality closer to the Book of Life, the Book of Oblivion, and God’s judgment. Time was God’s, not the world’s.33 But he shared with Irving the experience of writing hundreds of pages about loss. And perhaps he would have shared Irving’s framing of New Netherland’s loss within the tragedy of failing to ensure peace by preparing for war. Perhaps too he would have generously excused as whimsy the author’s romanticization of New Netherland’s decades as a poetic age, a mythic time worthy of a poet’s idealizations and lambent sentimentality.34 Stuyvesant and the New Netherlanders, however, did not give New Yorkers or Americans a time of mythic origins. They placed the settlements within a recent history of the Dutch Republic blessed by God, but with outcomes flowing from virtues unleashed by victory over the Spanish. In February 1660, for example, Stuyvesant spoke to his council members of a new beginning, but it was with reference to the Netherlands. Goaded by the persistent hostilities of the Esopus natives and almost as though speaking to them, he offered the newly established United Provinces as deserving of a “righteous reputation” and respect as a “nation loving honor and liberty.” God, he said, “has delivered us from “Spanish tyranny and inquisition.” We “deserve . . . [a “future”] in this place.” Even that statement—­we “deserve . . . [a “future”] in this place”—­suggests future enterprises in a place already made and possessed by indigenous peoples and others.35 The Dutch knew that their trading settlements were simply beginnings. They were the result of pragmatic choices made within time and therefore provisional—­as the Dutch demonstrated in 1674 when, after repossessing New York, they returned it to the English.36 Indeed, Stuyvesant would probably not have scrupled placing New Netherland’s purpose within the framework of profit and loss. The dictum that the East India Company directors put to Jan Coen in Batavia in 1622 would have rung true: “he has the honor who without doing unright or violence has the profit.”37 Nor would he have described his and others’ lives as anything other than harsh and dangerous, uncertain and, for many, unrewarding. In describing the events of 1664, Irving continued to toy with his readers. Scrambling facts with outrageous invention, he teased them to discern some element of truth—­some von Rankean “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”—­in his ruthlessly parodic language. He bestowed his melancholy entirely on Stuyvesant. “There is something exceedingly sublime and melancholy,” he

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began, “in the spectacle which Diedrich had now to unveil in his history.” Diedrich was about to present a venerable little city in 1664 “blockaded by sea, beleaguered by land” and “torn with internal faction and commotion.” Planning had been set afoot in “that nursery of monstrous projects, the British cabinet.” A Dutch province “on the high road to greatness”—­one that could never have had a “more appropriate chieftain than Peter Stuyvesant”—­ was about to suffer Poland’s fate: “being torn limb from limb to be shared among its savage neighbours.”38 Diedrich must portray days of popular tumult, brawling, and betrayal. He must bring himself to quote Peter’s courageous letter to the commander of the invading squadron. He translates his citation of Luke’s Gospel as “we fear nothing but what God . . . shall lay upon us . . . we may as well be preserved by Him with a small force as by a great army.” He must reluctantly cite Peter’s demand for amicable terms of surrender. Every man shall be free to smoke his pipe, speak Dutch, and not be compelled to “learn the English language” or “conform to any improvements.” Mournfully, the old antiquarian must record Peter’s surrender to “a legion of beef-­fed warriors, (who) poured into New Amsterdam.”39 The weary Diedrich must then fulfill one further “pious duty.” Stuyvesant’s retirement must fill the final pages of his “grave and edifying book.” And well might “mighty monarchs of the earth” attend on Stuyvesant and learn from him the difference between pursuing measures for peace—­truce, conciliation, and defense—­and blustering hypocrisy about “seeking to maintain peace and promote the welfare of mankind, by war and desolation.”40

* * * Irving’s infatuation in the Knickerbocker History was not with Peter Stuyvesant. It was with changing America. Using Knickerbocker wit, he could dip his own political philosophy into New York City’s cosmopolitanism and find there the city’s willingness to laugh at itself and its excesses. But in doing this, he tethered Stuyvesant to a caricature where, for many contemporary and subsequent readers, he is lost in a tangled skein of fancy and distortion that does the work of party political discourse. Irving rescued Stuyvesant from forgetting. But he did so in terms that rewrote and parodied him in a misreading that has endured. In one of the few lengthy passages where Irving abandoned humor for serious reflection, he continued to lean on Stuyvesant. More than that. In

Figure 5. George Cruikshank, Peter Stuyvesant and the Pig Tail. Frontispiece from [Washington Irving], The Beauties of Washington Irving, Illustrated by George Cruik­ shank. London: William Tegg 1866.

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momentarily discarding irony, Irving established an intimacy with him. I think his effort was not as moving as the few words about Stuyvesant created by the Englishmen in Flushing in early 1664. But it is nonetheless powerful. “Let the reign of the good Stuyvesant,” he wrote, “show the effects of vigor and decision, even when destitute of cool judgment, and surrounded by perplexities. Let it show how frankness, probity, and high soul’d courage, will command respect and secure honor, even where success in unobtainable.” Let it caution against “a too honest confidence in the loving professions of powerful neighbours, who are most friendly when they mean to betray.” Let Stuyvesant’s rule “teach a judicious attention to the opinions and wishes of the many who, in times of peril, must be soothed and led, or apprehension will overpower the deference to authority.”41

Chapter 11

A Place in Early America

Washington Irving’s determination to put Stuyvesant into dialogue with nineteenth-­century modernity was a unique moment in American literary history. With the continuing popularity of the Knickerbocker History, Stuyvesant’s image endured as well. In 2005, Annette Stott studied the iconography of New Amsterdam and its people. Asking questions about the process of summoning historical memory, she concluded that Irving’s History “dominated the early nineteenth-­century production of New Netherland images.”1 Moreover, Irving’s fanciful imagery was supported by an ahistorical visual sensibility that also permeated the century. Because New York image-­ makers were faced with no traces of New Amsterdam, the fantastic and the historical were mixed in bizarre and consciously inaccurate ways. Lacking architectural models and the historical documentation that might have offered reliable character portraits, artists were free to call upon fanciful imaginings, obscured memories, and a range of inventions, and present them all as authentic. Responsibility for accuracy disappeared. Nothing, after all, remained to be responsible to. In 1896, for example, Edward Augustus Rand wrote about New Amsterdam in 1664 using a 1708 dictionary for Dutch spellings, saying: “it seemed ancient enough to fit the present necessity.” The archaic became an identifying marker for all things Dutch. Old entered both the rhetoric and the conceptual domain. “The sleepy days of old Peter Stuyvesant” rubbed shoulders with “the gallant old Dutchman,” and “brave old man.” Actually, Stuyvesant served New Netherland from age thirty-­five to fifty-­two. Nonetheless, he became irreversibly (something like) “the irascible old Dutch governor.”2 It might be thought that Stuyvesant was the originator of the use of “old.” In 1664, he had put himself alongside leading merchants pleading with the directors to deal graciously with them as they were “advanced in age,” and

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elsewhere he identified himself as an “old faithful servant.”3 But in the nineteenth century, “old” carried a negative political and theoretical charge. As evolutionary theory moved into its apogee in the nineteenth century, “the old” was more forcefully defined. It was that which was flawed, that from whose deficiencies it might take decades or centuries to move forward. Mental development was a matter of stages of progressive development or, as German historians had it, “the stream of historical becoming.”4 A historian writing in the 1890s found evidence of this in New Netherland’s agricultural communities. “For rural organization,” he wrote, “the Dutch mind had reached only. . . [the level of] the patroonship.”5 The same evolutionary theory was central to validating descriptions of post-­1664 as “the new.” The end of the Dutch period was the beginning of a welcomed liberation from the old religious and political forms of authoritarianism personified in Stuyvesant.

* * * As the decades of the nineteenth century came along, a thin assortment of historical writings on Stuyvesant appeared. Each had its own set of purposes; each reached for a specific audience and gave different shapes to the governor’s character. John S. C. Abbott’s Peter Stuyvesant, The Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam (1873), Martha Lamb and Mrs. Burton Harrison, History of the City of New York, 6 volumes (1877–­1896), and John Fiske’s The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America (1899) were idiosyncratic in their makeup. They are a small selection, but valuable for a number of reasons. First, they exemplify the kinds of historical explanation that New York’s rising professional historians were determined to eliminate. Along with historians from other regions, these scholars were beginning to insist that authority for adequate causation rested on rigorous scientific research undertaken by experts working in universities and colleges and embracing new definitions of society. Recent historians have argued that such “scientific” scholars were not seeking coldly empirical methodologies but, rather, new intellectual virtues within a workable scholarly asceticism. Whatever the case, by 1910 amateurs such as Abbott and Lamb and Harrison were the very writers against whom these scholars—­later defined as social scientists—­were defining themselves.6 Second, Abbott and Lamb and Harrison clarify the rising professionals’ determination to match the writing of history with a redefined role of society undergoing historical change. Abbott’s historical biography of Stuyvesant



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and Lamb and Harrison’s portrait of New York stood as examples of history that bestowed determining roles on individuals, and for that reason should be counted, professional historians were arguing, as obsolescent. Unless significant individuals could be shown to be realizing self-­identity within a narrative of a broader national progressive historical development, the methodology was regressive. For a proper account of historical change, one no longer turned to a cosmology that assigned remote and immediate causation to Nature or God but to broad evolutionary processes. One student of the emergence of the social sciences put the shift in terms of its proponents’ hopes for a place for themselves: as long as Nature or God was operative in causation, the social sciences were not needed.7 Beginning in the twentieth century, however, a proper account upturned the more coercive aspects of evolutionary theory. Historians accepted that the mechanisms of society could only modify (not determine) people’s sense of who they were and what was most significant in their lives. But in both cases, one needed to abjure the metaphysical and highly romanticized statements that expressed cosmologies based on God or Nature. Verifiable sentences acceptable to the social sciences were the answer.8 Third, Abbott’s, Lamb and Harrison’s, and Fiske’s studies illuminate the degree to which the life of Stuyvesant would remain opaque due to lack of documentation and failures of one kind or another to have the available early documents translated out of the Dutch language. As Stott pointed out, the loss of colonial New York’s heritage did increase the desire for such documentation. And as I have written elsewhere, members of New York’s nineteenth-­century local genealogical societies and historical associations made themselves zealous hunter-­gatherers of pre-­1664 records. Many were minor players willing to await the coming of professional historians who would make sense of their gleanings (as they repeatedly used the word).9 And alongside them were a small number of individual scholars who are, to this day, honored for enlarging the archive of available documents and finding meaning in them.10 But the fruit of it all was many decades ahead. Abbott, writing in 1873, made no pretense about undertaking exhaustive archival research for his narrative. Lacking acquaintance with the Dutch language, he had more silence around him than words. Instead, he turned for his evidence to a scholar who had also hunted and gathered, but was no minor figure. John Romeyn Brodhead had used transcripts of eighty volumes of Dutch documents in the course of writing History of the State of New York:

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First Period, 1609–­1664 (1853). He wrote for historians. As a result, Stuyvesant appeared in volumes that were sparsely illustrated (as histories generally were), long, and either probably left unread or found to be tedious. In Abbott’s historical romances, however, Harper and Brothers had found a winner in the popular history stakes. At one point, more than twelve of his books were being marketed for sixty cents or a dollar. Union endorsed his Kings and Queens, Or Life in the Palace as a remarkable study “intended to embrace the great personages of all times.” An anonymous booster found his History of Queen Elizabeth of England “among the most attractively published books of the day.”11 Abbott, then, was a historian who unquestioningly assumed that there were great men and women, that they were prime agents in history’s transformations, and that their biographies could be told as historical romances—­ and readers were happy for all of that.12 So Stuyvesant appears in a series titled The Pioneers and Patriots of America. Unlikely as it may seem, the series locates him alongside volumes on Hernando de Soto, Miles Standish, and Daniel Boone. Abbott’s portrayal of Stuyvesant is an admiring one. Following Brodhead, he presents the governor as a man with a “spirit of self-­reliance and administrative ability.” He is a leader of “remarkable character and career.”13 Abbott does not plagiarize. But he rephrases Brodhead’s sympathetic interpretation of Stuyvesant’s shaping of events, even adopting his transitions from one episode to the next. He had also read E. B. O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherland and accepted O’Callaghan’s conclusion that the English capture of New Amsterdam was an act “violating all public justice and infringing public law.” Moving his narrative forward, Abbott urges readers to be sympathetic toward Stuyvesant in Holland after 1664. He was the victim of the West India Company’s “great severity” and “great injustice.”14 Stowed away as great in Abbott’s book, Stuyvesant was cargo on a sinking ship. Among historians, Lamb and Harrison’s account was the same sort of rickety vessel. Their volumes shared Abbott’s faults. They were good stories, not social inquiry. They offered little pretense to be reaching for objectivity. New York was not an object held at arm’s length by a neutral observer. Nor did the account of New York City have value as a case study, an investigation promising predictive value for understanding other cities. On the contrary, Stuyvesant’s role was “one long romantic history.” He had “marvellous intellectual power, [and] great subtlety of discernment.” A “turn of mind” made him less politically successful than others, but his



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opponents “had not half his ability.” After 1664, his “solitary heroism and his loyalty, unbroken to the last, did not protect him from the savage censure of his superiors.” An illustration of his tomb put his death at eighty (rather than sixty-­two).15

* * * Writing in 1899, John Fiske set Stuyvesant in a pattern of interpretation that had become fixed by the end of the century. He employed Irving’s Knickerbocker History as a platform for exploring the persistent inclination “to associate something slightly comical” when considering the Dutch.16 Unlike Brodhead, who wrote unequivocally that to America’s “provincial chroniclers” no good was to be seen in their “noxious neighbours of New Netherland,” he carefully avoided reference to the specific forms of cruelty wrought by such comedy in the case of New Netherlanders. Instead, he set the origins of this characterization of the Dutch in the enmity caused during the seventeenth-­ century Anglo-­Dutch wars. He universalized it as “what enemies do” and excused it as “harmless jesting.”17 For reasons unclear to me, Fiske also indulged in “harmless jesting.” He tagged Wouter van Twiller as Walter the Doubter and described the merchants of New Amsterdam on one occasion as laughable tradesmen, pusillanimous and given to drunken threats. Governor Kieft wore a “wicked smile which . . . puckered . . . his weazened face.” Stuyvesant was “Peter” having (at one point) “adventures with his Nine Men” and actually allowing “the incendiary expedient of a popular election.”18 Fiske used a developmental framework of history. He let a comparative methodology serve this framework. The emergence of American civilization could be explained by setting early non-­English political institutions alongside those of England and the New England colonies and finding them wanting. Fiske took the unfolding of American civilization in this direction: the free institutions of liberty and the rights of man were settled in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The seed of this political heritage germinated and bore fruit in the English colonies, where devising similar legislative and juridical fixtures “found spontaneous expression.”19 The “free institutions of Holland,” he continued, were won in the uprising against Spain. But they were not carried to North America by the Dutch migrants of the seventeenth century. The settlers brought with them “no pre-­ existing organization.” Moreover, Stuyvesant was an honest company man

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who, despite his desire to do otherwise, did nothing to institutionalize stable government and political rights.20 On evolutionary grounds alone, New York had to wait until after the Dutch years for a proper political system to arrive. Fiske was aware that by the 1890s Stuyvesant was taken to be one among a people “passed over in silence for their contribution to American civilization” or singled out as a “vulgar tyrant.”21 Finding a sneer of “superiority” in this, Fiske sought a more balanced portrayal. However, he was among the many who were per force ignorant of the structural components of New Netherland’s government. He did not know what to look for in the English translations of the limited number of Dutch documents only slowly becoming available. He found evidence of political structures solely in the first half-­decade of Stuyvesant’s administration when (as we have already encountered), a fierce exchange between articulate political opponents occurred in discourse that revealed more about personalities and limited objectives than underlying structures.22 He looked to the fallibilities of the West India Company, unable to see behind them to the larger culture of the Netherlands of which it was but a part. And finally, he mistakenly but confidently looked for Dutch structures through the keyhole of English institutions and practices. On those occasions when he turned from secondary references to the translated Dutch archives, he annexed them. But he did not know them with the intimacy that disrupting them—­trusting his feel of them—­would have given. Fiske reasonably assumed that Western European countries shared a range of philosophical precepts and a Christian understanding of basic morality. But he failed to recognize that each nation would initiate, develop, and implement that intellectual heritage in different encultured ways. That essential differentiation awaited a firmer setting of New Netherland within the culture of the Low Countries at home. It was an undertaking still a very long way from the questions and answers available in the 1890s. Fiske was left with accepting Stuyvesant’s administration as the product of an “arbitrary theory of government [that] has never flourished on the soil of the New World, and its career on Manhattan Island was one of its first and most significant failures.” New Amsterdam did sow the seeds of a cosmopolitan and tolerant city. But even this achievement did nothing to enhance Stuyvesant’s reputation. On the contrary. When the records showed him acting below the level to which an open and tolerant late nineteenth-­century society had (supposedly) evolved—­for example, in the treatment of Quakers, who since Stuyvesant’s days had undergone a radical metamorphosis from



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radicals to the Society of Friends—­he was erroneously censured for denying the first of the liberal rights established in early modern Europe, freedom of conscience.23 In lieu of evidence about Stuyvesant’s philosophy of government and internal administrative policies, Fiske turned to him as a diplomat and military figure. But in describing his role in seventeenth-­century Dutch-­native hostilities, he employed words he assumed had a stability of meaning. In this, he allowed anachronistic readings of terms that had taken on new and horrifying nineteenth-­century meanings for Americans having experienced the bloody Civil War, wars in the country’s West and Southwest, and the current Spanish-­ American war—­words like “war,” “soldier,” and “Indian Wars.”24 When these words were applied to Stuyvesant’s role in the seventeenth century, they could only do his reputation damage.

* * * I commented above on the relegation of Dutch ways of life into quaintness and the domain of folktales. For the most part, Stuyvesant’s life history followed the same trajectory. The works of Irving and Cooper raised quaintness and folksiness to the level of great literature, and those of Abbott and Lamb and Harrison carried them forward by masking loss in nostalgia and romance. In a way, being memorialized in folkways—being bound to a culture’s humorous stories of its past—is a gain and not a loss. For those still claiming a Dutch heritage, they told them their deepest values and histories.25 But Fiske’s ease in painting “Peter” and his “adventures” in laughable caricature showed how readily folksiness could be made deliberately destructive. In a way, none of the authors are blameworthy for not producing a fully accurate rendition of New Netherland’s or Stuyvesant’s way of life. They had neither the documentation nor the language skills to achieve an intensive study of the earlier culture. Nor was their own culture feeding them the analytical catagories and questions that would facility such an enquiry. But the consequences have survived nonetheless. Irving and Cooper were intent on critiquing the American way of life that was replacing that of New Netherlanders and Stuyvesant. Cooper, as I indicated, identified four of the emerging culture’s components. Two of these were nationalism and secularism. In recent years, these complex systems of thought and practice have been closely examined for their implications in

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interpreting colonial America. They are also implicated in present and possible future accounts of Stuyvesant. For that reason, they are important to our final considerations. In recent years, much of colonial history has turned on a rhetorical question put by Peter Hulme in 2000. How, he asked, are we to think of early America? He advised that as the first step to correct thinking, colonialists should stop equating early America with the future United States. Rather, allow the colonial years to be reconstituted as the local geographies and histories they in fact were. Allow them to be reconceived as populations the majority of whom did not live in anticipation of becoming a future nation. Recall elaborations of the cultural distinctions within which the colonial projects were conceived and came to develop. As Greg Dening has written: return the past to its present.26 Other colonialists have agreed. Michael Zuckerman has commended recent colonialist accounts that “accommodate regional variation.” The story of American colonialism, he writes, is more than an account of Anglo-­Saxon settlements embodying the “authentic ideals of the nation.” Revise the notion of New England solely standing as the “purest distillation of genuine Americanness” while places such as New York are “extruded almost totally from the tale.” Herbert Bolton, the outstanding historian of early California and the Southwest, wrote in 1933 that studying only the thirteen colonies had “helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists.” In recent studies, Michael Warner has noted that scholars who once responded to the nationalist impulse as an almost “preinterpretive commitment of the discipline” are now moving to new conceptions of the field of colonial cultures.27 These historians and others plead for the end of scrutinizing the early years for “germs of Americanism.” Early America was an Atlantic world with different colonialisms. The Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French systems, they argue, not only were different from one another, but also had contrasting kinds of colonies across the globe. Different sets of “spatial and temporal hierarchies” existed across the colonies and different moral languages conditioned consciousness. Historically, the construct of “the future nation” lay in the Revolutionary period. Then, Americans began to conceive of themselves living in an “immemorial nation rather than in a colonial interaction of cultures.” The Revolution was reified as a moral event. An ideology soon emerged demanding that to belong within that event and its unfolding, one must “eject from oneself all that is savage . . . [and other.]”28 Warner’s work represents a new analytical orientation. Ann Laura Stoler



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sees this orientation arising out of postcolonial theory and practice.29 Such theory and practice differs from that of earlier colonialists. They too were ethically motivated in their studies. But they placed European systems of colonialism in the remote past, and therefore commented on them as objects to be neutrally scrutinized within the methodologies of the social sciences. The new orientation, as Hulme writes, concerns itself with “networks of imperial power that continue to control much of the world.” The work of the “old school of  .  .  . [American] colonialists” and their concern for “the future nation,” Stoler adds, have not been rejected. Rather, recent scholarship has extended their work forward, but been more vigorous in embracing historically specific colonial cultures within an ethical framework privileging human diversity.30 Like Hulme, Warner, Stoler, and others, Thomas Bender has read across recent colonists’ narratives. He has found that “some of the most innovative and exciting scholarship has been framed in ways that do not tie it to the nation-­state.” Among other things, the more recent scholarship has been framed in ways that tie it to the ethical insofar as they have offered respect to the ways of life of the pluralized peoples of colonial America.31 Like the other scholars, Bender privileges difference over a unitary conceptualization. He offers a global context. He argues that a move away from the nationalist narrative would, for example, give due significance to North America’s place in the extraordinary events of the fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­ centuries rather than treating them as an incidental prequel to nation-­ building. It would also recover the reality of a liminal colonial world that held live alternatives to the linear design of settlements-­to-­nation that came to be accepted as natural within an evolutionary imagination set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.32 Bound within the framework suggested by these authors, Stuyvesant can, I suggest, be a spokesperson for colonial America. He can speak as representative of its distinctively different cultures. Loosened from an Anglo-­ American world and Anglo-­American priorities, he can stand in for other non-­English cultures where diverse forms of magistracies (or chiefly leaderships) governed different kinds of polities, and where different legal forms and moralities assisted people in making sense of their lives. In the case of New Netherland, these priorities will stand on their own: adherence to a political system based on social concord rather than democracy; justice and rights dispensed through a court system (embracing

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Dutch-­Roman law) rather than through assemblies; republicanism fiercely defended but less extreme than that of the English; a unique nexus between municipal autonomy and capital formation; contractual transactions adjudicated in continental-­style court procedures; distinctive forms of humanism, toleration, religious pluralism, and enjoyment: public auctions, water transport, and visual iconography, to name only a few. A framework of difference, or “a difference-­oriented ethic,” as Ganguly puts it, raises the risk of “romanticizing the lived and the experiential at the expense of valuing the systematic and the structural.” Nevertheless, a space made for narratives recognizing the experiential will assist in discovering the ways seventeenth-­century Dutch people drew both the rational and the emotional into moral judgments and multiple forms of social communication. Stoler, in her detailed studies of colonial archives, has shown that early modern European imperialists—­the Dutch among them—­seldom operated along strictly rational lines of procedure. Whether working within the various imperialist projects at home or in the field, they were prey to swings of emotion—­ambition, the desire to earn natives’ approval and “engineer morality,” working out feelings of inadequacy, disloyalty, indifference, or repugnance at their own cruelty, and so on.33 In a similar way, postcolonial scholarship has shown that even Europe’s periodizations of time are still built on a desire to control overseas peoples. Yet the desire to validate global communities according to their proximity to the modern not only is inapplicable outside Europe but is by its nature political. It subverts native rule as premodern or anti-­modern, thereby continuing to give Europe the power to define good and bad states and enforce its determination for continued imperialist power.

* * * Alongside recent critiques of nationalist pressures on our understanding of colonial America, recent studies have reinvigorated analysis of religion and secularism.34 This literature is not directed specifically at reinterpreting colonial America. But the scholars involved have offered new ways of considering premodern and modern religious formations. In a study that takes Stuyvesant’s piety seriously and that understands him within the compass of post-­Reformation religio-­politics, these explorations are not incidental. On the contrary, they put into perspective the reasons why he, as a believing person, was lost sight of when belief itself was devalued in the emergence of a modern secular



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(some would say scientific) worldview in which its denigrated role was and is largely, if quietly, accepted.35 Belief is a pivotal concern in these conversations. Its genealogy, breadth, and functions in Western and non-­Western societies have been closely scrutinized and debated. It is now generally agreed that the relationship between belief and the secular has been a complex and historically changeable one. Presenting it as a simple linear progression (or declension) from a hegemony of medieval ecclesiasticism to the (inevitable) dominance of our so-­called secular age is, for example, no longer persuasive.36 The adaptations and changing conjunctions of religion and the secular were (and are), it is argued, always at play as individuals or groups variously and unpredictably—­and perhaps to us contradictorily—­bring “religious ideas, cultural understandings and political agendas” into interaction with each other.37 We have evidence of this in the synthesis Stuyvesant made between religion and the secular—­and with which many may feel uneasy. Catherine O’Donnell found a different relationship existing in late eighteenth-­century Maryland when John Carroll was governor. In 2011, she explored Carroll’s career in Maryland’s colonial politics and as a supporter of the American Revolution. In particular, she examined the relationship between his Catholicism and its hierarchical structures, and the demands of the wider operative culture of republicanism and democracy. As her research showed, they were commitments that could be and were negotiated. O’Donnell concluded that no fixed opposition existed between Carroll’s religious allegiances and his wider political loyalties. As she wrote, “The elements in society that are hierarchical can sustain democracy even if they offer a sustenance different from that which democracy supplie[s].” Catholicism, “with its priesthood, hierarchy, and spirituality,” she contended, was “no less a part of American Christianity than were the myriad Protestant denominations.”38 A different kind of exchange between religion and a culture of secularism is evident in the case of Mexican Americans living today in the United States. Ethnics, as Richard A. Garcia has written, can live in two realities in simultaneity. There are tensions between ethno-­Catholicism as an “organic holistic worldview” and post-­Enlightenment notions of time and space, as well as the “material and spiritual divisions of reality” in America generally. However, Hispanics manage to “live in the objective reality of American rational culture and their own daily experiences with the medieval tradition, spirituality, and the magical realism” of ethno-­Catholicism.39

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Neither of the valuable examples above can, of course, sufficiently convey the shift in tenor and tone that is characteristic of much recent writing on religious practice. To ask it of them is like expecting a single wave or current to catch the subtle changing mood of the sea. This, however, can be said. They mark a shift away from a politics and epistemology that once underwrote historical narratives which were reluctant to appear sympathetic to religious impulses or claimed a (specious) neutrality. They shift toward narratives that are more culturally contextualized—­or, as Christopher Bilodeau wrote summarizing a similar paradigm shift in early native American studies, where “all people of the past” are now treated as the “always complicated human beings that people actually are.”40 In trying to understand Stuyvesant, I have used the term “spirituality” rather than “belief.” I admit to it being an anachronism. Whereas “spirituality” probably came into use only in the nineteenth century, “piety” carried the meaning of personal religious experience in the early seventeenth century and in the writings of John Calvin and followers such as Stuyvesant.41 The concept of spirituality is useful in two ways. It moves a number of contentious “big issues” offstage—­institutionalized religion, secularism, rationalism, the role of the Enlightenment, and so on. It also directs us to an individual’s—in this case, ­Stuyvesant’s—­personal way of assembling the component elements of his religion. It focuses on a conscious—­and undoubtedly unconscious—­ selection of religious images and practices that best satisfied his experience of religious belonging. Spirituality is not anti-­authoritarian. It does not separate an individual such as Stuyvesant from a religious institution. Rather, it recovers her or him from accusations of uncritical subordination to that institution. It is not the assertion of a nominalist position. It is a clear judgment and an aesthetic judgment on a way of belonging. In any case, it is inevitable.42 Spirituality directs us to interiority. It directs us to Stuyvesant’s sense of self, to a central aspect of his identity. It personalizes his faith in terms that are discovered to be profoundly meaningful to him as an individual. We have seen this personalization in the merchant’s religious notations on pages of accounts. We have encountered it in Stuyvesant’s record of his trip to Esopus in 1658 and his choice of a particular biblical image to explain to himself and others the fall of New Amsterdam. We caught it in Willem Beeckman’s wish to have his infant son christened—­a desire that had nothing to do with obedience to church authority. It is possible to make a case for Stuyvesant’s personal spirituality by considering the degree to which Calvinist belief and practice was still in process



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in the first half of the seventeenth century. Leading Reformed churchmen were still thinking out its precepts and structural implementation. The Calvin-­ism of later decades was not yet in place.43 Or Stuyvesant’s personal spirituality might have taken its shape in the same manner as that of other colonists. That is, he constructed it within the limited resources an overseas religious establishment had to offer. However, neither case needs to be made. Had Stuyvesant lived in the nineteenth century when Calvinism was securely institutionalized in a country such as Germany, or had he the religious resources available to a man in seventeenth-­century Amsterdam, selection would have happened in any case. The strongest evidence for Stuyvesant’s personal spirituality is in his words. Even captured as fragments, they are his selection out of the vast deposit of Calvinist (and non-­Calvinist) writings and teachings available to him. The quote from Luke’s Gospel, the call upon Isaiah, and so on: these were chosen. They fitted into a personal spirituality and self-­fashioning that had its own kind of integrity and independence from authority.

* * * In 1995, Willem Frijhoff published a study that will, I hope, result in a reconceptualization of writing about religion and identity formation in New Netherland. In Wegen van Evert Willemsz: Een Hollands Weeskind op Zoek naar Zichzelf, 1607–­1647—­published in 2007 as Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–­1647—­Frijhoff put spirituality at the center of his biography of Evert. He argued that Evert’s spirituality was at the core of his self-­fashioning. Evert’s later years as a Calvinist preacher in New Netherland in the late 1630s and early 1640s (when he was known as Everardus Bogardus) were a living out of a religious experience undergone twenty years earlier when he was a teenaged youth in Woerden in Holland. But Evert was not an ordinary boy in the months of 1622 and 1623. He was a visionary. He heard heavenly voices. He refused food and drink, incurred temporary deafness, loss of speech, and paralysis, subjected himself to clerical and civic inquisitions, and often thereafter saw himself as something of a prophet. Under the guidance of Lucan Zas, a sympathetic Latin schoolmaster, his visions were printed in pamphlet form, each testifying to his wonderen, his rapturous godly experiences. Frijhoff ’s contribution in examining these writings is in delving into Dutch pietism not solely in its doctrinal components, but as experiences themselves constructive of pietism. Moreover, he

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directs us to the pamphlets as being part of a wider interconfessional literature recently attracting close textual and contextual examination.44 Frijhoff had a number of choices in dealing with Evert’s supernatural visitations and their disturbing and inexplicable effects on the young man. He might have sought to explain them by looking to the future. That is, he might have employed the theoretical explanations of modern psychology, medical science, the science of adolescent behavior, or sociology. And where some of these ideas were useful, Frijhoff called on them. Or he might have chosen to move Evert’s experiences quickly into a wider discourse about the contemporary development of Dutch Calvinist doctrine and practice—­the defining Synod of Dort had been convened, after all, only three years earlier. Again, Frijhoff considered these institutional issues carefully. But he did not allow them to become central. Instead, he looked to the past. He examined the mystical tradition of the medieval period, especially from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century when emphasis on an interior life with Christ began to replace such exterior pious practices as pilgrimages. In Frijhoff ’s study, we encounter two creative and enriching crossovers. The first is the exchange in the early seventeenth century between Catholic and Protestant practices of spirituality. For example, the collection of relics survived in the practice of some of Martin Luther’s followers, who gathered pieces of Luther’s house and personal belongings. It continued in the retrieval of blood from the execution places of Protestant martyrs. And it manifested itself in Evert’s heavenly vision in Woerden. (One of Evert’s rapturous experiences lasted, as Frijhoff points out, nine days, that is, suggestively the length of a Catholic novena.)45 The second crossover is in Frijhoff ’s reading in both Catholic and Protestant sources and historiographies. This recognition of an interconfessional context provides Frijhoff with a richly endowed genre with which to explore Evert’s experiences, and a foundation for explaining his lifelong self-­ fashioning. By writing with both a scholarly and sympathetic approach to Evert’s spirituality, Frijhoff was not, I think, setting out to demonstrate the limitations of one or the other historiography or the difficulties of modern academic historians in confronting belief. Others have done so.46 But digging deeply into experience, he was demonstrating the role of the aesthetic. He was opening ground beyond the catchment area of the rational. It was a landscape where knowing and finding self were amenable to rational thought but went beyond it—­where, in the case of Evert in the 1640s in New Netherland,



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his anger was not simply the absence of rational control but (to him) a passionate imitation of the role of the Old Testament prophet and sometimes of Jesus himself. Frijhoff was legitimating the moments of awe (and confusion) before the transcendent-­made-­immanent that were present in the lives of early post-­Reformation Catholics and Protestants alike.47 In Wegen van Evert Willemsz, Frijhoff has shown the richness to be found in stepping outside the generally adopted institutional framework of religion and into the aesthetic world of personalized and embodied decision-­making about experiencing one’s faith. Rather than searching out the disputatious aspects of early seventeenth-­century religious history, he sought for explanations in the ambiguities and doubts as inexplicable happenings alternately challenged, troubled, and edified Christians of early and late Reformation times. Frijhoff did not deal with the spirituality of Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant and Evert Willemsz’s lives intersected on Manhattan Island only for a short three-­ month period in summer 1647. He does, however, ask us to think about Stuyvesant’s administration in the light of a motto he wrote in 1632, when he was a twenty-­year-­old student in Franeker. Stuyvesant took the words from a passage of John Chrysostom, a third-­century Father of the early Church, and wrote them out in a short Latin poem. Fide Deo, defide tibi, diffide patronis,    Diffide patri et regibus.    Sole fide Deo, qui cum spes deficit omnis    Hominesq, jam te deserunt,    Tunc fides est Domoni, tunc incipit ille    Laetosq. Donat exitus.     Petrus Stuijfsandt     Anno 1629 mense10bris. (“Trust in God, distrust yourself, distrust protectors, / Distrust your father and kings. / Trust only God, for if all hope fails, / And people finally leave you, / Then your trust in God remains. His work starts / And leads to a blessed outcome. —­Petrus Stuifsandt, October 1629.”)48 In addition to loss across time, Frijhoff and other scholars remind us to pay attention to loss across space as well. And here the literature on religion and secularism connects with American colonial studies. In the 1930s,

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Herbert Bolton had reminded his fellow colonialists about the Far West of the United States and the richness of its native and Spanish sources. Once explored, he argued, they held the promise of a new and more comprehensive vision of colonial America. Two decades earlier, Dutch historian H. T. Colenbrander had offered similar advice in respect to the European world from which “Americans” came. In a significant contribution to the voyaging publications of the Linschoten Society, he chided American historians for considering the few months during the 1640s when captain David Pietersz de Vries was in the lower Manhattan area, but for failing to take account of the larger story of his voyaging career beyond the waters of North America. Colenbrander contended that such a narrative would have enriched their accounts by opening the geographical and cultural space of the Low Countries, the Mediterranean, and the East Indies as contexts in which New Netherland’s history lay. Early North America was Europe’s history—­just as New Netherland was the Low Countries’ story.49

* * * We—­you as readers and me as writer—­began these pages by considering a spatial image. We considered a miniaturized description of Stuyvesant being driven out of a space he had known and governed for seventeen years. There is an irony in the image’s reminder that being driven out of a place can show—­ perhaps more than anything else—­how very much one belonged to it. For you and me, the 1664 English villagers’ image of Stuyvesant’s loss has been a remarkable entry into all the places and lives to which he belonged.

Notes

Preface: The Outcast 1. Berthold Fernow and E. B. O’Callaghan, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 14: Council Minutes, Jan. 7, 1664, 540 (hereafter CHSNY). 2. CHSNY, 2: Memorial of the West India Company, Jan. 21, 1664, 224. 3. CHSNY, 2: Observations of the West India Company on the Report of Ex-Director Stuyvesant, Jan. 11, 1666, 420. 4. Ganguly 2005: 2, vii. It is useful to note the rich conversation about modernity developing between medieval/premodern and postcolonial scholars—see Davis 2008: 20, 99, and Spiegel 2011: 617–25. 5. Ganguly 2005: viii. 6. Lloyd 2005: 156. In agreement, see Ganguly 2005: 25. In this volume I have called on history and memory, recognizing them as interconnected domains of study central to this essay. Historiography has, however, undoubtedly dominated over memory studies. For excellent contributions to the so-called “turn to memory” in historical scholarship, see Margalit 2002; Ricoeur 2004; Wyshogrod 1998; and Bernstein 2004: 165–78. For Paul Connerton’s remarks on forgetting, see Chapter 10. 7. Merwick 2008: 699; for further usage, CHSNY, 2: 452–59. For “Laus Deo” on eight pages from Book of Monthly Payments, Extracts, 1661–1664, 452–69. 8. See Lowell 2000: 300, 301. 9. Altieri 2007: 88.

Chapter 1. Magistracy and Confessional Politics 1. CHSNY, 1: Resolutions of the States General, July 26 and 28, 1646; Minute of Stuyvesant Sworn in as Director, July 28, 1646; Commission of Stuyvesant, July 28, 1646, 177, 178; see also Oath of Stuyvesant as Director, July 28, 1646, 492; and West India Company’s Commission to Director Stuyvesant, May 5, 1645, 493. Hereafter, I generally use “States” for States General, “WIC” for West India Company, and “Peter” for Petrus. I have tried to make the text intelligible for readers without reference to the notes. They are here for validation and additional information and references. In the final chapter, a number of them offer material ordinarily found in a Reflective Essay. 2. Corwin 1: Johannes Megapolensis and Samuel Drisius to Classis of Amsterdam, Oct. 6,

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1653, 318 (hereafter “Classis”). In his 2005 essay on Stuyvesant’s immediate predecessor as director, Frijhoff cites Willem Kieft’s great personal pride in his commission. It has not been found in the registers of the States General, 198. 3. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance of New Netherland, July 28, 1649, 293 (hereafter Remonstrance). 4. Gehring 2000, Stuyvesant to Goodyear, Dec. 16, 1647, 25. For rumors in Boston of Cornelis Melijn’s claim that he could remove Stuyvesant at any time, Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974a, Deposition of Laurens Cornelissen van der Wel, Mar. 30, 1649, 85. 5. Boxer 1957: 69; Merwick 1990: 151. For Curaçao salary as 1,200 guilders and 1,000 table money, plus allowances and fines, Goslinga 1985: 80. 6. Gehring 2000, Stuyvesant to Goodyear, Dec. 16, 1647, 26; Goodyear to Stuyvesant, undated, ca. Oct. 15, 1647, 18, my italics; Stuyvesant to Eaton, May 28, 1648, 31. Stuyvesant to Winthrop [Ap. 3, 1648], 27. 7. CHSNY, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, May 14, 1659, 239. 8. Games 2006: 679 and see 683. 9. See, for example, Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987, Resolution, Aug. 20, 1643 regarding Aruba natives, and Rodenburgh to Dirs., Ap. 2, 1654, 61, Beck to Dirs., July 28, 1657 and July 21, 1664, 107, 188. 10. For Craacke Bay on Curaçao, CHSNY, 2: Instructions for Carsten Jeroesen, June 24, 1654, 45. For “Den Nieuw Nederlandsche Indiaen,” Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987: 176–­81, and Records of New Amsterdam, 4: Mar. 21, 1662, 55. Hereafter RNA. 11. Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987: xiv; Declaration of Stuyvesant, June 9, 1655, 79; Resolutions, Aug. 20, 1643 and Feb. 26, 1643, 27, 11. 12. Jacobs 2005a offers well-­founded speculations regarding Stuyvesant’s departure from Franeker as well as details of his student years, 221–­36. For my return to Stuyvesant’s youthful and later spirituality, see Chapter 11. 13. CHSNY, 13: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Mar. 21, 1651, 28; Stoler 2009: 40. 14. For reproaches, Middleton 2010: 66; CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Dec. 26, 1659, 288. 15. Gehring 2000, Stuyvesant to Governor of Massachusetts, [undated], ca. Ap. 1651, 122. 16. I am reluctant to use “province” because it suggests a territory of settler colonization with well-­defined limits rather than a place mapped with a recognized degree of territorial uncertainty and thinly populated in widely dispersed trading centers. Frijhoff 1998 also urges caution in its use, identifying a difference in the way citizens in the Dutch Republic used the term and New Netherlanders used it. Whereas Dutch citizens took each province as a fatherland, the colonists developed a common value: that of “a fatherland overseas,” 31. The alternative to “province” might be “district” or “country,” both in use at the time. But “province,” I believe, best answers the needs of today’s readers. 17. See, inter alia, CHSNY, 1: Advice of Chamber of Accounts, WIC, Ap. 19, 1647, 242, and Gehring 2003, Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Mar. 13, 1656, 85. Stuyvesant later uses “on the spot,” CHSNY, 13: Order to Magistrates of Fort Orange, June 1, 1655, 39. 18. Gehring 2000, Dirs. to Stuyvesant, July 24, 1650, 92. 19. CHSNY, 14: for example, Stuyvesant to Dirs., Jan. 8, 1663, 520. 20. Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987: xvii; for Stuyvesant later advising that his government



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and the city’s officers take adequate defensive measures “to relieve ourselves from blame,” RNA 1: Stuyvesant to Burgomasters and Schepenen, July 28, 1653, 91. 21. Gehring 1995: xv; see also Gehring 1991: xvi. In agreement, inter alia, Otto 2006, 133, 135, 137 and Jacobs 2005b: 63. For Stuyvesant continuing to “demonstrate qualities of leadership” from 1654 to 1658 “as in his first six years,” Gehring 2003: xviii. It should be noted here that Gehring, who knows the New Netherland records better than any other scholar, offers a consistently positive interpretation of Stuyvesant’s administration. 22. Gehring 2000, Testimony of Domine Wilhelmus Grasmeer, Feb. 14, 1652, 130; for Cornelis Melijn on Staten Island, Gehring 2000, Deposition of Michiel Bergier, Feb. 8, 1652, 128; for Stuyvesant’s alleged murderous intent, Testimony of Grasmeer, Feb. 14, 1652, 130. 23. Gehring 1991, Ordinance for Assessing Vacant Lots in New Amsterdam, Jan. 15, 1657, 92, 93, passim., my italics; for reliance in Holland on the “empirical,” Frijhoff 1999: 140. For proof resting on “before two pairs of eyes,” CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 310. 24. CHSNY, 14: Council Minute Regarding Backerus, May 8, 1649, 114. 25. For “Director and primary judge of this country,” Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Declaration Signed by Stuyvesant, Ap. 21, 1649, 595. 26. Gehring 1991, Ordinance Against Practicing Religion Other Than Reformed, Feb. 1, 1656, 55 and CHSNY, 14: Sentence of William Hallett, Nov. 8, 1656, 369. 27. Davis 2008: 2. For Director General Willem Kieft’s conviction that “his authority  .  .  . stemmed from God,” Jacobs 2005b, 280. 28. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 305. 29. For Frijhoff ’s discussion of structural fragmentation (“De gecultiveerde verdeeldheid”) as a fundamental and traditional Dutch modus operandi, 1999, 126, and for the frequent blurring of boundaries, Elton 1963: 28. “The Genevan ideal” was that members of the consistory be the city’s magistrates, Crew 1978: 13. Nooter’s 1994 data support acceptance of the local magistrate as also a church official, 16, passim. For Calvin’s rejection of “church-­state separation,” Paul 2010, 180. Reeves 2009 argues that insofar as in Catholic and Protestant countries alike in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “there was a lack of differentiation between civil and ecclesiastical institutions, there was a politicization of religion,” making this period “an age of radical de-­secularization,” 61. 30. Corwin, 1: Domine Jonas Michaëlius to Domine Adrianus Smoutius, Aug. 11, 1628, 55; for Michaëlius’s position quoted, Jacobs 2005b: 275. The WIC directors commented on the interrelated roles of minister and magistrate regarding Indian conversions, CHSNY, 1: Answer to Remonstrance, Jan. 31, 1650, 340, and for magistrates of Wiltwijck collecting church money, Jacobs 2005b: 164. 31. Frijhoff 1995: 764; Gehring 1995, Council Minute, Mar. 1, 1656, 252. 32. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b: 600 and for further accounts of disputes before Stuyvesant’s time, 603, 612; see also Corwin, 1: John Backerus to Classis, June 29, 1648, 232, and Minute of Stuyvesant’s Visit to Backerus, 252. For Stuyvesant’s dispute with Backerus, CHSNY, 14: Minutes of Council, May 8, 1649, 114; see also Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Feb. 16, 1650, 120. For recent analyses of religion and secularism, see Chapter 11. 33. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Sept. 12, 1660, 13. For a minister and elders still needing to

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clarify the sphere of the “politiquen rechtbank” (secular court), see van der Linde, Records, Ap. 5, 1662, 39. 34. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Judgment of Stuyvesant and Council against Melijn and Kuyter, July 18, 1647, 410; for the complete document, 384–­417. For her reminder that, “at its core . . . [European] jurisprudence is theological,” Davis 2008: 80. 35. CHSNY, 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 24, 1660, 333. It should be noted that in 1563–­1565, Dutch synods were ruling that “public crimes had to be atoned for by public penance”—­suggesting continuing confusion regarding distinct spheres, Crew 1978: 64. 36. Davis 2008, 93; in agreement, Frijhoff 1999: with the breakdown of the two-­headed authority, pope and emperor, local and regional polities such as those in the Netherlands had to take decisions regarding religion into their own hands, 41. And de Certeau 1988: in Stuyvesant’s time, religion was still invested in a political system and the “spiritual powers” that guaranteed civil powers. They were quite obviously not (as after the Enlightenment) in “competition,” 183. 37. Corwin, 1: Rev. (sic) Peter Stuyvesant, Elder in the Church of New Amsterdam to Classis, Aug, 1649, 263; Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 4, 1652, 307; CHSNY, 13: Domine Samuel Drisius to Classis, Aug. 14, 1664, 391. For an excellent reference on these practices, Nooter 1994. 38. It is important to consider here the work of Carla Pestana on the Quakers’ intrusions into New England and New Netherland in the years 1656–­1661 and their historiography regarding the events. The Puritans, for example, found the Quakers to be preaching about the immanent end of the world and considered them inspired by the devil. Pestana’s further research on the Quakers’ later “vigorous censures” of the Puritans is particularly valuable: “The Quakers themselves largely invented the criticisms of the early Puritans, a criticism that is embedded in popular conceptions of our national history.” It emerged out of a “contested historiographical tradition,” with the Puritans and Quakers each having their own “mythic images.” See Pestana 1993: 442, 445–­47. Jacobs 2005b points briefly to the hagiography as well, 307. For the myth concerning New Netherland, see Chapter 11. 39. Corwin, 1: Johannes Megapolensis and Samuel Drisius to Classis, Aug. 5, 1657 (with postscript of Aug. 12, 1657), 400. In 1983, Pestana criticized historians for having failed to take into account “the anarchistic nature of early Quakerism,” and the “violence of chaos” read into their actions, 327. 40. For few people questioning “the principle of one temporal lord, one faith, one church,” Parker 2008: 121. There is general agreement that mutual confessional recognition showed little sign of promise between 1648 and 1789. And this is embedded in the meaning of “the Long Reformation,” Walsham 2011. 41. CHSNY, 14: Marquis de Daillebout to Stuyvesant, Feb. 18, 1658, 415; Corwin, 1: Megapolensis and Drisius to Classis, Aug. 5, 1657 (with a postscript Aug. 14, 1657), 400, and see Megapolensis and Drisius to Burgomasters and Schepenen of New Amsterdam, July 6/12, 1657, 388. Goodfriend, 2011, makes the point that coexistence among diverse religious groups in New Netherland was the result of negotiating on the part of the WIC, Stuyvesant, and, importantly, practitioners such as Quakers, Lutherans, and Jews. For the policy of religious exclusion as widely applied overseas, Bernhard 2010: 677–­708. 42. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Rustdorp, Vlissingen and Middelburg in Council Minute, Jan. 8, 1661, 489.



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43. CHSNY, 13: Propositions Presented to Stuyvesant from Milford in New England, Nov. 8, 1661, 209–­11. 44. CHSNY, 14: Sentence of William Hallett, Nov. 8, 1656, 369; see also van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 295, and Voorhees 2008: 11, 14. For banishment as a generally accepted form of punishment, Merwick 1990: 183; Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987: Instructions for Jacob Pietersz Tolck from Jacob Hamel [for WIC], Aug. 15, 1640. In this case, a man was banished “as a liability,” 5. For further discussion of Stuyvesant and the Quakers, see Chapters 6 and 11. 45. As he did in 1998 with reference to Dutch privileging of concordia, Frijhoff 2008 offers a close and balanced account of the Dutch achievement of religious harmony in the seventeenth century. For a readable but journalistic interpretation of this social peace later known as pillarization, Kramer 2006: 63. See also Paul 2010: pillarization is “peaceful though unfriendly existence,” 181. 46. Gehring 1991, Ordinance Against Religion Other Than Reformed, Feb. 1, 1656, 55, my italics. For fines demanded in the ordinance, 55. For my judgment on the impossibility of private conventicles in early seventeenth-­century New Netherland, see Chapter 6. If such privacy were possible, then Stuyvesant was guilty of enforcing the laws too rigorously and criticism of him for disallowing private conventicles justified. But for a similar situation in Woerden in 1602, where Lutherans were forbidden the establish huis-­kerken, Frijhoff 1995: 78. 47. CHSNY, 13: Propositions Made by English Settlers, [answered] July 20, 1663, 281. 48. Jacobs 2005b, makes this point in analyzing the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, 308, 309. In 1656, Stuyvesant and the Council ordered: “[we] do not intend any constraint of conscience in violence of previously granted patents, nor to prohibit the reading of God’s holy word, family prayers, and worship each in his household,” Gehring 1995, Feb. 1, 1656, 209, 210. Like Jacobs, Voorhees 2008 puts valuable historical contexts around the remonstrance. Shorto 2004 accepts Stuyvesant as blinded by Calvinism but also usefully contextualizes the Remonstrance, rejecting American history’s generalized judgment of Stuyvesant as “the reactionary boob,” 276. For a comprehesive overview of the complexities involved in institutionalizing and maintaining tolerance in early modern America, and the identification of recent work by “coexistence historians,” Beneke and Grenda, eds., 2011, 1–­20. 49. Van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 296, and Gehring 2003, Dirs. to Stuyvesant, June 14, 1656, 93. 50. Van der Zee and van der Zee 1978, 294, 295; for William Hallett and William Wickendam, CHSNY, 14: Sentences of Hallett and Wickendam, Nov. 8, 1656, 369–­70, and see 377; for the expectation that Stuyvesant would alter a judgment out of pity for a defendant, van der Linde 1983, Records, Oct. 2, 1661, 29; for lessening a defendant’s sentence, Van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 295. 51. Van der Linde 1983, Ordinance for Fasting and Prayer on July 1, 1663, Received and Promulgated in Breuckelen, June 26, 1663, 71, 73; on piety, Elton 1963: 62, and for piety’s significant meanings for sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Calvinists, see Chapter 11 below. 52. For the advent of Calvinist dogma and practice in the Netherlands, its many weaknesses, and the obstacles it had to overcome, e.g., no “solid Calvinist phalanx,” and too many varieties, Schama 1987: 96. For the later systemization of Calvinism as it developed from “a marker of denominational identity” to a set of “elaborated ideas about God, human beings and the natural world” in the nineteenth century, Paul 2010: 179.

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Notes to Pages 18–23 53. De Certeau 1988: 182. 54. For danger in traveling, Gehring 2000, Testimony of Grasmeer, Feb. 14, 1652, 130.

Chapter 2. Conflicts and Reputation 1. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 298; for seeking his own recall, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Mar. 21, 1651, 132. 2. Goslinga 1985: 79. 3. No one can doubt the tight hold the company kept on the early economic and political life of New Netherland. But I see no evidence for the claim of Goodfriend 1992 that it asserted its supremacy in New Amsterdam by maintaining a military garrison and a slave labor force as “vivid reminders” of the “coercive potential” of the company’s rule, 9 and see 83. 4. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Council Minute, July 18, 1647, 396. 5. Ceci 1977; Haefeli 1999; Jacobs 2005b; Merwick 2006; Otto 2006; Schulte Nordholt 1966; Trelease 1960; van der Zee and van der Zee 1978. 6. As an example of insufficient context for seemingly reliable detailed evidence, see CHSNY, 1: Defence of Hendrik van Dyck, Fiscal in New Netherland, Sept. 18, 1652 (received Dec. 6, 1652), 489–­518. Here his indictment of Stuyvesant is a fluent legal presentation. His facts appear to be authentic, especially because they are supported by others’ criticisms of Stuyvesant. The statements are, however, contestable in the light of other evidence, such as the company’s counterclaims identifying van Dyck as a known drunkard. These claims can be substantiated by later reliable data, putting a question mark over his 1652 testimony. 7. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 293. 8. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 299. 9. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 298. 10. CHSNY, 12: for Stuyvesant denouncing “a hard and tyrannical form of government,” Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 23, 1659, 247. For his recognition in 1653 that he was “now and then” called a “tyrant,” RNA, 1: Stuyvesant to Burgomasters and Schepenen, Aug. 25, 1653, 104. 11. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 303, and see 302; for the fort allegedly “used to torment” citizens, 1: Instruction of Commissioners, July 7, 1645, 499. 12. For accepting Huizinga on power, Frijhoff 1999, 65; for Stuyvesant establishing a Board of Nine Men with whom he was prepared to work, Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Ordinance Establishing a Board of Nine Men, Sept. 25, 1647, 439–­41. 13. CHSNY, 14: Resolution, Mar. 21, 1652, 163. 14. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 315. 15. Much has been made of the dispute between Stuyvesant and one of the accused, Cornelis Melijn, and Stuyvesant’s allegedly tyrannical role in the altercation. Little attention has been given to their later amicable relationship, see RNA, 1: Burgomasters and Schepenen to Dirs., Dec. 24, 1653, 186. 16. RNA, 1: Ordinance, June 18, 1647, 2, and see Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Council Minutes: Prohibition of Stuyvesant and Council, June 18, 1647, and Ordinance, July 4, 1647, 376, 391, 392; Council Minute, May 29, 1648, 524–­26, and 530–­33. See CHSNY, 1: Answer to Remonstrance,



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Jan. 27, 1650, 345; Gehring 2000, Stuyvesant to Eaton, May 4, 1649, 46; CHSNY, 1: Cornelis van Tienhoven’s Observations, Feb. 22, 1650, 360, 361; CHSNY, 1: Information about Taking up Land, Mar. 4, 1650, 365. 17. CHSNY, 1: Tienhoven’s Observations, Feb. 22, 1650, 361. 18. CHSNY, 1: Information about Taking up Land, Mar. 4, 1650, 367. 19. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 7, 1648, 84, and see directives, 346, 310; and RNA, 1: Ordinance, June 18, 1647, 2. 20. Middleton 2006: 22–­28. 21. Middleton 2006: 29, 28; Middleton, 2005: 139. 22. For the language of the Remonstrants as exaggerated when their representatives were in Holland, e.g., “the hatred of the people” toward Stuyvesant, CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, July 24, 1650, 126. 23. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 298. 24. See Frijhoff ’s speculation in 1999 that after the truce with Spain (1609–­1621), underlying religious and political conflicts could be openly played out in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, 82. 25. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 296; CHSNY, 1: for “Sovereign,” Remonstrance, 298; for “tyrannical,” Instruction of Commissioners, July 7, 1645, 499. In 2005, Frijhoff attempted to revise what he called the “odious” and unjust reputation of Kieft, 147–­204. 26. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 306, 307. 27. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Council Minutes: Case of Michiel Piquet, Sept. 28, 1647, 446–­52 and see 387; for Testimony of Hendrick van Dyck, Fiscal for WIC in New Netherland, stating that, with one exception, “no criminal cases occurred in my time deserving of corporeal punishment,” i.e., 1646 to 1652, CHSNY, 1: 505. 28. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 20, 1650, 123. 29. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 293. 30. Davis 2008: 15. 31. Middleton 2010: 59. 32. Gehring 1991, Ordinance Regulating Admittance of Great and Small Burghers, Feb. 2, 1657, 79 and see 80. 33. RNA, 2: Sess., Nov. 30, 1656, 238 and see Sess., Mar. 6, 1656, 191. 34. RNA, 2: Sess., Jan. 24, 1656, 23; for Stuyvesant learning to return cases appealed to his court to the city’s jurisdiction, RNA, 1: Order of Burgomasters and Schepenen, Oct. 21, 48. 35. RNA, 2: Sess., Sept. 4, 1656, 161. 36. Gehring 1995: xiv. 37. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Sergeant Andries Lourissen, Aug. [11], 1659, 102. 38. Exactly what place Stuyvesant might have imagined he belonged to in the “open country” of the province of New Netherland is, in my judgment, not easily determined until about 1660. In the beginning, “New Netherland” neither connoted a specifically defined geographical space nor did it offer itself as a “frontier” available for later psychological reflection. Early on, the WIC and the States had produced a sort of ur-­narrative of the province. It was usually dusted off and brought forward when the WIC or States were forced to defend ownership rights against English

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pretensions to the land. As a diplomatic document, its geographical detail rested on a good deal of genuine (and contrived) imprecision, CHSNY, 2: Deduction Respecting Differences About Boundaries, Etc., in New Netherland: Presented to the States General, Nov. 5, 1660, 131–­63. It was in this initially unknown territory that Stuyvesant operated during his seventeen years as administrator. He learned over the years that the most profitable and peaceful way of securing the trade and protecting settlements was by extracting all that needed to be known about it geographically while simultaneously disturbing its native structures as little as possible. As late as March 1664, he and his council were telling Hackensack and Mennesink chiefs, for example, that they didn’t know “much about their country”—­the context does not suggest that this admission was adventitious, CHSNY, 13: Proposals, with Answers, Mar. 6, 1664, 362. 39. See Chapter 4 below. 40. RNA, 2: Order of Burgomasters and Schepenen to Stuyvesant, and Extract from Resolutions of Stuyvesant and Council, Mar. 3, 1656, 52. 41. For example, see Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Case of Gerrit Vastrick, Ap. 21, 1649, 596. 42. Van Laer 1932, Jeremias van Rensselaer to Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, Sept. 14, 1660, 236. For Jeremias’s plans to accompany Stuyvesant to the Delaware River, van Laer 1932, Jan Baptist van Rensselaer to Jeremias van Rensselaer, Sept. [?], 1657, 58–­59. 43. Corwin, 1: Evert Pietersen to Domine Hendric Ruileus, Aug. 12, 1657, 401. 44. Frijhoff 1999: 66. Frijhoff 2008b offers a convincing argument against classifying the Dutch Republic as a Calvinist community in the first half of the seventeenth century. 45. Paul 2010: 179. 46. Safer 2009: 29. 47. CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 294–­95. 48. For the futility of presenting empirical evidence against entrenched mythologies, Davis 2008: 29. 49. Brodhead 1871: 748; Jacobs 2005b: 148, 147, 187. 50. Middleton 2006: 34. 51. Pestana 1993: 442, 445–­47; for Stuyvesant blamed, Fiske 1899, 236. 52. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Council Minute, Mar. 15, 1649, 587 my italics; CHSNY, 13: Oath for Magistrates, Mar. 13, 1662, 217. 53. Ritchie 1977, 51. For John Underhill (a New Englander who figured prominently in New Netherland affairs in the 1640s) removing Samuel Doughty in 1664 for “preaching against the . . . [newly installed English] government,” 51 and see 52. 54. Breen 1971. 55. Greer 2009: 279, and see Richards 2009: 39. 56. Bailyn et al. 1985, “The Failure of the Dutch:” 47–­50. 57. See Middleton 2010: 32. See also “Vindication of Captain John Onderhill (sic), May 20, 1653” for thirteen denunciations of Stuyvesant personalized in the style of those later made against George III in the Declaration of Independence: e.g., “He hath unlawfuly imposed taxes to maintain a lazy herde of tyrants over innocent subjects;” he has neglected “to avenge” Dutch and English blood shed by the Indians; he has conspired to murder all the English, CHSNY, 2: 151. 58. Ritchie 1977: 52.



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59. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant [personal], Ap. 4, 1652, 169; and see Middleton 2010, 54. 60. For New Amsterdam people criticizing Stuyvesant for leaving the city to inspect affairs at the Delaware River in March 1656, RNA, 2: Sess., Mar. 6, 1656, 54–­55. For Esopus natives’ request to meet with him personally, CHSNY, 13: [ca. Aug. 17], 1659, 104, 105. Jacob Alrichs found himself in desperate straits on the Delaware River with both the English and natives, and pleaded that Stuyvesant “in person would come here,” CHSNY, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, May 23, 1659, 242; see also Gehring 1981, Adriaen van Tienhoven to Stuyvesant, Nov. 9, 1648, 18. For New Amsterdammers begging Stuyvesant to stay with them, 12: Stuyvesant to Commissary at Delaware River, May 28, 1648, 59. 61. CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Sept. 12, 1659, 253 and see July 27, 1660, 321, July 23, 1663, 435. 62. CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Ap. 28, 1660, 308; Ap. 6, 1660, 302. 63. CHSNY, 2: Extract from the Register of New Netherland, 1664, Sept. 2, 1664, 413. 64. CHSNY, 13: Conference Held at Fort Orange, July 25, 1660, 185. 65. CHSNY, 2: Deposition before Pelgrom Clocq, Notary in New Utrecht, Feb. 14, 1664, 481. 66. CHSNY, 2: Memorial of WIC, Jan. 21, 1664, 224.

Chapter 3. Protecting by Deterrence 1. Frijhoff 1995: 575, 576 and see Jacobs 2009a: 86. 2. CHSNY, 12: Andries Hudde to Stuyvesant, May 29, 1663, 430 and for 800 natives, Beeckman to Stuyvesant, June 6, 1663, 431 and Dec. 23, 1662, 419; for Esopus, April 6, 1660, 302; for Susquehannocks, Council Minute, Sept. 25, 1671, 484 (figure excludes women and children). Otto 2006: 138. 3. Pulsipher 2005 and Lapore 1998 offer substantial studies on these events. For a comprehensive review of recent studies on Indians in southern colonial New England, Bilodeau 2011: 213–­27. 4. Richter 1992: 114. 5. Anderson and Caydon 2005: 40. 6. CHSNY, 1: Oath of Stuyvesant as Director, July 28, 1646, 492. 7. Ankersmit 2006: 333. 8. CHSNY, 2: Thoughts on Colonie at the South River, undated (From Muniment Register van de Raad, D. 89, Stadt Huys, Amsterdam), [ca. Feb. 22, 1663], 201. 9. CHSNY, 12: Minute of an Interview, July 13, 1647, 40; 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 84; 13: Deed for Westchester County, Eastern Half, July 14, 1649, 24 and see 25; Frijhoff 1995: 788. 10. Gehring 1995, Council Sess., Mar. 3, 1656, 257, my italics. 11. RNA, 2: Prohibitions Proclaimed, Ordinance, July 1, 1656, 134, 135. 12. CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Nov. 8, 1659, 283. 13. Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987, Matthias Beck to Stuyvesant, Feb. 21, 1656, 81. 14. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Feb. 16, 1650, 122. 15. CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 23, 1659, 247, 246. 16. Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987, Instructions for Matthias Beck written by Stuyvesant, June 8, 1655, 74; for Stuyvesant deferring retaliatory action on the Delaware in 1662, CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant to Magistrates of New-­Amstel, Sept. 16, 1662, 178; for “minor matters must be overlooked,” 14:

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Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Feb. 16, 1650, 121, and “temporize until a better opportunity offers,” 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Jan. 27, 1649, 105. 17. Shoemaker 2004: 17, 22, 23. 18. English Long Islanders quoted in Grumet 2009: 99; For Nevesink lands, Merwick 2006: 214. Stuyvesant was inconsistent on this matter regarding Esopus (Wiltwijck, later Kingston). There he disregarded natives’ insistence on maintaining their lands and opened them for Dutch settlement, ultimately ordering the natives to move away, see Merwick 2006: 215, 239, 240, 255, 258. 19. CHSNY, 12: Commission Appointing Beeckman to Try Persons for Savages’ Murders, Mar. 1, 1660, 295. By 1660 in Beverwijck, “walking in the woods” had become a common way for townspeople or their brokers to meet clandestinely with natives, often assaulting them if furs were not offered for trading. Legal sales were those limited to the town precincts where at least some control might be established over the inevitably disorderly encounters. In 1660, local authorities set fines at 300 guilders and the infractions were personally inspected by Stuyvesant. See Merwick 1990: 92. 20. CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 23, 1660, 305, my italics; 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Sept. 20, 1660, 326; 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 21, 1661, 348, 349. 21. For Beeckman’s concern that Dutch murders, should the sachems point them out, “would make us blush,” CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Dec. 23, 1662, 419. For Amsterdam officials’ identification of the severity of Stuyvesant’s “reprimands,” regarding their subordinates’ violence toward natives, and their complaints about them to the company, 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Jan. 27, 1662, 359. See also Jacobs 2005b: 393. 22. See RNA, 4: Proclamation Regarding the Sabbath, Sept. 10, 1663, 302, and Sess., Oct. 23, 1663, 321. 23. Gehring 1995, Proposals: Stuyvesant to Council, Mar. 3, 1656, 256. 24. Gehring 1991, Ordinance Prohibiting Sale of Liquor to Indians, Aug. 28, 1654, 48; Ordinance Concerning Wages for Indians, Sept. 28, 1648, 19, 20. 25. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Council Matters, Mar. 11, 1649, 586. 26. CHSNY, 13: Opinion on Propositions to Stuyvesant and Council, Nov. 14, 1655, 57. 27. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant’s Propositions Submitted to Council, Nov. 10, 1655, 51; for 1658, Merwick 2006: 252–­55. 28. See Gehring 1981, Stuyvesant to Andries Hudde, [ca. autumn], 1647, 22 and see 23. 29. A reading of CHSNY, 2 presents the Delaware River area as a useful microcosm of the tangled and generally lawless relations among native groups, Swedes, Dutch, and English for over three decades. 30. Stuyvesant had rejected the settlers’ call for “a general war” in late May 1658 after the murder of a trader at Esopus. For quoted passages, CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 82, 83. 31. See, for example, CHSNY, 13: Opinion on Propositions to Stuyvesant and Council, Nov. 29, 1655: “We must dissemble” because we cannot legitimate a just war against the natives, 57. 32. Otto 2006: 135 and see 137. 33. See Merrell 2006: 783, 794; CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 84. 34. For alliances, Shoemaker 2004: 86; Pulsipher quoted, 2005, 4; Grumet quoted, 2009, 69. 35. Pratt 1991, lists as some of the literate arts as “autoethnography, transculturation, critique,



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collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression.” Cited in Blair St. George 2000: 24. To these he adds speech regarding witchcraft, merchants’ theatrical performances, and a lawyer’s monological speech, 24. 36. See, inter alia, CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, May 31, 1661, 345. 37. RNA, 1: Ordinance, July 1, 1656, 22, 23. 38. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant and Council to Governor and Council of Conn., Oct. 26, 1654, 295. 39. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant’s Journal under May 31 and June 1, 1658, 84, 85; Laurensz to Stuyvesant, Aug. 8, 1658, 88; Proposal Made to Esopus Natives, Sept. 4, 1659, 106. 40. CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 83, 82; see also Merwick 2006: 250 and for full account, 251. 41. Gehring and Schiltkamp 1987, Mathias Beck to Dirs., Nov. 15, 1665, 194. 42. Van Laer 1932, Jeremias van Rensselaer to Anna van Rensselaer [Oct? 1656], 31. For a gunner under Stuyvesant’s command using the term respectfully, CHSNY, 2: “Report, 1665,” 366 and similarly Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, see van Laer, 1932, Jan Baptist to Jeremias van Rensselaer, Sept. [?], 1657, 58. But see also CHSNY, 1: Remonstrance, 310. 43. See Merwick 1990: 152. 44. For evidence of Stuyvesant looking back over the past and finding moments of being unfairly abandoned, “blamed and slandered,” see CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Andries Hudde, May 13, 1649, 373, and 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 15, 1662, 223.

Chapter 4. “The General” 1. CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Sept. 18, 1659, 255. For New Amstel’s (Fort Casimir’s) complement of probably 30 to 32 soldiers in 1659 but rising to 50 for service later at Esopus, 12: Van Ruyven and Kregier to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 269, but for only 16 or 20 in 1657, 12: Instructions for Ensign Dirck Smit, Ap. 25, 1657, 175–­76. For only six men in two Delaware River forts in 1648, 12: Alexander Boyer to Stuyvesant, Sept. 25, 1648, 43. For the WIC thinking 15 to 16 men adequate, 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Sept. 15, 1657, 198. 2. See CHSNY, 12: Van Ruyven and Kregier to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 269, 267. 3. Van Laer 1932, Jeremias van Rensselaer to Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, Sept. 14, 1660, 238. 4. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 24, 1660, 488. 5. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, May 20, 1658, 420. 6. See CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 21, 1661, 205; for the company “disembarrassing itself of the onerous charge of the military” in its trading centers in “Brazil, Angola and elsewhere,” 1: Advice of Chamber of Accounts, Ap. 19, 1647, 236. 7. Gehring 1995, Instructions for Expedition to Westchester, Mar. 6, 1656, 260. Exceptions to transients were, for example, “old officer[s]” or soldiers who wished to stay on and act as minor law enforcement officers, CHSNY, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, Aug. 10, 1657, 193. For the soldiers stating, “We have not any trade nor farming, the sword must earn us our substance, if not here then we must look for our fortune elsewhere,” 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs, July 21, 1661, 205. 8. CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Ap. 28, 1660, 307. 9. For tapping in New Amsterdam, RNA, 1: Sess., Feb. 22, 1655, 286 and see 288. For guard duty

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one day a week, Jacobs, 2005b, 53. For wages of soldiers ranging from captain to trooper, 1: Report of Garrisoning Fort Casimir, Nov. 1, 1656, 641, 642. For evidence of men hired on as both farm laborers and soldiers by the City of Amsterdam’s Delaware River colony, CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Dec. 28, 1663, 450. The attrition rate along the Delaware River was probably an extreme case but worth considering. Only 16 to 18 men from a contingent of 50 sent by the City of Amsterdam were in service at Fort New Amstel in 1659. The desertions were allegedly caused by “indigence and debt,” CHSNY, 12: van Ruyven and Kregier to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 268 and see 267, and Alrichs to Stuyvesant, May 23, 1659, 242 and June 26, 1659, 245. The number of 50 may have been no higher than 38, 2: Alrichs to Commissioners in Amsterdam, May 8, 1657, 10. For desertions, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, May 28, 1657, 186. 10. CHSNY, 12: Van Ruyven and Crieger to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 268; 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Sept. 18, 1659, 255. The soldiers were consistently unruly. At times, they were described as disobedient and surly and, on other occasions, as licentious and quick to dismiss a superior as a tyrant, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, Mar. 30, 1658, 206; for danger from dismissed troopers, 12: Examination of Thomas Forst and Other Soldiers, July 29, 1662, 393–­95. 11. CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 87; for full account, 81–­87. 12. CHSNY, 12: Administration of Jacquet, Minutes of Jan. 2, 1657, 139 and Ap. 13, 1656, 143. 13. CHSNY, 13: Proposals Made to Esopus Indians, Oct. 15, 1658, 95. 14. For examples of the correspondence, CHSNY, 12: Van Ruyven and Kregier to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 267; 60 soldiers serving the City of Amsterdam on the Delaware, 1: Report of Garrisoning Fort Casimir, Nov. 1, 1656, 641; the company considering 8 to 10 soldiers sufficient along the Delaware to “awe . . . the natives,” 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 19, 1656, 132. For the company planning to send 120 soldiers to relieve its “old servants,” 12: Stuyvesant to Commissioners on the Delaware, June 21, 1650, 65. 15. CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Sept. 4, 1659, 250. 16. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Dirs., June 25, 1660, 476, 477. For Stuyvesant’s concern about his men being massacred, 2: Stuyvesant to Magistrates of New Amstel, Sept. 16, 1662, 178. A march required six or, more likely, fifteen days. For safety’s sake, marches were often abandoned, 2: Alrichs to Commissioners in Amsterdam, Ap. 13, 1657, 9. 17. CHSNY, 2: Alrichs to Commissioners, Oct. 10, 1658, 49; for Alrichs’s plea for soldiers in the following year, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, Aug. 18, 1659, 249. 18. CHSNY, 12: Dirs. to Council of New Netherland, Ap. 26, 1655, 89. For his illness in mid-­ August, 1655 (a month before the expedition), 12: Stuyvesant to Council, Aug. 16, 1655, 91. He recovered and led the expedition in September 1655, Merwick, 2006, 218–­22, and 12: 89–­111. For the company’s reversal of its condemnation of Stuyvesant in 1664, 2: Dirs. to States, Oct. 9, 1664, 259. Gehring, 2003, offers an excellent summary of events in the Curaçao region and on the Delaware, xiii–xix. 19. CHSNY, 13: Dirs., to Stuyvesant, Mar. 13, 1656, 63, 64; 13: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 19, 1656, 70. See also 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, April 7, 1657, 386–­90. 20. CHSNY, 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 19, 1656, 130, 132, and for “lawful administration,” 133, my italics. Stuyvesant’s concerns are in Gehring 1995: 230–­35, 272, and see Gehring 2003, “Instructions to Stuyvesant and Council, Management of Finances, May 26, 1657, 136–­38.



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We have no sound data for Stuyvesant’s annual income and expenses during this time. But for ledgers sent to Amsterdam in 1660, CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 21, 1660, 470, and a generalized report in 1664 specifying 1663’s costs—­80,000 guilders expenses against revenues of 30,000 or less, 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 26, 1664, 373. For constant reports to WIC about Stuyvesant’s administration and finances, see, inter alia, CHSNY, 12: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 24, 1660, 333. 21. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Sept. 15, 1657, 398. The letter had also announced the directors’ decision, without his consultation, to alienate Fort Casimir and considerable territory on the Delaware to the City of Amsterdam. Soon reports were showing that the arrangement was complicating and weakening the Dutch position on the river. For the escalation to this confrontation, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 26, 1655: “You do not seem to understand our opinions or wishes,” 322. 22. CHSNY, 13: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Sept 15, 1657, 73–­74; 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 15, 1662, 223, 224. For the directors disbelieving Stuyvesant regarding his administration’s income, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec 19, 1656: how could you “have got so excessively into debt is beyond our conception.” Either you are “making too large and too expensive expenses” or our finances are not being “faithfully administered,” 373. Here, as so often elsewhere, they say that books are being withheld, 373. Further: “We perceive it is your intention, to shove all your expenses there upon our shoulders,” 375. Parts of this letter are in 12: 131–­33; 13: 70–­7 1; 14: 371–­73. See also 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, [May 26], 1657: “[just] for once may we see well and correctly kept books,” 391. The following information may have reached the directors, see 2: Jacob Jansen Huys to Commissioner for Colonie on the Delaware, Sept. 30, 1660: the Manhattans is “quite rich of people, and there are at present, fully over three hundred and fifty houses, so that it begins to be a brave place and diverse brave villages are rising up which are built in good order,” 125. 23. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 15, 1662, 223. 24. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Dec. 24, 1660, 487; 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 21, 1661, 204, 205. 25. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 15, 1662, 223, 224. 26. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Nov. [?], 1659, 123; 12: Van Ruyven and Kregier to Alrichs, Oct. 1, 1659, 267. For fear of the English and Swedes taking all of New Netherland “in case we . . .[here] should be conquered,” 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 23, 1659, 247. For half the 50 soldiers sent by the city of Amsterdam having quickly melted away and two-­thirds of those remaining found to be in hiding, terrified of being massacred and leaving at New Amstel only 8 or 10 soldiers, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Sept. 17, 1659, 254. 27. For the incident, Merwick 2006: 244–­46 and, as a later example, CHSNY, 13: Proclamation Calling for Volunteers, June 25, 1663, 259, 260. 28. See, inter alia, for growing opposition, CHSNY, 13: Report of P. W. van Couwenhoven. Mar. [25], 1664, 363 and, for the machinations of the colony of Hartford, 2: Memorial of the WIC to States, Jan. 21, 1664, 224. 29. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Dutch Delegates of New Utrecht, Nov. 6, 1663, 537; 2: Deposition of Nine Men from Midwout, Feb. 20, 1664, 483. For Stuyvesant’s concern “especially the lack of shoes and stockings for our soldiers,” 13: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 26, 1664, 372. 30. CHSNY, 2: Extract from the Register of the Principal Events which Occurred in the Attack

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on and Reduction of New Netherland, Anno, 1664. Stuyvesant to Nicolls, Aug. 23/Sept. 2, 1664, 412, 413–­14. 31. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to General Court of Massachusetts, Ap. 20, 1660, 467. 32. 2: Stuyvesant’s “Answer to the West India Company’s Observations on His Report on the Surrender of New Netherland, 1666,” 440.

Chapter 5. The Struggle to Believe 1. CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, 80–­87. 2. See Runia 2006a: 1, 17. 3. de Certeau 1988: 198. 4. In 1649, Stuyvesant was an elder of the New Amsterdam church and therefore a member of its consistory; he was serving as churchmaster in 1656, CHSNY, 1: Consistory Meeting reported by Remonstrants, July 28, 1649, 310, and Corwin, 1: Court Minutes of New Amsterdam, Board of Churchmasters Appointed, Jan. 24, 1656, 343 and see Feb. 28, 1656, 346. For Stuyvesant’s kerk-­huis and church attendance, see Chapter 6. 5. For a short biography of Polhemius, Nooter 1994: 22ff. 6. CHSNY, 14 holds a number of letters (mostly in 1656–­1658) pertinent to Polhemius and exchanged between Stuyvesant, magistrates of Long Island villages, directors of the WIC, and Classis in Amsterdam, 367–­414. See also Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974a, Power of Attorney on Oct. 15, 1654 before Provincial Secretary, 376, 377. 7. CHSNY, 14: Magistrates’ Petition to Stuyvesant, Jan [?], 1657, 381; Crew 1978: 9, 12. 8. CHSNY, 14: Magistrates’ Petition to Stuyvesant, Jan. [?]. 1657, 381. It is difficult to know exactly when Polhemius’s ministerial credentials arrived. His earlier career was as a teacher, but as early as 1655 he was recognized as a minister and therefore credentialed to administer the sacraments, Gehring 2003, Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 26, 1655: 52. A document exists from December 1654 quoting the Breuckelen congregation as saying “in case . . . Polhemius should again desire to say his prayers here, in lieu of giving a sermon, as he did before . . . we are disposed to make him . . . some allowances,” Hageman 1983: xii. For a minister expected to give “an edifying . . . example,” see, inter alia, van der Linde 1983, Records: Attestation Regarding Domine Henricus Selijns, July 23, 1664, 95. 9. Justice 2008: 12. 10. Justice 2008: 12, 13; see also Lindquist and Coleman 2008: 7, 14. For spirituality maintained through the edifying and embodied practices of others, see Glasier 2008: 24 and, in agreement, Lindquist 2008: 118, and Mitchell and Mitchell 2008. Crew 1978 quotes the Genevan Confession of Faith, 1561: those who are of the true Church, “battle against it [loss of faith] . . . all the days of their lives,” 51. 11. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Sept. 21, 1661, 27. 12. For dimensions of the kerk-­huis, CHSNY, 14: Appointment of Commissioners for Church at Midwout, Dec. 17, 1654, 310, and for accommodation for “a house of worship and in the same lodgings for the preacher,” Gehring 1995, Council Minute, Feb. 9, 1655, 20. Voorhees 2009 should also be consulted. For theft of planks, Dec. 14, 1656, 370, 371 and see 376; for denied salary, and petitions, Oct. 13, 1654, 294, Feb. 25, 1656, 338, Mar. 28, 1656, Dec. 21, 1656, 377–­80, Petition of Polhemius to Stuyvesant, Jan. 29, 1658, 411, 412 and see 414. These pleadings also appear in official church records,



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Nooter 1994: 17. For examples of Polhemius’s contact with the Amsterdam Classis urging a New Netherland Classis, Corwin, 1: letters of Aug. 8, 1662, 525, Sept. 11, 1663, 534, and Ap. 7, 1664, 542. Back pay arises as an issue in CHSNY, 14: Appointment of Commissioners, Dec. 17, 1654, 310, and 14: Polhemius to Stuyvesant, Dec. 14, 1656, 371. 13. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 21, 1660, 472. For the functions of church personnel below the level of minister, see Nooter 1994: 21, 22. 14. For examples, Corwin, 1: Case of Willem Grasmeer: Classis of Amsterdam to Grasmeer in Rensselaerswijck, Feb. 20, 1651, 288, 289 and also 286–­97, 301; CHSNY, 14: Magistrates of Breuckelen to Stuyvesant, Jan. [16?], 1657, 381; Corwin, 1: Acts of the Classis of Amsterdam, Aug. 7, 1651, 296; Corwin, 1: Classis to Drisius, Dec. 5, 1661, 514, and Drisius to Classis, Aug. 5/14, 1664, 555. 15. Crew 1978: 71; CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Officer in Rustdorp, Jan. 24, 1661, 492. Correspondence of the directors in Amsterdam suggests that on at least one occasion they had kept “an eye on” one suspicious preacher, Corwin, 1: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, Ap. 4, 1652, 307. 16. For “pure,” Corwin, 1: Proclamation of a Day of Prayer Set for Mar. 13 [Issued Jan. 21,] 1658, 414. For the teachings of heretics and the Church of Rome as opposed to “the pure truth,” Corwin, 1: Classis to Consistory of New Amsterdam, May 25, 1657, 379. Crew 1978 encounters this emphasis on purity when researching the iconoclastic happenings of 1555–­1557, 58. For the preacher as a living “sequel to the Bible,” Coleman 2009: 420. 17. Corwin, 1: Classis to Consistory of New Amsterdam, Ap. 22, 1642, 150, 151. For references to Paul dominating in the writings of the reformers, Frijhoff 1995: 423. He makes the point that, contrary to some interpretations, images from the New Testament were as plentiful in sermons as those of the Old Testament, 319. 18. Corwin, 1: Classis to Consistory of New Amsterdam, May 26, 1656, 349. For the Reformed churches continuing to use the catechism in Brazil and New Netherland, see van der Linde 1983, Records, Dec. 25, 1661, 31. 19. Frijhoff 2008a: 49; CHSNY, 14: Petition Copied into the Book of Petitions from Magistrates of Midwout and Amersfoort, Done in New Amsterdam by the Director-­General and High Council, Oct. 13, 1654, 294. For Stuyvesant’s home province of Friesland as a place where, more than in Holland, Calvinist leaders demanded that secular authorities had the right to appoint and maintain ministers, Jacobs 2005a: 217. 20. CHSNY, 14: Council Minutes, Mar. 26 and Ap. 2, 1658, 413, 414. For salary payment before harvest, Hageman 1983, entry of July 6, 1658, xii; for the gift of a piece of land to the Board of Overseers of the Poor, CHSNY, 14: Council Minute, June 3, 1655, 326. For the maintenance of a Presbyterian minister, Megapolensis and Drisius to Classis, Aug. 5, 1657, in Jameson, 1909, 2: 457. Fines for nonpayment are in CHSNY, 14: Council Minutes, Mar. 26 and Ap. 2, 1658, 413, 414. One man, a Catholic, was fined twelve guilders for nonpayment of Polhemius’s salary, 414. For personal intervention in the case of Polhemius, CHSNY, 14: Petition of Magistrates of Midwout and Amersfoort to Council, Feb. 15, 1656, 337; Petition Read in Council, Feb. 25, 1656, 338; Council Minutes, Mar. 28, 1656, 345; Appointment of Commissioners, Dec. 17, 1654, 310; Council Minutes, Feb. 9, 1655, 312; Petition of Magistrates of Midwout and Amersfoort to Council, June 15, 1655, 327; Pohemius to Stuyvesant [personal], Dec. 14, 1656, 371; Stuyvesant [personal] to Magistrates of Midwout, Dec. 21, 1656, 376, 378–­80; Petition of Polhemius to Stuyvesant [personal], Jan. 29, 1658, 411, 412.

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21. CHSNY, 13: Andries van der Sluys to Stuyvesant [personal], Sept. 28, 1658, 91, 14: Polhemius to Stuyvesant [personal], Dec. 14, 1656, 371. Stuyvesant’s statement of responsibility is 14: John Hicks and Magistrates and Inhabitants of Hempstead, Feb. 23, 1661, and Reply of Stuyvesant, Feb. 25, 1661, with Stuyvesant’s postscript to same referring to Mar. 12, 1661, 497. For Rustdorp’s (Jamaica’s) villagers “urgently” desiring that he appoint a clergyman, Council Minutes, [?], 1661, 489. 22. Stokes, 4: Jonas Michaëlius to Adrianus Smoutius, Aug. 11, 1628, 73; CHSNY, 2: Cornelis van Ruyven to Stuyvesant, Aug. 7/17, 1666, 473. For the low number of ministers as a serious problem in post-­Reformation Friesland, Jacobs 2005a: 217, and for the difficulty of staffing pulpits in the English North American settlements, Pestana 2004: 55 and 139–­42. 23. CHSNY, 14: Magistrates of Breuckelen to Stuyvesant, Jan [?], 1657, 381. Voorhees 2009 writes of Domine Roelof (Rudolphus) van Varick being praised first of all for his “edifying . . . way of life,” 49. A postil was a book of daily sermons on the Gospel or Epistle to be read in the church service or at home, van der Linde 1983, 247n60. 24. This criticism is dealt with in Chapter 1, note 40 and Chapter 11. But see Klein’s rejection in 1974 of historian John Fiske’s allegations about both Stuyvesant’s “intolerance” and “hounding . . . [Quakers] away” and settlers as generally more latitudinarian than their ministers, 17. For Fiske’s reading the benevolent aims of the nineteenth-­century Society of Friends backward into the arch-­radicalism of the Quakers in seventeenth-­century New Netherland, see Fiske 1899: 233, 236. He maintains that, unlike in Puritan New England, persecution of the Quakers “redounds to the discredit not of the New Netherland but of Stuyvesant.” Characteristically, he continues, “Had there been any effective constitutional method of restraining the Director’s arbitrary will, they would not have occurred, and therefore we cannot hold the people of New Netherland responsible to such an extent as we hold the people of Massachusetts for the hanging of Quakers on Boston Common,” 236.

Chapter 6. Managing Conventicles 1. Crew 1978: 135. 2. Walsham 2011: 152. For Jacobs’s explanation in 2005b of the punishments meted out to Quakers in New Netherland, 308, 309. 3. CHSNY, 14: Answer of Stuyvesant and Council to Petition from Rustdorp (Jamaica, Long Island), Jan. 24, 1661, 492, and Stuyvesant’s personal letter, Jan. 8, 1661, 490. In the Jan. 24 letter, Stuyvesant stated his conviction that conventicles of radicals had to be curbed to avoid “subversion” of the “protestant Religion,” 492. Corwin, 1: Proclamation of a Day of Prayer for March 13, Jan. 21, 1658, 414. 14: Testimony before Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 9, 1661, 490. Requiring Quakers to take a oath before his court may have been another tactic for getting Quakers to move on, Corwin, 1: Polhemius to Classis, Ap. 21, 1664, 544. 4. Corwin, 1: Classis to Consistory of New Amsterdam, May 25, 1657, 380, 379. 5. CHSNY, 14: Order of Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 15, 1656, 337. 6. Frijhoff 1995: 518–­20, 623–­26, 402. For voorlezers as “zealous instigators” of trouble for established ministers in the 1680s, Voorhees 2009: 87. 7. Corwin, 1: Journal of Brian Newton, Cornelis van Ruyven, and Carel van Brugge, Dec. 29,



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1656, 364, 365, and CHSNY, 14: Council Minutes, Jan. 8 and Jan. 13, 1661, 489, 490. For a troublesome case in Middelburg (presently Newton) in 1656, Gehring 1995: 178. 8. CHSNY, 14: Sentence of William Hallett and William Wickendam for Baptist Conventicles, Flushing, Nov. 8, 1656, 369, 370, and, for penalty partly rescinded, Nov. 11, 1656, 370. For Pestana’s evidence of uneducated Quakers preaching about complicated theological matters, 1983, 333. 9. Van der Linde, 1983, Records, Nov. 27, 1661, 31. For Crew’s reminder that, in the 1560s there was still confusion in the Netherlands over the status and authority of the minister and this applied “even more to lay preachers than to pastors” (1978: 71). 10. CHSNY, 12: Beeckman to Stuyvesant, Jan. 14, 1661, 335. 11. Crew 1978: 108, citing Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1971: 87–­88. 12. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Governor and Council of Connecticut, Oct. 26, 1654, 295. For a clear idea of the Classis’s message to New Netherland preachers, Corwin, 1: Classis to Consistory of New Amsterdam, Ap. 22, 1642: “open also the door among the Americans,” 150. 13. For confirmation of the Dutch Reformed efforts to accommodate Lutherans in 1554 and later, Crew 1978: 95, 104, 180. “[L]ittle psalm books, prayer books, and verses with the instruction of the congregation” were edited to make Reformed usage “more acceptable to the Lutherans in the colony,” Hageman 1983: xii. 14. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, May 20, 1658, 418. Earlier the directors had stated their desire that Stuyvesant and his council “induce” the Lutherans to “join the Reformed church and thus live in greater . . . harmony,” Gehring 2003, Mar. 12, 1654, 6. For Stuyvesant and his council as “eyewitnesses” to Megapolensis’s preaching and services, Corwin, 1: Megapolensis and Drisius to Stuyvesant and Council, Aug. 23, 1658, 428. 15. CHSNY, 14: Dirs. to Stuyvesant, June 7, 1658, 421. For two Amsterdam preachers’ belief that Lutherans could find “abundant edification and comfort of soul” in the Reformed Church, Corwin, 1: Preachers in Amsterdam to Domine Schaats, Dec. 15, 1661, 515. 16. Jacobs 2005b: 295, 302. 17. Corwin, 1: Megapolensis to Stuyvesant and Council, Aug. 23, 1658, 428, 429. For each post-­ Resurrection congregation called a “church” (as the Lutherans were demanding), Kelly 1977: 189. Care with “church” seemed to be taken in the council’s reference in 1655 to “all of God’s houses” in the fatherland, Gehring 1995, Council Minute, Nov. 10, 1655, 136. The charge that Megapolensis’s church services were leaning toward the Church of Rome would have hit a raw nerve. He had once been a Roman Catholic and had only recently showed himself openly sympathetic regarding several Jesuit priests’ brutal treatment at the hands of the Iroquois in Canada. See Corwin, 1: Megapolensis and Drisius to Classis, Sept. 28, 1658 for their lengthy explanation and defense of this relationship, 436–­39. 18. Corwin, 1: Answers to the Objections of the West India Company Concerning the Form of Baptism, Aug. 23, 1658, 431. One needs to be cautious in presenting the Reformed Church in the Netherlands as one of uniformity. In their “Answer,” Megapolensis and Drisius carefully point to the outcomes of two synods in the Netherlands provinces, both of which demonstrated differing interpretations of matters of doctrine and practice. The ministers might also have pointed to the strenuous doctrinal debates between Remonstrants and Counter-­Remonstrants during recent times but chose not to do so. For their justification for imitating the differing interpretations of “apostolic

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Notes to Pages 78–87

churches” in “good conscience,” see 431. See also Jacobs 2005a: after the Reformation, in Friesland, there were “many disconcerting diversions from orthodoxy” among the Calvinist ministry, 207. 19. Corwin, 1: Answers to the Objections of the West India Company Concerning the Form of Baptism, Aug. 23, 1658, 431. 20. Corwin, 1: Megapolensis and Drisius to Classis, Sept. 10, 1659, 449; Corwin, 1: Acts of the Classis of Amsterdam, July 6, 1660, 477. 21. Corwin, 1: Stuyvesant to Dirs, Ap. 21, 1660, 475. 22. Frijhoff 2008a: 47. For Fabend’s persuasive point that much of New Netherland historiography presents religion as unimportant supposedly because of public records filled with hard-­ drinking folk, but actually because its unimportance is more “attractive” to readers and plays upon a prevailing myth, Fabend 2009: 49. 23. Brown 1985: 122; For Stuyvesant’s attendance on May 30, 1658 for a reading of the Scriptures in the house of one of Esopus’s leading men, CHSNY, 13: Journal of Stuyvesant, June 30, 1658, and see 82. 24. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Selijns to Classis, Oct. 4, 1660, 227; Records, [Sept.] 12, [1660], 13; Records, Selijns to Classis, Oct. 4, 1660, 227. 25. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Selijns to Classis, Oct. 4, 1660, 227; Records, Selijns to Classis, June 9, 1664, 229. 26. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Records, Oct. 4, 1660, 227. 27. CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs., July 23, 1659, 247. 28. For this data: CHSNY, 12: 427–­50; 13: 100–­8. It supports Gehring’s observation in 1995 that Stuyvesant’s workload was excessive, xiv. 29. CHSNY, 13: Lourensen to Stuyvesant, May 24, 1659, 99. The separate plea that Stuyvesant and the council not desert the Esopus villagers even as “Christ did not desert us” but “gathered us in one sheepfold” was probably the wording of the local deacon, Andries van der Sluys, CHSNY, 13: T. Chambers, J. J. Stoll, C. B. Slecht, A. van der Sluys and others to Council, May 18, 1658, 79, and see 82. 30. Van der Linde 1983, Records, June 26, 1663, [Text of the Ordinance for Fasting and Prayer for July 4, 1663], 71. 31. Van Laer 1932, Jeremias van Rensselaer to Anna van Rensselaer, June 8, 1660, 230, 231. In the same letter, Jeremias asked for clasps to fix on to a thin psalter fit for carrying in his pocket and, if possible, with the Psalms rhymed. For Psalms as “sung, memorized and read” in some workplaces and, on some occasions, talked about as we talk about football, Frijhoff 1995: 314, 317. 32. In the 1678/9 will of Stuyvesant’s widow, Judith, it is a “church or chapel,” Abstract of Wills 1893: 139. 33. Shorto 2004: 7, 169.

Chapter 7. Ordinances: The Needle of Sin 1. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ordinance, Mar. 1, 1663, 63. 2. Manning 1997: 53. 3. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Ordinance, Ap. 16, [1648], 506–­10, my emphasis. For wonders in the heavens, inter alia, Joel 3: 3; see also Frijhoff 1995: 380.



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4. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, Ordinance, Ap. 16, [1648], 508–­10. The description here of a variety of places for religious services persists in all the ordinances, to 1664. For Ordinance for Better Observation of the Sabbath, April 29, 1648 [that is, about seven weeks later], Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, 516, 517. Proclamations demanding better observance of the Sabbath are common, see, for example, Ordinance, Ap. 29, 1648 in Gehring 1991, 17, 18, and Gehring’s note that the ordinance was renewed and enlarged on Oct. 26, 1656 and renewed in 1657, 1658, and 1663, 18. 5. Scott and Stryker-­Rodda 1974b, 481–­96. 6. Brodhead 1853: 587 and quoted in van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 251. 7. CHSNY, 12: Proclamation, Aug. 16, 1655, 90–­92, and see RNA, 1: Order for A Day of Fast and Supplication, [read out] Aug. 18, 1655, 342–­43. 8. CHSNY, 13: Propositions, Nov. 10, 1655, 53. For Stuyvesant’s and the Council’s careful investigation into the causes of the violence, see Merwick 2006: 232–­34. 9. Gehring 1995: Ordinance [late January or early February, 1656], 208, 209. 10. Corwin, 1: Proclamation of a Day of Prayer Set for March 13, issued Jan. 21, 1658, 414. Nicasius de Sille brought the proclamation into the court of New Amsterdam, where Cornelis van Ruyven, as secretary, signed it with Stuyvesant. For “We are of God . . . Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error,” see I John, 4: 6. Walsham 2011 deals at length with the unsettled question of Calvinism’s judgment on the capacity of the natural world to transmit “salvific grace,” 82. She quotes Martin Bucer, who referred to the subject in 1535: “Alongside Scripture, nature was a second and supplementary source of inspiration,” 89. 11. CHSNY, 2: A Day of General Fasting and Prayer, Sept. 30, 1659, 79. 12. Corwin, 1: Proclamation, Feb. 23, 1660, 468, 469. 13. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to General Court of Massachusetts, Ap. 20, 1660, 467. 14. Corwin, 1: Proclamation Appointing a Day for General Fasting and Prayer, Mar. 24, issued Feb. 23, 1660, 468–­69. For townspeople expecting Dutch magistrates to explain the meaning of comets being sighted, Merwick 1990: 183. For Jeremias van Rensselaer seeing the last of three comets and hoping that Christ would be merciful, van Laer 1932, Jeremias van Rensselaer to Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, Ap. 5/15, 1665, 376. 15. Van der Linde 1983, Ordinance of Jan. 26, 1662, 33, 35, and see Corwin, 1: Proclamation, Jan. 26, 1662 [for Mar. 15], 516–­18. 16. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ap. 1, 1663, 63. For Selijns as the “best educated and most influential domine to come to New Netherland,” Hageman 1983: xii, agreeing with Eekhof. 17. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ordinance, Mar. 1, 1663, 65. 18. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ordinance, Mar. 1, 1663, 63, 65. For the 1623 Thanksgiving Day, Frijhoff 1995: 497, and for similar days of thanksgiving, 300, 301. See also CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to General Court of Massachusetts, Ap. 20, 1660, 466. For a document shared with Stuyvesant by the directors in which great emphasis is placed on 1623, that is, the year forty years earlier when four West India Company forts were established and continuously maintained thereafter, CHSNY, 2: Deductions Respecting the Differences about Boundaries, Nov. 5, 1660, 133. 19. For the metaphor taken from St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermon on man’s original simplicity in Sermons on the Song of Songs, No. 82, van der Linde 1983, Ordinance, Mar. 1, 1663, 65. A considerable literature exists examining the special openness of John Calvin to the writings of

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Notes to Pages 93–98

Bernard of Clairvaux. Calvin’s respect for Bernard is evaluated in Tamburello 1994. For one Protestant worshiper in 1566 pulling the grass from the spot where a Protestant preacher had been standing and taking it home as a relic, Crew 1978: 27. For one of many other survivalisms, van Laer 1932, Jan Baptist van Rensselaer to Jeremias and Richard van Rensselaer, 1670, Received Sept. 18, 1670, regarding their mother’s death: “she took her departure with great piety from the Church Militant here to the Church Triumphant above,” 422. Walsham is among a number of scholars studying such survivalisms, 2011. 20. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ordinance, Mar. 1, 1663, 65. The biblical citation is Isaias 53:8. For Selijns’s belief in the efficacy of the congregation’s prayers, van der Linde, 1983, Records, Selijns to Ministers in Holland, June 9, 1664, 233. This ordinance may well carry a more eloquent tone because of the fine translation by van der Linde. 21. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Proclamation, June 26, 1663, 73, and Day of Thanksgiving, June 1 [for June 4], 1664, 87. 22. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Ordinance, June 26, 1663, 71, 73. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Magistrates at Fort Orange, July 12, 1663, 278. Stuyvesant put similar warnings to other Dutch magistrates, see RNA, 4: Stuyvesant to Villages, July 2, 1663, 273, and Stuyvesant to Assembly of New Amsterdam Officials, July 5, 1663, 275. 23. Van der Linde 1983, Records, June 1, [1664], 87. 24. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant to Lieutenant Couwenhoven, Oct. 21, 1663, 302. 25. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Nov. 13, 1663, 484. See also CHSNY, 13: Proclamation of Thanksgiving for Peace with the Esopus, May 31, 1664, 383, 384. This proclamation may have been as a response to Domine Blom’s request of May 6, 1664 for an annual Day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre, Corwin, 1: Blom to Stuyvesant and Council, May 6, 1664, 546. 26. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Proclamation of Day of Fasting and Prayer for June 4, issued May 31, 1664, 87. 27. CHSNY, 12: Alrichs to Stuyvesant, Oct. 7, 1658, 226. For the Book of Oblivion, refer to Psalm 69: 29. A reference also occurs in Exodus 32: 33. 28. Van der Linde 1983, Records, Proclamation, June 26, 1663, 71. For an ordinance’s authors expressing the people’s corporate shame for acting sinfully before the eyes of “neighbours and barbarous natives,” see Corwin, 1: Proclamation, Feb. 23, 1660, 468. 29. Corwin, 1: Blom to Classis, Sept. 18, 1663, 534–­35, and Blom to Stuyvesant, May 6, 1664, 545, 546. For a better translation of this letter see CHSNY, 13: 373, 374. 30. Corwin, 1: Blom to Classis, Sept. 18, 1663, 534. 31. Corwin, 1: Blom to Stuyvesant, May 6, 1664, 545, 546. 32. Corwin, 1: Blom to Classis, Sept. 18, 1663, 534, 535; for strafpredicatie (a Dutch punishment sermon), Schama, 1987, 46. 33. Corwin, 1: Blom to Stuyvesant, May 6, 1664, 546. 34. CHSNY, 2: Dirs. to Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 20, 1664, 221, and see Stuyvesant and Council to Dirs., Feb. 28, 1664 for his criticism of the company directors for demanding that invading English and barbarous natives should be “utterly rooted out” but omitting to send “any reenforcement (sic) of men, ammunition, or necessaries for clothing,” 230. 35. Jacobs 2005b: 291–­95, and see Jacobs 2009a: 86, 87. Frijhoff 1999 provides a careful



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breakdown of confessional adherents in 1650 in the Dutch Republic, concluding that Calvinism by no means exercised dominance across the Netherlands, 351–­60. 36. CHSNY, 1: Eight Men to Dirs., Oct. 28, 1644, 212. For Alexander d’Hinojossa, vice-­director on the Delaware River, refusing to implement this ordinance and issuing his own proclamation because nothing “adapted to their colony was expressed” in it, CHSNY, 12: Stuyvesant to Dirs, July 15, 1662, 390. 37. For an analysis of seventeenth-­century Dutch humanists such as Descartes and Spinoza wrestling with the causal role of Providence in human events, see Crittenden 2009: 28. 38. For a scriptural heritage as central to Dutch lives, Schama 1987: 93–­95. 39. Nooter 1994: 169–­70. 40. See Chapter 11. 41. Shorto 2004: 169.

Chapter 8. To Suffer Loss: 1664–­1667 1. This reconstruction of the surrender of 1664 draws from my study, Death of a Notary, 1999: 120–­23. See Stokes 1915–­1928, 4: Iconography: Chronology, 1565–­1776, 234–­42. Alongside the Chronology, see CHSNY, 2: 230–­72 and 14: 232–­42 as well as RNA, 5: 1897, 15–­116. For the account of finances, CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant. to Dirs., Ap. 26, 1664, 373 and Iconography: Chronology, 235. Samuel Drisius, as eyewitness, also calculated the geographical size of New Amsterdam and the number of men it would require to defend it, Chronology, 241. 2. RNA, 4: Burgomasters and Schepenen to Stuyvesant and Council, Oct. 22, 1663, 318, and see 319, 320, 325, and for the petition presented to the States General by leading citizens, the WIC, and the City Council of Amsterdam, CHSNY, 2: Memorial, Jan. 21, 1664, 224–­26. 3. CHSNY, 2: Journal of Dutch Embassy, Sept. 28/Oct. 8, 1659, 92 and see 99, 100. 4. CHSNY, 2: Journal of Dutch Embassy, Oct. 7/17, 1659, 97; 2: Augustine Herrman and Resolved Waldron to Stuyvesant, Oct. 11/21, 1659, 99. Stuyvesant states his refusal to authorize violence toward the English in 1663 in 2: Stuyvesant and de Sille to Scott [Jan. ?], 398; see also Koot 2010: 633, 634. The WIC admitted to the States General in 1660 that they knew of English intentions to drive the Dutch “from that country of America,” 2: Deductions Respecting Differences about Boundaries, Nov. 5, 1660, 135. 5. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant and Council to Dirs., Feb. 28, 1664, 230; see also 2: Report on the Colony of the City of Amsterdam, Aug. 10, 1663, 211. For the number of soldiers being continuously supplemented but remaining far fewer than Stuyvesant calculated he needed, Jacobs 2005b: 54, 55. For Amsterdam’s conviction that 15 to 16 soldiers were ample to supplement New Amstel’s few soldiers, CHSNY, 2: Report on the Colony of the City of Amsterdam, Aug. 10, 1663, 212. For Stuyvesant’s warning that his soldiers were without adequate clothing and supplies and that these conditions would almost certainly provoke mass desertions, 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Nov. 10, 1663. This is about four months after New Amsterdam’s officials make Stuyvesant “buy” his soldiers to protect the fort, 484. For dangers from leaving boundaries uncertain, see, inter alia, Gehring 2000, Stuyvesant to Governor Theophilus Eaton, May 4, 1649, 46; see also papers sent to Stuyvesant regarding

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Notes to Pages 108–116

boundaries, e.g. CHSNY, 2: Deduction Respecting the Difference about Boundaries . . . 5th of Nov., 1660, and Accompanying Documents, 133–­63; see also 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs, Nov. 10, 1663, 484. For “the subject [of the boundaries] is then absolutely referred to you,” 2: Dirs to Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 20, 1664, 219. 6. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant and Council to Dirs, Feb. 28, 1664, 232, and for Stuyvesant’s fear that each of “three stools” (as he put it elsewhere) was endangered, 233. 7. Pandey 1992: 27; Roth 2007: 68, quoting Huizinga. 8. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 420. 9. See RNA, 1: Stuyvesant to Burgomasters and Schepenen, Aug. 25, 1653, 106, and 104, 105. 10. I will be capitalizing Company in this chapter to personalize it. I also retain States General to reinforce the solemnity of the investigations. 11. CHSNY, 14: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 21, 1660, 469; 2: “Answer,” 441 and see 442. 12. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 451. 13. Van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 479, and Raesly 1945: the case against Stuyvesant “must have dwindled into comparative insignificance. At any rate, their High Mightinesses apparently did not pass judgment either for or against Stuyvesant,” 134. 14. Runia 2006b: 307. 15. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 420. 16. For evidence of some colonists arriving before mid-­October 1664, CHSNY, 2: Ambassador M. van Gogh to States General, Oct. 14/24, 1664, 275. For twenty-­four men with their servants and families sailing for Holland at the end of 1664, Goodfriend 1992: 24. Most were men from the upper ranks of New Amsterdam society with close ties to the WIC; fifteen were either merchants or WIC employees. Working from a cohort of 222 male New Amsterdammers who signed the petition of September 5, 1664, took the oath of Allegiance in October 1664, and appeared on a tax list in April 1665, Goodfriend calculates that about 12 percent, or 26 members, of leading families left Manhattan Island, some to Europe and others to various colonial regions. 17. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 434. 18. Merwick 1999: 21. 19. For valuable insights on the workings of committees, Stoler 2009: 1, 29, 30. 20. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 365. 21. CHSNY, 2: Memorial of Peter Stuyvesant, Late Director of New Netherland, Oct. 19, 1665, 364. 22. For Stuyvesant’s conviction at this time that “some Lords” felt that his “Report” had vindicated him and he would soon receive his discharge, “Answer,” 428, and see 429. 23. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 365, 366. 24. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 365. 25. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 365, 366. 26. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 441 and see 442. 27. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 366, 369, 367, and for Stuyvesant’s indication that, as elsewhere, he has copies of these “and other documents,” 368. 28. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 369, 474, 369. 29. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 373–­74, 375.



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30. CHSNY, 2: “Report,” 377. 31. CHSNY, 2: Remonstrance of New Netherlanders to Stuyvesant and Council, Sept. 5, 1664, 248. 32. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 419–­23. This submission is dated Nov. 1, 1652. For “neglect or treachery,” 420, and see 420–­23. 33. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 420, 421. 34. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 422, 423, and see Jacobs 2005b for 300 men aboard, 179, and, in agreement, Ritchie 1977: 20. 35. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 422, 423. 36. Quoted in Merwick 1990: 134. 37. CHSNY, 2: see, as examples, Resolutions of Jan. 12, 1666, 423, Ap. 2, 1666, 425, and Oct. 29, 1666, 447. 38. CHSNY, 2: Resolution of States General, Ap. 2 and 17, 1666, 425. 39. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 451. 40. See Gehring 1995, Case of Abraham Verplanck vs. Allard Antony, Feb. 8, 1656, 220, and Merwick 2006: 254, 255. 41. CHSNY, 2: Van Ruyven to Stuyvesant (and entered as testimony), Aug. 7/17, 1666, 472.

Chapter 9. Dismissal, and Return 1. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 431, 432. For “live free,” “Report,” 367. 2. In his “Answer,” Stuyvesant writes of supporting testimonials from “Dirk Loten . . . at present in Amsterdam . . . [who] with many others, will be able and necessitated to testify,” CHSNY, 2: 434. Additional support will come from “many and divers affidavits of people who were there at the time and are now in Holland,” 434 and see 432; 2: “Answer:” The darta from official registers and accounts falls between 435–­76. 3. For Cousseau’s testimony, CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 471; additional declarations are 470, 471. 4. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 440 and see 441. 5. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 440. 6. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 444. 7. The Long Islanders’ description of Scott is in CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 483; for rejection of Stuyvesant as guilty of cowardice, 475–­76 and for reference to bloodshed, 485. The deposition of villagers denouncing Scott is 483 and Stuyvesant’s offer of his own property, 474. 8. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 450. 9. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 497. 10. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 508, 509. 11. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 500. 12. CHSNY, 2: “Observations,” 421 and “Reply,” 495; for frigates arriving, 494; for private farms, 495. 13. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 444, 495–­97 and 503. 14. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 500, 501. 15. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 503–­4, my italics, 491. 16. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Feb. 28, 1664, 230; “Reply,” Appendix F, 506.

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17. See CHSNY, 2: Extract: The Colony on the South River, [Mar.?], 1663, 201; Dirs. to Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 20, 1664, 219. 18. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 444. 19. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 494. For Wouter van Twiller’s awareness in the 1630s that firing on an English ship or fort would “certainly win the censure of the States General for such belligerent conduct,” Fiske 1899: 156. For rumors in New England in June 1664 of no firm peace being reached, CHSNY, 2: “Report,” Stuyvesant to Dirs., June 10, 1664, 407 and see, inter alia, “Reply,” Appendix C, 503 and Appendix D, 505. For Scott’s use of an alleged Dutch attack on him as a pretext for escalated violence, 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs, Ap. 26, 1664, 406. For Stuyvesant to Nicolls, Sept. 2, 1664: “we act . . . [in offering a truce] in the expectation that his Majesty has agreed to their High Mightinesses about the Boundary,” 2: 414. For the company’s threat of consequences should war break out, Rink 1986: 245–­46. 20. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant and Nicasius de Sille to Scott, Jan. [?], 1664, 398; 2: Remonstrance of West India Company to States General [Oct., 1663?], 217. 21. CHSNY, 2: Letters and Extracts between Dec., 1663 and Aug. 4, 1664, 390–­409, but see 2: Stuyvesant and de Sille to Scott, Jan. [?] 1664, 398; Report of Commissioners, Jan. 15, 1664, 401; Stuyvesant to Dirs., Ap. 26, 1664, 406. For Stuyvesant’s refusal to open a letter sent to him by Scott addressed as simply “Petrus Stuyvesant,” 2: Council Minute, Jan. 11, 1664, 393. 22. CHSNY, 2: For Stuyvesant’s requests to the Company in 1653–­54 for frigates, soldiers, and train-­bands, and in 1662, for men and ships, see “Answer,” 442. 23. CHSNY, 2: Dirs. to Stuyvesant and Council, Jan. 20, 1664, 219, 221. 24. CHSNY, 2: Dirs. to Stuyvesant and Council, Ap. 21, 1664, 235, 236. Stuyvesant knew on August 4, 1664 that the New England colonies were prepared to support the five rebellious English Long Island towns, 2: Extracts from Documents Relating to the Reduction of New Netherland, 409, and see 412–­15. 25. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs., Feb. 28, 1664, 231–­33. 26. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 440 my emphasis. See 2: Stuyvesant to Richard Nicolls, Aug. 23/Sept. 2, 1664, 413–­14. 27. CHSNY, 2: “Reply,” 500. 28. CHSNY, 2: Stuyvesant to Nicolls, Aug. 23/Sept. 2, 1664, extracted for Rejoinder of States General to Downing’s Reply, 413, and see 13: Drisius to Classis, Sept. 15, 1664, 393. 29. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 440; for reference to “citadel,” 2: “Answer,” 440. 30. For the episode: Gehring 2003: xiii–xix; Merwick 2006: 218, 221; Van der Zee and van der Zee 1978: 266–­70. 31. Gehring 1995: 208. 32. CHSNY, 2: “Answer,” 442. For the Company’s rejoinder, “Reply,” 503. 33. Goodfriend probably expressed a majority opinion on the notable tolerance of the English and readiness of the Dutch to acquiesce to conquest: “No more cogent testimony of the prevailing atmosphere of toleration under the early English administration is available” than Stuyvesant’s choosing to return permanently to New Amsterdam, 1992, 22. For a contrary interpretation, see Ritchie 1977. He writes that after 1664 “the [English] soldiers remain[ed] in the colony to watch the Dutch” and Nicolls did not use the garrison beyond Manhattan Island because, among other



Notes to Pages 133–137

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things, “the Dutch population would have been left unguarded,” 48, 52. For Stuyvesant’s continued activity in business affairs including acting as agent for an overseas trading company in 1668, Rink 1986: 203 and, cooperating in a rederij in 1667, see Ritchie 1977: 58, 59. 34. Fiske, writing in 1899, expressed the myth as “a warn friendship sprung up between the genial Englishman and the gallant old Dutchman,” 293. 35. Bailyn et al. 1985: 50. 36. Shorto 2004: 298, my emphasis, 299. 37. Shorto 2004: 305–­6. 38. CHSNY, 13: Stuyvesant and Council to Dirs., Sept. 4, 1659, 108. 39. Rink 1986: 22.

Chapter 10. Stuyvesant Tattooed 1. In this and the following chapter, I am presenting a limited number of texts as illustrations of the ways reputation depends on shifting cultural modes of interpretation of which historians are, among others, bellwethers. (Others could have been used as well.) I use them as significant in themselves but, more important, as indicators of the changing political formations, epistemologies, and sensibilities that have pressed on interpretations of Peter Stuyvesant. To engage in an exhaustive study of the historiography of New Netherland and Stuyvesant is beyond the scope of this book. It would in any case require a cultural anthropology of each of the texts and iconographical items examined from the late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century political and discursive landscapes through to pop culture, occasional commentaries and commemorations, novels, and children’s literature. 2. Hutton 2009: 98, and see Paul Connerton’s insistence that along with marketing, consumerism is a way of life based on forgetfulness, 104. For “capitalist colonialism,” as a cause of losing touch with the past, 104; see also Lloyd 2005: 180. 3. Hutton 2009: 99. 4. Merwick summarized some of these interpretations in 1999: 182–­86, 242. For a text stressing the prevalence of loss—­“the governor’s life in New Amsterdam was a sequence of scenes resembling the final act of his last public humiliation”—­see Raesly 1945: 134. Without being specific, Brodhead wrote of American historians who, up to the date of his writing in 1853, “from habit or prejudice, had been inclined to magnify the influence and extol the merit of the Anglo-­Saxon race, at the expense of every other element which has assisted to form the national greatness. In no particular has this been more remarkable than in the unjust view that has so often been taken of the founders of New York. Holland has long been a theme for the ridicule of British writers,” 749–­50. 5. Voorhees 2005: 309–­28, and Goodfriend 2005: 1–­10 are among others who have valuably asked these questions. Silence is a significant consideration in respect to writing about New Netherland. In 1993, for example, the Omohundro Institute sponsored a forum on law in early America. Nothing was mentioned of the Dutch legal system; see Forum 1992: 3–­50. Ritchie was correct in arguing in 1977: 3 that “scholars have largely ignored this period,” and see Klein 1974: 8–­16 for a summary of aspects of that neglect. This neglect is corroborated in a widely dispersed literature exemplified in Pagden 1993, where the Dutch are entirely absent.

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Notes to Pages 138–141

Euphemisms for the conquest are those such as “the colony’s shift to English control,” Stott 2005: 21, and the “English intrusion of 1664,” Maika 2005: 125. For the Dutch gaining the “privilege of English institutions [in 1674],” see David T. Valentine, 1853, quoted in Abbott 1873: 331. See also Balmer 1989: 9, and Roeber 1991: 221. The majority of those who have studied New Netherland have until recently supported Kammen’s contention in 1975 in Colonial New York that, “Despite the discontents and very real changes that occurred after the conquest . . . too much has been made of them. Only in a formal constitutional sense did New York become an English colony in 1664; in many important respects, the province remained predominantly Dutch,” 73. He concludes that beneficially “an “English phoenix . . . arose from Dutch ashes in 1664” . . . [and] “the native Dutch residents . . . gave the governors little or no trouble,” 74, 145. Archdeacon wrote that an “uneasiness” with changes wrought in 1664 found expression in 1673, when the Dutch briefly returned to control of New York and left traces of “hostile” ethnic divisions into the 1690s (1976: 100). In 1989, Merwick, however, asked readers to consider that in the course of those ethnic hostilities, an English governor beheaded Jacob Leisler as the leader of a Dutch faction in New York City during the spillover there of the Glorious Revolution. In the colonial period, Leisler was the only mayor of a colonial American east coast city to undergo such a punishment. 6. Fiske 1899: 294. 7. Cornell 1993: 329. 8. Cooper 1845: 47; Ferguson 2004: 271, see also 150, 295, 256, 257. For an excellent review of Ferguson’s work, Slauter 2006: 175. 9. Cooper 1845: 47, 14, and see 18, 19. 10. Cooper 1845: 14, and see 18, 19, 15. 11. Cooper 1845: 107, 106. 12. See Ferguson 2004: 254–­81. 13. Cooper 1845: 1, 8, 58, 108 and “Afterword,” by Dixon Ryan Fox, viii, ix. For the general agreement that James Fenimore Cooper’s characterizations regarding property ownership were his personal problems raised to a fictive and universal level, see, inter alia, Cooper 1845: 175. 14. [Washington Irving], Letter from Mustapha Rub-­a-­Dub Keli Kaan, Captain of a Ketch, to Assam Hacchem, Principal Slave-­Driver to His Highness the Bashaw of Tripoli [Salmagundi] in The Beauties of Washington Irving, 1866: 4. 15. Cooper 1845: 9. 16. Cooper 1845: 18; for Cooper’s introduction of Coejemans as a captain in the narrator’s father’s 1776 regiment, 13. 17. Cooper, 1841: 13. 18. In the 1835 edition, a comic illustration of Peter Stuyvesant appears as “The Valorous Governor of New Amsterdam” [Anon.], opp. title page. All quotes are from this edition. Hereafter KH. For illustrations by George Cruikshank, see Irving [Anon.] 1866. This publication illustrates Irving’s concern with declining language standards in America as well as his vanity as a man-­about-­ town, ix-­xliv. Irving points to himself and his brother Peter concocting an aborted book commencing with the “Creation of the World,” xxiii, xxiv. 19. KH, “Account of the Author,” xxiv; “To the Public,” xxv; “To the Public,” xxvi; “Account of the Author,” xviii.



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20. KH, 251. 21. KH, 311. 22. KH, 311, and see 308–­12. 23. KH, 27. For Irving continuing to denounce Christianity, perfectibility, and natural rights of conquest as empty justifications of invading Europeans, 28–­35; Cooper 1845: 142. 24. KH, 105. For the enmity of Connecticut and the “Amphyctions” at Boston to New Netherland see, inter alia, 180. Irving regarded Connecticut’s people as “the greatest poachers in Christendom, except the Scotch border nobles,” 184. 25. KH, 106. 26. KH, 168. For Stuyvesant teaching the people “to hold their tongues, stay at home and tend to their business,” and for Irving writing that, in Stuyvesant’s day, mercifully “party feud and distinctions were almost forgotten,” 171, 166. For “the enlightened vulgar,” 260. 27. KH, 263, 175, 202. For Irving’s worry that Americans were inordinately concerned to “affect . . . the world at large,” 148. 28. KH, 186–­89. 29. KH, 187. For reference to the continental army, KH, 187, and see 188. 30. KH, 175. For his paeon against war, see also [Washington Irving], 1866, 69–­70 and KH, 249. (After 1656, Fort Casimir is referred to as Fort New Amstel.) 31. KH, 242–­44, 249, 250. In early 1656, Stuyvesant rightly referred to the hostilities as a “threatened and feared war” averted by peace negotiations on both sides and, somewhat later, as “the Southern expedition,” Gehring, 1995, Proclamation for a Day of Prayer and Fasting, [Jan. 26, 1656], 208, and see Stuyvesant’s Proposals, Feb. 22, 1656, 230. Curiously, Stuyvesant’s call for volunteers for the expedition specified compensation for loss of a limb or maiming but not loss of life, Gehring, 1995, Call for Volunteers, Aug. 19, 1655, 76. As argued in Chapter 11, I reject “war” in favor of “military expedition” or its equivalent. For Brodhead 1853 using “expedition,” 604, as quoted in Abbott 1873: 180. For Brodhead’s full coverage of the assault in the Delaware area, 602–­6. For New Amsterdam officials’ call for public prayers for the expedition to the Delaware, RNA, 1: 342–­43. 32. KH, 310, 311, and for “Happy” is the nation not “insatiable for territory,” 268. 33. KH, 252. 34. Irving’s criticism of Stuyvesant’s adherence to “the broad Dutch bottom of unoffending imbecility” is KH, 169. Irving’s insistence that the Dutch times were “the poetic age of our city . . . like the early obscure days of Rome . . . open to all the embellishments of heroic fiction,” is Lydenberg 1953: 7. Lydenberg is using “The Author’s Apology,” a prefix to the 1849 revised edition of KH. Paragraphs there are dated 1848 by Irving. 35. Merwick 2006: 252. 36. For his useful distinction between origins and beginnings, Mitchell 2005: 466. The forty years mentioned in the Ordinance of 1663 (see Chapter 8) point toward a known chronological history, not origins. Frijhoff rightly contends that New Amsterdam was not founded for religious reasons and that religion “never became the founding myth” of the Dutch of New York State,” 2008a, 49. 37. Steensgaard 1996: 153. This advice is preceded by the words, “No great attention should be paid to the question of reputation or honor, which is often taken too heavily.” We are merchants,

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Notes to Pages 148–153

153. Steensgaard concludes that, in principle, in the East India Company in the 1620s “the use of violence was subordinated to the rational pursuit of profit” (but with the rule by no means always obeyed), 153. 38. KH, 297, 271, 269. 39. KH, 300–­302, and see 298. 40. KH, 310, 305. 41. KH, 309, 310.

Chapter 11. A Place in Early America 1. Stott 2005: 38, and for caricatures of Stuyvesant, figures 1, 2, 4, following 18. 2. Stott 2005: 22, quoting Rand, Behind Manhattan Gables: A Story of New Amsterdam, 1663–­ 1664 (1896), ix. For other inaccuracies, Stott 2005: 36. For “old,” see Goodfriend 1992: 289n160; Fiske 1899: 293, 290; Rink 1986: 262. 3. CHSNY, 2: Dutch Towns on Long Island to Stuyvesant and Council, [n.d., pre-­1664 invasion], 375 and for “old faithful servant,” 2: Stuyvesant to Dirs., [n.d., mid-­August 1666], 450. 4. Paul 2010: 170. Historicism was evolutionary theory’s complement in German historical writing at the time. Paul writes of its “ability to explain a world witnessing rapid change . . . more convincingly than any other world-­view available to educated citizens in the mid-­nineteenth century.” To historicists, progressive rather than sequential change was central. Ideas about “God, human beings and the natural world,” all were “awaiting further development,” 172, 179. 5. Fiske 1899: 226. Voorhees 2009: 85 writes of Flatbush’s agricultural community in the 1680s as “late medieval” in appearance but competently part of an international economy. 6. See Haskell 1977: vi, vii; for new intellectual virtues, Paul 2011a: 107. 7. Haskell 1977: 43. Jörn Rüssen has valuably contributed to an understanding that the nineteenth-­century shift in explanation and causation was not meant to render the social sciences God-­less. He points to Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that “every epoch is immediately related to God, and that its value is not based on its outcome, but on the very existence of its own.” Von Ranke had in mind “that the past should never be understood in the conceptual framework of the present, thus repudiating the Enlightenment concept of progress, as well as giving back the past its ‘Eigensinn’ (meaning in itself),” 266. For her conviction that “theories of modernity rely upon the legitimacy of secularisation,” Davis 2008: 7. Gregory 2008, offers an excellent explanation of why religious belief was vulnerable to the inroads made by evolutionary theory and skepticism, 502–­5. 8. Haskell 1977: 43, 44; see also Paul 2010: 174. In 2011a, Paul joined others in arguing that the scientific historians were not coldly empirical, but in fact searching for intellectual virtues within a new and workable “scholarly asceticism,” 107. 9. See Stott 2005: 15, and Merwick 1999: 184, 185, 242–­43. As an example, see the research edited and presented in Goodwin, Royce, and Putnam 1897. 10. Outstanding among the nineteenth-­century historians and editors were John Romeyn Brodhead 1845, 1853–­1871; Berthold Fernow [& Edmund B. O’Callaghan,] 1856–­1883, 1902, 1907; Henry C. Murphy 1865; Edmund B. O’Callaghan 1849–­51, 1846–­48, [with Fernow] 1856–­83, 1865a, b, 1868; David T. Valentine 1862.



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For comprehensive commentaries on the discovery, translation, and publication of Dutch language documents, those of Charles T. Gehring should be consulted: 1988: 33–­51, and 2005: 287–­307. Readers may wish to know that, for example, the valuable 1628 letter of Michaëlius to Smoutius was only discovered in 1857 and the records of New Amsterdam properly translated and printed only in 1895. 11. In Brodhead 1853, see Valuable Standard Works Published in Harper and Brothers, New York, 6 (following Index); Abbott’s Peter Stuyvesant was published by Dodd and Mead, New York, 1873. 12. For the “archaic individualism” ascribed to many antebellum intellectuals by late nineteenth-­century historians, Haskell 1977: 60. 13. Abbott 1873: 122, iii. Brodhead 1853 judged the 1664 conquest as a “treacherous and violent seizure of the territory and possessions of an unsuspecting ally . . . no less a breach of private justice than of public faith,” 745. He continued: Among “all the acts of selfish perfidy which royal ingratitude concerned and executed, there have been few more characteristic and none more base.” The flag of Holland had “rightfully” waved over New Netherland for half a century. 14. See Brodhead 1853: 606 and Abbott 1873: 180; For O’Callaghan quoted, 313; Abbott quoted, 303. 15. Lamb and Harrison 1877: 216, 214, 216. For a similar vindication of Stuyvesant while in Holland and severe criticism of the WIC, Fiske 1899: 292. 16. Fiske 1899: 158; for Fiske’s admiration for Irving, 160, 161. 17. Fiske 1899: 159; Brodhead 1853: 749–­50; Fiske 1899: 199, and see 158–­61. For seventeenth-­ century English mythmaking about the Dutch as “sadistically cruel” as grounds for seizing New Netherland, Pestana, 2011, 39 and see 54, 55. 18. Fiske 1899: 155–­57, 191, 206. 19. Fiske 1899: 221–­25. In the 1890s, the origins of American freedoms were being debated by East Coast historians as against Frederick Jackson Turner and his Midwest-­oriented followers, with Turner advancing the frontier thesis and the Eastern historians promoting the germ theory of history. For his acceptance of the germ theory, Fiske 1899: 222 and see 221. Writing in 1974, Klein gave detailed attention to Fiske’s conversion to “the theory of Teutonic origins of American democracy and of Aryan race supremacy,” noting his role as president of the Immigration Restriction League and hostility toward non-­Anglo-­Saxon people, 11, 12. 20. Fiske 1899: 223, for his conviction that initially Virginia resembled New Netherland, having “an autocratic governor and council” acting as agents of a commercial company. However, after only eleven years, Virginia set proper English institutions in place, 132, and see 225. Fiske advances this point in order to counter the argument that “our free . . . [American] institutions were derived not from England but from Holland,” 132. 21. Fiske 1899: 30, 216. For evidence that this kind of denunciation of New Netherlanders did not cease with the end of the nineteenth century, see Greene (1988): New Netherland was “characterized by little civic consciousness, slight concern for achieving social cohesion, [and] high levels of individual competitiveness and public contention,” quoted in Voorhees 2005: 320. 22. Fiske 1899: 159. Fiske fits Haskell’s description in 1977 of a historian making the transition to professional “scientific” history. Fiske had read widely—­see fifty-­five references to secondary sources in his study—­and often registered the need to call upon “facts” to ground authority, 57, 127, 157.

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Notes to Pages 157–160

23. Fiske 1899: 294, and discussing Quakers, 232–­36. On 236, Fiske ascribed persecution of the Quakers not to the New Netherlanders, but solely to Stuyvesant. Jacobs 2005b argues convincingly that many historians (such as Fiske) failed to make a distinction between Stuyvesant’s fears about the Quakers’ heterodoxy and their insubordination to legitimate authority, see Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 note 24. For Stuyvesant upholding the primacy of conscience, Corwin, 1: Records and Resolutions of Stuyvesant and Council, Nov. 28, 1661, 511, Stuyvesant to New Haven Colony, Mar. [?], 1662, 519, and CHSNY, 12: Letters to Commissary on the Delaware, June 21, 1650, 66. For crediting “European colonization” [and not the Dutch] with founding “one of the most flourishing cities on the globe,” Abbott 1873: iv. 24. Fiske 1899: 257, 274. 25. I am grateful to Robert Blair St. George for drawing this to my attention. 26. Hulme 2000: see 34, 38, 39; Dening, 2004:18. 27. Zuckerman 2003: 313; Bolton quoted in Bender 2006: 13; Warner 2000: 51. For the exceptionalist rhetoric that placed the English Puritan perspective on America as the center of a Christian world replacing Rome, Myles 2000: this rhetoric was to become a “central force in shaping American identity from the seventeenth century to the present,” 93. For the negative image of New Netherland as against this “religious mythology and the success of its supporters in United States historiography,” Frijhoff 1995: 567. For my critiques of an American historiography that has failed to pay due respect to a diversity of cultures, Merwick 1994, 1999, 2006. 28. Warner 2000: 65, 52, 53, 63, 69. For the unlikelihood that any colonial themes will ever have “the ego satisfaction of national belonging,” Warner 2000: 52, and for Bender’s similar admission that “the unitary logic of national history seems to have kept at bay new scholarship that could be transformative,” 2006, 5. For New Netherland erased from the “national metanarrative,” as well as “the American creation myth,” Goodfriend 2005: 2, 3. 29. Stoler 2001: 830. 30. Hulme 2000: 35; Stoler 2001: 840. 31. Bender 2006: 5. On the ethical needed in history, see Ganguly 2005: 236, Booth 2010: 462, and Cracraft 2004: if history is “to rediscover itself as a moral discipline, if it is to take the heralded ethical turn, the implicit morality of conventional historical practice  .  .  . [an alleged neutrality] simply is no longer good enough,” 42. For Bender’s critique of the “unethical distinctions” arising from uncritical nationalism, and the historian David Thelan’s appraisal of nationalist history as “unethical because it delegitimizes the more authentic identities of ordinary people,” Neem 2011: 45, 46. Recent literature on the ethical takes up the claim of Emmanuel Levinas that “ethics is now, not epistemology, the ‘first philosophy,’” Vanhoozer 2003: 16. For her thoughtful exploration of “the ethics of history at the present time,” Ermarth 2004: 61. 32. Bender 2006: 15, 49. 33. Ganguly 2005: 236; Stoler 2009: 69. 34. Davis 2008: 77. For his assessment that “we appear to be at a moment when we need new intellectual and professional approaches to deal with religion” and that there is “a new turn to religion among historians” and a search for new paradigms, Shaw 2006: 3, 7. This contention is supported by the appearance since 2004 of seven forums devoted to the subject and organized by



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five leading journals: History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 43: “Historians and Ethics,” Introduction, Brian Fay (December 2004), 9 contributors; History and Theory 45: “Religion and History,” ed. David Gary Shaw (December 2006), 9 contributors; New Literary History 38: “The Religious, The Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession” (Autumn 2007), 3 contributors; Social Analysis, The International Journal of Culture and Social Practice 52: “Against Belief,” ed. Galina Lindquist & Simon Coleman (Spring 2008), 12 contributors; History and Theory 47: “Forum: God, Science, and Historical Explanation” (December 2008), 2 contributors; WMQ 3rd ser. 66: “Critical Forum: Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religion, Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World” (April 2009), 9 contributors; Representations 105: “Special Issue: Early Modern Secularism,” ed. Victoria Kahn (Winter 2009), 6 contributors. As journals written largely for historians and others in the social sciences, the issues deal largely with modernity and the function of its categories in relation to religion and secularization. For a helpful way into this broad and complex literature, see Kahn 2009: 1–­11. One of the issues raised in these forums is the degree to which historians can claim a stance of neutrality toward religious belief. Shaw 2006 offers a useful overview of this issue, 2, 3. For his examination of the relationship between religious experience and academic inquiry as well as his conclusion (supported by many of the above contributors) that the historian needs to consider eschewing neutrality and accept that “beliefs may be held and examined at the same time,” Appleyard 1987, quoting Frye at 109, 16. My concern in this chapter has been with a literature concerning new paradigms about religion specifically made available to and used by historians. Students of historical theology have also proposed new linkages between religion, modernity, and postmodernity. Vanhoozer published the work of a number of leading scholars in 2003 in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, where many of their references overlap with those of historians and anthropologists. They reaffirm the need to investigate religion’s cross-­fertilizations with changing cultural formations such as postmodernity. Contributors to Webster and Schner’s collection of essays in Theology After Liberalism: A Reader, 2000, take up the same issues. 35. For a valuable analysis of the present scientific worldview and its relationship to religion, Gregory 2008: 495–­501. See also Salmi 2011 quoting Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-­century historicist generally taken to have broken away from explanations resting on God: “every era is in direct relation to God, and its value does not reside in what it creates but in its existence, its own being,” 181. 36. Consult Shaw 2006: 5 and see also Buckser 2008: 52. For ours as a “postmetaphysical culture,” Schulenberg 2007: 372. For a critique of the followers of Carl Schmidt who hold that with secularism “the world took a wrong turn,” Kahn 2009: 3. For the need to find continuity of theological forms, Davis 2008: 81. For his rejection of a “linear movement from premodern traditional religiosity to modern scientific secularism,” Gregory 2008: following 511. In 2009, Piciotto reminded readers that the decline of “traditional religion” is now “so familiar it feels like knowledge,” 85. For the sake of space, I have sidestepped the large literature on the rise of the Protestant ethic and the Weberian thesis. It is certainly within the scope of this study, but requires a more in-­depth examination than these pages allow. There is no consensus on the impact of the Enlightenment on the history of religious belief.

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Many scholars do not accept it as a turning point in all respects. David D. Hall and others would, for example, reject the Enlightenment as issuing in the concept and practice of toleration 2009, 413. Ganguly, however, accepts the Enlightenment as a shift from mythos to logos (and all that entails) 2005: 28. She deals superbly with Immanuel Kant on 212. Many scholars are in agreement with Richard A. Garcia—­though their wording may be less forceful—­that the Enlightenment ushered in the “totalitarianism of rationality,” 2006: 526. Bell also accepts the Enlightenment as a moment when religion became identified as the “irrational,” 2006: 31. 37. Buckser 2008: 41. In this volume we have observed the interaction of the religious and the secular in ordinances that worked because they were one historical moment’s way of uniting the political and religious. Obversely, we encountered a different interaction of the two in the late nineteenth-­century social scientists’ conviction that causation attributed to God or Nature needed to be displaced if historical explanations based on a scientific paradigm were to prevail, see Chapter 7 and this chapter’s earlier discussion of the rise of nineteenth-­century social science. 38. O’Donnell 2011: 126, 103. O’Donnell’s insight into the capacity of a society to shape its various religious confessions rather than be shaped by them is also present in Frijhoff ’s 2008b study of the Dutch Republic. 39. Garcia 2006: 526, 528. For Garcia following Geertz’s Religion as a Cultural System, 526–­28. 40. Bilodeau 2011: 226. For Tamburello’s insistence in 1994 that a paradigm shift in interpretations of religious practice is recent, 3, 103, 108–­10, and for a valuable overview of new directions in “the scholarship of the past twenty years,” Juster and Gregerson, 2011: 1–­15. 41. Tamburello 1994 notes that Calvin was primarily concerned with piety and wanted his Institutes to be considered a “summa pietatis,” 102. 42. See William James, 1958 ed., The Varieties of Religious Experience where, throughout the collected series of lectures (1901–­1902) and especially in the “Conclusions,” he writes of “each man . . . [staying] in his own experience” of the spiritual life, 369. 43. See Paul 2010: 179. 44. Frijhoff 1995: 19–­64. For Frijhoff ’s analysis of Evert’s pamphlets within the popular seventeenth-­century genre, see 53–­64 and for titles of the two pamphlets, one published in Utrecht in 1623 and the other in Amsterdam in the same year, 65, 66. 45. Frijhoff 1995: 21. Tamburello 1994, points to Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thinkers claiming mysticism “as if their traditions had exclusive right to this phenomenon,” 108. He would place Frijhoff among recent scholars demonstrating that the Reformers also drew upon medieval spirituality and mysticism, 108. Fuchs 2011 deals effectively with sameness and difference within early modern religious discourse and practice, arguing that the wider the spectrum of texts the more sameness appears, 58, 59. 46. For her discussion of the explanatory limitations of modern history and anthropology in relation to belief in the case of the Santhal Rebellion of 1855 as well as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s answer to the problem posed, Ganguly 2005: 22, 23. 47. Frijhoff sets Evert’s behavior in a comprehensive discussion of Dutch pietism, 875–­79; see also 869 for the possible effect of pietism on Evert’s outpourings of anger in New Netherland. Alongside Frijhoff ’s scholarship, the groundbreaking works of Caroline Bynum 1987, 1991, 2007, and, more recently, Alexandra Walsham 2011, are among the many carefully balanced works on



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the place of the emotions and affective religious practices in the medieval, Reformation, and post-­ Reformation periods. 48. This passage is quoted and translated by Jacobs 2005a: 223, see also Frijhoff 1995: 799. Stuyvesant’s student years in the artes faculty at the University at Franeker have been carefully set out by Jacobs 2005a. Using lists of the scholarly books auctioned by Stuyvesant in the early 1630s, Jacobs is able to construct a picture of the theological, philosophical, and doctrinal books (mostly in Latin) probably studied by the young man and to place him in the orthodox Counter-­ Remonstrant center of Dutch Calvinism “possibly with a slight inclination to militancy,” 229. 49. Colenbrander 1910: xxxix. Recent historians of New Netherland may not have dipped into Colenbrander’s contribution to the great Linschoten Collection, but they have increasingly given full weight to the overseas context, see Frijhoff 1995, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2008a, b; Jacobs 1996, 2004, 2005a, b; Klooster 1997; Merwick 1990, 1994, 1999, 2006; Schmidt 2001; Venema 1993, 1998, 2003, 2010; Voorhees 1994, 2008.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Abbott, John, S. C., 152–54, 157. See also Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam Alrichs, Jacob, 60, 175 Altieri, Charles, on the universal and particular in a work of art, xx Amersfoort, Long Island, 64 Amsterdam: on Delaware River, 51; supports defensive measures in 1664, 129 Archdeacon, Thomas J., interprets English conquest, 192n5 Beeckman, Willem, 8, 31, 37, 38, 75, 112 belief, religious, 160, 161, 164; efforts to access and maintain a relationship with God, xvi; and New Netherlanders, 63–71; requirements for, 62–66. See also spirituality Bender, Thomas, 196nn28, 31; adopts new colonial history framework, 159 Bernard of Clairvaux, 84, 85, 93, 186n19 Beverwijck (Albany, New York), 22, 33, 41, 46–47, 54, 82, 176n19; church membership in, 98; Stuyvesant admonishes magistrates of, 93 Blom, Domine Hermanus, 79, 82; describes Esopus massacre, 96, 97 Bogardus, Domine Everardus, 14, 163–65, 198n44; and influence of pietism on, 198n47. See also Evert Willemsz Bolton, Herbert, critiques American colonialist historians, 158, 166 Breuckelen (Brooklyn), 15, 28; Calvinist community in, 64–71 Brodhead, John Romeyn, 153; cites ridicule of New Netherlanders, 191n4; excoriates English conquest of New Netherland, 195n13; favorable assessment of Stuyvesant, 154; rejects “provincial” accounts about New Netherlanders, 155

Calvin, John, xvi, 162 Calvinism, 68, 80, 171n52, 181n19, 185n10, 186n35; and Geneva Confession of Faith, 180n10 Calvinist practices, 28, 62, 63, 65, 99, 162, 164; different from later Calvinism, 162–63; in New Netherland, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83 The Chainbearer (Cooper), political purposes of, 138–41. See also Cooper, James Fenimore Charles II, king of England, 94, 105, 116 Christianity, as force of energy, 84, 85 Church, apostolic, 69, 78, 80 Church, Dutch Reformed, possible membership of in New Netherland, 97, 98 “church,” meanings of debated, 72, 76, 78, 80, 81 church-houses (huis-kerken), 87, 93; and Stuyvesant’s, 75, 80–83. See also conventicles Classis of Amsterdam, 4, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76–79 Coejemans, Andries, 139, 140, 143 Colenbrander, H. T., and critique of U.S. historians, 166 colonial America, recent analytical orientation, 157–66 comets, 185n14 confessional politics, 13, 16, 17. See also Reformation, Protestant Connecticut, 26, 43, 108, 123; negates rightful existence of New Netherland and Stuyvesant’s authority, 32, 56. See also Hartford conscience, freedom of in New Netherland, 13, 18. conventicles, 17, 66, 68, 71–79, 171n46. See also church-houses Cooper, James Fenimore, 138–41, 143, 157 Cortelyou, Jacques, 28 Cousseau, Jacques, 112, 122 Couturier, Hendrick, Peter Stuyvesant (portrait circa 1660), xix Crew, Phyllis Mack, 73

214 Index Cruikshank, George, Peter Stuyvesant and the Pig Tail (1866), 149 Curaçao, 6–9, 37, 42, 51; Stuyvesant voyages to, 88 Days of Thanksgiving and Prayer, in Europe, 93, 98. See also ordinances, religious Delaware River area (South River), 10, 15, 33, 35, 50, 81, 82, 108, 126, 176n29, 179n21. See also Swedish forts deterrence, policy of, 34–40, 42, 46, 54, 55, 97, 107, 127, 128, 130, 131, 144. See also military arrangements in New Netherland discourse: no theology of war against natives, 96; religious, as powerful, 97, 98; used by Stuyvesant regarding natives, 95, 96 Dort, Synod of, 164, and baptismal formulary, 77 Drisius, Domine Samuel, 77, 78, 187n1 Dutch, as allegedly “sadistically cruel,” 195n17 The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America (Fiske), 152; arguments in and stylistics of, 155–59. See also Fiske, John Eaton, Theophilus, New Haven, Connecticut, 4 edification, 70, 71, 75; Christian New Netherlanders’ desire for, 63, 66 English attack on New Netherland: as act of war, 129–32; descriptions of, x, xiii, 148, 154; and conquest interpreted, 192n6 The Enlightenment, 28, 136 emotions, role of, 44, 50, 64, 113, 114; in Stuyvesant’s relations with natives, 8, 41–43; in Stuyvesant’s relations with West India Company, 8 Esopus (Wiltwijck, Kingston), 26, 33, 50, 54, 61–63, 176n30; Dutch-native violence at, 39, 40, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97; natives of, 43, 44, 82, 94; Stuyvesant at, 35, 40, 49, 55, 61–63, 162 Evert Willemsz. See Bogardus, Domine Everardus evolutionary theory, 159; and historical explanation, 153; used for negative image of New Netherland, 152, 155, 156 experience, role of, 160, 163–65; and contextualization, 106–8; and recovery of historical past, 64, 106–9; Stuyvesant’s, in Holland, 109–32 Fernando de Naronha, Stuyvesant’s service at, 6

Ferguson, Robert A., explores early Republic’s literature, 138, 139 Fiske, John, 152, 153, 155–57, 182n24; and germ theory, 193n19, 193n20; and Stuyvesant as alleged leader of Quaker persecutions, 196n23. See also The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America Flatbush, Long Island, 64, 65 Flushing, Long Island (Vlissingen), 22, 31; conventicles at, 74, 75; and Quakers, 17; villagers in ix, xii, xviii forgetting, xiv, 136, 141, 191n2 Fort Casimir (later New Amstel), 145, 146 fragments of the historical past, 62, 63, 82, 163 Frijhoff, Willem, xviii, 13, 21, 79, 80; centers spirituality in study of Domine Everardus Bogardus, 163–65 Ganguly, Debjani, 160; and critique of modernity, xiii, xiv Garcia, Richard A., and synthesis between religion and culture of secularism, 161 Goodfriend, Joyce D.: harmony between English and Dutch post-1664, 190n33; and New Netherland in American historiography, 196n28 Goodyear, Stephen, 4 Goslinga, Cornelis Ch., 20 Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 152, 154, 157. See also History of the City of New York Hartford, Connecticut, 127, 128; treaty with Dutch uncertain, 81. See also Connecticut Herrman, Augustine, mission for Stuyvesant to Delaware area, 107 historians, American, misinterpretations of Stuyvesant’s later years, 132–35 historical explanation, and nineteenth-century reformers, 152, 153 historical writing: and need for ethical component, 196n31; and place of neutrality, 197n34 historicism, 194n4 historiography: American, xviii; of New Netherland, xv History of the City of New York (Lamb and Harrison), 152–55. See also Harrison, Mrs. Burton, and Lamb, Martha The History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty



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. . . By Diedrich Knickerbocker (Irving, 1835 ed.): continuing influence of, 151, 155; considers war and peace, 144, 145; pits seventeenth-century New Netherlanders against nineteenth-century Americans, 142–45; political purposes of, 138–50; stylistic devices of, 142, 146–48, 150 Hulme, Peter, 158, 159 humanists, Dutch, and Providence, 187n37 Indian-hating, 96, 97 Iroquois: diplomatic traditions of, 42; Indian Warriors Returning with a Captive, x Irving, Washington, 151, 157, 192n18; characterizes Stuyvesant’s personality, 144, 147, 148, 150. See also The History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1835 ed.) Jacobs, Jaap, xviii, 28–29; on Reformed Church membership in New Netherland, 97, 98 Kammen, Michael, interprets conquest of New Netherland, 192n5 Kieft, Governor Willem, 7, 21, 24, 143, 145, 168n2, 173n25; ridiculed, 155; wars against natives, 10, 14 Knickerbocker, Diedrich, Stuyvesant as favorite hero of, 141–48. See also History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1835 ed.) Krieger, Martin, 47, 112 Lamb, Martha, 152, 154, 157. See also History of the City of New York The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), questions contemporary American values, 140, 141. See also Cooper, James Fenimore Laurissen, Andries, and military report, 82 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 76 Lloyd, David: on Irish famine, and modernity and forgetfulness, xiv Long Island villagers: Dutch face impending English attack, 105, 106, 116, 123; English complaints against Stuyvesant, 38 Long Islanders, English, 108, 121, 125, 126; opinion of West India Company on threat from, 123

“The Long Reformation,” 170n40 Lord’s Supper, practice of, 75 loss, 165, 166; highlights a state of belonging, 166; not “tragic,” xviii. See also forgetting Luke, Gospel of, cited by Stuyvesant, 56, 57, 90, 91, 122, 130, 148 Lutherans: in Amsterdam, 76–79; in New Netherland, 4; Stuyvesant’s dispute with, 75–77 Manhattan Island, and serious native disturbances on, 89 Maryland, 82; threatens New Netherland, 90 Massachusetts General Court, Stuyvesant urged to mollify, 126 medieval religious practices, and struggle to believe, 66. Megapolensis, Domine Johannes: on baptismal formulary, 77, 78; catechism of, 69; dispute with Lutherans, 76–79; friend of Stuyvesant, 6; as “Jesuit” and pro-papacy, 183n17 Melijn, Cornelis, 172n15 memory studies, 167n6 Merrell, James H., 42 Merwick, Donna, interprets conquest, 192n5 Middelburg (Newton), 71 Middleton, Simon, 23, 24, 29 military arrangements in New Netherland: defensive/offensive, 26; and municipal autonomy, 26, 27. See also deterrence missionary landscape, 69, 80; bleakness of, 70, 71; kinetic nature of, 72; and Stuyvesant, 73 modernity, 142; power of, xiii, 160; pressures of, on Stuyvesant’s reputation, 136; theories about, 194n7 Mohawks, 33, 41, 55 Munsees, 33, 41 myth-making: difficulty of dislodging, 134, 135; in historical writing, xviii Nassau-Siegen, Johan Maurits van, 4 nationalism, 157, 158, 160 natives: religious conversion of, 68. See also individual groups “the needle of sin,” 84, 93 New Amsterdam, 33, 54, 55; authority passes from Stuyvesant to municipal officers, 25, 40, 55; daily intercourse with natives in, 35; described in 1660, 179n22; as emerging urban community, 41; as “European” foundation, 196n23; founding

216 Index New Amsterdam (cont.) of, 24; inaccurate nineteenth-century representations of, 151; ”old” as negative description of Stuyvesant and, 151, 152; records of, 195n10; Stuyvesant and its founding, 31; surrender of, xi, 31, 56, 57, 103–6, 162, 187n1 New Amsterdammers: affirm Stuyvesant’s sense of abandonment before surrender, 116, 117, 123; conflicting reports on, at surrender, 116, 124; as laughable, 155 New Netherland: as alleged failed colonial project, 30; and emerging stable communities, 40, 41; English attack on as European-style war, 126, 127, 129–32; English neighbors encroaching on, 143, 144; evaluated negatively against New England, 196n27; geographically uncharted, 173n38; and historiography in overseas context, 199n49; as Indian world, 33, 34; intimations of collapse of, 90, 91; population of, 33; promising interpretations of, 159, 160; silence in historiography of, 191n5; surrender of, as metaphoric, 135; unstable religious landscape of, 65–68 New Netherlanders, 65; and acceptance of Thanksgiving ordinances, 94; misidentified under “modernity,” xiv, 28; negative descriptions of, 138, 155; relations with natives, 33–41. See also belief, religious New Utrecht, 31 New York: historical recovery of, 137; no mythic origins, 147, 193n36 Nicolls, Colonel Richard, 94, 130, 131, 190nn19, 33; effects surrender of New Amsterdam, 56, 57; punishes slander of English crown as high treason, 29 Den Nieuw Nederlandsche Indiaen, 6, 95, 168n10 O’Donnell. Catherine, the secular and religious in eighteenth-century Maryland, 161 ordinances (Days of Thanksgiving and Prayer), xvii, 73, 84–99; complement Dutch culture, 98; emphasize Christ, 92; general characteristics of, 84–87, 89, 95; many functions of, 85, 94; modulate Indianhating, 97; and other discursive forms, 88; and policy of deterrence, 97; and references to natives, 89–90, 96; requirements set

upon believers, 87; as Stuyvesant’s kind of discourse, 85, 88; use of biblical typologies in, 84, 92 Otto, Paul, 41 “the outcast,” ix–xii, xix–xx, 111, 166 Paul, apostle, 69, 70, 78, 92 Paul, Herman, and scientific historians, 194n8 Pavonia, 39 Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam (Abbott), 152–54. See also Abbott, John S. C. petitions, book of, 70 pietism, 79, 163, 164 piety, intermingles with daily life, 81 pillerization, 171n45 Polhemius, Domine Johannes Theodorus, 63, 65, 66, 70, 71, 82, 180n8; fails to provide edification, 65, 66 preachers, Calvinist, 67, 181nn15, 16, 183n9; compared unfavorably with Jesuits in Canada, 79; defended by Stuyvesant, 79; illegal substitutes for, 74, 75; in New Amsterdam, 67; in New Netherland, 70; as “peace delegates,” 84, 92; and population in New Netherland, 80; and “sending out,” 68; sermons of, 181n17; as sign of impermanence, 67 “province,” multiple meanings of, 168n16 Quakers, 156, 157; as anarchic, 73; in early New England and historiography of, 29; Long Island villagers’ fear of, 73; persecution of in New Netherland, 16, 17, 29, 73–75, 170nn38, 39, 182n24, 183n8; and “Spirit of Evil,” 89 Raritans, 23, 54 Reformation, Protestant, 18, 64, 75; affects believers’ lives, 165; emphasis on experiential, 68; inaugurates new forms of politics, 12, 13, 15–18; leaders draw on medieval traditions of spirituality, 198n45; Lutheran heritage in New Netherland, 77; and new imaginary, 68; Stuyvesant and scope of, 73; Stuyvesant’s place within, xvi Reformed Church: concessions to Lutherans in Holland, 183nn13, 15; dissentions in, 183n18 religion, 82, 197n36; in American historical studies, 160–66; and colonial studies, 165;



Index 217

historically differing relationships with secular, 198n37; and modern secularism, 197n36; myth in New Netherland as unimportant, 184n22; and new historical approaches to, 196n34; and recent historical theology, 197n34; and secular, xvii, 13; significance of Psalms in New Netherland, 184n31; as subject of historical studies, 165. See also belief; spirituality Remonstrants: as Calvinists, 28; oppose Stuyvesant, 24; leading role in founding New Amsterdam, 24 Rensselaerswijck, 10, 26, 41, 81 Revolution, American, 143; Dutch participation in as marginal, 140; as moral event, 158 Rink, Oliver A., 135 Ritchie, Robert C., 191n5; and post-conquest unrest, 190n33 Rustdorp (Queens), Long Island, and Quakers, 17 St. Martin, Island of, 9 Schaats, Domine Gideon, 79 Scott, Captain John, 31, 127, 128, 190n21; continued rebelliousness of, 129; menaces of, 116, 123; mocks Stuyvesant for his weak military forces, 56; Stuyvesant seeks reconciliation and truce with, 127, 128, 131 secularism, 14, 157, 160, 162, and secularized worldview, 80. See also belief; religion Selijns, Domine Henricus, 63, 80, 81; fears English on Long Island, 94; and ordinances, 91, 92 Seneca natives, 31, 33 Shorto, Russell, 99 soldiers, Dutch, in New Netherland, 8, 46, 47, 48, 50, 178nn9, 10, 116; along Delaware River, 48, 50; disrespected, 48; in Esopus, 49, 55; as fortune-seekers, 177n7; insubordination and violence of, 48, 49; numbers, 46, 49 spirituality, 65, 162–65; Catholic and Protestant practices of, 164; and historians, 99; requires further investigation in New Netherland studies, 98, 99; and Stuyvesant, 162, 163, 165; value in historical recovery of, 64. See also belief; religion States General (The Hague), 20, 24, 25; and army, 46; supports deterrence, 37 States General (The Hague), Committee on West Indian Affairs adjudicates Stuyvesant

and West India Company cases for surrender of New Netherland, 109–32; submissions of Stuyvesant and West India Company to, but findings on submissions unknown, 110–12; workings of, 113 Staten Island, soldiers stationed at, 47 Stoler, Ann Laura: and emotions of early modern imperialists, 160; identifies reoriented colonial American studies, 158, 159 Stott, Annette, 151, 153 structure of distance, 45, 54; based on municipal autonomy, 54; played out in Stuyvesant versus New Amsterdam officials, 26, 41 Stuyvesant, Peter: and belief, xv, xvi–xvii; careful in administration of the law, 24, 38; concern for acts against his government’s authority, 28, 29, 34, 73; conflict with leading New Amsterdam merchants, 1647–1653, xvi, 5, 9, 18–32; demands West India Company provide adequate military defence, 105, 107, 115, 118, 124, 128, 131; determined to avoid bloodshed in 1664, 122, 126, 129, 130, 131, 190n19; early life and career of, xiii, 4, 5–9, 21, 165, 199n48; exerts control on Dutch territorial expansion, 37, 38; fears threat from English, 22, 49, 50, 90, 107, 125, 129; fits into new orientation in colonial studies and recent studies of religion and belief, 159, 160–62; as “General,” 44, 45, 46–57; journeys to Esopus, 49, 61–63, 162; and loss, xviii, 29– 30, 57; and oath of office, xv, 3–5, 12, 29–30, 31, 34, 56, 125; relations with natives, 33–45, 51–53, 174n38; relations with West India Company strained, 9, 23, 38, 47, 48, 50–53; and soldiers, 9, 22, 40–50, 107; supported by local ministers, 4, 16; and trope of loss, xii; weakness of military forces recognized, 25, 56. See also Stuyvesant, in Holland; Stuyvesant, manages Calvinist practices; Stuyvesant, representations of; Stuyvesant, reputation of Stuyvesant, in Holland, 109–32; as archivist and historian, 1664, 113; assessments of John S. C. Abbott and Mrs. Burton Harrison/ Martha Lamb, 154, 155; “Answer” of (1666), 112, 115, 119–23; “Report” of (1665), 112, 114–17

218 Index Stuyvesant, manages Calvinist practices in New Netherland: and Calvinist pietism, 7; combines politics and religious belief, 88, 94, 95, 99; and conventicles and Quakers, 6–18; deals with Domine Johanes Polhemius, 64–67, 70, 71; dispute with West India Company over, 67; distrusts itinerant preachers, 67; and magistracy, 10, 12, 13–15, 56, 85; and missionary landscape, 69–70, 73; role in Reformed Church, 66, 70; required to provide for edification, 63, 66 Stuyvesant, representations of: 99, 132–34; and administration of, xi, 30, 83, 137, 138; denounced for “murder” by John Underhill, 174n57; as figure of rejection, ix, x, xii, 27–32, 51; flaw identified by Washington Irving, 144; by individual historians, 28, 29; by New England officials, 4 (or 9?); nineteenthcentury representations of, 152–58; no place for in “urbanity” or “humanism,” 27, 28; as object of unreliable testimony, 172n6; as outcast, ix–xx, 31, 45; in portraiture, xx; as “reactionary boob,” 171n48; as solely responsible for Quaker persecution in New Netherland, 29 Stuyvesant, and reputation of, 42, 136; acute concern for, 109, 177n44; as alleged warrior, 157; among colonists, 40, 41, 44, 45; as compared unfavorably with New England magistrates, 30; and good relations with New Amsterdam tradespeople, 23, 24; impact of New Amsterdam charter on, 25–28; as rigorous Calvinist rather than humanist, 28; among some leading merchants, 1647–1653, 20–24; as subject of injustice, 137; undermined by myths, 28, 29, 30, 31; among New York historians, 10, 29, 41, 169n21; among U.S. historians, xii, 12, 29, 45 survivalisms, religious, 64, 84, 186n19 Susquehannocks, (Minquas), 31, 33, 35, 54, and Stuyvesant’s relations with, 44 Swedish forts on Delaware River: Dutch expedition against, 51, 88, 108, 115, 122, 130–32, 145, 146, 193n31; Irving plays with worldwide significance of, 146. See also Delaware River area symbiosis of civil and ecclesiastical institutions in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 169n29

Thelen, David, critiques unethical historical writing, 196n31 United States history, and role of modernity, xiv Vander Donck, Adriaen, 22, 29 Van der Sluys, Andries, 184n29; petitions Stuyvesant, 70 Van Ommeren, M., 109, 110, 114, 117 Van Rensselaer, Jeremias, 46; dealings with Stuyvesant, 44; teaches himself the Psalms, 82–83 Van Ruyven, Cornelis: in Oostdorp (Westchester), 74; supports Stuyvesant, 117, 119–21 Van Tienhoven, Cornelis, 23 Van Twiller, Wouter, governor of New Netherland, 143; ridiculed, 155; warned against belligerence toward English, 190n19 Von Ranke, Leopold, on historical explanation and God, 194n7, 197n 35 voorlezers (readers of prayers in church services), as troublesome, 182n6 Walsham, Alexandra, 185n10 war: requirements for just war set out by Stuyvesant, 89, 93; “war” used in “Answer,” 122 Warner, Michael, 158, 159, 196n28 West India Company: admits to ominous English intentions, 187n4; alleges Stuyvesant’s treachery for surrender, 110, 111, 117, 123; blamed by New Amsterdam merchants for early bad government, 24, 25; characteristics of, 6, 20; complains about Stuyvesant’s handling of Lutherans, 79; declares surrender scandalous, 118; demands “rooting out” of Esopus natives, 186n34; different perspective on New Netherland from Stuyvesant, 40, 49, 50; hopes for peace with England, 116; satisfied with number of Dutch forces before surrender, 118; washes its hands of Stuyvesant’s case, 110, 111, 119, 120; ignores Stuyvesant’s request for greater military assistance, 50, 51–54; and “Observations” (1666), 117–20; and policy of deterrence, 36, 126, 130; pronounces on Esopus massacre, 97, 186n34; questions Stuyvesant’s administration as “lawful,” 51, 179n22; repeatedly provides inadequate



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West India Company (cont.) armed forces for New Netherland, 107; and “Reply” to Stuyvesant’s defense of surrender (1667), 123–27; underestimates Hartford’s and Long Islanders’ insurgency, 128, 129 Winthrop, John, governor of Massachusetts, 5, 126 writing, as protection from West India Company, 106

worldview: of Christian New Netherlanders, 62–64; providential, 82, 83; of Stuyvesant, 62, 63 ziekentrooster (comforter of the sick), 74 Zuckerman, Michael, urges colonial historians to address cultural variation, 158 Zyperus, Domine Michiel, 67

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Acknowledgments

From the beginning, I have conceived of this book as an essay in the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century meaning of the word. It is an interpretive composition dealing with its subject from—­as my ancient 1956 Webster’s dictionary states—­“a more or less limited or personal standpoint.” I hope that the focus has not been too limited. In fact, I hope it has been expansive, moving into such domains as colonial history, religious history, the study of emotions and empires, the call upon some philosophy and anthropology. But it is personal—­as I believe critical history should be. I have archivists, librarians, and research assistants to thank. Or, better, I have to thank them in a once-­again statement—­that is, for all the intellectual gifts they have made available to me over the past decades when I began my studies as a historian and, more latterly, as a student of New Netherland. I thanked them then, and I thank them now. I extend my thanks to the many colleagues and friends who have read and critiqued chapters of this book. Among them are Ron Adams, Ian Britain, Joy Damousi, Susan Foley, Katie Holmes, Jim Mitchell, Klaus Neumann, John Rickard, Chips Sowerwine, Alistair Thompson, Christina Toomey and Charles Zika. Wim Frijhoff, emeritus professor at The Free University of Amsterdam, and The Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Robert Blair St. George at the University of Pennsylvania acted as readers of the manuscript for The University of Pennsylvania Press. Their insights into the purposes of Stuyvesant Bound and their careful readings of the text were balanced, gracious and, in every way, encouraging. I give thanks too to David William Voorhees, editor of de halve maen journal and outstanding historian of early New York. The years have shown me that I could always turn to him for advice. Val Noone helped me bring the manuscript to proper form; I could not have done it myself. Mary Tomsic helped me with illustrations, and Emily Brissenden generously designed the map of New Netherland, circa 1660. To family and friends who encouraged me over the past five years, I am grateful beyond words.