Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America

REVISITING NEW NETHERLAND

THE ATLANTIC WORLD Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500-1830

EDITORS

Wim Klooster (Clark University) Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington)

VOLUME IV

REVISITING NEW NETHERLAND Perspectives on Early Dutch America EDITED BY

JOYCE D. GOODFRIEND

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

Illustration on the cover: Edwin Austin Abbey, New Amsterdam – The Dinner. Harper's Weekly 1882.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1570–0542 ISBN 90 04 14507 9 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To the memory of Irvine Slater Goodfriend (1911–1996)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...................................................................... List of Contributors ....................................................................

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Introduction ................................................................................ Joyce D. Goodfriend

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NEW NETHERLAND AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

Inventing Memory: Picturing New Netherland in the Nineteenth Century ................................................................ Annette Stott The Walloon and Huguenot Elements in New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century New York: Identity, History and Memory .......................................................................... Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

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NEW NETHERLAND IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

The Place of New Netherland in the West India Company’s Grand Scheme .................................................... Wim Klooster New Sweden: An Interpretation ................................................ Richard Waldron

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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NEW NETHERLAND

Securing the Burgher Right in New Amsterdam: The Struggle for Municipal Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World .................................... Dennis J. Maika

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contents

Joris Dopzen’s Hog and Other Stories: Artisans and the Making of New Amsterdam .................................................. 129 Simon Middleton

NEW NETHERLAND’S DIRECTORS: A NEW LOOK

Neglected Networks: Director Willem Kieft (1602–1647) and his Dutch Relatives ........................................................ 147 Willem Frijhoff Like Father, Like Son? The Early Years of Petrus Stuyvesant ................................................................................ 205 Jaap Jacobs

FAMILY RESEARCH AS A KEY TO NEW NETHERLAND’S HISTORY

The State of New Netherland Genealogical Research—2001 ...................................................................... 245 Harry Macy, Jr. Sex and the City: Relations Between Men and Women in New Netherland ................................................................ 263 Firth Haring Fabend

WRITING THE HISTORY OF NEW NETHERLAND IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A Survey of Documents Relating to the History of New Netherland ...................................................................... 287 Charles Gehring Tying the Loose Ends Together: Putting New Netherland Studies on a Par with the Study of Other Regions .......... 309 David William Voorhees Index ............................................................................................ 329

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book had its genesis in a conference held in New York City in October 2001 under the auspices of the Holland Society of New York, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and the New Netherland Project. The experience of assembling—on stage and in the audience—a variety of people who all shared an abiding interest in America’s Dutch founders proved both exhilarating and inspiring. Occurring as it did only weeks after the unspeakable events of 9–11, our gathering took on an unanticipated symbolic meaning as we realized that the ground so recently desecrated had centuries earlier been close to the heart of New Amsterdam. By demonstrating in such a visible way the strength of the bonds that connect the local, national and international communities that treasure New York’s Dutch past, we reaffirmed the unique role that history has to play in holding the world together amid the uncertainties of our global age. As the primary sponsor of the conference, the Holland Society of New York deserves much of the credit for its success. President Walton Van Winkle never flagged in his support and enthusiasm for this endeavor. Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Institute was also instrumental in bringing the conference to fruition. As the genius behind the annual Rensselaerswijck Seminars in Albany, Charly played a pivotal role in transplanting the show to the Big Apple on this special occasion. Special thanks also go to Harry Macy of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and Annette Van Rooy of the Holland Society of New York for making everything run so smoothly. To all those who gave papers at the conference, a sustained round of applause. To those who wrote (and rewrote) their essays for this volume, profound gratitude. To Wim Klooster, the series editor for Brill Academic Publishers, deeply felt thanks for his expertise, efficiency, and friendship. To Annette Stott, my colleague at the University of Denver, appreciation for her advice on the title and illustrations and much more. Julian Deahl, Marcella Mulder and Ms Gera van Bedaf of Brill Academic Publishers each worked to make this book a reality. I am pleased to acknowledge their contributions.

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acknowledgements

The publication of this volume affords me an opportunity to salute the friends from whom I have learned so much about the history of New Netherland and the Netherlands over the years: Tom Burke, Peter Christoph, John Coakley, David Cohen, Margriet de Roever, Firth Fabend, Willem Frijhoff, Charly Gehring, Evan Haefeli, Henry Hoff, Hans Krabbendam, Dennis Maika, Simon Middleton, Hennie Newhouse, the late Eric Nooter, Paul Otto, Nico Plomp, Martha Dickinson Shattuck, Jacob Schiltkamp, Russell Shorto, Jos van der Linde, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Adriana Van Zwieten, Janny Venema and David Voorhees. Thanks to all of them for speeding my labors and smoothing my path. With this book, I honor the memory of my mother, who taught me to love Paulus Potter’s cows and all the other wonders of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Willem Frijhoff is professor of Early Modern History and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He specialises in cultural and religious history of early modern Europe and New Netherland. His recent publications include Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen 1995), on the New Netherland minister Everhardus Bogardus, 1650: Hard-won Unity (Assen/Basingstoke 2004), and 2 volumes of the Geschiedenis van Amsterdam (Amsterdam 2004–2005). Charles Th. Gehring is Executive Director of the New Netherland Institute located at the New York State Library in Albany, New York. He is translator and editor of the series New Netherland Documents, which consist of the archival records of the West India Company colony centered on Manhattan. Most recent published translations in the series are: Fort Orange Records, 1656–1678; Correspondence, 1654–1658; and Council Minutes, 1655–1656. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Ph.D. (1975) in History, University of California, Los Angeles, is Professor of History at the University of Denver. She is the author of Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664 –1730 (Princeton 1992) as well as numerous essays on the Dutch in early America. Firth Haring Fabend is an independent historian. She is the author of A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals, and numerous essays. Jaap Jacobs (Ph.D. 1999, Leiden University) specialises in the Dutch role in European expansion, particularly in the Atlantic. He has published numerous articles on New Netherland and has recently published New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth Century America (Brill, 2005). He is currently preparing a biography of Petrus Stuyvesant.

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list of contributors

Wim Klooster is Assistant Professor at Clark University, where he teaches Atlantic History. His most recent book is The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration and Imagination (2004) (co-edited with Alfred Padula). Harry Macy, Jr., is Editor of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. He is a professional genealogist specializing in the families of New Netherland and New York. His articles on the European origins and early American generations of such families have been published in the Record and other genealogical journals. Dennis J. Maika, Ph.D., teaches history and psychology at Fox Lane High School, Bedford, NY. As a historian of colonial New York, he has consulted on various local history and education projects and has written numerous articles and papers. Simon Middleton is Lecturer in American History at the University of East Anglia. His first book, Privileges and Profits: Tradesmen in Colonial New York, 1624–1763, is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is professor of American civilization at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). He specializes in the Huguenot diaspora and early America. He is co-editor of Memory and Identity. The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, SC, 2003) and author of From New Babylon to Eden. The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, SC, 2005). Annette Stott is Associate Professor and Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver. She is the author of Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Hollandgekte; Overlook/Anthos/Olifant, 1998) and many articles about nineteenth-century American art. David William Voorhees is Director of the Papers of Jacob Leisler Project at New York University and Managing Editor of de Halve Maen, a quarterly scholarly journal devoted to New Netherland studies. His published works include Records of the Reformed Protestant Church of Flatbush, Kings County, New York, Volume 1, 1677–1720 (1998).

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Richard Waldron retired recently as the executive director of the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia. He specializes in the history of 17th- and 18th-century Sweden, especially its North American colony (1638–55) and its religious mission to the Delaware Valley (1697–1780s). He is the coeditor of New Sweden in America (1995).

INTRODUCTION Joyce D. Goodfriend

New Netherland has not fared well as the American past has been invented and reinvented over the centuries. Nearly four hundred years after the start of Dutch colonization in what would become the United States, historians are still grappling with the legacy of distortions and omissions that has perennially plagued accounts of the colony and its role in American history. Why this has been the case, why Dutch colonization in North America has never been accorded the recognition it patently merits, can be traced to one fundamental and inescapable fact. When the Dutch definitively ceded their large and valuable territory on the mid-Atlantic coast to the English in 1674, they surrendered control over not only the sword, but the pen. No matter how many legal rights Dutch colonists retained, no matter how respectful English officials were of Dutch customs, no matter how little everyday life changed, the English donning of the mantle of cultural authority set in motion an intellectual shift that within a few decades had re-visioned the Dutch colonial experience in the negative terms that would echo through the standard narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the words of Donna Merwick, “Dutch men were made strange as the victors, the English and then the Yankee-Americans, exercised their power to be rulers over knowledge and the story of the past.”1 Once the process of reducing the colonial Dutch to insignificance on paper was underway, it acquired a momentum of its own, periodically fed by infusions of malice and mockery. The first years of the new nation proved inhospitable to refurbishing what was then regarded as a distant past. By the early nineteenth century, the facile pen of Washington Irving had appropriated the New Netherland

1 Donna Merwick, “The Suicide of a Notary: Language, Personal Identity, and Conquest in Colonial New York” in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), 152. See also Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca and London, 1999).

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Dutch as subjects of jest. Irving’s seductive word pictures, bolstered by ludicrous illustrations, captured the popular imagination of a citizenry bent on progress and disrespectful of antiquities. Descendants of New Netherland families who yearned for a Dutch-centered rendering of the colony’s history and even more for homage to their forbears’ contributions to the nation, found it virtually impossible to rehabilitate their Dutch ancestors, once they were coated in an English gloss. James William Beekman, whose ancestor Willem Beekman was a prominent New Netherlander, delivered impassioned speeches lauding the virtues of Dutchmen to assemblies of sympathetic gentlemen at the Saint Nicholas Society and the New-York Historical Society.2 The Holland Society, founded in 1885 for male descendants of New Netherland’s original settlers, provided a convivial forum for celebrating things Dutch.3 Lectures on the glories of the fatherland and the accomplishments of Netherlandic pioneers were bound to elicit pride. Yet such exercises conducted in the rarefied atmosphere of late nineteenth-century elite organizations did little to alter popular perceptions of American beginnings. Somewhat more promising was the increasingly favorable attitude of national opinion makers toward the Dutch and their Republican legacy. Initiated by John Lothrop Motley’s writings on the Dutch Republic and intensified by the Holland Mania that infiltrated American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this fascination with the history and material culture of the Dutch had a far-reaching impact in the realms of art, architecture, the decorative arts and advertising.4 Yet the antiquarian impulse at the heart of Holland Mania, like the forces driving the broader colonial revival, was, in essence, a response to the perceived disordering of society caused by industrialization and the mass influx of immigrants. Inducting the Dutch into the pantheon of heroes alongside the English fortified the ranks of the self-proclaimed standardbearers of American tradition, but it did not translate into a comprehensive revision of the, by then, deeply ingrained saga of the nation’s

2 Philip White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce 1647–1877 (New York, 1956), 571–572, 629. 3 On the history of the Holland Society, see David William Voorhees, The Holland Society: A Centennial History 1885–1985 (New York, 1985). 4 Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, N.Y., 1998).

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beginnings. Nor did the meticulous archival work of scholars such as Arnold van Laer, who set about making authoritative translations of the Dutch records of New Netherland in the early twentieth century, make more than a ripple in the sea of historical interpretation. Chroniclers of the American past had placed their imprimatur on a version of national origins centered on the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts Bay.5 By consigning New Netherlanders to the margins along with Germans, Africans and Native Americans, they had managed to register America’s pedigree as English and to exalt the values associated with this English heritage. The staying power of this conception of national history in which only the English truly matter has been remarkable, even as historians have shed the constraints of provincialism and adopted an Atlantic, if not a global, perspective on the past. Still the omnipresence of the American creation myth, with its Anglophone underpinnings, looms as a seemingly insuperable obstacle to institutionalizing a version of America’s origins that does not overlook or trivialize the Dutch moment in American history and gives due weight to the imprint of Dutch settlement in the midAtlantic region. As the twenty-first century begins, there are signs that the axioms of the Anglophone version of American origins may be vulnerable. The critical acclaim that has greeted Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, a non-academic but historically informed account of Manhattan and the colonial Dutch, may be a measure of a changing cultural climate.6 That Shorto’s plausible and persuasive argument for a reading of the seventeenth-century roots of the American experience shorn of the English accents applied so long ago has awakened interest in New Netherland among the reading public cannot be attributed solely to the sophisticated marketing techniques that have garnered the book a great deal of exposure. The success of a book about the lasting Dutch imprint on Manhattan, a book that challenges the verities at the heart of the standard storyline of American beginnings, is rooted in broader cultural and academic trends. 5 Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origins (Boulder, Co., 1999). 6 Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York, 2004).

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In the last few decades, complacency about the orthodox version of American history has been shattered as culture wars pitting conservatives, liberals and multiculturalists against each other have divided Americans and ramified into a variety of spheres. The twilight of common dreams, the signature one social critic has affixed to this turbulent era, has opened unparalleled opportunities for not only challenging the absolutes of prior generations but for stretching the canvas on which American history is displayed.7 By fracturing, though not obliterating, the consensus that has customarily anchored school texts, museum exhibits, media offerings, and countless political speeches, the ongoing, and often heated, debate over interpretive emphases, heroes and heroines, and symbols and language has made alternate renderings of American beginnings less implausible than they might have been in the past. Historians have experimented with new ways of telling what was thought to be a familiar story, unearthing previously invisible characters, detecting unrecognized connections, and magnifying what has previously been minimized. This stirring, this rearranging, has been a tonic for the enterprise of early American history and prepares the way for featuring the Dutch more conspicuously in the master narrative of seventeenth-century American history. Concurrent with and, no doubt, contributing to the cultural ferment that has shadowed American life in recent decades has been the rise to prominence of cultural studies in the academy. The ascendancy across disciplines of methods geared to questioning whatever has been taken for granted has also fostered an atmosphere conducive to revision. Scholars engaged in demystifying American icons have tunneled through the layers of packaging that have encased heroic figures, hallowed sites, and even entire regions, and in the process scrutinized the motives and methods of preservationists, philanthropists, and heritage entrepreneurs.8 Max Page’s perceptive reconstruction of

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Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995). 8 Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986 (Cambridge, Ma. and London, 1988); John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, 1998); Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 2001); James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, 1995); James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism

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the goals and methods of those engaged in “Inventing and Displaying the Past at the Museum of the City of New York” in the early twentieth century heralds a developing interest in detecting the fingerprints of the individuals and groups responsible for fabricating the formats in which the remnants of New Netherland—buildings, artifacts, and documents—have been presented to the public.9 Work in this vein has already destabilized the props on which the pillars of public memory, uniformly English in composition, have stood. It also has inspired explorations of the ways in which cultural representations of non-English peoples fit into larger patterns. Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, an innovative work that focuses on the intersection of landscape and memory in the Hudson Valley, a region originally settled by the Dutch, deftly shows how the Dutch have been inscribed in the national imagination as foils for allegedly superior and progressive English.10 Richardson startles us with her revelation that in the region’s folklore, the Dutch have been paired with the Native Americans as ghosts. One other impetus to rethinking the history of New Netherland has been the widespread acceptance of an Atlantic perspective on early American history.11 Exemplifying this trend is April Lee Hatfield’s Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, which spells out the economic and social links between New Netherland and Virginia in detail.12 Scholars who tie developments in the Dutch West India Company’s colony to events in Europe, the Americas and Africa have moved well beyond earlier Anglocentric formulations of the colony’s history to better understand the era when the (Charlottesville and London, 1993); Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven and London, 2003); David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998; originally published 1996). 9 Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900 –1940 (Chicago, 1999), 145–175. 10 Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, Ma. and London, 2003). 11 Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1093–1114. 12 April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004). See also April Lee Hatfield, “Dutch merchants and colonists in the English Chesapeake: trade, migration and nationality in 17th-century Maryland and Virginia” in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton/Portland, 2001), 296–305.

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Dutch had a foothold in North America. In a variety of works spanning economic, political, social and cultural topics, they have mined the voluminous sources for New Netherland history, many now available in English translation, and combed manuscript archives in the Netherlands and the United States to show how center and peripheries interacted in the seventeenth-century world. Cumulatively, this research has gone a long way toward elucidating New Netherland’s place in the Atlantic world.13 To mark the revitalization of New Netherland as a field of study and to communicate the scope and substance of current investigations, men and women from the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Canada, gathered in New York City in October 2001 at a conference called “New Netherland at the Millennium: The State of New World Dutch Studies” to share their findings with a large and enthusiastic audience and to forge links that would promote future research endeavors. This volume of essays, most of which are revised versions of papers presented at the conference, offers a rich sampling of current scholarship on New Netherland. It displays the variety of topics that have engaged the attention of researchers and the ingenious approaches they have taken to resolving perplexing historical problems. It features discussions of method, reviews of historiography and surveys of source materials related to New Netherland and its people. It puts some issues to rest, while posing new and maybe more difficult questions. Most significantly, this book illustrates the potential of New Netherland studies to reorient the narrative of American beginnings. A crucial first step in telling New Netherland’s history in a credible manner entails dissecting the images of the colony and its inhabitants that have been embedded in American culture and searching out their origins. The essays of Annette Stott and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke illuminate the ways in which the historical memory of New Netherland has been constructed over the centuries. In “Inventing Memory: Picturing New Netherland in the Nineteenth Century,” Stott traces the lineage of familiar visual images of New Netherland,

13 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Historiography of the Dutch in Colonial America” in Eric Nooter and Patricia U. Bonomi, eds., Colonial Dutch Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (New York, Press, 1988), 6–32; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History, 80 ( January 1999), 5–28.

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amply documenting her argument that the excursions of nineteenthcentury artists and illustrators into New York’s prehistory were, more often than not, flights of the imagination. These artistic representations of the vanished seventeenth-century world, nonetheless, came to shape how generations of Americans remembered the Dutch colony. In an equally enlightening study, “The Walloon and Huguenot Elements in New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century New York: Identity, History and Memory,” Bertrand Van Ruymbeke demonstrates the power of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians to mold the story of the Walloons, New Netherland’s first settlers, in ways that served these writers’ own interests. His account of the contest between Belgian nationalists and Huguenot hagiographers over the memory of the Walloons is anchored in a meticulous comparative analysis of the distinctive histories of the Walloons and the Huguenots in early modern Europe. Sweeping away the accumulation of cultural debris may be a daunting task, but curbing the tendency to think of New Netherland primarily in light of its transformation into an English possession is not difficult. This is not to question the legitimacy of the questions about Dutch cultural persistence in the English era that have formed a staple of earlier studies, but to contend, as do the authors represented in this volume, that New Netherland is best viewed as a component of the seventeenth-century Dutch trading empire that spanned both West and East. Wim Klooster’s essay, “The Place of New Netherland in the West India Company’s Grand Scheme” situates New Netherland in the context of Dutch imperial ventures and explains why the North American colony occupied such a minor place in the thinking of West India Company officials and Dutch political leaders. As a Dutch outpost in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world in which European nations competed for territory, wealth, power and cultural influence, New Netherland was perennially subject to the fluctuations of international trade, diplomacy, and warfare. Richard Waldron asks us to consider the rivalry between the Netherlands and Sweden over the Delaware region that culminated in Petrus Stuyvesant’s conquest of New Sweden in 1655 from the vantage point of Sweden, one of the Great Powers in the seventeenth century. In “New Sweden: An Interpretation,” he outlines the history of New Netherland’s little known neighboring colony, clarifying the motives behind its settlement, the objectives of its leaders, and the nature of its relations with the Dutch.

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Recognizing the broad canvas on which New Netherland’s history unfolded does not require us to minimize the significance of events that transpired in local settings. On the contrary, as several authors show, studies of New Netherland’s communities, families, and even individuals benefit enormously from a transatlantic perspective. Essays by Dennis Maika and Simon Middleton examine the institutionalization of Dutch civic culture in New Amsterdam. Maika, in “Securing the Burgher Right in New Amsterdam: The Struggle for Municipal Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” takes as his subject the evolution of civic consciousness in the city at the tip of Manhattan Island from the residents’ early identification as burghers through the chartering of the city in 1653 and the granting of the Burgher Right that ensured economic security and privileges in 1657, to the melding of the Dutch and English versions of municipal citizenship after England acquired New Netherland in 1664. By explaining why servants, soldiers, slaves and sojourners did not qualify for the Burgher Right, he not only substantiates the significance of burgher status for New Amsterdammers, but shows how the boundaries of the small urban community were defined. Middleton views New Amsterdam’s civic maturation through a narrower lens in “Joris Dopzen’s Hog and Other Stories: Artisans and the Making of New Amsterdam,” focusing on the part played by artisans in community affairs in the 1650s and 1660s. Drawing on the theories of Michel de Certeau and Alf Lüdtke, he maintains that a close examination of the everyday lives and work of tradesmen reveals their contribution to “the idea and practice of New Amsterdam as a distinctive municipal community modelled on those found in the United Provinces.” Middleton challenges the notion of the commercial elite’s domination of city government, suggesting instead that the merchants who filled the positions of Burgomasters and Schepens engaged in an ongoing dialogue with artisans over the setting of rules for the regulation of trade. Perhaps the greatest gap in scholarship on New Netherland is the lack of comprehensive biographies of the most important directors of the colony, Willem Kieft and Petrus Stuyvesant. Two essays go a long way toward filling this lacuna. Willem Frijhoff ’s “Neglected Networks: Director Willem Kieft and his Dutch Relatives” takes on the unenviable task of reclaiming the reputation of Willem Kieft, a man almost universally vilified over the centuries. By reconstructing Kieft’s family networks and situating him in his social milieu, Frijhoff

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frames an alternative view of Kieft and adduces compelling reasons for his style of governance and his attitude toward the Reformed church. If, as Frijhoff points out, Kieft lacked any descendants to cushion his memory from the aspersions of his detractors, this has not been the case with Stuyvesant. Nevertheless, Stuyvesant remains a controversial figure, largely because of his religious views. In “Like Father, Like Son? The Early Years of Petrus Stuyvesant,” Jaap Jacobs, author of a forthcoming biography of Stuyvesant, investigates the formative years of New Netherland’s last Director with an eye to uncovering the roots of his uncompromising Calvinism. As the title of his essay suggests, Jacobs uses parallels in the intellectual and religious biographies of Balthasar Stuyvesant, a Reformed minister in the province of Friesland, and his more famous son as a platform for speculating on Petrus Stuyvesant’s motives for choosing a career with the West India Company. In the seventeenth century, families constituted the basic unit of the community in New Netherland and the Netherlands, and family bonds undergirded commercial, political and social relations. Consequently, delineating the kinship ties that stretched across the Atlantic is of unquestionable importance for students of New Netherland’s history. Harry Macy Jr.’s comprehensive overview of the practical side of investigating New Netherland’s families, “The State of New Netherland Genealogical Research—2001,” proceeds from the premise that genealogies are useful to historians in manifold ways, not least in providing clues to the values that informed Dutch family life in the seventeenth century. Genealogists also have much to contribute to the ongoing conversation among scholars over the diversity of New Netherland’s population, as Macy makes clear by directing attention to recent investigations of the European roots of New Netherland’s colonists that confirm the high proportion of non-Dutch settlers in the colony and to Henry Hoff ’s innovative research on the colony’s African American families. The fact that there has been no full-fledged study of the family in New Netherland is the starting point for Firth Haring Fabend’s exploration of “Sex and the City: Relations Between Men and Women in New Netherland.” In the course of a wide-ranging historiographical review of research related to women and the family in New Netherland, Fabend raises a battery of penetrating questions and assesses the viability of possible strategies for recovering aspects of family life in the colony. Capturing a sense of la vie intime of middling people may

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prove an elusive goal, Fabend admits, but she demonstrates the value of a gender-study approach, one that examines power relations between men and women in historical context, through an intriguing pilot probe that uses court records to examine marital harmony among New Amsterdam couples. Fabend’s essay stands as a reminder that, despite the proliferation of studies on New Netherland and the colonial Dutch in the last decade, much remains to be done. The final set of papers in this volume offers guidance for future research through an examination of extant primary sources and a review of the secondary literature. Charles Gehring’s systematic guide to source materials, “A Survey of Documents Relating to the History of New Netherland,” supplies valuable historical background on the major collections of records and reveals the documentary riches that await students of New Netherland. In “Tying the Loose Ends Together: Putting New Netherland Studies on a Par with the Study of Other Regions,” David William Voorhees appraises what is now a kaleidoscopic body of scholarship on New Netherland, offering new ideas on subjects as diverse as demography, trade, social class, religion, family, literacy and language. Arguing forcefully that New Netherland should be defined in a broad cultural context, Voorhees crafts an ambitious agenda for future investigations. His research, as well as that of all the other contributors to this book, makes abundantly clear that there are many promising avenues to explore as the history of New Netherland is once again rewritten in the twenty-first century.

NEW NETHERLAND AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

INVENTING MEMORY: PICTURING NEW NETHERLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Annette Stott A visitor to lower Manhattan today will find little evidence of the colony the Dutch once founded here. Place names and the configuration of some streets and squares recall New York City’s humble origins. Colored paving stones outline the place where the town hall once stood and glass panels in sidewalks open brief vistas to archeological remains. It is hard to imagine from such minute visual clues what this place must have looked like three hundred and fifty years ago. The character of the colonial Dutch buildings, streets, waterfront and the people who once inhabited these places are long gone. When nineteenth-century visitors looked for visual reminders of New Amsterdam they found almost as little to inform their impressions. New Amsterdam had undergone rapid change from its earliest years, as colonists replaced small structures with larger ones and filled open spaces. They reinforced the shoreline and then continually extended and reshaped it with landfill. Streets were added and paved, canals constructed and filled, houses demolished and built. By 1828, when J.F. Watson wrote his “Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New York City,” he noted that only five Dutch buildings still stood in New York City.1 All of them post-dated New Netherland, the oldest having been erected in 1689. With no trace remaining of the city that nineteenth-century image makers often chose to represent all of New Netherland, artists and authors relied heavily on their powers of invention. Edward Rand exercised a vivid imagination as he walked the streets of Manhattan about 1890, inventing a story about New Amsterdammers of 1663– 1664:

1 John F. Watson, “Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New York City,” in Annals of Philadelphia: being a collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of the city and its inhabitants, from the days of the Pilgrim founders . . . (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1830).

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annette stott In Broad Street, once De Heeren Graft, I thought of the canal that pierced it, a fond memorial of old Holland. I looked down and saw in fancy the clumsy barges bringing cargoes from vessels in the stream . . . Just where did New Amsterdam’s famous “wall” run? I was close to its post-holes; could I not fancy them gaping in this to-day’s thoroughfare of so many of the money kings of the nation?2

Written descriptions, such as those embellishing Rand’s stories, evoke mental images in the reader that are unique and personal, and cannot be reconstructed. Pictures on paper or canvas create shared images that can be preserved and experienced by many. There is a deep-seated reliance in western societies on the visual as a preserver of memory. Phrases like “seeing is believing” and “a picture is worth a thousand words” express our desire for visual confirmation of what we believe we know. In the absence of photography, upon which the present generation often relies to record its personal and collective memories, the need for a pictorial record of Dutch colonial experience in North America was filled by map makers, printers, engravers, and painters. The output of images and the market for them increased in proportion to the loss of physical reminders of the Dutch occupation. Not surprisingly, the amount of invention in such images also increased as the original settings and artifacts to be represented were lost. It was in the early nineteenth century, with full awareness of the irrevocable loss of New Netherland’s physical presence, that American artists began to depict the colonial Dutch era in earnest. This period of picturing New York opened with the 1809 publication of Washington Irving’s satirical A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker, which inspired a large number of paintings and engravings of New Netherland.3 As the century progressed, artists attempted to depict the everyday life of the Dutch colony in genre pictures, book illustrations, murals and history paintings. Antiquarians collected and republished seventeenth-

2 Edward Augustus Rand, Behind Manhattan Gables: A Story of New Amsterdam, 1663–1664 (NY: Thomas Whittaker, 1896), vii–viii. 3 Washington Irving, A 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 or Ever Will Be Published (New York, Philadelphia: Inskeep & Bradford, 1809).

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century maps and views of the colony, which influenced some artists’ renditions. This increased picture making continued throughout the nineteenth century, emphasized in the last quarter of the century by the centennial-inspired Colonial Revival. It culminated with an outpouring of historical pictures around the time of the 1909 HudsonFulton celebrations that marked the anniversaries of Henry Hudson’s Dutch-financed “discovery” of the Hudson River and Robert Fulton’s invention of a working steamboat. Just as notable as the nineteenth-century’s new-found fascination with images of New Netherland, was the failure of artists to reach a consensus about its appearance. Artists’ conceptions of New Netherland figures, costumes, architecture, cityscapes and landscape varied from rotund buffoons in tight knee breeches to serious armored soldiers and dignified burghers, and from modest wooden houses to step-gabled brick and stone mansions. Focusing on characteristic examples of the wealth of visual materials produced in the nineteenth century, this essay will demonstrate that their great diversity was determined by the wide variety of sources on which artists relied in the absence of a physical model. Similarly, historians sought new sources of information and reinterpreted New Netherland history throughout the course of the century. The changing visual picture of New Netherland often paralleled developing ideas and methods among historians of colonial Dutch America.

1800–1840 The dominant source of inspiration for images of New Netherland throughout the early nineteenth century was a history of New Netherland that was not written to be a history at all. Washington Irving intended his History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker as a spoof on the many contemporary books, such as Samuel Mitchell’s The Picture of New York, that blatantly promoted New York in a spirit of civic boosterism.4 Irving’s outrageous exaggerations and inventions

4 Wayne R. Kime, “Washington Irving,” 147–155 in American Historians, 1607–1865, vol. 30 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984). For an in-depth study of Irving’s comic modes within the History, see Martin Roth, Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976). For an analysis of Irving’s influence on

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were certainly understood as comedy by most of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, in the absence of an equally compelling scholarly study, in time its very popularity caused Irving’s Knickerbocker History to color popular understanding of colonial Dutch history. Washington Allston’s A Schepen Laughing at a Burgomaster’s Joke (fig. 1) of 1818 is a typical example of a Knickerbocker image from the first half of the nineteenth century, and one that was endorsed by Irving as conveying the spirit of his History. The scene illustrates Irving’s description of New Amsterdam’s governing body: This potent body consisted of a schout or bailiff, with powers between those of the present mayor and sheriff[,] five burgermeesters, who were equivalent to aldermen, and five schepens, who officiated as scrubs, subdevils, or bottle-holders . . . It was, moreover, tacitly understood, though not specifically enjoined, that they should consider themselves as butts for the blunt wits of the burgermeesters, and should laugh most heartily at all their jokes; but this last was a duty as rarely called in action in those days as it is at present, and was shortly remitted, in consequence of the tragical death of a fat little schepen—who actually died of suffocation in an unsuccessful effort to force a laugh at one of burgermeester Van Zandt’s best jokes.5

Allston’s burgomaster is a figure of fun, with his long pointed nose and substantial girth. The schepen’s laughing mouth and rollicking pose, juxtaposed against the serious demeanor of three men in the background, solemnly smoking their pipes as they gaze upon the jokesters, provides an ironic note. Allston’s view of New Amsterdammers typifies early nineteenth-century artists’ renditions in several ways. First, the principal figures are all male. If one compiled all the painted and drawn views of New Netherlanders from the first half of the century, one would have a picture of a place almost devoid of women.6 The common tendency of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury historians to focus almost exclusively on political and military events is undoubtedly responsible for this. Irving concentrated other historians of New York, see Jennifer E. Steenshorne, “Past, Present, and Future: History and Memory in New York City, 1800–1860,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2002. 5 [Washington Irving], A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (NY: Geo P. Putnam, 1860), 155. 6 I have not treated Rip Van Winkle and other tales set in the eighteenth century as images of New Netherland, but I note that they were more likely to feature women.

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on three governors of New Netherland, their immediate companions, and their political enemies, rarely introducing a heroine as the center of his tale. Consequently women usually appear in pictures of New Netherland as peripheral figures pushed to the sides or background, if they appear at all. John Quidor painted many scenes from the Knickerbocker History, among them Antony van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant (fig. 2) of 1839. The room is filled by the figures of a rotund Stuyvesant, his black servant, a soldier guarding the door, an old man, the impossibly fat Van Corlear and the sound of his trumpet. In the background, the upper torso of a small woman is just visible peeking around the doorway, but the soldier bars her entrance to this male domain by bracing one booted foot against the door jamb. This visualization of separate spheres reveals more about the early-nineteenth-century social construction of gender than it does seventeenth-century colonial Dutch relations.7 The second way in which Allston’s image typifies the early view of New Netherlanders is that his figures are humorous, exaggerated types, often bordering on caricature. Allston described his Schepen Laughing to Irving as “one of my happiest comic efforts,” noting that he “is laughing with all his might and main, while the rest of the company, who have nothing to gain by a laugh, are impenetrably and most Dutchly, grave.”8 Both Irving and Allston characterized the Dutch as phlegmatic, a common nineteenth-century stereotype. After seeing the first illustrations for the Knickerbocker History by his friends Washington Allston and Charles Leslie, Irving described their visual humor as “rich but chaste,” telling them that if he had seen the pictures before writing the History, he might have toned down the “grossierté into which the writer of a work of humor is apt to run.”9 One of the most prolific and well-known illustrators of Washington Irving by mid century, Felix Octavius Carr Darley, became a master of the Knickerbocker buffoon (fig. 3). He invented a silly widebrimmed hat with a pointy crown and long drooping feather to identify his New Netherland men. In pose and expression, his characters 7 Patricia Hills first noted this visual marginalization of women within some nineteenth-century genre paintings in relation to women’s real political and social status, in The Painters’ America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), 12–16. 8 Jules David Prown, “Washington Irving’s Interest in Art and His Influence Upon American Painting,” master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1956, 48. 9 Prown, 47.

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epitomize the ridiculous. Darley’s style, like Quidor’s, is reminiscent of low Dutch genre scenes. In Adriaen Van Ostade’s seventeenthcentury tavern paintings, for example, fat rumpled men carouse and smoke. Van Ostade and his colleagues took rural Dutch peasants as their subject, producing humorous images for an urban clientele. Perhaps no pictorial tradition could be more compatible with Irving’s literary portrayal of buffoonish seventeenth-century Dutch-American colonists than this seventeenth-century low Dutch tavern painting and printmaking tradition, and many Knickerbocker illustrators borrowed from it more or less loosely. Third, in Allston’s Schepen Laughing, a few simple props set the scene as a Dutch home. In Knickerbocker illustrations, even the landscape was often suggested with a simple tree or rock, giving little sense of the appearance of the place. When a building was needed, a stepped gable or half door generally provided sufficient Dutch flavor to satisfy the audience. For interiors, a tiled fireplace or Dutch painting on the wall created a Dutch milieu. Historical accuracy was not required. Irving’s Knickerbocker History was a run-away popular success and images of his New Netherland were widely disseminated as illustrations in editions of the book, as individual prints, and as oil paintings intended for exhibition and home decoration. Not just art collectors, but everyday middle-class people became familiar with a wide range of Knickerbocker images. Darley’s illustrations were so popular that publishers bound them in books and portfolios and sold them separately from Irving’s text.10 Several artists’ renditions of the Knickerbocker History gained recognition through the Art-Union’s activities in the period 1839–1853. The Art-Union was a lottery in which subscribers paid an annual fee in hope of winning an original oil painting. Even if one did not win a painting, the fee guaranteed receipt of a print by an American artist. For example, in 1850 the American Art-Union distributed prints of John Whetten Ehninger’s painting, Peter Stuyvesant and the Cobbler (1850, oil, New-York Historical Society), to its membership. Like other early nineteenth-century Knickerbocker inspired images, most of the figures in this scene are men and boys, and the few 10 F.O.C. Darley, Knickerbocker Sketches from “A History of New York” by Washington Irving (Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott co. [c. 1886]) was preceded by portfolios of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow illustrations in 1849 by the Art-Union.

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Fig. 1. Washington Allston, A Schepen Laughing at a Burgomaster’s Joke, engraved by Hall from the 1818 oil painting by Allston. From Washington Irving, A History of New York ... by Diedrich Knickerbocker (New York: Geo P. Putnam, 1860).

Fig. 2. John Quidor, Antony van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, oil, 1839, 27 3/8 34 1/16 inch, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York.

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Fig. 3. Felix Octavius Carr Darley, Oloffe Van Kortland Measuring the Land with Ten Broeck’s Breeches, engraving. From F.O.C. Darley, Knickerbocker Sketches (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1886).

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Fig. 4. William Heath, Peter Stuyvesant’s Army Entering New Amsterdam, engraving by Sarony & Major from the oil painting by Heath. From Washington Irving, A History of New York...by Diedrich Knickerbocker (New York: Geo P. Putnam, 1860).

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Fig. 5. View of New York, 1656, nineteenth-century print of the prototype view of New Amsterdam, published in Mrs. Martha J. Lamb, History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress, vol. 1 (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1877).

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Fig. 6. Anonymous, Batavorum Americae Coloniae, tapestry, undated, private collection.

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Fig. 7. Kennedy and Lucas, lithographs published in J. F. Watson, “Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New York City, 1828” in Annals of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart,1830).

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Fig. 8. The Residence of Jacob Leisler on “the Strand” (now Whitehall Street, N.Y.), color lithograph, from David T. Valentine, Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1869.

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Fig. 9. George Hayward, Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street in 1679, lithograph, from David T. Valentine, History of the City of New York, (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853). Photo courtesy the Denver Public Library, Western History Department.

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Fig. 10. George Hayward, Stadthuys, detail from Mrs. Martha J. Lamb, History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress, vol. 1 (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1877).

Fig. 11. French, First Settlement at Albany, engraving, from William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1876).

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Fig. 12. Walter MacEwen, Stadt Herberg, Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in 1650, sketches after his oil painting, published in L’Art in 1890.

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Fig. 13. George Henry Boughton, A Fair Daughter of Holland, engraving, 1880, from G.H. Boughton and E.A. Abbey, Sketching Rambles in Holland (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884).

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Fig. 14. George Henry Boughton, Daughter of a Knickerbocker, oil on panel, 1880, 8 inch, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Gift of Samuel P. Avery. Photo by Joseph Szaszfai.

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Fig. 15. Howard Pyle, The Choicest Pieces of Cargo were Sold at Auction, engraving, 1895, illustration from “New York Slave-Traders,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1895).

Fig. 16. Anonymous, The Dutch Trading with the Indians, illustration from Edward S. Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States, vol. 1 (New York: The Woolfall Company, 1896).

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women are compositionally marginalized. They wear costumes that bear little relation to seventeenth-century Dutch dress and occupy a space defined by an unlikely gateway, but they are not quite such comic types as those by Allston, Quidor, and Darley. The representation of New Netherlanders as fat foolish men, laughing, smoking and putting on airs, suited some of Irving’s written descriptions, but it provoked criticism almost from the start. Washington Allston was surprised to learn that New Yorkers were insulted by his Schepen Laughing.11 Like many fellow American artists, Allston studied in London where he may have been influenced by some negative British attitudes toward the Dutch, and he drew his Knickerbocker illustrations while living in London. British cartoon artists such as George Cruikshank and William Heath also enjoyed popularity in the United States. Heath out-caricatured Allston and Quidor combined, when he portrayed Peter Stuyvesant’s Army Entering New Amsterdam led by a row of pear-shaped “van Brummels,” urged on by a skinny Stuyvesant (fig. 4). The well-known American lithographers of this scene, Sarony and Major, identified the first families of New Netherland by inscribing the lower margin with Irving’s pithy comments, such as “the Van Nests of Kinderhoek, Valiant robbers of Birds Nests” and “the Couenhovens, a jolly race of publicans.”12 Given the outpouring of Knickerbocker images in this period and their continued popularity throughout the century, it is ironic that the first edition of Irving’s Knickerbocker History included only one illustration, a reproduction of an authentic seventeenth-century panoramic view of New Amsterdam. The illustration may have been the most historical thing about the History. Known as the prototype view because of its association with the well known prototype map, the many variations on this panorama (fig. 5) exemplify a second strain of imagery in nineteenth-century attempts to picture New Netherland— historical documentation. Those who looked to historical documents for visual references found a wealth of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps, the dominant visual genre of the Dutch colonial period. The best known of them in the nineteenth century is the series based on a prototype 11 William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins, “A Man of Genius”: The Art of Washington Allston (1779–1843) (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), 96. 12 Heath’s foldout image illustrated A History of New York (New York: Geo P. Putnam, 1860), 468–469, and according to one bookseller, also an 1850 edition. Heath’s undated original oil painting, 28 × 84 ½ inches, is in a private collection.

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map published in the Netherlands around 1650, which not only indicated land and waterways claimed and named by the Dutch, but contained decorative images of plants, animals, native peoples and villages. Although it was known by the names of the publishers and authors who produced it, particularly N.J. Visscher, Johan Jansson and Adrian van der Donck, in the time-honored tradition of early mapmaking, numerous individuals had contributed to the image. They combined visual information from previous maps, modified by data gleaned from ships’ captains and other travelers, with the pictorial conventions of cartography, and doses of artistic invention. It was drawn and redrawn by a succession of European artists, each making subtle and not-so-subtle changes.13 It is usually assumed that this series has a common source, despite some significant variations. Yet, like other early colonial maps and views, its accuracy as a source of historical data about the appearance of the colony is quite limited due to its method of production and its original purposes of advocating further exploration and amazing European audiences. Early nineteenth-century publishers frequently commissioned reproductions of the various seventeenth-century maps of New Netherland, but nineteenth-century artists rarely invented new ones. One exception may be an undated anonymous tapestry (fig. 6) that is known to have been hanging in a Denver home in the early twentieth century. It purports to be a map of “Batavorum Americae Coloniae” in the year 1626, and is based on the prototype map, without the view of New Amsterdam. It includes a bear similar to one on the N.J. Visscher version of the map, as well as a moose, and two Indians. The water is enlivened with a nautical rose, Dutch sailing ships and whales, all typical of seventeenth-century map imagery. The difficulty of reproducing details with dyed threads necessitated a simplified design, but the tapestry retains a remarkable fidelity to the general outlines of the seventeenth-century prototype. It varies, however, in misspelling place names such as “New Needersland” and in reproducing a fully costumed Plains Indian instead of the half naked Woodlands Indian typical of earlier maps.14 13 For a description of this set of images and their tangled relationships, see Tony Campbell, “The Jansson-Visscher Maps of New England” in R.V. Tooley, comp. The Mapping of America (London: Holland Press, 1980) and Joep M.J. de Koning, “Dating the Visscher, or Prototype, View of New Amsterdam,” De Halve Maen 72 (Fall 1999): 47–56. 14 This Plains Indian points to a date of late nineteenth or very early twentieth

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More commonly, the focus of nineteenth-century artists narrowed from pictorial maps to more intimate views of New Netherland’s towns and buildings, particularly New Amsterdam.15 Excluding maps and plans, only two images dating to the four-decade Dutch period were known in the early nineteenth century: the Hartgers view16 that is now believed to represent the 1628–30 era but was once thought to be later, and the prototype view that depicts the period around 1650. These views and their many variants provided source material for nineteenth-century artists, but in addition to their questionable accuracy, they had the drawback that they revealed little architectural detail and no sense of the people. Even artists bent on historical accuracy had to add a large amount of visual information from their imaginations. Let us return to the prototype view, which appeared in the first edition of the Knickerbocker History. This view across the water to the south shore of Manhattan Island constituted the most well known and widely redrawn cityscape view of New Amsterdam in the early nineteenth century (fig. 5). Printers and publishers regularly asked their staff artists to reproduce it, often cropping the panorama to a brief segment. They added or subtracted buildings and architectural details depending on the function for which the image was needed, from high-priced, quality folio prints to small illustrations for a pocket history of the United States. The dates in captions were arbitrarily derived. Publishers used this source to illustrate New Amsterdam as they imagined it appeared at any time during the seventeenth century, without regard to the fact that the city constantly changed. This ahistorical visual sensibility characterizes the use of images of New Netherland throughout the nineteenth century. Because source material was scarce for the period 1624–1664 and Dutch culture had not come to a halt with the colony’s shift to English control, century for the anonymous tapestry, but I include it here as part of the imagery related to seventeenth-century documents. Much more study of this object is needed. 15 Printmakers’ panoramic and aerial views of cities remained extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, but they invariably presented the contemporary city, according to John W. Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984). 16 Entitled t’Fort Nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans, the Hartgers view appeared in 1651 in Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, Nieuw Nederlandt, Nieuw Engelandt . . ., published in Amsterdam by the printer and bookseller Joost Hartgers. Several early nineteenthcentury American engravers reproduced it for books including Joseph White Moulton’s New York 170 Years Ago (New York: A.T. Goodrich, 1824–26; 1843 edition).

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any aspect of a city or rural dwelling that looked Dutch, from any period before the revolutionary war, became fodder for artists picturing New Amsterdam. “Grandfather’s time,” a phrase indicating a time within memory of a relative, was frequently considered as sufficient to represent the distant past. When Edward Rand wrote his story about 1663–1664 New Amsterdam, he used a 1708 dictionary to provide spellings, saying “it seemed ancient enough to fit the present necessity.”17 Another whole class of ‘documentary’ colonial Dutch images appeared at the hands of nineteenth-century artists who recorded the remnants and ruins of late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch style buildings. The amateur watercolorist, Baroness Hyde de Neuville, was one of several people who painted old buildings around Albany in 1800–1810. Her purpose was preservation of a visual memory that she knew was rapidly passing. Just before its demolition in 1835, engraver-historian Benson Lossing drew the house that Myndert Van Kleek built in Poughkeepsie in 1702 (watercolor, New-York Historical Society). Rather than attempt to reconstruct what it might have looked like in its colonial years, Lossing drew it as he saw it in the 1830’s. He used his drawings and engravings to illustrate the many histories he wrote, including one of his last, The History of New York City.18 Of course, nineteenth-century images of individual buildings, remodeled and care-worn, conveyed little of the appearance of the colony’s first four decades, yet altered post-New Netherland buildings were almost all that artists had for solid physical evidence. They recorded old Dutch buildings in order to preserve in pictures remnants that hinted at New Netherland. Others relied on earlier artists’ renditions of post-New Netherland era New York. Watson illustrated his “Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New York City,” published in 1828, with two lithographs representing buildings no longer standing in his time (fig. 7). The small figures in his scenes wear eighteenth-century dress, suggesting that he may have reproduced eighteenth-century views of these street corners. The general sense of “olden time” was sufficient for his purpose. Both images were redrawn and reproduced through17

Rand, ix. Benson Lossing, History of New York City, embracing an outline of events from 1609 to 1830, and a full account of its development from 1830 to 1884 (New York: G.E. Perine, 1884). 18

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out the nineteenth century as images of New York’s Dutch period. Serious scholarly histories tended, as a general rule, to have the fewest illustrations, while popular histories contained the most and the greatest variety. This may be due to the scarcity of visual documentation on the Dutch colony and the desire of good scholars to stick to the facts. George Bancroft has been described as the preeminent historian of his time.19 The second volume of his ten-volume History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time, published in 1837, contained a chapter on the founding and early years of New Netherland. As late as 1848 when the fourteenth edition was published, it still contained only a map and a single rendering of Hudson’s ship with Indians hunting deer in the foreground. Bancroft described New Amsterdam in the briefest terms: “Round the new block-house on Manhattan, the cottages of New Amsterdam began to cluster; . . . It was the day of straw roofs, and wooden chimneys, and windmills.”20 His description of prominent historical figures is equally unenlightening. With such sparse visual description, it is no wonder that artists so often turned to Washington Irving for inspiration, or exploited the prototype view, embellishing and expanding upon it.

1840–1870 By mid century, New Yorkers’ awareness of the on-going loss of their colonial Dutch heritage was sufficient to result in an increased desire for documentation. At the urging of the New-York Historical Society, the state legislature appropriated funds and the lawyer/diplomat John Romeyn Brodhead began collecting documents pertaining to the colonial history of New York from European archives. He returned to the United States in 1844 with some eighty volumes of transcripts. The legislature gave the task of cataloging and publishing

19 For twentieth-century estimates of Bancroft as a historian, see Robert H. Canary, George Bancroft (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974) on Bancroft’s literary and narrative form; Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) for his political and social context; and Russell B. Nye, George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944) for a biography. 20 George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time, 14th edition, 10 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1848), v. 2, 277, 279.

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these documents to a physician, Edmund O’Callaghan, but both Brodhead and O’Callaghan published substantial histories of New York. Scholars today generally give more credence to Brodhead’s History of the State of New York (1853), which had received George Bancroft’s endorsement in its own time. Brodhead’s Dutch biases may be considered less egregious by some than O’Callaghan’s unscholarly moral condemnation of the Dutch governors, yet both authors were influential in the nineteenth century.21 Brodhead’s history included a seventeenth-century map of New Netherland as its only illustration. O’Callaghan reproduced a number of colonial maps and views in his 2-volume History of New Netherland or New York Under the Dutch (1846–48) and in the official 4-volume Documentary History of the State of New-York (1849–1850). One of the most influential figures in the mid nineteenth century’s attempts to picture New Amsterdam was David T. Valentine. As Clerk of the Common Council of New York, Valentine assumed responsibility for compiling the annual Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, which was published from 1842 through 1870. In addition to the official record of the Common Council’s business and various other reports and records, the Manual often included a section on the city’s history. Valentine assembled pictorial and other documents, carrying out in the city archives and libraries a similar type of research to that done by Brodhead in Europe. Along with George Henry Moore, librarian of the New-York Historical Society, and Georg Michael Asher, a private collector and antiquarian, Valentine became an authority on old maps and views of New York at mid-century. Over the years the number of illustrations in the Manual increased from one per volume to around forty. Most depicted New York as it appeared in the year of the Manual’s publication, but many represented scenes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike Brodhead, Valentine often failed to identify the exact sources of his information, and although he claimed that they were authentic, we know that he altered titles and appropriated images that did not really represent New York history.22 He also commissioned images 21 Ronald. W. Howard, “John R. Brodhead, 1814–1873,” in American Historians, 1607–1865, vol. 30 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, Clyde N. Wilson, ed. (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984), 45–51. See also Adriaan J. Barnouw, “John Romeyn Brodhead,” de Halve Maen, 39 (Oct. 1964): 3. 22 Christopher Douglas Pierce documents Valentine’s deception regarding Van Der Helst’s 1656 picture, Vier Overlieden van de Amsterdam, which Valentine published

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to be created from his archival research and included illustrations from Irving’s Knickerbocker History in his later Manuals.23 Valentine’s main contribution to the image of New Netherland was in popularizing reworked historical and invented “documentary” images of New Amsterdam. In 1869, Valentine published a color lithograph of “The Residence of Jacob Leisler on ‘the Strand’,” noting that it represented the first brick dwelling erected in the city (fig. 8). He stated that this view was copied from a drawing made in 1679, undoubtedly the panoramic drawing that accompanied Jasper Danckaerts’ and Peter Sluyter’s Journal of a Voyage to New York, 1679–80.24 Like the prototype view, this drawing was frequently redrafted and cropped in the nineteenth century. Other frequently reproduced remnants of the post-New Netherland era that served as visual reminders of New York’s Dutch roots include two narrow brick buildings in Pearl and Broad Streets, built in typically Dutch style with iron anchors on the gable ends spelling the years 1697 and 1698 respectively. Many artists drew and engraved the facades of these buildings, which Valentine reproduced individually in the 1847 Manual and side by side in the 1853 Manual. There are few variations, suggesting that artists were copying an earlier image, presumably from the eighteenth century. When a building in a picture carried a construction year on its facade, as these two buildings did, publishers not uncommonly attached a caption dating it as a view from that year. For example, the lithographer George Hayward created a print that was called Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street, 1679 (fig. 9) when Valentine published it in his 1853 Manual. According to recent scholarship, the as Hudson on his Return to Holland, a blatant conversion of a seventeenth-century Dutch subject into one related to New Netherland. See Pierce, “The City Delineated: Aesthetic and Ideological Aspects of Colonial Discourse in New York,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Edinburgh, 2002, 63. 23 David T. Valentine, Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (NY: 1859), 548, mentions a map he had drawn of New Amsterdam with only the aid of old deeds and other written records. He recorded the satisfaction he felt when the newly discovered “Duke’s Plan” seemed to confirm the validity of his invented image. See also note 31. 24 Also known as the Labadist general view (Brooklyn Historical Society), this drawing was apparently redrawn and corrected by J. Carson Brevoort, among others. The Stadt Huys view in fig. 10 was derived from a different part of the same drawing. See I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498–1909, 6 vols. (NY: Robert H. Dodd, 1915) v. 1, 224, 231.

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image originated with an oil painting of 1845 by Mrs. A.M. Scudder.25 When she created the image, the building did not exist. She is supposed to have represented it from memory as it appeared in 1833 and she imagined the background she thought it might have had in the 1600s. The date in the Hayward version’s title comes from the year inscribed on the cottage. Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street, 1679 relates to the seventeenth-century Dutch rustic landscape tradition as practiced by such engravers and painters as C.J. Visscher, Cornelis Massys, Jan van de Velde and others.26 Typically their paintings and engravings represented picturesque rural Dutch farmyards and inns, often with a woman leaning out a window or half door and a few animals about.27 Mrs. Scudder undoubtedly consulted such images of the Netherlands to help create her version of a seventeenth-century building that, if it ever existed, she knew only in its nineteenth-century guise. The Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street represents a somewhat dilapidated, one-story cottage surrounded by a thatched house and a brick gabled building.28 It has a distinctly rural feeling that provides a balance to the two urban brick buildings mentioned above. Together these images suggest a wide range of social, economic and architectural character in the mid-nineteenth-century understanding of seventeenth-century New York. With the city of New Amsterdam long gone, such fragmentary remains, deriving as much from imagination, memory and Dutch art as from real buildings, became the basis for the narrow-focus architectural rendering of a lost city. To understand the extent of invention and the resulting variety of images involved in what were billed and recognized at the time as historically accurate documents, consider the Stadt Huys, a stone tavern built in 1642 that became the town hall in 1653 and served

25 Richard J. Koke, compiler, American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the NewYork Historical Society, 3 vols. (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), v. 3, 336–337. 26 Christopher Pierce also notes this relationship. 27 For examples, see Walter S. Gibson, Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 28 When this image was later redrawn to illustrate a historical sketch by Woodrow Wilson, the engraver removed all the rustic touches, straightened walls and added a large brick building to create a more urban air, but it still carried the date in its new caption, “Old Houses, New York City, 1679.” Woodrow Wilson, “Colonies and Nation: A Short History of the People of the United States, Part IV,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 102 (April 1901): 712.

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in that capacity until about 1700.29 Valentine published multiple versions of the old Stadt Huys. The earliest known depiction of this building is found on the extreme right-hand side of the prototype view (fig. 5), a version of which Valentine published in 1852. We have already seen that many other artists produced variations on this image. In some versions the image maker represented the building as having an entrance on the short gable end, while others placed an entrance in the center of the longer side. In some, the fenestration on the gable end consisted of windows on either side of the door with a row of windows above and three windows in the gable. In other versions, the windows beside the door are omitted. In all versions, on the south side three stories of single, evenly spaced windows are capped by a steeply pitched, stepped-gable roof with a central chimney. Lithographer George Hayward produced a very different view of the Stadt Huys (fig. 10), based on a small part of Danckaerts’ panoramic drawing of 1679. In this view, the door occupies the center of the long South side and another building, likely intended to represent the tavern that Governor Lovelace had erected in 1670, abuts one gable end. Three vertical columns of paired windows replace the regularly spaced windows of the prototype views and the Stadt Huys now rises four full stories over the basement. An open bell tower crowns the stepped-gable roof. Despite the addition of a fourth story, its proportions are lower and broader than in the prototype views. Many publishers used this lithograph or variations on it. It even appears twice in one article. First we see a three-story covered porch version entitled “Old State House of New Amsterdam.” Next it appears as a four-and-a-half-story open porch version by the popular illustrator Harry Fenn called “New York City Hall and Docks, 1679.”30 Perhaps the most commonly used depiction of the Stadt Huys in the nineteenth century is that in Watson’s 1828 illustration, printed by Kennedy and Lucas Lithographers (fig. 7). This view purports to 29 Archeological research on the Stadt Huys site in the late twentieth century mapped out some of the building history, but the archeologists seem to have taken the pictorial record at face value. Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archeology of New York City (New Haven: Yale University, 2001), 16–30. 30 Wilson, “Colonies and Nation . . . Part II,” 102 (Feb. 1901): 368 and “Part IV,” (April 1901): 710.

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show the Stadt Huys around 1700, after part of Coenties Slip had been filled in and two new houses had been erected in 1698 and 1700, one on each side of the Stadt Huys. The appearance of this Stadt Huys is considerably altered from the prototype and Hayward views. Instead of a simple stepped-gable roof, this image shows a hipped roof with stepped edges, a crest rail and an enclosed cupola. Five dormers have been added to the roof in two tiers and the door is raised above a basement story to dominate the South facade, which consists of only two full stories on a basement, instead of three or four. When this view was reproduced by another lithographer for Valentine’s 1853 History, the dates on the ends of the houses were removed and pediments were added over the windows of the Stadt Huys. Without the dates, the image became more flexible in terms of the time period it could be said to represent. Some of the variations between these three depictions may be accounted for by the physical alterations that buildings endure over time. According to nineteenth-century historians of the Stadt Huys who searched the court records, this building required shoring up in the seventeenth century. The popular historian Alice Morse Earle wrote that appropriations were made for studs and planks in 1679, and for further reinforcements in 1695 and 1697. However, the variations among multiple versions of the same image as it was redrawn to be reprinted demonstrate that the images derive their details from the imagination of the individual artists. Even major features must owe a lot to artistic license. For a broad four-story brick or stone building with paired windows and gable roof to become a narrow two-story building with single windows and hipped roof would require a very unconventional approach to remodeling! Furthermore, none of these three images match what nineteenthcentury scholars appear to have believed the Stadt Huys looked like, based on their research in the written record. F.B. Patterson’s 1875 The Old Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam, a paper read to the New-York Historical Society and subsequently published, described the building: “Of substantial stone was the Herberg, about fifty feet square and three stories high. The row of little windows in the roof and the gables rising in successive steps, recalled the architecture of Old Amsterdam.”31 Twenty-one years later, Alice Morse Earle used vir31 F.B. Patterson, The Old Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam (NY: F.B. Patterson, 1875), 4.

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tually the same words to describe the Stadt Huys.32 Neither author included a picture of the building to illustrate their text. Had they done so, they would have to have commissioned new drawings, for all visual representations to this time showed a building more rectangular than square. Over time, as Valentine reproduced images of New Amsterdam from the previous two centuries and from artists’ present imaginations, his views gained acceptance as the image of New Amsterdam. When iconophile William Loring Andrews compiled an index of the illustrations in Valentine’s manuals at the end of the century, he noted that “Valentine’s Manual plates were for years a glut in the market, and so plentiful were they in the print-shops that extra-illustrators avoided them as too commonplace for their purpose.”33 Valentine’s plates were also reproduced in many histories of New York and the United States, including Valentine’s own History of the City of New York, and in various reminiscences and works of fiction by a variety of publishers.34 It would be hard to overestimate Valentine’s importance in making so-called historical views of New Amsterdam known to a popular audience in the nineteenth century. In 1901, Julia Colton was still illustrating her history, Annals of Old Manhattan, 1609–1664, with Valentine’s prints.35 Throughout the century, scholarship continued. New plans and views were discovered36 and eventually every building in early New Amsterdam had been identified on the prototype views and Danckaerts’ drawing, including buildings for which no documentation existed, and which were presumed to have been artists’ inventions. Around the end of the century two important collectors of early views of

32 Alice Morse Earle, The Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam, vol. 1, no. 1 in the Half Moon Series (NY: New York City History Club, 1896), 6–7. 33 [William Loring Andrews], An Index to the Illustrations in the Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1841–1870 (NY: Society of Iconophiles, 1906), xxvii. Extra-illustrators provided images for patrons who wished to bind or rebind books with additional pictures. 34 David T. Valentine, [William I. Paulding], History of the City of New York (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853). 35 Julia Colton, Annals of Old Manhattan, 1609–1664 (New York: Brentano’s, 1901). 36 Most notably, George Henry Moore discovered “The Duke’s Plan” in the British Museum in 1858. This three-dimensional aerial view, printed in 1664, became a useful source after Valentine published it in the 1859 Manual, although aerial plans were not especially popular among nineteenth-century illustrators of New Amsterdam.

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New York, Andrews and I.N. Phelps Stokes, published their findings.37 Their exhaustive illustrated catalogs of images attest to the position that “documentary” images of New Netherland had attained during the nineteenth century. While one emphasis among artists at mid century was on serious research and documentation of New Netherland’s visual appearance, most continued to invent scenes, such as the engraver French’s The First Settlement at Albany (fig. 11), purportedly an image of Albany’s predecessor Beverwijck. New Amsterdam dominated the nineteenthcentury view of New Netherland, but it did not have a monopoly. Pictures of Albany’s early buildings, similar to those Valentine published of New Amsterdam buildings, also appeared as illustrations in history books and articles about New Netherland and were available as prints. James Eights appears to have been one of the more prolific recorders of old Albany buildings. Johann Culverhouse painted fanciful night scenes of market places set in Albany and/or New Amsterdam.38 The First Settlement at Albany was published in William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay’s Popular History of the United States in 1876. This history book combined reproduction maps and views, pictures of old buildings, artists’ genre scenes, and illustrations from Irving’s Knickerbocker History and Sleepy Hollow tales. Information conveyed by this variety of illustrations must have affected the meaning that readers derived from Bryant’s text. Illustrations were popular with readers and expensive to produce, so publishers recycled the images they had on hand. Most popular histories in the second half of the century indulged this practice of combining pictures from history and fiction. Publishers’ juxtaposition of documentary images with Knickerbocker illustrations was paralleled by the methods of some historians. Mary L. Booth, for instance, wrote a History of the City of New York from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time in which she acknowledged that her research encompassed Bancroft, Brodhead, O’Callaghan,

37 William Loring Andrews, New Amsterdam, New Orange, New York: A Chronologically Arranged Account of Engraved Views of the City from the First Picture Published in MDCLI Until the Year MDCCC (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1897) and I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909. 38 The Albany Institute of History and Art is a repository of images of old Albany.

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Valentine, and Irving among others.39 The numerous images illustrating her history include the Hartgers view, eighteenth-century buildings as they looked in the nineteenth century, many of Valentine’s prints, the left side of the prototype view with a caption stating that it showed New York in 1674, and illustrations from fiction. In this case, the bizarre mixture of fiction, fancy and history found in Booth’s written history was merely reinforced by the illustrations.

1870–1910 When copyright expired on Irving’s work near the end of the century, publishers flooded the market with new editions and instead of fading into obscurity, the Knickerbocker History took on new life. At the same time, Brodhead’s and O’Callaghan’s historical researches had highlighted the inadequacy of Irving’s history for scholarly readers. Thus as the nation’s centennial turned people’s attention toward their colonial roots, the conviction spread among New Yorkers that Irving and Anglo-American historians had created a false and prejudicial picture of New Netherland that must be overcome. The prominent art and architectural historian and critic, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, provided this evaluation in the introduction to her History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century: “Irving’s Knickerbocker History is, of course, the chief example of a book thus fundamentally faulty; . . . the substance of what it says, and above all the tone in which it is written, having tinctured the thoughts and the writings of three generations, still affect the point of view of many an American, not merely distorting his ideas about this fact or that, this personage or another, but perverting his general mental and emotional attitude toward the place, the times, and the people in question. Even the professed historian still sometimes helps to propagate

39 Mary L. Booth, History of the City of New York from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (New York: W.R.C. Clark & Meeker, 1860), xviii. See Clifton Hood, “Journeying to ‘Old New York,’ Elite New Yorkers and Their Invention of an Idealized City History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Urban History, v. 28 no. 6 (September 2002): 699–719, for a consideration of Mary Booth, David Valentine, Mariana Van Rensselaer, Martha Lamb, and others as “patrician historians” who idealized and romanticized city history in order to shore up the position of a New York elite.

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the influence of Irving’s burlesque.”40 Other historians also noted, correctly, that school books and popular histories frequently quoted Diedrich Knickerbocker. A small group of revisionist historians, mostly amateurs, arose to dispute the common interpretation of United States history as a continuation of English history, claiming instead that the most basic institutions of the United States originated in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Wrote the lawyer turned historian Douglas Campbell: From their earliest school days Americans have been told that this nation is a transplanted England, and that we must look to the motherland as the home of our institutions. But the men who founded New York were not Englishmen: they were Hollanders, Walloons, and Huguenots. The colony was under Dutch law for half a century; its population was probably not half English even at the time of the Revolution; and yet here one finds some of the institutions which give America its distinctive character, while, what is more remarkable, no trace of many of these same institutions can be found in England.41

The revisionist historians, led by the prolific popular writer and lecturer William Elliot Griffis, made wide-ranging efforts to rewrite the history of New Netherland in a more serious vein and to reassess the influence of the Dutch on the formation of American institutions and values.42 The late nineteenth century also saw an increase in historical pictures of New Netherland that multiplied as the 1876 centennial ushered in a colonial revival. By historical pictures I mean history paintings, historical genre paintings and related prints, not the seventeenth-century maps and views or the nineteenth-century records of old buildings that I have referred to as documentary.43 New York

40 Mrs. Schuyler [Mariana Griswold] Van Rensselaer, History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1909), v. 1, xvii. See also the extraordinary claims of Tiemen de Vries, “Washington Irving and the Dutch People of New York,” in Dutch History, Art and Literature for Americans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans-Sevensma Co., 1912). 41 Douglas Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1893), xxiv. 42 Annette Stott, “Rewriting American History,” in Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (New York: Overlook Press, 1998), 78–100. 43 For a general overview of American history painting see William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Ft Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1988) and Patricia M. Burnham and Lucretia Hoover Giese, eds., Redefining American History Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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was one of the major art centers in the United States by the end of the century, so it is not surprising that many New York artists and publishers became interested in New Netherland, in particular. These images depart from the Diedrich Knickerbocker-influenced art of the first half of the century. They tend to be serious, dignified portrayals of characters based more on the burgher portraits of Rembrandt and Hals than on the peasants of Van Ostade. They sometimes refer to seventeenth-century documentary maps and views of New Netherland, but always rely heavily on the artist’s individual imagination. Walter MacEwen’s oil painting, Stadt Herberg, Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in 1650 (fig. 12) is such a colonial revival image. Gentlemen quietly smoke long clay pipes and converse in small groups. One man leans forward in his seventeenth-century-style chair, earnestly speaking to another who listens attentively. Although tankards attest to the drinking that is part of the business of the Stadt Herberg, or Stadt Huys, it does not result in drunken revels, or even joviality. MacEwen could have derived his New Amsterdammers in their wellshaped black hats and plain white collars from Rembrandt’s De Staalmeesters (Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). There is nothing silly or derogatory in the scene, which has no direct correlation to Irving’s History. In a bid for popular opinion, some revisionists argued that Americans who traveled abroad found themselves more at home in Holland than England and that this was further evidence that the Netherlands had helped determine American political and social institutions. They pointed out similarities between Holland and the United States, implying earlier Dutch influence. Historians’ willingness to look to contemporary Holland for evidence of New Netherland’s role in U.S. history has its counterpart in artists’ reliance on modern Holland for sources. The late nineteenth century was a period of extensive European travel for American artists, and Holland was one of the most popular sites for summer sketching. There were colonies of American artists in Nunspeet, Volendam, Egmond, Laren, and Rijsoord.44 They spent their days filling sketchbooks with impressions and color notes that could be taken back to their studios and reworked into paintings

44 Annette Stott, “American Painters Who Worked in the Netherlands, 1880–1914,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 1986.

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during the winter. They sketched contemporary people in traditional costumes, old buildings, landscapes and townscapes, all of which became source materials for the way they would imagine New Netherland. MacEwen traveled in the Netherlands for many summers, sometimes renting a room in the town hall of Hattem to use as a studio. Stadt Herberg, Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in 1650 may have been painted there, for many of his paintings from Hattem include the banks of windows in the background. This fenestration does not correlate with any known illustration of the New Amsterdam Stadt Huys, as can be seen by comparison with the three exterior views discussed earlier. It most likely comes either from a building he knew on his sojourns in the Netherlands or from imagination. The long clay pipes, wooden foot warmer, silver or pewter flagons, and tables and chairs in his painting all represent artifacts that artists could easily acquire in Holland and often brought home with them as studio props. While most of MacEwen’s male New Netherlanders wear seventeenth-century costume, the serving woman, seen in profile, provides a clear view of the peculiar dress and winged cap of nineteenth-century Volendam. It consists of a tight bodice with square neckline, white linen insert, tight three-quarter-length sleeves that leave the forearms bare and thick layers of skirts under a full-length apron made of two tiers of fabric, a short patterned piece at the waist and longer solid color below. The Volendam dress was unique to the small area around this fishing village in North Holland. Two of the earliest and most influential artists to visit the Netherlands for the purpose of collecting picturesque sketches were George Henry Boughton and Edwin Austin Abbey. In 1880 Harpers Publishers sent them on a summer trip to bring back visual material for a sevenpart series of travel articles to be published in Harper’s Weekly Magazine. The articles proved so popular that Harper’s republished them as the book, Sketching Rambles in Holland.45 In the text that he wrote to accompany their illustrations, Boughton stressed how much the scenes they passed reminded them of a seventeenth-century painting. He and Abbey traveled by train, but seem to have treated this modern technology as a time machine intruding into an otherwise unchanged land. Because of the belief that the 45 George Henry Boughton, Sketching Rambles in Holland (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897).

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Netherlands had remained in stasis since the time when Dutchmen sailed to the New World, Boughton and Abbey had no trouble using their summer travel sketches to draw and paint historic New Netherland. One of Boughton’s Sketching Rambles illustrations, A Fair Daughter of Holland (fig. 13) is clearly related to his oil painting Daughter of a Knickerbocker (fig. 14). Boughton toned down the richness of dress seen in the Dutch woman’s embroidered apron and gloves, fur muff, and embossed metal cape clasps, to suggest a somewhat plainer existence for the New Netherlander. She wears a smaller amount of fur trim, no embroidery and a plain skirt, but her lace ruff and cuffs place her in the seventeenth century. The urban background of A Fair Daughter of Holland reveals seventeenth-century costumed skaters, so Boughton appears to have modified his nineteenth-century sketch twice, to fit a historic Dutch context and to suit his notion of rural New Netherland. Daughter of a Knickerbocker’s snowy landscape setting includes a Dutch style country home in the background and she has exchanged her Dutch counterpart’s ice skates for a Bible, making the mood somewhat reminiscent of Boughton’s popular Pilgrims Going to Church (1867, New-York Historical Society). Boughton’s and Abbey’s focus on women in Sketching Rambles foretells another change in late-nineteenth-century American depictions of New Netherland. Women began to play a greater role due in part to the emerging popularity of the female figure in art as representative of an aesthetic ideal. More women artists, a larger female art audience, the women’s rights movement, and changing notions of gender embodied by the “New Woman” also helped ensure that artists would begin imagining New Netherland as a place where both men and women had played picture-worthy roles. Very often, artists chose nineteenth-century Volendam costume for their images of colonial Dutch women. In part, this reflects their knowledge of its recognizability for American audiences. Volendam had become a major tourist center and artist colony by the end of the century, so images of the winged cap and unique apron were widely dispersed through the United States in children’s books, art and advertisements. Certainly no one thought that the early Dutch men of New Netherland had all married fisherwomen from Volendam. Rather, the Volendam image was becoming a familiar Dutch type that would evolve into a lasting stereotype. Unlike its female counterpart, the distinctive male Volendam costume was rarely used to illustrate historical pictures of New Netherland.

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Edward W. Kemble drew the tall fur hat of a Volendammer on one of the characters in his illustration, The Edict of William the Testy, for an 1894 edition of the Knickerbocker History, but his is a rare exception. Instead, most artists referred to seventeenth-century Dutch art for help with the male figure, continuing the tradition begun earlier in the century when Irving’s male characters had constituted most of the drawn and painted population of an imagined New Netherland. With the introduction of more female figures into colonial Dutch history pictures, artists applied the contemporary practice of referring to nineteenth-century Holland for sources, hence the two-century discrepancy between male and female costumes in many history paintings. Artists exhibited paintings of New Netherland side by side with paintings of contemporary Dutch peasants and landscape. That juxtaposition reinforced the identification of the visual appearance of New Netherland with the visual appearance of contemporary Holland, as did the juxtaposition of seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century costumes in history paintings. This is similar to the unscholarly way that revisionist historians used perceived similarities between the United States in the nineteenth century and Holland in the seventeenth century to prove a strong Dutch influence in the formation of American customs and institutions. Many of the major changes between representations of New Netherlanders in the early and late nineteenth century can be illustrated by comparing Quidor’s Antony van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant (fig. 2) with Walter MacEwen’s Stadt Herberg, Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in 1650 (fig. 12). Quidor’s Dutch men sprawl about the room in ungainly poses, exposing their button-popping bellies, while MacEwen’s distinguished gentlemen, fit and trim, sit clustered about the room for serious discussion. The cartoonish eighteenth-century Queen Anne furniture in Quidor’s painting bears no resemblance to Dutch furnishings of the time period he purports to illustrate, whereas MacEwen has researched the material culture of that era and produced a typical seventeenth-century arm chair. The timid young woman excluded from the male party in Quidor’s scene is replaced in MacEwen’s interior with a serving girl who moves confidently across the room with a tankard for one of the patrons. She wears the dress of a nineteenth-century Volendam woman, while the men wear leather jerkins and pantaloons over colorful stockings and shirts with split sleeves. Their square white collars and ruffs are

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familiar from seventeenth-century Dutch portraits. Quidor’s figures wear eighteenth-century coats over tight vests and neck cloths. A tricorn on the floor recalls late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonial head gear. The mood of these two paintings is entirely opposite, the unrestrained joviality of Quidor’s a stark contrast to the quiet dignity of MacEwen’s. Whereas Quidor’s image was inspired by Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History, MacEwen’s is more in line with the later historical interpretations of Douglas Campbell and William Elliot Griffis. One thing that did not change over time was the nineteenth-century awareness of the variety of peoples in New Netherland. Historians recognized the role of the slave trade in New Netherland’s development and they devoted considerable attention to the relations between the Dutch and various native peoples with whom the colonists came into contact. Although they are far from ubiquitous, African Americans do form part of the visual repertory, from the servant/slave in Quidor’s Van Corlear to a black child in Kemble’s Edict. One of the most compelling images is Howard Pyle’s 1895 illustration of the sale of slaves from the Dutch ship White Horse in 1655 (fig.15). The familiar male dress and a stepped-gable brick building with the date 1643 help identify the site as New Amsterdam.46 Darley placed Native Americans in outdoor scenes juxtaposed with Knickerbockers for humorous effect (fig. 3). Later artists included them in scenes where the narrative required them, such as a staff artist’s illustration of The Dutch Trading with the Indians (fig. 16). Images such as Pyle’s slave market and MacEwen’s Stadt Herberg provided generic historical views of specific places, the appearance of which the artists invented wholesale. Other artists turned to seventeenth-century sources for guidance with settings. The Dutch Trading with the Indians is distinguished by the artist’s reliance on the left side of the prototype view. Canoes, Indians and people are all drawn from the artist’s imaginative repertoire and historical research, but the gallows and signal tower in the foreground are prominent motifs taken from the prototype view. Likewise, the windmill rising over 46 Artists also borrowed from one another. The same tavern sign that appears in Pyle’s slave market scene can be found in a Scene in New Amsterdam, 1660 by Victor S. Perard, published in Julian Hawthorne, United States, vol. 1, Nations of the World series (New York: J.C. Yancey, c. 1898), 99. Pyle created his image to illustrate Thomas A. Janvier’s pseudo-historical article on “New York Slave-Traders,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 90, no. 536 ( January 1895), 293–305.

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the walls of the fort, the distinctive double roof of the church, a row of small houses and their placement in relation to one another also come from that source. Rather than the brick gable so popular with other artists, the creator of The Dutch Trading with the Indians depicts these buildings with wooden roofs and plank sides suggesting an earlier era in New Amsterdam history. Still other artists took specific events as their subject. William Ranney is one of several who painted the purchase of Manhattan Island, not as Irving described it, but as a serious transaction in an open landscape.47 John Ward Dunsmore painted a series of historical scenes, including Peace Treaty with the Indians at the House of Jonas Bronck (Greene County Historical Society, Bronck Museum, Coxsackie, NY) and Signing the First Deed Recorded in New York City, October 16, 1654 (Title Guarantee and Trust Company, New York City), and Howard Pyle painted the Arrival of Stuyvesant at New Amsterdam (Brown County Library, Green Bay, WI), in which Peter Stuyvesant marches grimly forward, followed by a line of soldiers as the townspeople look on. Pictures of the Half Moon and Hudson’s explorations became ubiquitous after the turn of the twentieth century, particularly during the heightened awareness of the Hudson-Fulton celebration. Many less well known historic moments also became subjects of murals in hotels, schools and libraries, as well as easel paintings.48 To review, Irving’s Knickerbocker History dominated the early nineteenth-century production of New Netherland images. In addition to the inspiration derived from Irving’s words, artists used seventeenthcentury Dutch tavern scenes and their own imaginations as sources. The result was a view of New Netherlanders as corpulent, pipesmoking caricatures. At mid century, the use of historical and documentary images, which had played a minor role in the previous decades, became a major theme. Brodhead, O’Callaghan and other historians compiled and interpreted a mass of new documentary material, while D.T. Valentine popularized visual records by com-

47 David Scobey provides an interesting commentary on the popularity of the “Purchase of Manhattan” story during the nineteenth century as symbolizing two essential aspects of the city’s image: “it made an act of trade the constitutive event of New York’s Public life” and “it specified that primal scene of exchange as a transaction in land.” David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 91. 48 See The Brochure of the Mural Painters, A National Society founded 1895 (New York: Kalkhoff Company, 1916) for many examples.

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missioning numerous reproductions of what he claimed were archival images of New Amsterdam and old New York. Many “seventeenth century” images were invented at this time, such as Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street, 1679. In the 1890s, as revisionist historians including Campbell, Griffis, and Van Rensselaer attempted to elevate New Netherland’s status in American history, artists looked to Rembrandt and Hals, and to contemporary rural Holland to provide a more serious and elite, if equally inventive image of New Netherland. Women were more often represented as residents of the Dutch colony and artists depicted numerous historical events in murals and illustrations. Whether nineteenth-century images derived from historical documents, imagination, or a combination of sources, an ahistorical sensibility frequently characterized their use. The most scholarly histories took the most conservative approach, including only one or two historical maps or views, while works of popular history and fiction freely combined the full range of images. The practice of reusing images of New Netherland with new captions, dates and visual details was widespread. The impossibility of knowing what New Netherland really looked like in detail, combined with New Yorkers’ desire for visual affirmation of the past, inspired its constant reinvention. Past art traditions, creative imagination, contemporary interests and historical methods inform these images that often say more about the times in which they were created than the times they attempt to depict.

THE WALLOON AND HUGUENOT ELEMENTS IN NEW NETHERLAND AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK: IDENTITY, HISTORY, AND MEMORY Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

I. Walloon and Huguenot Identities In his Story of the Walloons at Home, in Lands of Exile and in America, published in 1923, William Griffis observed that “it may puzzle the average person whose historical reading is defective, to discriminate between ‘Walloon’ and ‘Huguenot,’ as these terms are commonly used.”1 More recently, Oliver Rink, in his history of New Netherland, spoke about “a Huguenot culture founded by the Walloons.”2 This common practice of using these two words interchangeably is not only confusing, even to people whose “historical reading” is not defective, but also misleading. In terms of early modern European religious identities, to use an American constitutional parallel, I favor strict construction. Huguenots are not French Huguenots.3 Otherwise, Walloons would then be Belgian Huguenots and French-speaking Swiss Calvinists would be Swiss Huguenots. These almost humorous associations are inaccurate because they grant the word Huguenot a generic meaning that it does not possess. The term Huguenot, which has a specific, although disputed, Swiss German etymology, has been closely and exclusively associated with the history of French Protestantism.4 The word Walloon, which has equally uncertain origins, either comes from the ancient Teutonic 1 William E. Griffis, The Story of the Walloons at Home, in Lands of Exile and in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923), 247. 2 Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson. An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 143. 3 It is equally redundant to speak of “Belgic Walloons” as Griffis does. The Story of the Walloons, 221. 4 The term Huguenot has several etymologies but the most widely accepted has it come from the word Eidgnossen, meaning confederates, in reference to the Genevans’ struggle to gain freedom from their Lord, the Duke of Savoy, in the early 1500s. Janet G. Gray, “The Origin of the Word Huguenot,” Sixteenth Century Journal, XIV, n. 3 (1983): 349–59.

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word Wahl, meaning foreigner, or the Flemish and Dutch word Waalsch, meaning Gaul.5 Both hypotheses are not incompatible since they refer to a Celtic group settled in what is today northern France and southern Belgium, either perceived as foreign or Gallic. As opposed to the term Huguenot, however, both etymologies carry a linguistic dimension and by derivation the word Walloon, which can be applied to people and areas, has mainly referred to the descendants of the Waalsch as speakers of a Romance language related to French. In some cases, the term Walloon even exclusively means French-, as opposed to Flemish-, speaking, as, for example, in Walloon Flanders, that is Flanders where the main language is French, but known in France as les Flandres gallicanes, that is through its cultural and territorial rather than solely linguistic identity. Similarly when Griffis wrote in 1923 that “there are to-day no Protestant Walloons in southern Belgium,” Walloon means French-speakers.6 In terms of religious organization and beliefs, early modern Walloons were Calvinists. Their church was defined by the Belgic Confession, La Confession de foi, faicte d’un commun accord par les fidèles qui conversent ès pays-bas, which was drafted by Guy de Brès and adopted in 1559, the same year the Gallic Confession was agreed on at the underground Huguenot national synod of Paris.7 A French version was first published in Rouen in 1561 and translated into Dutch the following year. The Belgic Confession, which later became one of the founding documents of the Dutch Reformed Church [synods of Antwerp (1566) and Emden (1571)], is similar to the abovementioned Huguenot Confession of Faith, known as La Confession de foi de La Rochelle because of its official adoption at a synod held there 5 David S. Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?,” New York History, 62 (1981): 54; Lucy G. Green, The De Forests and the Walloon Founding of New Amsterdam (New York: The Gillis Press, 1924 [Master’s Thesis, University of Nebraska, 1916]), 3. 6 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, 271. Not to make things more confusing, however, the term Walloon refers to Francophone Calvinists from Southern Netherlands only historically because in present-day Belgium, Walloons are inhabitants of Wallonia, the French-speaking southeastern part of the country. Although the name was coined in the 1840s, la Wallonie is a relatively recent creation since it does not correspond to a historical province or group of provinces but to a linguistic and administrative region born of the 1970 and 1980 Belgian constitutional reforms. Robert Stallaerts, Historical Dictionary of Belgium, European Historical Dictionaries n. 35 (Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1999), “Wallonie,” 164–65. 7 Emile Michel Braekman, Le protestantisme belge au 16 e siècle. Belgique, Nord de la France, Refuge (Carrières-sous-Poissy, France: La Cause, 1999), 69–83.

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in 1571, except for its stronger emphasis on ecclesiastical discipline and more virulent condemnation of Anabaptism.8 This similarity is hardly surprising since the Reformation developed in Walloon territories, as it did in France, under Calvin’s supervision. The Walloons, and therefore the Dutch, and the Huguenots had an identical Presbyterian, technically known as presbytero-synodical, polity. This is a significant observation to bear in mind in view of the religious integration of the Huguenot refugees in colonial New York in the eighteenth century. The adoption of the 1579 pro-Catholic Union of Arras, signed between “les provinces vallones” of Artois and Hainaut, the largest French-speaking provinces of southern Netherlands, and the subsequent Spanish reconquista, shall we say, turned the Walloons into a religious minority. As Griffis emphatically reminds us, the Walloons, like the Huguenots, were victims of “tyrants of the peculiarly Latin order,” except that, unfortunately for the Huguenots, “the French royal autocrat excelled the Spaniard, or the Turk, in the deviltry of his oppression and persecution.”9 The Walloons also never had enough leverage to negotiate an Edict of Nantes and the proximity of the Calvinist Northern Netherlands led most of them to flee their home provinces early on. Although early modern Walloons inhabited all southern netherlandish provinces, which remained under Spanish allegiance or were reconquered by Spain in the 1580s, they mostly hailed from the French-speaking provinces or parts of provinces of Artois, Hainaut, Walloon Flanders, Namur, Cambrai, southern Brabant or le Brabant wallon, western Luxemburg, and the Prince-bishopric of Liège.10 A geographic reality that has strengthened the semantic association, not to say fusion, of the religious, geographic, and linguistic connotations carried by the word Walloon. It is their southern geographic origins, with its cultural and political implications, and their language

8

Michael A. Hakkenberg, “Belgic Confession,” in Hans J. Hellerbrand, gen. ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols. (New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), 1:137–39; Phillipe Wolf (dir.) Histoire des protestants en France. De la Réforme à la Révolution (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2001 [1977], 48–54; Didier Poton and Patrick Cabanel, Les protestants français du XVI e au XX e siècles (Paris: Nathan, 1994), 15–16. 9 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, 212–13, 248. 10 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), Map. 3, 36.

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that distinguished the Walloons from the Dutch. Culturally, and somewhat religiously as well, the Walloon refugees stood out in the Netherlands for what Willem Frijhoff calls “the rather exuberant lifestyle characteristic of their southern origin,” which was criticized by the Dutch population for its “mannerism, its propensity to luxury, and its allegedly dissolute morality.”11 Therefore, if we were to draw a series of concentric identity circles around the term Walloon, the first would be linguistic, Walloons are French speakers; the second would be religious, Walloons are Calvinists; and the third would be geographic and cultural or protonational, most Walloons were from present-day Belgium. In the second half of the seventeenth century, France’s aggressive territorial policy and the inherent fluidity of borderlands led to official identity changes as Walloons living in Spanish-controlled provinces suddenly became French subjects.12 As Griffis puts it in an oversimplifying nutshell, “Walloons became Frenchmen.”13 Artois was annexed in 1659; Walloon Flanders and Lille in 1668; and Valenciennes and Hainaut in 1678.14 While the political and cultural longterm consequences of these territorial shifts cannot be underestimated, the religious impact was probably minimal. First, long before the French annexation Artois and Hainaut had recognized Spanish Catholic control. The Jesuits had been in Arras, for example, since 1603. There were thus no official religious changes. Second, the number of Walloons living in these provinces must have been minuscule, as persecution had driven most of them away before the close of the sixteenth century. As for the few who had remained, they certainly did not immediately become “Frenchmen” as the postannexation cultural absorption had to take at least a generation. Migration is another factor, probably more effective though much less spectacular simply because it was voluntary and involved only 11 Willem Frijhoff, “Uncertain Brotherhood: The Huguenots in the Dutch Republic,” in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity. The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 131. 12 On the evolution of the present-day Franco-Belgian border in the early modern period, see Nelly Girard D’Albissin, Genèse de la frontière franco-belge: les variations des limites septentrionales de la France de 1659 à 1789 (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1970). 13 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, 247. 14 “Artois,” “Lille,” “Flandres Gallicanes,” “Picardie,” in Lucien Bély, ed., Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime. Royaume de France XVII e–XVIII e siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 90–91, 553–54, and 988–89.

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a few, which, to use Griffis’ words, led Walloons to become Frenchmen. A case in point is the Mazyck family, Huguenots who eventually came and prospered in Charleston, South Carolina. The Mazycks, spelled with a “k”, left Brabant and settled in the La Rochelle area at the turn of the seventeenth century. They were among the few Walloons who, in order to maintain existing trade networks, actually migrated to Catholic France to live among Huguenots. In 1685, however, the Mazycqs [or Mazycques], who had by then gallicized their name by ending it with “cq” or “cque,” left France first for the Netherlands, and then for England, and South Carolina. Incidentally, once in Charleston, the Mazycks reverted to the ancestral spelling of their name. By the time of the Revocation, the Mazycks were Frenchmen and Huguenots of Walloon origins and emigrated to North America as such.15 In contrast, Louis Gourdain, who was born in Concourt, Artois before the French annexation and who settled in Carolina in the mid-1680s, was a Walloon subject of Louis XIV rather than a Frenchman.16

II. Walloon and Huguenot Migrations to Dutch and British North America The Mazyck and Gourdain cases make it clear that the Walloon and Huguenot migrations to Dutch and British North America have to be studied in their diasporic contexts. Although closely related, both historically and historiographically, the Walloon and Huguenot exoduses nonetheless constitute two distinct diasporas. There is no such thing as “the dispersion of the Huguenot Walloons,” as Griffis claimed, but the multifaceted interaction between the two groups of French-speaking Calvinist refugees has led historians to merge, with

15 Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “The Huguenots of Proprietary Carolina: Patterns of Migration and Settlement,” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of South Carolina’s Plantation Society (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 38–39. 16 Daniel Ravenel, ed., ‘Liste des François et Suisses’ from an Old Manuscript List of French and Swiss Protestants Settled in Charleston, on the Santee and at the Orange Quarter in Carolina who Desired Naturalization Prepared Probably about 1695–6 (Baltimore: Clearfield Company Reprints & Remainders, 1968 [Charleston, 1868]), 61; Virginia Gourdin, “Madeleine Chardon, of Tours, Touraine and her Family,” Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, 91 (1986): 88, note 125.

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somewhat confusing results, both migrations, which became known as the premier and second Refuge.17 The Walloon migration, which is part of a larger flow of Flemish and French-speaking Protestants who left the southern Netherlands, occurred from the 1520s to the 1630s, and reached a peak between 1567 and 1590. Most of the Walloons, possibly 150,000, emigrated to the Netherlands, and the rest settled in England, the Palatinate, and independent cities such as Wesel and Emden.18 The Walloons left Spanish-controlled and inquisition-plagued provinces in the international context of the Dutch rebellion. The Huguenot exodus, which took place between 1680 and 1700, resulted from Louis XIV’s increasing repression and the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It pertains almost exclusively to the French domestic context. The time gap between the two migratory flows, in practical terms, means that when the Huguenots reached England and the Netherlands descendants of Walloon refugees were fully integrated into the host societies that had welcomed their ancestors. While a handful of Huguenots had settled among Walloons in cities such as London, Norwich, Frankfort, and Emden, especially in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), conversely the late seventeenth-century diaspora was exclusively a Huguenot affair.19 Throughout Northern Europe (except in the Netherlands), and especially in England, an overwhelming number of French refugees revived and took over moribund Walloon communities, which pro-

17 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, 15. See for example, Paul Dibon, “Le Refuge Wallon précurseur du Refuge huguenot,” Dix-Septième Siècle, 76–77 (1967): 53–74. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the specific term ‘Refuge’, rather than diaspora, has been used to refer to the Huguenot exodus but this long-established usage is eroding as shown by the two following recent publications. Eckart Birnstiel, ed., La Diaspora des Huguenots. Les réfugiés protestants de France et leur dispersion dans le monde (XVI e–XVIII e siècles) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001) and Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity. 18 Braekman, Le protestantisme belge, 61–68 and 207–18; Gustaaf Janssens, “‘Partis par nécessité de conscience . . .’ Les émigrés des Pays-Bas méridionaux au XVIème siècle,” in Anne Morelli, ed., Les Émigrants Belges. Réfugiés de guerre, émigrés économiques, réfugiés religieux et émigrés politiques ayant quitté nos régions du XVI ème siècle à nos jours (Bruxelles: Evo, 1998), 259–78; Frijhoff, “Uncertain Brotherhood.” 19 For essays on the Walloons in Emden, London, and Norwich, see Timothy Fehler, “The French Congregation’s Struggle for Acceptance in Emden, Germany,” Charles Littleton, “Acculturation and the French Church of London, 1600-circa 1640,” and John Miller “The Fortunes of the Strangers in Norwich and Canterbury, 1565–1700,” in Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity, 73–89, 90–109, and 110–27 respectively.

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vided essential religious and administrative structures that greatly facilitated the integration of the Huguenots. As Willem Frijhoff notes in the case of the Netherlands, “seen from the perspective of the Second Refuge, the most important achievement of the First Refuge was the elaboration of a stable network of institutions where Frenchspeaking refugees could find appropriate help, shelter, and support.”20 Perhaps more importantly, however, the Walloon migration paved the way for later Huguenot settlements from a political and socioeconomic perspective by creating a precedent in confronting the institutions of the host countries with a first massive influx of displaced French-speaking Calvinists. In terms of premier and second Refuge, North America constitutes a specific case. In the 1560s, Florida was the destination of groups of Huguenots but within a crown-sponsored colonization policy. The centrality of a quest for a haven for persecuted Calvinists does not emerge from contemporary sources but is the result of a post facto historical interpretation, especially in the writings of late nineteenthcentury historians, such as Francis Parkman and Charles W. Baird, who interpreted the history of the colonization of North America as a struggle between Protestant and Catholic forces.21 In this view, the Huguenots were depicted as a sort of precursors who farsightedly envisioned North America as a Protestant Canaan. The arrival of thirty “Walloons” in New Amsterdam in 1624, among whom were a few Huguenots, is to be placed not so much in the context of the premier Refuge, but in that of the flurry of Northern European, especially English, transatlantic colonial projects of the first half of the seventeenth century. Individuals who had little awareness of colonial realities but who had influential connections in court 20

Frijhoff, “Uncertain brotherhood,” 132. Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World, rev. ed., Colin G. Calloway, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, [Boston, 1885]); Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America (Baltimore: The Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., 1998, [New York, 1885]). For recent investigations on Coligny’s objectives, see John T. McGrath, The French in Early Florida. In the Eyes of the Hurricane (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Mickaël Augeron and Laurent Vidal, “Refuges ou réseaux? Les dynamiques atlantiques protestantes au XVIe siècle,” in Guy Martinière, Didier Poton, and François Souty, eds., D’un Rivage à l’Autre. Villes et Protestantisme dans l’Aire Atlantique (XVI e–XVII e siècles) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1999), 31–61 and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Un refuge avant le Refuge? La ‘Floride huguenote’ et les origines de la Caroline du Sud” in Martine Acerra and Guy Martinière, eds., Coligny, les protestants et la mer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de ParisSorbonne, 1997), 235–45. 21

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and in the mercantile community, usually initiated these colonization plans. These often chimerical schemes contemplated the establishment of hundreds, even thousands, of settlers, with quick cash returns and fame for their sponsors. Like the Puritans in 1621 and the Huguenots in the wake of the 1627–28 siege of La Rochelle, the Walloons succumbed to the charms of the mysterious Virginia and in 1622 petitioned English authorities for permission to settle there.22 After the English denied their request, they left for New Netherland under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company.23 In the perspective of the premier Refuge, the timing of this migration is very late since most Walloon refugees had left the Southern Netherlands by 1600. These were isolated individuals, who, inspired by their leader Jesse de Forest, who seems to have entertained various colonial schemes for personal profit, the sake of adventure, and posterity, crossed the Atlantic primarily for economic reasons.24 Hailing from Valenciennes and Roubaix, these Walloons had first escaped to Leiden, where they could worship in complete freedom, before relocating in New Netherland.25 The next wave of Walloon and Huguenot migration to North America occurred in the mid-1670s as a preliminary phase of the second Refuge, and led to the settlement of New Paltz, New York. Except for a couple of families from Calais, which had been part of France since 1558, these settlers were Walloons.26 There was no need for Huguenots, unless personal or economic, to leave France until the late 1670s when persecution intensified. Most New Paltz settlers came from the war-torn border provinces of Artois and Walloon Flanders, and seem to have left their homes around the time of France’s conquests. Like the Walloons in the 1620s, they moved to America in a dual migratory process.27 They first left for

22 Paul E. Kopperman, “Profile of Failure: The Carolana Project, 1629–1640,” The North Carolina Historical Review, 59 (1982): 1–23; Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 1:158–66. 23 Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 74–80. 24 On Jesse de Forest’s posthumous fame, largely fueled by his descendants, see Caroline-Isabelle Caron, “Se créer des ancêtres: les écrits historiques et généalogiques sur les Forest et de Forest en Amérique du Nord, 19e et 20e siècles,” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2000). 25 Harry Macy, Jr., “375th Anniversary of the Eendracht and Nieuw Nederland,” The New York Genealogical and Biographical Newsletter, 10 (Winter 1999): 3–4. 26 Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch,” 54–55. 27 For a recent demographic and cultural study on the relatively little-known

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the Palatinate in the late 1650s and 1660s, and then settled in New York in the mid-1670s, after the English had secured control of the colony. The Huguenot migration proper to New York started almost ten years after the foundation of New Paltz with the arrival of refugees in the early 1680s. In New York, as in British North America, except in the case of the 1701–02 crown-sponsored Manakinton settlement in Virginia, the Huguenot migration was short since all refugees settled in the colonies before 1690. In North America, as in Europe, the two migrations were therefore distinct and had their own dynamics. In order to answer the oft-asked question, “Is so and so a Walloon or Huguenot settler?,” two parameters need to be factored in: geographic origin and time of the migration. If he or she was from one of the border provinces of Artois, Walloon Flanders, or Hainaut, he or she was a Walloon even if they left after 1659, 1668, and 1678. If they were from Calais and Picardy or other areas annexed by France before the seventeenth century, they were Huguenots. Additionally, very few Huguenots came to British North America before the mid-1670s, simply because there were no reasons to leave France until the hardening of Louis XIV’s religious policy, which occurred at about the time of the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678. It is therefore safe to assume that, except for a handful of migrants from Calais and northern Picardy, most French-speaking Calvinists who settled in New Netherland were Walloons.

III. Walloon and Huguenot Memory: Uses and Misuses of History The fact that the Walloon migration has been historiographically integrated into the better-known post-Revocation Huguenot diaspora led to the absorption of Walloon memory by its Huguenot counterpart. In Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, there are Huguenot but no Walloon Historical and Genealogical Societies. While being aware of the Walloons’ historical existence, especially in Great Britain, these Societies nonetheless preserve Walloon memory in a Huguenot shell. The association of the Huguenot diaspora with highly visible events such as the 1680 dragonnades and the Huguenot-Walloon community of New Paltz, see Paula W. Carlo, “The Huguenots of Colonial New Paltz and New Rochelle: A Social and Religious History,” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2001), 85–223.

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Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and of the Huguenot refugees with the French nation account for their memorial domination over the Walloons, who cannot boast a Revocation or be completely associated with the Belgian nation because many of the original migrants hailed from regions later annexed by France. Exceptions to this Huguenot takeover are to be found in the Netherlands and New York. In the former, where Walloon refugees were more numerous, more influential, culturally closer to the Dutch and arrived earlier than the Huguenots, a Commission pour l’Histoire des Églises Wallones was founded in 1878, almost a century before the Fondation Huguenote des Pays-Bas was created in 1975. In New York, due to the Walloons’ early presence in the colony and their historical ties to the Netherlands, their ethnic memory was to be claimed by Dutch and Huguenot memory with the almost simultaneous foundations of the Huguenot Society of America in 1883 and the Holland Society of New York in 1886. The Walloon and Huguenot migrations to Dutch and British North America soon became prime material for historians, genealogists, writers, and politicians eager to tell and/or claim a slice of American history. The 1924 joint commemoration of the arrival of the Walloons in New York and the Huguenot attempted colonization of Florida provided an ideal forum for the expression of nationalism exacerbated by the Allies’ victory over the Central powers in World War I.28 In the United States, “historical and patriotic societies” celebrated Huguenot and Walloon heritage in unison with the creation of the Huguenot-Walloon New Netherland Commission, which meant to honor “the landing of the first Huguenot-Walloons (Belgian and French Protestant refugees) in the territory of New Netherland,” and whose message was relayed through various Huguenot societies in the country.29 Significantly, from the perspective of Huguenot mem-

28 Caroline-Isabelle Caron, “Une fondation ‘française’ de New York? Le Tricentennaire huguenot-wallon de 1924,” Paper read at the Deuxiémes Rencontres de la Commission Franco-Québécoise des Lieux de Mémoire Communs, Université Laval, Québec, september 2003. I wish to thank the author for sharing a copy of her paper with me. 29 “Activities of Huguenot Groups,” Transactions of the South Carolina Huguenot Society, 28 (1923): 58–60. The 1924 commemoration was also an opportunity to provide the Middle Colonies with Calvinist—albeit foreign- founders soon after the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts.

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ory, the obvious Dutch dimension of the commemoration was completely eclipsed.30 The 1924 anniversary was for Belgian historians the occasion to restore Belgium’s role in the founding of the United States at the expense of their culturally aggressive neighbors and eternal rivals, the French and the Dutch. The 1924 commemoration led to the publication of two eminently patriotic Belgian works, Griffis’ The Story of the Walloons and Henry Bayer’s seminal The Belgians: First Setters in New York and in the Middle States, and of Lucy Green’s 1916 University of Nebraska Masters thesis, The De Forests and the Walloon Founding of New Amsterdam.31 Griffis’ book was dedicated to “all descendants of the Belgic Pilgrim Fathers of the Middle States who by their gifts and graces enriched the American composite,” and Bayer’s to “the brave Belgian nation whose children, Walloons and Flemings, through their courage and perseverance so usefully contributed to the founding of the United States of America.”32 Clearly, the Belgians had been the victims of a historical injustice that needed to be redressed. In tune with these Belgian nationalist historians, Green also deplored the fact that the first Walloon settlers had been regarded as Dutch. “Oddly enough,” she writes, “while no one appears to have considered the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth Colony a Dutch colony because they sailed from Leyden, yet it has been assumed the BelgianFrench colony, sailing at the same time from the same place, were Hollanders.”33 Green omits, of course, that the Walloons, as opposed to the Puritans, emigrated with the material assistance and the sponsorship of the Dutch West India Company. These authors also used the Latin name Nova Belgica to trace a Belgian origin of the colonization of New Netherland. Bayer, who

30 The choice of the date, which coincided with the arrival of the Walloons, led to much bickering between the Huguenot Society of America and the Holland Society of New York, the descendants of the Dutch preferring to celebrate the beginning of Dutch trade in New Netherland in 1610, a year after Hudson’s voyage, or the 1626 purchase of Manhattan by Peter Minuit. Caron, “Une fondation ‘française’ de New York?”, 4–7. 31 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons; Henry G. Bayer, The Belgians: First Settlers in New York and in the Middle States (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, Inc., 1987 [New York, 1925]); Green, The De Forests. 32 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, [v]; Bayer, The Belgians, [vi]. 33 Green, The De Forests, 69.

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also denounced the “Batavian disguises” of Walloon names, explained that Nova Belgica is not a translation of New Netherland but a tribute to the Walloon presence in the founding years of the Dutch colony made by the Dutch officials, for if it had been a mere translation, New Netherland would have been called “Nova Belgica Hollandica,” meaning the Dutch provinces of ancient Belgium.34 The 1920s and 1940s also saw the genealogical and historical appropriation of well-known New Netherland historical figures by the Belgians. Primus inter pares stands Peter Minuit, or rather Pierre Minuit, who became a highly coveted character in this struggle between Belgian and Dutch heritage in New York. Green wrote that Minuit was “a man of [Walloon] blood, faith, and language” and in his 1943 book, De Pierre Minuit aux Roosevelt, l’épopée belge aux ÉtatsUnis, [From Pierre Minuit to the Roosevelts, the Belgian Epic in the United States], Robert Goffin explained that Minuit’s father was “Jehan Minuit, a farmer at Ohain” a small town of the Walloon Brabant located 15 miles south of Brussels.35 New York was not the only focus of the festivities celebrating the Huguenot-Walloon heritage in the United States in the 1920s. The year 1924 also marked the 360th anniversary of the foundation of Fort Caroline in Florida a 1564 Huguenot settlement sponsored by Admiral Coligny. Additionally, in the wake of US Marine Major George Osterhout’s assumed discovery of the site of Charlesfort (founded in 1562), the South Carolina Huguenot Society organized a ceremony on Parris Island in 1926.36 According to Jeannette T. Connor, historian of early Florida whose 1927 edition of Ribault’s Whole and True Discoverye of Terra Florida was republished by the 1964 Florida Quadricentennial Commission, these anniversaries were to commemorate “the landing of the first Protestants on the soil of North America, [which] mark[ed] the birth of religious freedom in

34

Bayer, The Belgians, 260 and 266–71. Green, The De Forests, 69; Robert Goffin, Les Wallons, fondateurs de New York (Gilly, Belgium: Institut Jules Destrée, 1970 [reprint of excerpts from De Pierre Minuit aux Roosevelt, l’épopée belge aux États-Unis, New York: Brentano’s, 1943]), 39. Claiming Peter Minuit, who purchased Manhattan in 1626, as a Walloon was, of course, a way to counteract the arguments put forth by the Holland Society supporting a Dutch foundation of New York. 36 “Programme, ceremonies at Parris Island, South Carolina on March 27, 1926,” Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, 31 (1926): 7–41. 35

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our country, forty-five years before . . . the beginning of Jamestown, and fifty-eight years before the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.”37 In their quest for founders, Huguenot and Walloon hagiographers used the comparison with the Pilgrim Fathers to integrate their ethnic memory into the national consciousness. Griffis evoked Plymouthbound “Priscilla Mullens, the typical ‘Puritan’ maiden, who was born in France!;” Goffin stressed the presence of Walloons on the Mayflower; and Green could not resist devoting a chapter of her thesis to the “Comparison of the Walloon Colony in Leyden with the Contemporary Puritan Colony from England in Leyden.”38 While historians of the Walloons in North America found the apparently similar trajectory of the New Amsterdam Walloons and the New England Pilgrims irresistible, chroniclers of the Huguenot experience in Florida also exploited the Pilgrim vein. In 1924 they explained that the column honoring the French expeditions erected in Mayport, Florida, “truly deserves the proud designation of Southern Plymouth Rock, given by its neighbor, the city of Jacksonville.”39 The Florida and South Carolina columns, stone symbols of founding ventures, echoed the commemorative stelle, called Monument des Wallons, which was placed in Battery Park in 1924, in remembrance of early Walloon presence in Manhattan.40 The dedication of these markers was the occasion for formal ceremonies enlightened not so much by the presence of officials, such as consuls and other foreign dignitaries, but by that of descendants of leaders who inspired and conceived these pioneering settlements. In New York, Goffin tells us, some lucky attendees could see “a very young woman, Priscilla de Forest, a descendant of the great Jesse de Forest, a Walloon from Avesnes, who was the first to conceive the idea of colonization.”41 The Florida ceremony, with a Southern touch, boasted the presence of an even more prestigious descendant in the person of “William Gaspard de Coligny, a resident of New Orleans, a colonel of the Confederacy, a man of great personal charm, who [had] reached

37 Jeannette T. Connor, ed., Jean Ribaut. The Whole and True Discoverye of Terra Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1964, [Deland, Florida, 1927], x. 38 Griffis, The Story of the Walloons, 275; Goffin, Les Wallons, 62–63; Green, The De Forests, 7. 39 Connor, The Whole and True Discoverye, x and 5. 40 For a picture of the monument and dedication, see Goffin, Les Wallons, 17. 41 Ibid., 10.

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his four-score years, and who [was] a lineal descendant—and a living portrait—of Gaspard de Coligny, the wise and mighty Admiral of France.”42 These descendants played a fundamental role in giving the ceremony a human dimension absent from the stone markers and embodying the successful integration of the real or virtual heirs of these foreign founders. Regarding the Walloon anniversary, the fact that the monument was offered not by the Belgian Government but by the Provincial Council of Hainaut was a harbinger of a historiographical trend, which was initiated in the 1940s but not fully developed until the 1970s. While in the 1920s, the Walloons of New Amsterdam were heralded as Belgians, in the 1970s, a gradual shift occurred as they were specifically depicted as Walloons, in the contemporary cultural and administrative sense of the word. Excerpts from Goffin’s 1943 book were conspicuously reprinted in 1970, at the time of the Belgian constitutional reforms which recognized the existence of Wallonia, by the Institut Jules Destrée, an organization dedicated to “the defense and illustration of Wallonia,” and in a series entitled “Connaître la Wallonie.” In the Belgian domestic context of the Walloon and Flemish rivalry, the remembrance of the New Amsterdam Walloons served a political cause in enhancing the role of Walloons in founding “the little pioneer settlement which has come to be the metropolis of the Western World.”43 It was reassuring and pride-inspiring to Goffin’s politically conscious, perhaps even militant, new Walloon readership to learn that “Pierre Minuit n’était pas un Flamand ” [Peter Minuit was not Flemish].44 As opposed to Bayer, who in a post World War I Belgian nationalistic mood, wrote in honor of Belgium’s children, Walloons and Flemings, Goffin’s work reflected a divisive Walloon nationalistic perception of Belgium’s overseas history. Goffin, who relied heavily on Griffis’ work, called Wallonia, “mon pays,” and not ma région. In his view, New Amsterdam was in 1626 “a Walloon village in a corner of the New World” until, he seems to deplore, it was “hollandized” to become a Dutch town.45 Clearly, his work meant to restore the place not only of the Walloons but more significantly of La Wallonie in the colonization of North America. 42 43 44 45

Connor, The Whole and True Discoverye, ix. Green, The De Forests, 80. Goffin, Les Wallons, 95. Ibid., 100 and 127.

NEW NETHERLAND IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

THE PLACE OF NEW NETHERLAND IN THE WEST INDIA COMPANY’S GRAND SCHEME Wim Klooster

A treatise from 1662 which tried to induce inhabitants of the United Provinces to move across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, argued that many writers called New Netherland “a most pretty and fertile land.” Tilling the land was less labor-intensive than in the Low Countries, and despite the often bitter cold, at least one settler had produced “choice cabbage lettuce” in the middle of a very vicious winter. The pamphleteer went on to assert that New Netherland’s climate was so pure and dry that it would be extremely surprising to encounter a sickly person.1 Exaggeration aside, New Netherland may well have been the healthiest place for Dutch settlers to live, compared to any other part of the Dutch Atlantic world. But its climate did not earn the colony a preferential treatment from the West India Company (WIC). In this essay, I will show that little attention was paid to New Netherland, which hardly featured in the plans and actions of the West India Company and, by extension, in the schemes of the political rulers of the Dutch Republic. The West India Company was founded as a counterpart of the Dutch East India Company, that commercial giant in the Indian Ocean which had managed to rapidly seize control of the lucrative trade in Moluccan spices. Merchants and politicians expected similar exploits from the WIC, whose original objective, as stated in the charter, was simply to conduct trade and shipping with Africa and “the West Indies,” i.e. all of the New World.2 In other words, it was the Company’s task to direct and coordinate the flow of trade in the Atlantic basin. Conditions in the Atlantic world on the eve of the Company’s foundation were reminiscent of those in maritime Asia before the VOC started its operations. In both cases, several Dutch firms were actively involved in trade with specific regions: while the 1 [Franciscus van den Enden,] Kort Verhael van Nieuw-Nederlants Gelegentheit, Deugden, Natuerlijke Voorrechten, en byzondere bequaemheidt ter bevolkingh (Amsterdam?, 1662): 1, 7–8. 2 Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), 33.

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Spice Islands acted as a magnet in the East Indies, Dutch merchants in the Atlantic were mostly interested in West Africa. It was here, near the Portuguese stronghold of Elmina, that, at the instigation of the Estates General, a fort was erected in 1611 to protect the gold trade.3 In the next few years, merchants in both Amsterdam and Middelburg combined forces in so-called Guinea companies.4 About the same time, other corners of the Atlantic began to draw attention as well. In the year 1614, two companies saw the light of day, both choosing the northern Atlantic as their terrain: the Noordsche Compagnie (Northern Company), which concentrated on whaling, and the New Netherland Company, created by the merger of four firms that imported fur from North America. Such were the principal activities which the West India Company was to assume responsibility for after 1621. Since trade in all quarters of the Atlantic world had to be protected against formidable enemies, the Estates General assigned great authority to the WIC, including the maintenance of an army and the signing of alliances with foreign princes. The WIC mirrored the state that had spawned it. In contrast to the surrounding European countries, all of them monarchies, which succeeded in strengthening their positions by concentrating their instruments of power and eliminating local rights and privileges, the Union of Utrecht, the constitutive charter of the Dutch Republic, obliged the provinces that joined to maintain the privileges and liberties of all the signatories. Since the national government was based on provincial assemblies and town councils, power and authority were heavily decentralized.5 Although the same was true for the WIC, the Company’s day-to-day business was not as cumbersome as its federal structure implies, as some provinces were more equal

3 John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1979), 164–165. 4 Victor Enthoven, Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek. Handel en strijd in de Scheldedelta, c. 1550–1621 (Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), 267. As early as 1605 and 1606, proposals to found a company for Guinea were made to the Estates General, but in both instances the motions were not brought to a formal vote: Vogt, Portuguese Rule on Gold Coast, 147. 5 G. de Bruin, “Het politiek bestel van de Republiek: een anomalie in het vroegmodern Europa?” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 114: 1 (1999): 16–38: 16–17. A.Th. van Deursen, “Tussen eenheid en zelfstandigheid. De toepassing van de Unie als fundamentele wet,” in: idem, De hartslag van het leven. Studies over de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996): 307–321: 321.

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than others, a fact that was laid down in a distributive code. The code stipulated both the relative power of the departments or Chambers, and the contributions each of them had to make to fitting out ships and other Company activities. The share was determined both by the capital supplied and the tax system in force in the Netherlands, so that Amsterdam’s share was assessed at four-ninths, Zeeland’s at two-ninths, and the three other Chambers each had one-ninth. A comparable code was used in the appointment of the Heren XIX, the board of nineteen that ruled the Company.6 Distrust prevented the new company from rapidly becoming solvent. It took more than two years before enough subscriptions for shares had been received to start operations. Some potential investors viewed the WIC as a sham intended for nepotism, a means for the directors to employ their needy friends. Some feared that Company posts would be filled by men fueled by ambition, not those propelled by talent. Others were deterred by the example of the East India Company, whose arbitrary policies were said to frequently conflict with the shareholders’ interests.7 More generally, the hesitation to invest can be explained by the bellicose nature of the new enterprise. The main motive to stake money on this new horse, a pamphlet of a later date explained, was not profit but harming the enemy. The backers, in other words, may not have been smart investors, they were pious patriots.8 When the nineteen directors gathered in August of 1623 for their first central board meeting, conditions in the Atlantic had changed dramatically since the days when the Company was chartered. The relatively peaceful Truce years with Habsburg Spain (1609–21) were 6 M.R. Menkman, De West-Indische Compagnie (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1947), 44–46. Den Heijer, Geschiedenis, 31. 7 “Advies tot aanbeveling van der verovering van Brazilië door de West-Indische Compagnie. Uit het archief van Hilten.” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, gevestigd te Utrecht, 6th series, part 2, no. 27 (1871): 228–256; 230–232. Given the similarity in style and content to the text of another tract (Redenen waarom de West-Indische Compagnie dient te trachten het Landt van Brasilia den Coninck van Spangien te ontmachtigen, Amsterdam: Cornelis Lodewijcksz, 1624), the author of this memorandum was undoubtedly the Anabaptist Jan Andriesz Moerbeeck. 8 De Portogysen goeden buurman. Ghetrocken uyt de Registers van syn goet Gebuerschap gehouden in Lisbona, Maringan, Caep Sint Augustijn, Sint Paulo de Loando, en Sant Tomée. Diendende tot Antwoort op het ongefondeerde Brasyls-Schuyt-praetjen, Weest onnosel als de Duyven, En voorsichtich als de Slangen. Instead of listing the actual publisher and place of publication, the title page of this anti-Portuguese book from 1649 reads (in translation) “Printed in Lisbon, in the large printing hall, where treacherous Portugal resides.”

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no more than a vague recollection. War was the catchword now, and the Company directors were increasingly following the lead of the Estates General, which reasoned that the recently resumed hostilities in the Netherlands would not suffice to bring the war to a happy conclusion. As one director put it, it was necessary to “cut off the nerves and veins of the King of Spain’s annual revenues, from which the blood and vivifying spirit spreads through his large body.”9 In other words, warfare had to be extended to the Americas, the source of the silver which oiled the Habsburg war machine. A new front had to be opened. The VOC had, once again, shown the way. Ignoring the Truce stipulations, its directors dispatched a fleet in 1614, which sailed through the Strait of Magellan, ravaged two Chilean towns, and defeated a Spanish fleet of eight galleons. Although the main goal of the expedition, capturing a Spanish silver transport, was not accomplished, the VOC did instill so much fear in the enemy that Peru’s viceroy subsequently spent large sums of money improving his defenses.10 Now it was the West India Company’s turn. Although it was not lacking in ambition, the Company board never seriously considered seizing Mexican or Peruvian silver mines, which were located too far inland and across almost insurmountable natural barriers. Rather than Spain’s overseas provinces, Portugal’s colonies in the Atlantic world would bear the brunt of the Dutch war effort. At Cape Lopez in present-day Gabon (West-Central Africa), privateers preyed on Portuguese ships returning to São Tomé from Benin, Calabar, and Allada.11 And the first comprehensive WIC project, prepared in all secrecy, was an expedition that aimed at the conquest of the Brazilian capital of Bahia. A fleet of 3,300 men put to

9 Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), I: 5. 10 Joris van Spilbergen, Oost ende West-Indische spiegel der nieuvve navigatien, daer in vertoont vverdt de leste reysen ghedaen door Ioris van Speilbergen, admirael van dese vloote; in vvhat manieren hy de Vverelt rontom gheseylt heeft (Leiden: Nicolaes van Geelkercken, 1619). Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701 (London: MacMillan, 1989), 41–42, 47. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 28. 11 Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600 –1650. Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 49. Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the African Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 120–121.

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sea in December 1623 and arrived in All Saints’ Bay in May of the next year. The surprised Portuguese defenders soon surrendered.12 Two years later, in October 1625, a fleet of twenty-five ships landed a Dutch force of 1,200 men who, aided by five hundred Africans, launched an attack on Elmina that went terribly awry. Dutch sources put the number of their losses at 441 or 442, while the Portuguese believed that all but a few dozen Dutchmen were killed.13 Why was the conquest of Brazil a top priority for the WIC? For some three decades, the Dutch had had access to the Portuguese colony in what amounted to a triangular trade, with Portuguese intermediaries at work in Lisbon, Oporto and Viana, and Dutch and Portuguese factors operating in Brazil. Superior to the Portuguese caravels, which were vulnerable to attacks by English privateers and pirates, and which had less capacity, Dutch ships sailed back and forth to Brazil, carrying large amounts of sugar. The prospect of a direct connection was, however, alluring. Profits would be higher and supplies to Brazil cheaper once the trade was free from customs duties.14 The scope of the Company’s first military activities was in stark contrast to the scale of its commercial ventures, among which was the trade in African slaves. At the time of the WIC’s establishment, the Dutch slave trade was still negligible. Even the small numbers of Africans at work on Dutch plantations at the mouth of the Amazon River may have been supplied by foreigners.15 Along with the assault

12 S.P. L’Honoré Naber, ed., Documenten uit het archief van den Luitenant-Admiraal Piet Heyn (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), LVIII–LXIII. 13 Nicolaes à Wassenaer, Het elfde deel of ‘t vervolgh van het Historisch Verhael (Amstelredam: Jan Jansz, 1627), 56. A. van Dantzig, Les hollandais sur la côte de Guinée à l’époque de l’essor de l’Ashanti et du Dahomey 1680 –1740 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1980), 33–34. J. Bato’ora Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482–1637. La vie d’un comptoir portugais en Afrique occidentale, 2 vols. (Lisbonne/Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Commission Nationale pour les Commémorations des Découvertes Portugaises, 1993), I: 479–480. 14 John Carter Brown Library [ JCBL], Providence, R.I., Codex Du-1. “Beschrijvinge van de custen van Brasil, en verder zuidelijk tot Rio de la Plata, toestand der forten, enz. Getrokken uit scheepsjournalen, officiëele verklaringen enz. van 1624–1637. Wt het raport van Joannes van Walbeeck,” fol. 17. 15 Lorimer speculates that Dutch ships returning from Cape Verde, Elmina and Brazil had supplied these slaves, while Ratelband suggests Portuguese Jews may have been responsible: Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1989), 76; K. Ratelband, ed., De Westafrikaanse reis van Piet Heyn 1624 –1625 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), CIII.

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on Brazil, setting up the slave trade was an agenda item at the WIC’s very first board meeting, and the connection was obvious: once in control of the world’s largest sugar-producing area, the WIC would put African slaves to work to make the plantations profitable. Consequently, not only were imports from West Africa and Angola needed, but in order to guarantee a steady supply of African workers, it was necessary for the Company itself to organize the voyages, which was preferable to dependence on foreign merchants. Within a few weeks, therefore, three ships were sent to Angola. This was a false start, however. It would take another dozen years for the Company to become actively involved in the slave business.16 Plans for New Netherland were debated as well in Amsterdam in the fall of 1623. The Company directors decided to found a small trading colony and send the first settlers in a few months’ time. New Netherland, however, hardly exercised minds in the mother country. As the only territory within the limits of the WIC charter clearly outside the sphere of influence of the Spanish Crown,17 it was far removed from the turmoil of battle. Other parts of the Atlantic world were more worthy of attention, from Dunkirk and the Iberian peninsula, via West Africa and Angola, to the Caribbean and Brazil. By 1625, the Heren XIX concluded that there was little to show for their large expenditure. In order to curtail their spending, they decided to confine privateering to Brazil and the West Indies.18 This move paid off. Shipping between Portugal and Brazil suffered tremendously at the hands of the privateers. In 1625–26 alone, eighty Portuguese vessels employed in the Brazil trade were captured, while in 1627, Piet Heyn and his fleet took thirty-eight prizes in Brazil’s coastal waters.19 Spain’s State Council assessed the costs of Dutch aggression between 1623 and 1626 at more than five million ducats,20

16

Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Africa, 50. Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations. The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland 1623–1639 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 55. 18 Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 71. 19 C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 29, 33. 20 Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada. Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Forense-Universitária; São Paulo: Editôra da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), 55. Five million ducats equalled circa 6.9 million pesos: John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775. A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 99–100. 17

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while Johannes de Laet, the Company’s contemporary chronicler, estimated the immediate damage inflicted by Company ships on the Iberian enemies from 1623 through 1636 at thirty-seven million guilders. In this period, they seized 547 Spanish and Portuguese vessels.21 The disruption of trade was not the Company’s only goal. It planned to undermine Spain’s colonial defense.22 Despite the impressive organization of Spain’s defense system, with naval escorts for transatlantic fleets, cruiser squadrons in the Caribbean, and fortifications to protect the principal Caribbean ports, the WIC did not consider the capture of a returning Spanish fleet a foolhardy undertaking. For many years, the movements of Mexican fleets and Peruvian galleons, which constituted the lifeline of Spain’s Atlantic empire, were studied. This good preparation yielded rich rewards in 1628, when in a dashing exploit Piet Heyn and his men seized the socalled Silver Fleet. The Company paid its investors a handsome 75% of the capital that had fallen into its lap. There was more that the Company directors could be content about than the windfall itself. The next homeward-bound Spanish fleet, ready to sail from the viceroyalty of Peru, was held up, thus delaying the payment of Habsburg soldiers in the Netherlands, and benefitting the army of the Dutch Republic.23 Spanish fears of Dutch privateers were certainly not groundless. Between 1629 and 1640, four more Dutch attempts were made to capture a Spanish silver fleet, but ended in failure.24 Not all was in vain, though. In 1631, for instance, the Mexican Silver Fleet lost its battle with the elements and was completely destroyed, after Dutch fleets plying the Caribbean had brought about the postponement of the Silver Fleet’s sailing date until the hurricane season was well under way.25

21

De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, IV: 282–287. See for similar English designs at the end of the sixteenth century: G.V. Scammell, “The Columbian Legacy,” Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History XVII (1993:1): 21–44: 38. 23 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 201. Cf. the letter of the Governor of the Río de la Plata, Francisco de Céspedes, to King Philip IV, October 28, 1629, in: R.P. Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Perú, Bolivia y Brasil) según los documentos originales del Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1912–1915), I: 439. 24 Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, 63, 65. 25 De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, III: 68. 22

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Since the Company’s financial position seemed sounder than in previous years, the directors now agreed to return to Brazil, where it had lost Bahia in 1625, after just one year of Dutch occupation. The Company board now decided upon the conquest of Pernambuco, the sugar-producing captaincy in the north, which promised to be an easy task, since the Portuguese were supposed to be small in number and the forts in their ports unsound. The successful invasion had far-reaching consequences, as the Company subsequently got stuck in a war that was extremely costly and proved impossible to win. Brazil transformed the West India Company into an organization which, unlike the East India Company, had to turn to subsidies from the Estates General time and again. In the process, its self-image as a war machine was consolidated, presenting a definitive break with the innocuous charter of 1621. War was the rationale for the Company’s existence, as the Heren XIX and the Chamber of Amsterdam revealed in memoranda that they drew up in 1629 and 1633, respectively.26 The authors emphasize the yeoman services done to the country, as an employer of soldiers and sailors, a consumer of provisions, an importer and exporter, and last, but not least, through its conduct of war. It is telling that the first document was composed in order to thwart the signing of a new truce with the Habsburgs. Such a treaty, the authors argued, would be the kiss of death for the West India Company. A close look at the 1629 document shows that New Netherland did not occupy the directors’ mind. The Company’s military successes loomed large in the summer and fall of that year. Only a few months had passed since the treasures on board the Spanish Silver Fleet had arrived in Holland. In many other ways, so its directors argued, the WIC had become indispensable to the country as well. The Company employed as many as 15,000 sailors and soldiers, producing many experienced navigators, and it was a major consumer of Dutch provisions and heavy artillery. Numerous riches had arrived on Company ships, including huge amounts of silver, indigo, cochineal, sugar, and hides. Such benefits, the directors went on, were only

26 Consideratien ende redenen der E. Heeren Bewind’hebberen vande Geoctrojeerde West-Indische Compagnie nopende de teghenwoordige deliberatie over den Treves met den Coning van Hispanien (Haerlem: Adriaen Rooman, 1629). M.G. de Boer, “Een memorie over den toestand der West Indische Compagnie in het jaar 1633,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap XXI (1900): 343–362.

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possible because of the war; they would be virtually reversed once a new truce were signed. Company ships would no longer sail and therefore had to be rented or sold, perhaps even to the enemy. The abundance of exquisite merchandise would evaporate, and the few exotic products that still found their way to Dutch shores would be subject to heavy duties. In search of employment, the numerous seamen, finally, would offer their services to the enemy, or take up piracy, now that they had become experienced freebooters. How much the Company interest coincided with that of those in Dutch political circles who were bent on continuing the war with Spain is also borne out by two documents of later years. Both were compiled when the WIC’s survival was threatened, and both stressed its military successes. In 1644, when a merger with the VOC seemed an elegant way to avoid being shut down, the Heren XIX alleged in so many words that its counterpart could not, in all decency, decline an amalgamation. After all, they argued, it was the war effort of the WIC that had tied the hands of the Spanish king, allowing the VOC to build its Asian empire.27 A quarter of a century later, the Company’s principal shareholders hammered away at the same argument in their attempt to convince the Estates General of the WIC’s deeds of valor. Because the enemy refused to give up its colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean, so their argument ran, it began to neglect the war in the Low Countries, preferring to repair old colonial forts and towns and build and man new fortifications. Since they were so busy blocking the West India Company’s progress, the Spaniards had been unable to wage an offensive war in the Netherlands after 1629. The Dutch conquests of Brazil, Elmina, and Curaçao forced the Habsburgs to be active on multiple fronts. That proved fatal in the naval battle of the Downs in October 1639, where the Spanish king used one fleet to fight the Dutch. Another fleet of sixtysix ships and 15,000 men, which could have made the difference in the battle, he dispatched to Brazil to engage the WIC. The latter fleet, incidentally, was also defeated.28 27

Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, 98. Nationaal Archief (NA), The Hague, Staten-Generaal 5768. Shareholders to the Estates General, 1668. The Brazil fleet, under the command of the Count of La Torre, left for Bahía in the fall of 1638. In November of the following year, it sailed to Pernambuco. Elliott mentions eighty-six ships and 10,000 men: J.H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 551. John Lynch has pointed out that these defeats deprived Spain “of a naval arm against Lisbon,” when the Portuguese rebellion 28

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The documents also point out that the Company had in the past come to the rescue of the state. In 1629, the Meuse Chamber had indeed sent one hundred musketeers on wagons to Arnhem, and 1,100 other soldiers in WIC service had been dispatched to the towns of Utrecht and Hattem. All of them had been ready to set sail for a large-scale expedition.29 This aid was, however, unique, and necessary in the face of the unprecedented threat posed to the Republic in that year. In addition to Habsburg advances, the Dutch had to cope with the invasion of an Imperial German army that seemed unstoppable and headed for Holland.30 Was the West India Company actually designed as a bellicose organization? The authors of the 1633 memorandum admitted that the focus on warfare had not been part of the Company’s initial make-up, having been founded chiefly to further commerce and shipping. However, it was found that trading or planting in parts of the New World unoccupied by the Spaniards did not make sense.31 The soil was infertile and required the immigration of more Dutchmen than could ever be prevailed upon. And the encounter with the Indians, who were once revered from afar, had been a bitter disappointment. The natives of Guiana, for example, were so barbarian in Dutch eyes, and needed so little in the way of clothing or other items that two or three trading vessels could conduct the annual trade. In order to acquire true wealth, the only option was to attack Iberian ships and settlements.32 It is in this context that the future of New Netherland was considered. The directors observed in 1629 that seasonal changes had wreaked havoc on the colony’s settlers. While the region seemed to be as warm and as suitable for cultivating fruit as the extreme south of France, winter weather could be as inclement as in the Netherlands or areas even further north. For want of sustenance, the memorandum says, the settlers have been detrimental rather than beneficial

started in late 1640: John Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change 1598–1700 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 155. 29 NA, The Hague, Staten-Generaal 5752. Heren XIX to the Estates General. Amsterdam, July 30, 1629. WIC directors, Chamber of de Meuse, to unknown. Dordrecht, July 31, 1629. 30 Israel, Dutch and Hispanic World, 176–178. Van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen, 241–242. 31 De Boer, “Memorie,” 353–354. 32 Ibid., 356.

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to the Company. The fur trade might be advantageous, but yielded no more than 50,000 guilders per year.33 This trade was, of course, the wellspring of New Netherland. Manhattan and Fort Orange had been established as trading posts to tap the hinterland for peltries. It took a few years before the West India Company decided to transform these trading posts into permanent settlements. Initially, the directors were split between two factions, one in favor of trade and the other of colonization. The colonizing group emphasized the positive long-term effects of investments in agriculture and settlement. The commercial faction was opposed to private enterprise and argued that the Dutch presence in New Netherland should be limited to what was strictly necessary to gain wealth, in order to curtail the Company’s spending on defense and the supply of provisions. The trade in furs would be critical to the WIC’s presence in North America. Limiting investments in New Netherland had the additional advantage that the financial loss would be small in case of an English conquest, a prospect that became increasingly realistic as the century advanced. The colonizing group retorted by saying that building up a colony cost money. Anything short a sustained effort would mean that it could not be properly defended.34 Developing New Netherland was costly indeed. Expenditures were much higher than anticipated. In adopting the set of so-called Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629, the directors allowed for breaches of the monopoly. The fur trade was opened to both patroons and ‘free’ settlers in areas where the Company did not maintain an agent.35 Although the new arrangement was a compromise between the two factions, those arguing that private capital would make the colony profitable, came off best. Private settlement was permitted and nonCompany colonists gained the right to trade along the entire eastern

33 This estimate was too conservative. The value of New Netherland’s fur exports, as listed by De Laet, was 91,375 guilders in 1633—still, no impressive amount. See further Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest. Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus-Bert Bakker, 1999), 180–181. 34 Oliver A. Rink, “Company Management or Private Trade: The Two Patroonship Plans for New Netherland,” New York History LVIX (1978): 5–26, ibidem 6–8. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 64, 118. This paragraph and the next two are based on my “Failing to Square the Circle: The West India Company’s Volte-Face in 1638–39,” De Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 73 (2000): 3–9. 35 Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 106. Even before this plan, the Company had allowed settlers to purchase furs from the Indians, but obliged them to sell the products to the WIC at a fixed price. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 114, 185.

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seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida, while metropolitan merchants could freely dispatch their goods to New Amsterdam. The Company also abandoned further investment in the colony’s agriculture, leasing the farms on Manhattan and selling many of the Company’s cattle.36 The last vestiges of the WIC’s monopoly were removed in a series of measures in 1638–1640, when trade and shipping between the colony and the mother country was declared open to all Dutch citizens. Given its modest yields and its location far from Habsburg territories, it is small wonder that New Netherland, along with some Dutch plantation colonies in Guiana, often went unmentioned in contemporary correspondence, documents and literature. A good example is Johannes de Laet’s four-volume history of the WIC, published in 1644, but covering the years through 1636. It contains only three references to New Netherland and all constitute departures from the main story lines, which focus on other areas of the Atlantic world. While New Netherland was sidelined in the war with Spain, it could not be ignored in the rivalry with England, the up and coming European nation that found the Dutch on its way to regional hegemony both in the North Sea and North America. Strife with the English was a birthmark of New Netherland. The purpose of scattering the first settlers in 1624 among four locations (Governor’s Island, the upper Hudson, and the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers) was to lay claim to a large area, thus preempting English appropriation.37 Subsequent border disputes between New Netherland and New England were numerous. It goes without saying that the role of New Netherland in the Atlantic world was therefore judged more positively once the peace with Spain was signed in 1648 and England became the United Provinces’ foremost foe. At the outset of the first Anglo-Dutch war (1652–54), the Company directors pointed out that New Netherland was better placed than any other colony to attack the English.38 By the start of the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–67), 36

Bachman, Peltries or Plantations, 95. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 63. 38 West India Company directors Johan le Thor, Isaack van Beeck and N. ten Hove to the Estates General’s deputies for West India affairs. July 30, 1652. In: John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of NewYork; Procured in Holland, England and France, ed. E.B. O’Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), I:483–484. 37

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of course, New Netherland was in English hands. A final indication of the colony’s relative insignificance to the Dutch nation was the lack of public outcry over its loss. Compared to the nostalgia for Brazil and the attempts to reconquer that lost colony or recreate it in other parts of the New World, no such plans surfaced for the mainland colony in North America. It was hard for the Company board to conceive of its colonies in other than commercial or military terms. When, despite the breaches allowed in the Company’s monopoly, proceeds from the fur trade still proved disappointing, some Company officials in the 1630s hoped for New Netherland to become an agrarian colony, which would export grain. A memorandum presented to the Estates General in 1638 suggested, for example, that the settlers of New Netherland be encouraged to export their produce to Dutch Brazil, and carry slaves back in return. In this way, two birds would be killed with one stone, as Brazil was provisioned and New Netherland received fresh laborers.39 Nothing ever came of this plan. As much as the Dutch became involved in the Atlantic slave trade, very few ships sailed from Africa to New Netherland. How unfamiliar they were with such a route was shown in 1660, when two ships with human cargoes failed to reach New Amsterdam, and instead ended up in Cartagena on the north coast of South America.40 In general, the Company did little to increase the population of New Netherland. Only after the Estates General threatened to take away its North American colony did the Heren XIX take significant steps to lure migrants.41 This hesitancy is not surprising, since a settler colony was highly uncommon in the world of Dutch overseas

39 Brodhead, Documents relative to the Colonial History, I: 246. Many years later, in 1673, when New Amsterdam was temporarily back in Dutch hands (and renamed New Orange), its government presented a variation on the same theme. Provisions would be shipped not to Brazil, but Suriname and Curaçao, in exchange for Caribbean products: Schout, burgomasters and schepens of New Orange to the Estates of Zeeland. New Orange, September 8, 1673. In: C. de Waard, ed., De Zeeuwsche expeditie naar de West van Cornelis Evertsen den Jonge 1672–1674 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928), 167. 40 The Spanish authorities confiscated both ships. Nationaal Archief, StatenGeneraal 12576.77. WIC directors Jacobus Reynst and Ab. Wilmerdonxs to the Estates General. Amsterdam, November 3, 1661. 41 Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson. An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, Cooperstown, N.Y.: New York State Historical Association, 1986), 134.

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expansion, even in maritime Asia. Although as many as 325,000 soldiers and sailors left for VOC strongholds in the seventeenth century,42 permanent migration to the main Dutch colonies of Batavia or Ceylon did not amount to anything much. The adult Dutch or European males living outside the walls of Batavia, for instance, numbered only 290 in 1655. In 1673, they had increased to 340, while 461 men were probably Company employees. The number of settler families living in Colombo (Ceylon) at the same time did not exceed one hundred,43 and the other destinations of Dutch emigrants to Asia received still fewer migrants.44 The same was true for the western hemisphere, where even the WIC’s prize colony of Brazil failed to attract many permanent settlers.45 It was remarkable, therefore, that migration to New Netherland did reach appreciable numbers in the late 1650s and early 1660s. Whether this might have been the start of a long-term trend must remain a matter of speculation. At the time, it was too little and too late to change the WIC’s view of a province that had never met its expectations.

42 Many of them died and only 105,000 returned to The Netherlands. I. Schöffer, “De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden, 1609–1702,” in De Lage Landen van 1500 tot 1780, ed. I. Schöffer, H. van der Wee and J.A. Bornewasser (Amsterdam/Brussel: Elsevier, 1983), 167–267: 177. 43 Remco Raben, Batavia and Colombo. The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities 1600–1800 (Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden 1996), 87, 98, 153. Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia. European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 10. 44 Another Dutch ‘plantation’ that is often thought of as successful is Cape Colony in South Africa. But twenty-seven years after the Dutch East India Company had founded a refreshment station (1652 ) there, only 259 free men, women and children were residing in that colony. This nucleus grew into a community of 2,000 souls by the 1710s: Leonard Guelke, “Freehold farmers and frontier settlers, 1657– 1780,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Ralph Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 66–108: 66. 45 A census of the mid-1640s revealed that 3,399 non-Company men, women, and children were living in Dutch Brazil: José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente de Nação. Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and Editora Massangana, 1989), 281.

NEW SWEDEN: AN INTERPRETATION Richard Waldron

In August of 1664, a squadron of English warships commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls anchored in what is today New York Harbor, off the capital of New Netherland, the town of New Amsterdam. Petrus Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s Director-General, sent a note to the English commander, asking his purpose. Nicolls replied that His Majesty of Great Britain, whose right and title to these parts of America is unquestionable, well knowing how much it derogates from his Crowne and Dignitie to suffer any forraigners, how near so ever they be allyed, to usurpe a dominion and without his Majesty’s Royall consent to inhabit in these or any other of his Majesty’s territoryes, hath commanded me in his name to require a surrender of all such fforts, towns or places of strength which are now possessed by the Dutch under your Commands and in his Majesty’s name I do demand the towne situate upon the island commonly known as Manhattans with all the fforts thereunto belonging to be rendered unto his Majesty’s obedience and protection into my hands.1

Nicolls’s assertion of an “unquestionable” English claim to the land of New Netherland prompted Stuyvesant to make a vigorous presentation of Dutch claims. Stuyvesant first cited the States General’s several patents and commissions, including that to the West India Company (WIC) in 1621, as the bases of New Netherland’s existence as a legitimate possession of the United Provinces in North America. Further, he wrote to Nicolls, “it is without dispute and acknowledged by all the world, that our predecessors by virtue of the commission and patent of . . . the States General, have without controule and peacably . . . enjoyed Fort Orange about 48 or 50 yeares, the Manhatans about 41 or 42 yeares, the Southriver 40 yeares and the Freshwater [Connecticut] River about 36 yeares.”2 1 Richard Nicolls to Petrus Stuyvesant, August 20/30, 1664. B. Fernow, trans. and comp., Documents Relating to the History of the Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware River, vol. 12, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. E.B. O’Callaghan (Albany, 1877), 12: xi–xii (hereafter cited as NYCD, vol. 12). 2 Petrus Stuyvesant to Richard Nicolls, September 2, 1664 (N.S.). NYCD 12:xiii.

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As we know, Stuyvesant’s protestations of Dutch legitimacy were futile and New Netherland passed into the control of England and became the colony of New York. The South River—the Delaware—was, like all of New Netherland, contested territory, claimed by both England and the United Provinces from early in the seventeenth century (the English claim rested on sixteenth-century grants to various trading companies that neither sailed to nor traded in North America).3 The Dutch claim rested on Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage during which he sailed into both Godin’s Bay (Delaware Bay) and the mouth of the river that today bears his name, but which the Dutch called the Great or the North River. Subsequently Dutch skippers and traders traversed the Atlantic to this area that lies between 38 and 42 degrees north latitude— modern Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut—traded with the Native people and settled in various places within that boundary. No matter what the English claimed, it was the Dutch and their West India Company who were the most consistently on the ground and in the waters of New Netherland from 1609 until 1664. They were the Europeans who exercised a measure of control over the area and not the English. But not over the South River. Dutch investors purchased land on the western shore of Godin’s Bay from the local Indians in 1630, and planted a few settlers there in 1631, establishing the patroonship of Swanendael. Indians destroyed the colony in 1632 and the Dutch seemed to recoil from serious settlement efforts at the southern end of New Netherland until after New Sweden’s demise in 1655.4 (In 1657, the City of Amsterdam, planted the colony of New Amstel at the location of modern New Castle, Delaware.) With the destruction of Swanendael, the lower South River and Godin’s Bay were under no European control until the Swedes arrived in 1638. That expedition’s leader, Pieter Minwe, had been the Director-General of New Netherland from 1626 to 1632. He knew the area well and knew how little control the Dutch exercised over

3 Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986): 30. 4 For the Swanendael tragedy, see ibid., 112–14, and Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 1638–1664, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Swedish Colonial Society, 1908), chapter 20, 1:164–81.

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it, the farthest of their North American claims from the centers of their power at New Amsterdam and in the Hudson (North River) Valley. Minwe also knew that furs traveled along a route in the lower Delaware from the interior of the continent for sale to shipborne traders—often English ones—in the river or overland across what is now New Jersey to New Amsterdam. Minwe and his partner, Samuel Blommaert (an erstwhile WIC stockholder), chose the lower Delaware as the site of New Sweden, and were able to sell the idea to the Swedish government and the stockholders of the South or New Sweden Company precisely because of the vacuum of power there and because locating a colony on the South River would give the Swedes access to furs at Dutch expense. The Dutch were quick to protest the Swedish landing in March 1638 and assert their claim to the area of the Swedish colony. Willem Kieft, the Director-General of New Netherland, wrote to Pieter Minwe (Minuit) on May 6, saying that “the whole Southriver of New-Netherland has been many years in our possession and secured by us above and below by forts and sealed with our blood, which,” he reminded Minwe, “even happened during your administration of New-Netherland and is well known to you.” The intrusion, Kieft wrote, “shall never be suffered by us,” and he added that “we are very certain, that her Royal Majesty of Sweden has not given you any order to build fortresses on our rivers or along our coasts.” He concluded with a formal “protest against all damages, expenses and losses,” and assured Minwe that “we shall maintain our jurisdiction in such manner, as we shall deem most expedient.”5 The Swedish landing on “the Rocks” at modern Wilmington in March 1638 established the colony of New Sweden.6 The colony 5

Willem Kieft to Pieter Minwe, May 6, 1638. NYCD 12:19 The historiography of New Sweden began in 1702, when Thomas Campanius Holm published his Kort Beskrifning om Provencien Nya Sverige uti America . . . (Stockholm). It was translated into English by Peter S. Du Ponceau and published as Description of the Province of New Sweden . . . (Philadelphia, 1834; reprinted, Milwaukee: Kraus Reprint Co., 1975). Holm had access to the papers of his grandfather (now lost), Johan Campanius, who had served as a minister in New Sweden, 1643–48. In 1759, Israel Acrelius, a pastor of the eighteenth-century Church of Sweden mission to the Delaware Valley, published Beskrifning Om De Swenska Forsamlingars Forna och Närwarande Tilstånd Uti Det så kallade Nya Sverige (A History of New Sweden: or, the Settlements on the Delaware River, trans. William M. Reynolds; vol. 11, Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1874), bringing New Sweden’s story up to almost the middle of the eighteenth century and focusing on the Church of Sweden’s mission. Like Holm, Acrelius placed 6

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was at first managed by a joint stock company, the New Sweden Company, which was heavy with Dutch investors (six of the eleven were Dutch). The partners, including some of Sweden’s major nobility, sought to get rich by trading in furs and tobacco. The settlers were Swedes and ethnic Finns (Finland was part of Sweden until 1809).

New Sweden’s history and Sweden’s entry into the broad world of seventeenth-century colonialism in the context of the first two centuries of European transoceanic expansion. Jehu Curtis Clay pastored at Philadelphia’s Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century (it was originally a congregation of the Swedish mission) and published The Annals of the Swedes on the Delaware (1834; reprinted three times, most recently by the John Ericsson Memorial Committee, Chicago, 1938), which includes a narrative as well as translated documents, largely about the mission period, some of which can be found in English nowhere else in the United States. The most complete history of New Sweden (and which created the modern field of New Sweden studies) remains Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 1638–1664. Most of the papers presented at a 1988 conference to mark New Sweden’s 350th anniversary were published in Carol E. Hoffecker, et al., eds., New Sweden in America (Wilmington: University Press of America, 1995). These essays revise some of Johnson’s conclusions, and include subjects he did not present, such as the material culture of the Forest Finns who helped to settle the colony. New Sweden’s primary documents are collected in a number of important compilations. Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967, a reprint of the 1912 edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York City, a volume in the series Original Narratives of Early American History, J. Franklin Jameson, gen. ed.) includes Johan Printz’s reports for 1644 and 1647, Johan Risingh’s reports for 1654 and 1655, and Risingh’s “Relation of the Surrender of New Sweden.” Peter Lindeström, Geographia Americae, with an Account of the Delaware Indians (New York: Arno Press, 1979) is a reprint of the Swedish Colonial Society’s original English edition (translated by Amandus Johnson) of 1925. Lindeström was a very young and somewhat gullible fortification engineer who accompanied Johan Claesson Risingh to New Sweden in 1654 and wrote a vivid account of the country, its Native inhabitants (who may have told him some “travelers’ tales”), and the Dutch conquest. Johnson edited The Instruction for Johan Printz (Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1930), which includes Johnson’s biography of JP, Printz’s reports for 1644 and 1647, his instructions from the New Sweden Company and the Swedish crown, and letters between the governor and various people in Sweden, including Axel Oxenstierna and Per Brahe. Stellan Dahlgren and Hans Norman produced an edition of Risingh’s journal as a project for the 350th anniversary of New Sweden: The Rise and Fall of New Sweden: Governor Johan Risingh’s Journal 1654–1655 in its Historical Context (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988). The translation is by Marie Clark Nelson. The volume includes excellent interpretive essays by the editors: Stellan Dahlgren, “New Sweden: The State, the Company, and Johan Risingh,” 1–43, and Hans Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America, 1638–1655,” 45–126. Also important is E.B. O’Callaghan and B. Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (15 vols.; Albany, 1853–87), vol. 12, which collects documents about the Delaware during the time of New Sweden and the subsequent periods of Dutch and English control of the region. Documents pertaining to the Delaware under Dutch and English rule to the founding of Philadelphia

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Over the seventeen years of the colony’s existence, the company and later the royal government, were unable to supply it on a regular basis with the necessities of colonial life—goods for trading with its Native American neighbors, and settlers in sufficient numbers to establish a strong Swedish presence in the lower Delaware Valley. In the colony’s whole brief history only thirteen ships set out from Old Sweden for New Sweden.7 One of them was wrecked in the Caribbean. Another arrived too late, after the colony had been lost. An expedition Petrus Stuyvesant led from New Netherland, financed by the City of Amsterdam, conquered it in 1655. New Sweden fell to the Dutch at a time when for once it had enough of a population to compel the respect of its Native American neighbors. New Sweden made no one very rich. And right after the conquest, when Petrus Stuyvesant, beset with Indian troubles around Manhattan, offered the management of New Sweden back to the Swedes, the colony’s governor, Johan Claesson Risingh, refused.8 The tiny governing elite returned to Old Sweden. Most of the settlers remained. That is the very short story. But, of course, there was more to it than that. *

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Sweden was from about 1620 until about 1720 a European Great Power. Those dates take us from early in the reign of King Gustavus Adolphus (Gustav II Adolf ) until just after the death of King Karl XII. In that period, this people who numbered fewer than two million, including those who lived in Finland and Sweden’s provinces across the Baltic in parts of modern Estonia, Germany, Lithuania,

are Charles T. Gehring, ed., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volumes 20–21; Delaware Papers (English Period) . . . 1664–1682 (two vols. in one; Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1977; and Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volumes 18–19; Delaware Papers (Dutch Period) . . . 1648–1664 (two vols. in one; Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1981). 7 See the list of expeditions to New Sweden in Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America,” 126. 8 See Johan Claesson Risingh, “The Account of what occurred in New Sweden during the Assault by which the Dutch Residents of Manhattan attacked the Swedish colony in New Sweden with hostility, unexpectedly, unreasonably, and without due cause,” in Dahlgren and Norman, eds., The Rise and Fall of New Sweden. Risingh details his reasons for refusing to take back the colony on pp. 261–63. See also, Lindeström, Geographia Americae, 270, and Johnson, Swedish Settlements 2:610–13. Throughout, I have adopted Dahlgren’s and Norman’s spelling “Risingh,” rather than the more traditional (in the United States) spelling without the final “h.”

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Latvia, Poland, and Russia, exercised a powerful military and political influence in Europe. This Swedish Age of Greatness and the Gothicist intellectual movement that preceded it helped to produce its mentalité gave rise to an imperial elite with high expectations.9 Swedish foreign policy had two goals traditionally. One was to keep the Russians out of the Baltic; the other was to contain Denmark. Throughout most of the seventeenth century neither country was in much of a position to menace Sweden. The Russians were enduring a “time of troubles” that accompanied the rise to and consolidation of power by the first Romanovs. The Danes, defeated by Imperial forces in 1628, and again, by the Swedes in the 1640s and

9 A fine basic history of imperial Sweden is Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560 –1718 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On Sweden in the seventeenth century and the imperial expectations of its “political nation,” see the essays in Arne Losman, et al., eds., The Age of New Sweden, trans. Bernard Vowles (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren, 1988), including Sven A. Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden: Nation-Building, War and Social Change,” 7–39; Allan Ellenius, “Visual Culture in Seventeenth-Century Sweden: Images of Power and Knowledge,” 41–67; Gunnar Eriksson, “Science and Learning in the Baroque Era,” 69–83; Arne Losman, “Skokloster—Europe and the World in a Swedish castle,” 85–101; and Margareta Revera, “The Making of a Civilized Nation: Nation Building, Aristocratic Culture and Social Change,” 103–31 (also published in Hoffecker, New Sweden in America, 25–53); and the essays in Michael Roberts, ed., Sweden’s Age of Greatness, 1632–1718 (London: Macmillan, 1973)., including Sven Lundqvist, “The Experience of Empire: Sweden as a Great Power,” 20–57; Sven-Erik Åstrom, “The Swedish Economy and Sweden’s Role as a Great Power, 1632–1697,” 58–101; Stellan Dahlgren, “Estates and Classes,” 102–31, and “Charles X and the Constitution,” 174–202; Michael Roberts, “The Swedish Church,” 132–73; Göran Rystad, “Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie,” 203–36; Kurt Ågren, “The reduktion,” 237–64; and Alf Åberg, “The Swedish Army, from Lützen to Narva,” 265–87. Roberts’s Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1958) treats “Gothicism,” the intellectual fiction of the ancient Swedes as world-conquerors and saviors of European civilization, and its influence in the development of an upper class Swedish imperialist metalité in the seventeenth century. Michael Conforti and Guy Walton, eds., Sweden: A Royal Treasury, 1550–1700 is the catalogue of a 1988 exhibition sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (which copublished the catalogue). It contains two essays about the material culture of Sweden’s seventeenth-century monarchy and aristocratic elite, the elite’s artistic connections to the rest of Europe, especially France, and the objectives the elite had for its conspicuous consumption and sumptuous display: Michael Conforti, “Sweden’s Imperial Experience and Its Artistic Legacy,” 13–26, and Guy Walton, “Royal Castles and Palaces: The Architectural Image of the Monarchy in Sweden,” 37–53. An excellent collection of selected primary documents of Sweden’s Age of Greatness is Michael Roberts, ed., Sweden as a Great Power, 1611–1697: Government, Society, Foreign Policy (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1968).

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’50s, were unable to mount a serous threat to Sweden until the mid1670s, during the minority of King Karl XI. One can argue that the Swedes’ ability to found an American colony was to some degree the result of Russian and Danish weakness throughout much of the century. And they founded and managed their colony while they were involved deeply, from 1630, in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany (1618–48).10 What may seem to have been an almost accidental colonial success should not obscure the fact that Sweden’s leadership was of the very highest caliber throughout most of the seventeenth century. Each of three monarchs—Gustavus Adolphus (1611–32), Karl X Gustav (1654–60), and Karl XI (1660–97)—pushed and pulled his country along the road to modern statehood. Each accomplished major governmental reforms, each was an organizer of energy and genius. Gustavus and Karl X were also outstanding military strategists and leaders of men in battle. And each built on the work of his predecessor. For example, Gustavus’s military organization, especially his national method of supplying his army, laid the basis for Karl XI’s later triumph of military management, the indelningsverk.11 Gustavus’s collaboration with his chancellor, the aristocrat Axel Oxenstierna, produced a new, quite modern Swedish state. This partnership was the real foundation of Sweden’s success, especially during the first half of the seventeenth century, and that success continued

10 Sweden’s seventeenth-century foreign policy concerns and considerations grew from the nation’s experience fending off aggressive neighbors during the sixteenth century, when under Erik XIV (1560–68) the Swedes founded their Baltic “empire.” See Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, chapter one, “The making of the empire,” 1–43, and Franklin D. Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 149–53, 166–69. See also Conforti, “Sweden’s Imperial Experience,” 13, and Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden,” 9–15. 11 For Gustavus Adolphus, see Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958), and the cogent summary in Conforti, “Swedish Imperial Experience,” 18–19. For Karl XI, see Anthony F. Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). There is a brief summary of Karl X Gustav’s career and accomplishments in Stellan Dahlgren’s history of that monarch’s limited resumption of alienated crown lands late in the 1650s, Karl X Gustav och reduktionen, Studia Historica Upsaliensia XIV (Norstedts, Sweden: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1964). Karl X and Karl XI are well treated in Anders Florén, Stellan Dahlgren, and Jan Lindgren, Kungar och Krigare: Tre essäer om Karl X Gustav, Karl XI och Karl XII (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1992). For the economic exigencies of Sweden as the quintessential seventeenth-century “military state,” see Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden” 7–39.

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even after Gustavus’s shockingly early death, in battle in Germany in 1632.12 Historians often view France of the same period—the France of Kings Louis XIII and XIV, and Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin— as the cynosure of state modernization in early modern Europe.13 But what Sweden accomplished during the reigns of Gustavus and Karl XI is impressive in its own right. The Swedes developed an efficient bureaucracy to manage the government and collect taxes. They established a national budget and used it to govern the country. They began the long, frustrating, and always painful process of creating a money from a barter economy. The modernization took the burden of government from an ad hoc system employing royal favorites who lacked specialized abilities or functions, and established a civil service that included the pastors of the Church of Sweden. The new Swedish government made effective use of the church to carry the royal or the bureaucratic will deep into the countryside. Government service in Sweden as in France became attractive and accessible to men of the middling sort—men like Johan Claesson Risingh, New Sweden’s last governor.14 Why did Sweden want, or need, a colony? Because it needed the wealth a colony was supposed to bring home, and because the notion of having a colony and engaging in international trade befitted the Swedish elite’s view of itself and the nation’s destiny. In 1624 Willem Usselincx brought to Stockholm the idea of establishing a Swedish trading and colonizing company. He had in mind something like the Dutch West India Company, which he had helped to found and which he thought was both mismanaged and insufficiently profitable. Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna and others at court

12 On Oxenstierna and Gustavus and Swedish modernization, see Scott, Sweden, 164, 182–94; Revera, “The Making of a Civilized Nation”; and Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden.” 13 For seventeenth-century France, see Victor L. Tapié, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu, trans. and ed. D. McN. Lockie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 14 The best short treatment of Sweden’s modernization in the Age of New Sweden is Margareta Revera, “The Making of a Civilized Nation,” 103–31, in Losman, The Age of New Sweden, and 25–53, in Hoffecker, New Sweden in America. But hers is a treatment of social groups, especially the country’s political and economic elite. For a more statist view of ways in which the requirements of war shaped both government and economy, see Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden,” in Losman, The Age of New Sweden. The two essays are, in fact, best read together.

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were very interested in Usselincx’s proposals.15 The idea captured the imagination of the political nation because it offered a way for Sweden to emulate the other major powers. A colony would be evidence of Sweden’s new status, in addition to the country’s military and diplomatic significance the endless German war had produced. Perhaps there would be a lucky strike—it had happened twice to the Spaniards, in Mexico and Peru—and everyone who invested would become wildly rich, and economic might would be added to Sweden’s other kinds of importance. But by 1637–38, when its first expedition traveled to North America, the New Sweden Company really looked to make its fortune from trading in furs with the Indians and growing tobacco.16 Was there here also some sort of a spirit of corporate and national adventure? Sweden had been a frontier within Europe for centuries and continued to be one throughout the seventeenth century. The royal government welcomed, often invited those with imagination, energy, and capital to make their fortunes in Sweden, and help to enrich the country in the process. Sweden was a land that rewarded will and enterprise and a certain level of daring. Young men from all over Europe came to fight in Gustavus’s and Karl X’s armies. The crown recruited entrepreneurs to make the country industrial, a source of finished and semifinished products that the rest of Europe and a colony would want to buy. The best contemporary example of serving the state and the self equally is Louis de Geer and the great enterprise he founded at Stora Kopparberg, the basis of Sweden’s early modern copper industry.17 15

For Willem Usselincx and the foundation of the New Sweden Company, see Amandus Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:52–108. Johnson also details the important roles Samuel Blommaert and Peter Minwe (Minuit) played in founding the New Sweden Company after Usselincx’s efforts resulted in the founding of the South Company, which did not lead directly to a colony. For the relative importance of the royal versus private interests throughout the New Sweden Company’s existence, see Stellan Dahlgren, “New Sweden: The State, the Company, and Johan Risingh,” 1–25, and Hans Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America,” 45–51, in Dahlgren and Norman, The Rise and Fall of New Sweden. 16 Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:104–19. The instructions Peter Minwe carried with him make it clear that preying on Spanish shipping was encouraged as much as trading with Native Americans and others whom the Swedes might encounter on their journey to and from North America. For an English text of Minwe’s instructions, see C.A. Weslager, in collaboration with A.R. Dunlap, Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, 1609 –1664 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 169–82. 17 For Louis De Geer and his role in Sweden’s economic development—and that

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To understand that Sweden was a place of the upwardly mobile in the age of New Sweden, look briefly at the career of one Johan Björnsson, who was calling himself Johan Printz by about 1630.18 Johan was the son of Björn Hansson, the pastor of Bottnaryd parish in Jönkopings lan in southern Sweden. Johan was educated for the church but chose instead a military career. He also found for himself a place in the patronage network of Per Brahe, the count of Jönkoping, one of the great men of the realm. And it was a good thing that he did, for his career came close to ending because of an indiscretion in Germany. He was accused of having surrendered a town to the enemy without sufficient cause and forced into temporary retirement. But because of Count Brahe’s influence, instead of being sacked, he was knighted and made the governor of the new Swedish colony, and in 1643 he arrived on the Delaware to assume his command. Many times in the next decade he must have thought that his life would have been easier without the count’s help. There is another sense in which Sweden was a frontier in the seventeenth century. Ethnic Finns from Karelia in Finland had moved into the open spaces of west central Sweden during the sixteenth century, practicing the cultural complex associated with the form of agriculture known as huuhta, or “burn-beating.” It was a method that required the use of great deal of land over a long period of time, as communities moved away from burned-over plots so the land could regenerate.19 In the sixteenth century, the areas of Västmanland

of similar entrepreneurial immigrants—see Revera, “The Making of a Civilized Nation,” and Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden.” 18 Johan Printz’s life is detailed in Johnson, The Instruction for Johan Printz, 3–51. In Johnson, Swedish Settlements, Printz’s career in the New World is treated in chapter 1: 301–66, though he is also mentioned extensively elsewhere in volume 1. Hans Norman’s treatment of Printz (“Swedish Colonial Venture,” 64–79, in The Rise and Fall of New Sweden) largely follows Johnson. For another view of Printz and his “management style”—a Dutch one—see Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 243–44. See also C.A. Weslager, The English on the Delaware: 1610–1682 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 107–31. 19 Forest Finn culture in New Sweden and North America is covered well in three essays in Hoffecker, et al., eds., New Sweden in America: Per Martin Tvengsberg, “Finns in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and Their Contributions to the New Sweden Colony,” 279–90; Juha Pentikäinen, “The Forest Finns as Transmitters of Finnish Culture from Savo via Central Scandinavia to Delaware,” 291–301; and Terry G. Jordan, “The Material Culture Legacy of New Sweden on the American Frontier,” 302–18.

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in which the Finns settled meant relatively little to the Swedish crown. They were sparsely populated and the Finns and their agriculture competed with no one and nothing. But the seventeenth century was different. Then the government coveted the forests for its new industries—charcoal, iron, and copper. By the time of New Sweden, the Forest Finns’ agricultural practices were criminalized and a fair number were “encouraged” to settle on the Delaware. In all, they may have accounted for a little more than half of New Sweden’s settlers.20 Like some of the other North American colonies, New Sweden had great difficulty filling up its land with settlers. There were no religious reasons to emigrate. There was no Swedish population problem, except that there wasn’t enough of it to work the good land in the home country. There was simply no reason for Swedes or Finns to move to the Delaware, and no way for the government to encourage emigration—except by condemning a few criminals to a term of service with the company in the New World.21 Thus, the homeland was embroiled in the German war until 1648. Its economy was precariously balanced on the necessities of that struggle, and it was simply beyond the Swedish capability to make sufficient capital available to the New Sweden Company, or to supply the colony regularly with anything —trade goods, tools and weapons, and most vital of all, people. That New Sweden survived at all was because of local power factors that changed continuously along the Delaware, the “generosity” of potential enemies and actual competitors, and the leadership qualities of Johan Björnsson Printz. New Sweden’s neighbors all had claims to the country that preceded the Swedish one. But the Swedes more or less squatted in a vacuum, where and when none of the other claimants was in a position to contest their presence seriously. Potentially the most serious problems could have been caused the Swedes by their Indian neighbors. But which ones? Printz’s opinion of one group—the people the Swedes called the “River Indians”— is well known to students of New Sweden. He wrote in his report about the colony for 1644 that “nothing would be better than that 20 For the estimate that Finns made up about half of New Sweden’s total population, see Weslager, The English on the Delaware, 70. 21 Ibid., 70–71.

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a couple of hundred soldiers should be sent here and kept here until we broke the necks of all of them in the river, especially since we have no beaver trade with them, but only the maize trade.”22 These Indians whom Printz despised were the people who called themselves “Lenape” and who lived on both sides of the South River. But beyond them to the north and west lived much more powerful groups—the people of the League of the Iroquois, and their linguistic cousins the Susquehannock.23 Much has been made of the peaceful relationship the Swedes and the Finns are supposed to have enjoyed with the Indians (though, in fact, Printz described five murders of colonists by Indians in his report for 1644, and Minister Johan Campanius went in fear of his life when he preached Christianity among them). This relationship is supposed to have been based on a similarity of lifestyle—the Forest Finns did indeed practice a form of agriculture very similar to that of some Indian bands. Both the Swedes and the Finns lived on relatively isolated farmsteads, spread out through the territory they shared with the Indians. And the low density of both peoples must have made them seem unthreatening to each other.24 Let us focus on the term “low density.” In fact there were never very many Swedes and Finns along the Delaware. The number of Europeans in the Delaware Valley does not seem to have threat22 Johan Printz, “Relation to the Noble West India Company in Old Sweden Sent out of New Sweden on June 11, Anno 1644,” in Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 103. 23 On New Sweden’s relations with its Indian neighbors in general, see the following: Francis Jennings, “Dutch and Swedish Indian Policies,” in Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., History of Indian-White Relations, vol. 4, Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 13–19; on the powerful Susquehannock, whom the Swedes called the “Minquas,” see Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1): 15–53. Johan Printz’s instructions enjoined him to keep his colonists from harming the “wild people,” teach the Indians about “the true Christian religion and worship,” and—one has the impression that this was most important—establish trade with them. The Instruction for Johan Printz, paragraph 9, pp. 78–80. In his journal, Johan Risingh catalogued a complex relationship with the Lenape, the local Indians, and the more distant Susquehannock (Minquas). The Minquas vowed to be the Swedes’ friends and protectors, ceded them a large tract of land, and invited the Europeans to come and live among them. See The Rise and Fall of New Sweden, pp. 175–76, 179, 199, 205, 237–39. 24 Printz’s mention of the five murders in his 1644 report is on page 103 in Myers, Narratives. Johnson quoted Campanius’s worry (in a letter dated January 30, 1647) about his Indian proselytes in Swedish Settlements 1:373.

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ened the River Indians until much later, well after the period of Swedish control of the region, when the Quakers came. Then the Indian response was to avoid this new group that arrived in such great numbers, especially in 1682 and thereafter. Anders Sandel, a pastor of the Swedish mission early in the eighteenth century, blamed the large numbers of English in and near Philadelphia for the disappearance of the local Indians. He wrote that the Indians had been “driven . . . far up in the woods by the English.”25 The relationship between the Swedes and their Indian neighbors was peaceful most of the time because there were few Swedes and Finns and they were far less trouble to the Indians than were, say, the English in New England, or the Dutch around Beverwijck (present-day Albany), Paulus Hook (modern Jersey City, New Jersey), and Manhattan. When a few hundred Swedes showed up with Johan Risingh in 1654, the Indians took account of the new power relations in the valley, and tried to use the newcomers for their own purposes.26 Late in Johan Printz’s administration, his high-handedness toward the colonists led many to “escape” to Maryland and even New Netherland.27 By the time Risingh replaced him in 1654, the number of colonists was at its lowest ebb—maybe 100 people in all. We can read in Risingh’s journal that the small numbers of Swedish colonists had led the Indians—which ones is not clear—to repudiate their land deals with the Swedes and make new ones with the Dutch.28 The Dutch were even less numerous on the ground in New Sweden than the Swedes. But from 1652 to 1654, in the Indians’ calculations the Dutch wielded local power, and not the Swedes. Risingh’s arrival meant that New Sweden was suddenly populous, and in the Indians’ minds the local balance of power shifted back

25 Andreas Sandel to Olaus Cythraeus, June 22, 1703, Amandus Johnson Papers, box 59, folder 1, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 26 See Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture,” 105–108. Risingh’s journal entry for June 17, 1654, describes his meeting with Lenape sachems at Tinicum during which Indians and Swedes renewed their friendship (175–79). 27 Ibid., 91. See also 72–74, 78–79, and Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:450–66 for Printz’s often rancorous relations with his colonists. 28 Risingh’s journal entry for July 9, 1654 (187–89), and Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture,” 77 (the Indians selling to the Dutch land Printz believed the Swedes had already purchased). See also Johnson, Swedish Settlements 1:436–45, for a detailed account of Petrus Stuyvesant’s purchase of the disputed land and Johan Printz’s futile protests.

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to the Swedes. Not only did land transfers get redone, to the Swedish advantage, but some western people (Risingh called them the “Minquas” in his journal; they were probably the Susquehannock) invited the Swedes to live among them, teach them to use European weapons, and repair the guns the Indians already had or might acquire. Risingh was eager to accept this offer but never got the chance to act on it; the Dutch conquest intervened.29 But the point is that the Indians could count, and Europeans in large numbers were Europeans with whom it paid to have good relations, if it were possible to do so. New Sweden’s relations with the local English population were equivocal because there were almost no Englishmen until after the fall of New Netherland in 1664.30 What Johan Printz and Johan Risingh had to deal with were itinerant seaborne English traders who operated out of New Haven and New Amsterdam and elsewhere, and whom we can credit with helping to sustain the colony during some of its darkest times.31 No matter whether “the English” claimed the Delaware (they did) and regarded the Swedes as illegal interlopers (they did), that was an official position and it had little to do with the day-to-day conduct of business. Johan Printz allowed the traders to come and go in his colony because they were fairly reliable, if expensive, sources of the supplies the Swedes needed badly. Not everyone in the colony was a farmer. Some were ministers and surgeons. Some were soldiers. And the governor and his family certainly were not going to grow crops of tobacco or anything else. New Sweden could not feed and equip itself, and depended on both the local Indians and the other Europeans for goods without which the colony could not have survived for even as many as seventeen years. It was Printz’s policy to control the traders’ access to the colony, to keep them away from individual colonists insofar as was possible, and to subject the traders to the same body of law and dictates with

29 See Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture,” the section of his essay called “The Great Land Transfer from the Minquas,” 108–111, as good a case as one can find of Native American and European interests converging. Risingh’s journal ( July 9, 1655) records the discussions with Minquas representatives on 237–41. 30 On relations with the English through Printz’s era as New Sweden’s governor, see Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:207–17, 380–404, and Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture,” 67–69. 31 Ibid.

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which Printz governed his colonists. This was consistent with most of his dealings with other Europeans. He was as high-handed toward them, below the level of his peers, the other colonial governors, as he was toward his own colonists. He tried a trader for spying, and extended his lordship over the New Haven settlement at Varkens Kill (probably Salem Creek) on the eastern shore of Delaware Bay in the 1640s.32 He might correspond in the most charming manner with other governors; but access to the Delaware and New Sweden’s diminutive market was his to control, and control it he would, at no matter what cost. If his colonists were mostly interested in the livings they could get from the land, and if they cared little who controlled the land, he cared deeply. Johan Printz never forgot that he embodied royal Swedish power. He conducted himself as a Swedish nobleman amidst commoners. He upheld the honor of Sweden. He kept the peace (mostly), and he tried conscientiously to carry out his instructions.33 The Swedish relationship with the Dutch was the most problematic of all.34 If there was no English colony close enough to worry Printz and then Risingh, there certainly was a powerful Dutch colony uncomfortably nearby—in northern New Jersey and across the North (Hudson) River on Manhattan Island (and beyond, up the Hudson Valley, across Long Island, and into Connecticut). Like the English, the Dutch had a prior claim to the South River.35 But the Dutch had more pressing problems than the Swedes. Their periodic difficulties with their local Indians, preoccupation with the Hudson and 32 Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:207–17; see 399, for the abandonment of the English settlement at Varkens Kill (Salem Creek). 33 It was in terms of those instructions that he structured his annual reports to Sweden (the two that survive are for 1644 and 1647). His instructions and the reports are found in Johnson, The Instruction for Johan Printz, 63–99 (the instructions, in both Swedish and English) and 105–43 (the reports, in English only). The reports are also printed in Myers, Narratives, 91–129. 34 On the Swedes and the Dutch in the Delaware Valley, see “Report of Governor Johan Printz, 1647,” in Myers, Narratives, 123–24 (“It is of the utmost necessity for us to see how we can get rid of the Dutch from the river, for they oppose us on every side,” 123); Charles T. Gehring, “Hodie Mihi, Cras Tibi: Swedish/Dutch Relations in the Delaware Valley,” in Hoffecker et al., eds., New Sweden in America, 69–85 (the best brief account of the competition between the Swedes and the Dutch); Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1:405–49; Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture,” 69–72, 74–78. 35 The clearest Dutch claim seems to be found in the history of the foundation of Swanendael. See Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 112–14, and Johnson, Swedish Settlements, chapter 20 (1:164–81), “The Early History of the Delaware Until 1638.”

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Mohawk valleys, competition with the English on Long Island and in the Connecticut Valley, and the lack of a convenient way to project their power southward combined to keep them from attacking New Sweden before 1655. One wonders how different all of this might have been had the Dutch colony of Swanendael survived. Had Swanendael flourished, by 1638 the Dutch might have been present in sufficient numbers along the western shore of Godin’s Bay to deter the Swedes from establishing their colony anywhere in the Delaware Valley. Johan Printz and Johan Risingh were new Swedish men, who owed their careers and almost everything else to the shape and texture of the new Swedish state. Each in his own way was deeply loyal to an idea of imperial Sweden. This was as true of Risingh as of Printz, though they resembled each other not at all. Rising was a mercantilist bureaucrat, a well known economic theorist, a man of reports, close reasoning, and a certain punctiliousness, who would refuse to take back the colony from Petrus Stuyvesant after the Dutch conquest when the Dutch needed to decamp quickly for Manhattan.36 Risingh it had been who on arriving in the Delaware and finding a Dutch fort (Casimir, at present New Castle, Delaware) below the Swedes’ Fort Christina on the western bank, promptly took it to enforce Sweden’s claims—a step Printz late in his term was too weak to take.37 It was not only New Sweden’s weakness at the end of Printz’s time as governor that led Stuyvesant to take a step his predecessor, Willem Kieft, had been unable to take. The relative powers of the two rivals on the South River shifted continually, as did the power relationship between the Swedes and the Indians. Stuyvesant built his fort and closed the Delaware to the Swedes (not that any Swedish shipping was then trying to enter the river) because he was able to do so. And Fort Casimir’s existence provoked Risingh to do what his numbers enabled him to do in 1654—to reassert Swedish sovereignty over the lower Delaware Valley.38 36 Risingh, “The Account of what occurred in New Sweden during the Assault by which the Dutch Residents of Manhattan attacked the Swedish colony in New Sweden . . . ,” in Dahlgren and Norman, eds., The Rise and Fall of New Sweden, 261–63; Lindeström, Geographia Americae, 270; Johnson, Swedish Settlements 2:610–13. 37 Johnson, Swedish Settlements 1:446–47; Risingh’s journal, May 21, 1654 (151). 38 Risingh detailed his taking of Fort Casimir in his journal entry for May 21, 1654 (151–57). Since the event occurred on Trinity Sunday, he renamed the fort Holy Trinity (Trefaldighet). See also Lindeström, Geographia Americae, 87–88.

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But, as Charles T. Gehring has shown,39 both the Dutch and the Swedes were ever aware of the English to the north and south of New Netherland and New Sweden. Directors-general at New Amsterdam were loath to upset the balance on the South River for fear of provoking an English descent there or elsewhere along New Netherland’s thinly populated length. One of the factors that motivated Stuyvesant in 1655 was the conclusion of an agreement with the English colonies of New England that seemed to free his hand for operations in the south. An additional factor was peace—temporary peace, as it turned out—with the Native American people around Manhattan. For a time in the summer of 1655, the Dutch did not fear an Indian attack on New Amsterdam or the settlements around it, and peace removed yet another obstacle to an operation against the Swedes. Finally, after Risingh captured Fort Casimir, the directors of the WIC ordered Stuyvesant to destroy New Sweden, writing that “above all your Honor must do your utmost to revenge this misfortune not only by restoring matters to their former condition, but also by driving the Swedes at the same time from the river, as they did us.” But looking to the future, the directors added that Stuyvesant was to do so “in such a manner however, that those of them, who should desire to come under our jurisdiction, may be allowed to do so.”40 What does all of this mean for New Netherland studies? This interpretation of New Sweden and the men who managed it clarifies some of the issues inherent in the rivalry between the Dutch and Swedish colonies. Old Sweden was a Great Power always balanced precariously on the edge of ruin. The Swedish army, navy, and economy were at their strongest when not called on to do very much. The doctrine by which the army lived into the time of the Great Northern War (1700–18) was to win quickly and live off of the enemy’s territory, or else Sweden’s rudimentary infrastructure and relative poverty (which always stressed its supply capability) would undermine the superb organizational and fighting qualities of its army.

39

Gehring, “Hodie Mihi, Cras Tibi,” 69–85. The Directors of the West India Company to Petrus Stuyvesant, n.d., NYCD 12:85. 40

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The small, carefully nurtured Swedish navy was no match for the fleets of England or the Netherlands, and it was not in Sweden’s interest to antagonize either, though the Swedes tried and failed to compete with the Dutch for commercial control of the Baltic. Repeatedly during the seventeenth century, from Karl X’s near-destruction of Denmark in the 1650s, to Sweden’s almost miraculous survival under Karl XI in the Scanian War of the 1670s, the Maritime Powers proved unwilling to allow either Nordic kingdom to achieve total victory in any of the endless series of wars the Danes and the Swedes seemed destined to fight. In this, at least, they were in general accord with the France of Louis XIV. No matter on what adventures Louis embarked, usually with the Dutch as his intended victims, the stability of the North was a goal of all the larger powers (though it was alliance with France that got Sweden into and out of trouble in the 1670s).41 Nothing could make Sweden important as a European economic or maritime power. A similar situation held on the Delaware. By intelligent exploitation of local conditions, Johan Printz projected New Sweden as a formidable power. Occasionally, as immediately after the arrival of Johan Risingh and his people, the Swedes were a considerable power, strong enough to convince their Indian neighbors to revert to the relationship that had prevailed when Printz was at his strongest. The Susquehannock Indians also believed that the reinforced Swedes might be powerful allies against other enemies.42 I doubt that anything could have saved New Sweden from the fate that overtook it in 1655. The colony was never going to be adequately supplied with settlers, soldiers, or any of the other necessaries of life on the Delaware. The Swedes would never be able to match the naval firepower and transport capability the Dutch commanded in 1655. Neither the New Sweden Company nor the government would ever be able to generate enough capital to support the colony, nor would the colony ever produce enough furs and tobacco, nor would the Swedish market absorb enough of these prod-

41 On the foreign imbroglios in which the Swedes found themselves in Europe in the years after they lost the colony, see Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, “The unmaking of the empire,” 123–56; Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History, 211–14; Conforti, “Swedish Imperial Experience,” 21–22; Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden,” 14. 42 The Susquehannock and the land deal they offered the Swedes in 1655; see Risingh’s journal, entry for July 9, 1655 (237–41).

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ucts to enable the colony to break even, let alone turn a profit for its investors. The final point to make looks toward New Sweden’s future, for it did have a future as a cultural and ethnic entity. The colonists and their descendants endured, multiplied, and prospered, even after the English conquered New Netherland in 1664. By the 1690s they numbered more than a thousand, far more than the largest population of the colony. But in the 1670s they began to feel threatened by some of their neighbors, English and Welsh Quakers who began to flood the Delaware Valley beginning in 1675. It looks very much to me as if European settlers dumped out in the wilderness without sufficient population mass did not retain much sense of identity as European culture-bearers for very long. It took some external threat to sustain that identity or recover it once it was lost. It seems clear that it did not matter to the people along the Delaware who ruled them as long as they were permitted opportunities to prosper with little interference from whomever was in authority. The matter of “Swedishness” arose as a response to the threat the Quakers posed. By the 1690s, bereft of Lutheran ministers and surrounded by these neighbors, the elite of this “cultural” New Sweden called on the Swedish crown to send ministers of the Church of Sweden to help them to maintain their Swedish culture, especially their language and their faith.43 As soon as the Swedes on the 43 There is not a general history of the “cultural” New Sweden that remained after the Dutch conquest of 1655. Two studies of the population of the Swedish and Finnish culture areas of the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley are Peter Stebbins Craig, The 1693 Census of the Swedes on the Delaware. Family Histories of the Lutheran Church Members Residing in Pennsylvania, Delaware, West New Jersey, and Cecil County, Md. (Winter Park, FL: SAG Publications, 1993), and 1671 Census of the Delaware (Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 1999). See also Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America,” 119–25. Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America provides a view of how the descendants of New Sweden’s settlers lived during the middle years of the eighteenth century (as does Acrelius’s history, cited in n. 6). The edition cited here was published as Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, Revised from the Original Swedish and Edited by Adolph B. Benson (New York: Dover Publications, 1937). For the history of the Church of Sweden mission to the Delaware Valley, 1697–1786, resources are scant and a modern general history remains to be written. See Otto Norberg, Svenska Kyrkans Mission vid Delaware i Nord-Amerika (Stockholm 1893); Oliver K. Olson, ed., The Church in New Sweden (Milwaukee: Lutheran Quarterly, 1988), especially Richard Hulan, “New Sweden and its Churches,” 3–33; Suzanne Geissler, Lutheranism and Anglicanism in Colonial New Jersey: An Early Ecumenical Experiment in New Sweden, Studies in American Religion, vol. 29 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988); and Israel Acrelius’s history.

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Delaware (subsuming in that term the “Finns on the Delaware”) began to perceive the Quakers as less of a threat—before the eighteenth century began—we can see the people the Church of Sweden came to succor in 1697 becoming increasingly “American” and less and less Swedish. Given New Sweden’s problems and material disadvantages, one should wonder not that it endured for only seventeen years, but that it endured at all. It did so because of Swedish toughness and tenacity, the Swedes’ supreme good luck, and a locally fluid military and political situation. Johan Printz manipulated that fluidity and the weaknesses of his stronger neighbors with a good deal of skill and projected a strength that New Sweden in fact almost never possessed.

Primary sources for the mission era include Amandus Johnson, The Journal and Biography of Nicholas Collin, 1746–1831 (Philadelphia: The New Jersey Society of Pennsylvania, 1936). Johnson wrote a lengthy biography of this last of the Swedish missionaries and translated the journal Collin kept while he was the pastor of the Swedish church at Swedesboro (Raccoon) New Jersey, 1770–86 (actually an epitome Collin made after the original journal was lost in a shipwreck on its way back to Sweden with another minister); Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, State of New Jersey, The Records of the Swedish Lutheran Churches at Raccoon and Penns Neck, 1713–1786 (1938; reprinted, Woodbury, N.J.: Gloucester County Historical Society, 1982); and Horace Burr, trans., The Records of Holy Trinity (Old Swedes) Church, Wilmington, Delaware, from 1697 to 1773, with an Abstract of the English Records, 1773–1810, Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware, vol. 9 (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1890). There is a good English translation of the May 1693 letter from the Swedish congregations that produced the Church of Sweden’s mission in Craig, 1693 Census, 159–64.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NEW NETHERLAND

SECURING THE BURGHER RIGHT IN NEW AMSTERDAM: THE STRUGGLE FOR MUNICIPAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD Dennis J. Maika

In the 1650s, the Stad Huys or City Hall was normally a hub of activity for New Amsterdammers. First built as a tavern in 1641, it was Manhattan’s most prominent landmark, standing fifty feet square, three stories high and conspicuously situated near the East River on Pearl Street. From its stoop, one could feel the strong pulse of trading activity that had become New Amsterdam’s life-blood by the mid 1650s: ships arriving from the Chesapeake laden with tobacco; furs, hides, and food stuffs from the Hudson Valley being loaded for shipment; new colonists disembarking after a long voyage; slaves waiting to be sold; crates of textiles, tools, wines and sundries arriving from Amsterdam and Europe. The physical site of Manhattan’s interface with the Atlantic world was also the physical seat of New Amsterdam’s incorporated city, the place where Manhattan residents focused their political attention. A bell in a small turret on the roof announced each new session of the Court of Schout, Burgomasters (Burgemeesters), and Schepens (Schepenen) where New Amsterdammers brought their economic and personal disputes. The magistrates were the city’s leading merchants who, as they heard and resolved these cases, sat comfortably on pillows emblazoned with New Amsterdam’s municipal seal.1 I am grateful to the following scholars and friends who have offered their advice and suggestions on this and earlier versions of the essay: Firth Haring Fabend, Willem Frijhoff, Jaap Jacobs, Wim Klooster, Martha Dickinson Shattuck, David William Voorhees. 1 Alice Morse Earle, “The Stad Huys of New Amsterdam,” in Maud W. Goodwin, Alice Carrington Royce, and Ruth Putnam, eds. Historic New York, Series I–Vol. I (Port Washington, NY, 1897), 41–73; J.H. Innes, New Amsterdam and Its People: Studies, Social and Topographical, of the Town Under Dutch and Early English Rule, 2 Vols. (Port Washington, NY, 1902), 176–186; “Description of the Towne of Mannadens, 1661,” in J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664 (New York, 1909), 421; Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experience

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As the trading season began in April, 1657, more people than usual appeared at the Stad Huys steps—not to have the Court settle their disputes but to be recognized as citizens of New Amsterdam. Beginning on 10 April, regular bi-weekly court sessions were suspended, and all residents who wished to claim membership in Manhattan’s municipal community presented themselves to the city magistrates and took the proper oath. Within eight days, 237 people, representing a great majority of white adults (mostly males, few females), claimed the burgher right (burgerrecht).2 In many ways, this was a defining moment for hundreds of Manhattan residents. As they stood before the magistrates to take the burgher oath, they were very much aware that their decision was influenced by their unique location in a wider world of interaction.3 It was during this time of promise and peril, as prospects for improved commerce were bright but the future was by no means certain, that Manhattan residents refined and clarified the way they viewed them-

(New York, 1990), 143–145, 147; Henri and Barbara Van der Zee, A Sweet and Alien Land: The Story of Dutch New York (New York, 1978), 347, 351; John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History (New York, 1972), 41. From 1653 to 1672, an average of 18 cases were heard per court session, a majority of them involving debt. Table 4:1—Debt Litigation Cases as Percentage of Total Cases Heard Before Manhattan’s Municipal Court, 1653–1672, in Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995, 264. 2 Two hundred thirty seven individuals originally claimed the Manhattan’s Burgher right in 1657. Maika, “Commerce and Community.” See Appendix A, 514, 516–520 for lists of original Great Burghers and Small Burghers. It is difficult to know precisely what percentage of the adult population was represented by the original two hundred thirty seven burghers because those excluded (soldiers, indentured servants, enslaved Africans) cannot be accurately assessed. However, population estimates would suggest that original burghers made up a relatively large percentage of the adult white adult population. Stokes estimated 1000 inhabitants of New Amsterdam in 1656, increasing to 1500 by 1664, with fewer than three hundred fifty being adult males. The remainder were women and children under 18. I.N.P. Stokes, ed., Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York, 1915–1928), IV:231. Joyce Goodfriend’s more recent effort to establish population statistics has estimated that in 1664, approximately two hundred fifty adult males were living in Manhattan out of a total population of 1500. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, 1992), 13. Burrows and Wallace suggest that as many as two hundred fifty eight adults were initially admitted as burghers. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 67. 3 David Armitage has called the study of a unique location within an Atlantic context a “cis-Atlantic” approach, which this essay attempts to follow. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002), 21–25.

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selves and their place in the fluctuating world of Atlantic commerce and politics. In the burgher right negotiations, the participants were motivated by their unique experiences and different perceptions.4 Manhattan’s budding merchant elite, who led the drive for the burgher right, sought to protect their own trade in the face of competition, and to firmly establish an exalted position in their community. Other free people in Manhattan—lesser merchants, skilled craftsmen—saw a chance to participate in new commercial opportunities as well as to protect their local businesses. The West India Company (WIC) directors in Amsterdam, primarily concerned about their investments and debts in areas outside New Netherland, were somewhat resistant to the demands of Manhattan’s population and seemed to support those traders whose interests were at odds with the local colonists. Petrus Stuyvesant, the WIC Director-General on the ground in New Amsterdam, needed to satisfy his superiors in the Netherlands as well as the local residents upon whose cooperation he depended. As a result of the tension caused by these conflicting perceptions, those who ultimately became “burghers”—citizens of the city of New Amsterdam— deliberately and clearly distinguished themselves from others who were either unable or unwilling to make the same commitment.5 As they constructed public identities as burghers, Manhattan residents drew upon years of effort to apply meaningful components of European and Dutch urban culture that were shared by municipal citizens on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean.6 As they took the burgher oath, New Amsterdammers continued the practice of transplanting selected features of Dutch civic culture that were found relevant to particular circumstances. As legally recognized citizens of the city of New Amsterdam, they endowed themselves with a sense of order, stability, and security in the ever-changing Atlantic world. Municipal citizenship became the community’s essential foundation

4

Greg Dening points out the importance of the way experience “prompted reflection” on the construction of identity. See his “Reflections on Defining Self,” in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, Fredrika J. Teute, eds. Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 346. 5 On the significance of “otherness” to self-description, see Greg Dening, “Introduction: In Search of a Metaphor,” Ibid., 5. 6 On “shared identities” in British colonies, see Michael J. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 93–112.

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that allowed its members to adjust more easily to new conditions after the English intrusion in 1664 and later in the seventeenth century.7

Foundations of Burgher Right From the time the WIC ended its fur trading monopoly in 1640 until the burgher right was formally established in 1657, Manhattan residents and Company officials on both sides of the Atlantic selectively applied aspects of Dutch civic culture to their experiences in New Amsterdam. It was natural for Dutch settlers to turn to municipal institutions; in the Netherlands, an individual’s primary political experience was at the municipal level and the essential basis for political authority in the Netherlands was at the local level. Dutch municipalities had also supported the growth of trade and commerce. City governments, especially in Amsterdam, had historically served as “incubators of capitalism” providing efficient organization and careful regulation of commerce. Although municipalities varied in size, population, and location, essential principles of Dutch civic tradition were well known by burghers and inhabitants throughout the Netherlands.8 It is not surprising then, that in the years before the burgher right, New Amsterdammers sometimes referred to themselves as burghers. Individuals like the anonymous author of the “Journal of New Netherland,” written between 1641 and 1646, talked about “burghers” being called upon to defend their colony. In a 1655 case, Augustine Heermans’ claimed that since he was “a burgher here and is a resident,” he was not required to post bond for debt owed to Pieter Dircksen for the “purchase of negroes.”9 Local leaders like the Twelve 7 Burghers as “denizens” will be discussed later in this essay. Other elements of personal identity built on this essential core. For example, the significance of religion was a component of merchant identity especially late in the seventeenth century, see J.F. Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 52, No. 1 ( January 1995), 80. 8 J.L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford, 1994), 2, 3, 15, 19; Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1984), 5; Renee Kistemaker and Roelof Van Gelder, Amsterdam: The Golden Age, 1275–1795 (New York, 1982), 8–9. 9 Dircksen v. Heermans, 18 October 1655, in Berthold Fernow, ed. The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols. (Baltimore, 1976), I:379. Hereafter cited as RNA.

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Men claimed to be speaking for the “burghers and inhabitants” of New Netherland in 1643 as they offered advice to West India Company Director Willem Kieft on how best to retaliate against the natives for the murder of Claes Swits.10 And less than a year before the burgher right was formally established, New Amsterdam’s magistrates again supported a resident’s assertion of burgher privileges, declaring an arrest of his goods invalid “according to the customs of our Fatherland.”11 Indeed, the “custom” of being a responsible community member who expected certain privileges in return for supporting government was exercised by many Netherlanders as they first made their mark in the Atlantic world; similar expressions of burgher citizenship can also be found in Beverwijck and Brazil.12 In many ways, the WIC encouraged the application of Dutch civic tradition as a way to support their own commercial goals. As they created a new stimulus to trade in the Freedoms and Exemptions of 1640, Company officials were optimistic about this latest effort to improve the colony.13 All commerce, including the fur trade, would be opened to New Netherland’s patrons and colonists who would now enjoy the privilege “to sail and trade to the entire coast, from Florida to Newfoundland.” In an effort to stimulate new immigration, the Company offered 200 morgens of free land to anyone who brought over five family members or servants. And once the colonists’ ranks had grown sufficiently, “the creation of local town, village, and city government” would be required.14 Within a few years, Dutch towns like Breuckelen (1646), Beverwijck (1652), and Midwout (1653) 10 Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–87), I:186, 415. Hereafter cited as DRCHNY. 11 “Loockermans v. Hendricks, 15 May 1656, RNA, II:98 12 Jan Verbeeck of Beverwijck took “the usual burgher oath” in 1652. No one was allowed to exercise a trade in Beverwijck in 1655 without taking the “burgher oath.” Charles T. Gehring, ed. and trans., Fort Orange Court Minutes, 1652–1660 (Syracuse, 1990), 4–5, 183. and Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664,” Ph.D. Diss., Boston University, 1993, 212. See also Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Albany, NY, 2003), 106. In Dutch Brazil, it was possible for time-expired WIC soldiers to obtain the burgher right with permission of the governor and council. See Herman Watjen, Das Hollandische Kolonialreigh in Brasilien. Ein Kapital aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Den Haag, 1921), 298. I am grateful to Wim Klooster for the previous reference. 13 Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 172. 14 “Proposed Freedoms and Exemptions for New Netherland, 1640,” DRCHNY, I:120–121.

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were established, creating town councils of Schepens and Schout that would have been familiar to anyone from the Netherlands. Even charters for English towns like Gravesend and Hempstead that were granted by the Director General and Council administered justice “in the Dutch form of a court of council-approved magistrates” while also using the English form of administration with selectmen and town meetings.15 Since the island of Manhattan would be at the center of future prosperity, the WIC applied the Dutch custom of staplerecht or “staple right” to New Amsterdam. Manhattan was to be New Netherland’s capital, “the staple of all produce and wares accruing in the North River and the country thereabout.”16 In European tradition, a city with staple right status became the exclusive trading center for a specified geographic area. That city would serve as a gateway regulating the flow of exportable commodities from the hinterland as well as a hub for the secondary return flow of goods.17 In the Netherlands, for instance, Dordrecht’s strategic location at the junction of the Maas, Noord and Merwede rivers, made the city a regional trading entrepot specializing in luxury goods from the Rhineland. The history of staple right privileges belonging to such towns as Dordrecht was not lost on New Amsterdam’s residents.18 Initially, the Company’s willingness to combine new trading privileges with relevant features of traditional civic culture produced positive results. In New Netherland, WIC servants applied for discharge, built homes and farms, traded with the natives, and began a regional trade with New England and Virginia. There was also some increase in the number of immigrants arriving from Holland.19 However, devastating Indian attacks quickly curtailed the rising optimism. Manhattanites bemoaned the devastation created by “wild Heathens and Barbarian savages” who cruelly murdered men women and children, 15 Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “Hempstead: An English Town Under Dutch Rule,” in Natalie A. Taylor, ed. The Roots and Heritage of Hempstead Town (NY, 1995), 33; Shattuck, “A Civil Society,” 20–70. Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 228 n. 22; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (Millwood, NY, 1975), 53. 16 “Proposed Freedoms and Exemptions for New Netherland, 1640,” DRCHNY, I:120–121; Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 137. 17 In the “network system,” a model for European urbanization, key cities served as regional hubs, dependent on a staple product. See Paul M. Hohenberg, and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, 1985), 62–63. 18 On medieval Dordrecht (Dort), see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), 74. 19 “Journal of New Netherland,” DRCHNY, I:181.

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destroyed homes and crops. They perceived the future growth of their city to be imperiled since “there is no misery on earth however great that does not manifest itself in time of war.”20 In response to these new challenges, WIC officials together with Manhattan residents turned once again to municipal customs of the Fatherland. Faced with the threat of war, Director Kieft called together a group of local citizens to ask for advice. This group referred to itself as the gemeenschap or “commonalty,” and was subsequently called together to consider important issues and select several individuals “from among ourselves to weigh maturely the articles laid before us.” In keeping with Dutch practice, Manhattan’s early leaders—the Twelve Men, Eight Men, Nine Men—based much of their legitimacy on claiming to speak for the commonalty, as well as on their legal appointment by the Director-General.21 As the Company officials organized their resistance to Indian attacks, they turned to another Dutch civic tradition—the “burgher guard,” or civilian militia—to supplement their salaried soldiers. Known as schutterijen, the burgher guard was not only used to maintain order but also to defend towns in time of need. Burgher guard recruits originally came from the middle strata of society, and in other New World holdings of the WIC like Curaçao, participation in the burgher guard was an obligation of citizens.22 Similar use of a civilian militia was made in New Amsterdam when the burgher 20 “Memorial of the Eight Men in the Manhattans to the States General, 3 November 1643,” Ibid., I:139–140. “The Eight Men to the Assembly of the XIX,” 24 October 1643, Ibid., I:190. 21 “Resolution Adopted by the Commonalty of the Manhattans,” DRCHNY, I:191–92. “The Commonalty of New Netherland, assembled by the Director’s order, to answer three Articles proposed by him, do say thereunto as follows:” 29 August 1641. Ibid., I:415. Martha Dickinson Shattuck has informed my understanding of the term “gemeenschap.” Personal Correspondence, 16 October 2003. The “commonalty” was similar to the “gemeenslieden” of Holland’s inner provinces, an organized group of citizens recruited from the guilds that sometimes controlled town finances and elected local leaders. My thanks to Willem Friijhoff for making me aware of this feature of civic culture. Personal correspondence, 15 July 1998, 3 Sept., 2002. On the selection of the Twelve Men, see Langdon C. Wright, “Local Government and Central Authority in New Netherland,” The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. LVII, No. 1 ( January 1973), 17. 22 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1996), 121; Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, 8, 91. Wim Klooster, “Other Netherlands Beyond the Sea: Dutch America Between Metropolitan Control and Divergence, 1600–1795,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, 2002), 181–182, 184.

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guard joined Company soldiers and other groups in campaigns against the Indians. In 1643, for example, Jochem Pietersen’s forty burghers served with Englishmen under the command of the WIC’s Johannes La Montagne against Indians on Staten Island. Later, the same burgher company was sent to attack Indians at Hempstead on Long Island.23 As they sowed the seeds of traditional Dutch municipal culture by calling themselves “burghers,” witnessing the creation of new towns, and employing traditions like staple right, commonalty, and burgher guard, early Manhattan residents had begun to grow their own distinctive civic consciousness in the fertile soil of New World experience. When put into practice, these early adaptations of Dutch civic tradition offered the possibility of stability and order but not enough local control. In the challenging years from 1648 to 1653, New Amsterdammers and their leaders realized that securing a city charter of their own would help put them in charge of their own destiny as they continued their search for constancy in a consistently fluctuating Atlantic environment.

Establishing City Government Manhattan residents were initially encouraged by the changes in the commercial climate in the late 1640s. With the end of the Eighty Years War in 1648, investors in the Netherlands were more willing to take risks in the New Netherland trade. Both large and small investors, mostly from Amsterdam, appeared before notaries to legalize their business arrangements, employing new and creative ways of spreading risk in search of profit. Partners and agents of these new investors accompanied an ever-increasing number of immigrants aboard the vessels that were carrying their cargoes.24 By 1650, this renewed interest was most apparent to the WIC. In a letter to Stuyvesant, Company officials exclaimed that “Formerly, New Netherland was never spoken of and now heaven and earth seem to be stirred by it.” Another exuberant company official remarked that “trade has long since been opened to everyone and is as profitable as ever.”25 23 24 25

“Journal of New Netherland,” DRCHNY, I:186, 187. Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 92. “Letter from the Directors at Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant,” 16 Feb. 1650,

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 101 In spite of this promising commercial environment, Manhattan residents bemoaned the “very poor and most low condition of New Netherland.”26 They were still reeling from Kieft’s War, a brutal and costly conflict with local native tribes that ended in 1645; fears of future attacks persisted. Aggressive actions from the English in New England and the Swedes on the South River further threatened New Netherland’s security. And instead of permanent settlers arriving to strengthen the local population, a superabundance of petty traders— peddlers or “sojourners”—appeared to “skim a little fat from the pot” without contributing anything to the local community.27 Furthermore, little was being done for the poor, the orphans, to improve schools or to support the Reformed church. New Amsterdam’s leaders knew what was causing the problem: “bad government with its attendants and consequences.”28 They sent to the States General a full description of the WIC’s failures in the “Remonstrance of New Netherland,” a petition coordinated, written and presented by Adriaen Van der Donck.29 The petitioners accused Company officials of provoking the Indian war, committing barbaric acts against the natives, and refusing to improve the protective fort, which “lies like a mole-hill or a ruin.”30 The Company placed burdensome taxes on beer and wine, levied onerous duties on trading commodities, arbitrarily enforced commercial regulations and confiscated ships (abominations that sent trading partners elsewhere) and in general, found a “thousand ways to shear the sheep before the wool had grown.”31 Even reliable adjudication of disputes was impossible as Director General Petrus Stuyvesant typically harassed one of the two disputing parties “not as beseemeth a judge, but as a zealous advocate,” thus discouraging many individuals from bringing suit to collect debts.32

in Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Correspondence, 1647–1653 (New York, 2000), 84. “Secretary van Tienhoven’s Answer to the Remonstrance of New Netherland,” 29 November 1650, DRCHNY, I:422. 26 DRCHNY, I:259. 27 Ibid., I:263. 28 Ibid., I:296. 29 For a fuller discussion of the significant role played by Adriaen Van der Donck, see Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York, 2004), especially 205–206, 209–232. 30 DRCHNY, I:303. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., I:307.

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The States General agreed with the petitioners, and in provisional orders of 1650, recommended that within the boundaries of New Amsterdam, “a municipal government consisting of a Sheriff (Schout), two Burgomasters and 5 Schepens” be established, whereas in the mean time, the Nine Men would continue in their positions for another three years.33 The delay in carrying out this directive seems to have been caused by the internal political situation in Holland, but by 1652, international events hastened the institution of the charter.34 By April 1652, war with England appeared imminent. In the wake of the new Navigation Act passed by Parliament in August 1651, English naval vessels and privateers harassed Dutch commerce capturing at least sixty Dutch vessels in Europe, and more than twentyfive in the Caribbean. In response, the WIC prepared a fleet of 150 ships to recover lost property and goods.35 As company officials informed Stuyvesant of these developments and prepared for war, they also urged him to “create a bench of justice framed as much as possible after the laws of this city (Amsterdam).” And in choosing new municipal leadership, care should be taken to select persons “who should be honest and respectable, and whom we hope can be found among the burghers there.”36 These instructions reveal two very significant points about the Company’s intentions. First, it was clear that Company directors wanted Amsterdam’s municipal traditions to serve as the basis for local government, specifically in the method of magistrate selection. At this particular moment in time, the Amsterdam city government was clearly taking a step toward limiting the number of those who could hold political power. Possibly in response to the death of William II, the final decision for selection of magistrates was in the hands of an oudraad, a body made up of Amsterdam’s sitting and former Burgomasters and Schepens. Such a method of tightening the coherence of a leadership group was a response to dangerous, unsettling times, a process that appealed to Manhattan’s merchant leaders and was reflected in the initial selection of New Amsterdam magistrates by the Director General.37 33

Ibid., I:397. Jaap Jacobs, “A Hitherto Unknown Letter of Adriaen van der Donck,” de Halve Maen, Vol. LXXI, No. 1 (Spring 1998), 3. 35 Israel, The Dutch Republic, 715; Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 146. 36 Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 149. 37 Dennis J. Maika, “Leadership in Manhattan’s Merchant Community: OfficeHolding Patterns and the Persistence of a Merchant Elite,” Working Paper No. 34

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 103 Secondly, although the letter from the company sarcastically remarked that instituting municipal government would “silence everyone,” referring to the controversy created by the Remonstrance of 1650, it seems more likely that wartime exigencies motivated the Company and Stuyvesant to finally carry out the recommendation made earlier by the States General. The threat of an Atlantic war with England was serious enough for the Company to anticipate a mass exodus of settlers who had so recently arrived, and it was logical that people would be happier to remain in a colony where local government was run by those most interested in the country. A more substantial role in their own governance might also make New Amsterdammers more willing to share the Company’s financial and military burdens. At a time when local security concerns were high, and the risks of war were real, Manhattan residents, especially merchant leaders with connections to Amsterdam investors, eagerly supported the direction offered by WIC in the adoption of a city charter. The new city government, the Court of Schout, Burgomasters and Schepens, quickly assumed its duties and responsibilities, and local residents seamlessly adjusted to it. At its first meeting on 10 February 1653, the court heard several debt cases, ordered the construction of a new city weigh house and the appointment of a city Weighmaster, ordered the clear “stamping” of weights and measures, and appointed Orphanmasters to administer estates. Local residents pursued their claims for payment of debt, defamation of character, and back wages. New Amsterdam was on its way to functioning as a “well-ordered city” and the future application of Dutch municipal culture rested on a firm footing.

A Time of Promise and Peril The end of the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1654 renewed the sense of optimism for New Amsterdam’s commercial future. With wartime uncertainties behind them and a city government as their anchor, Manhattan merchants and their overseas partners anticipated a renewal of the trade that had shown such promise in the pre-war years. Furs were arriving from Beverwijck in large quantities, a steady flow of Chesapeake tobacco was traveling through New Amsterdam 02–21, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University, 2002, 7.

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on its way to Holland, and the Company’s remaining outposts in the Caribbean were becoming increasingly dependent on New Netherland’s fish, flour, and country produce.38 But as they looked closely at their post-war world, Manhattanites found new commercial challenges that led them to sharpen their view of themselves, their city, and their place in the Atlantic world. One of the most dramatic changes resulted from the WIC’s devastating loss of Brazil (New Holland), an event that caused a ripple effect felt around the Atlantic world. In January, 1654, a few short months before the official end of the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Portuguese finally wrested control of Brazil away from the WIC by capturing Recife. Although a devastating loss for the WIC, the Portuguese take-over of Brazil created new opportunities in the African slave trade for New Amsterdam residents. No longer able to count on Brazilian sugar plantations as a market for enslaved Africans, the Company looked to Manhattan as a new slave entrepôt. Slaves normally bound for Brazil would be sent to the city for re-export to the English tobacco growing colonies, and Manhattan merchants were encouraged to participate in the process.39 The WIC further encouraged private merchants to finance slaving voyages by granting them permission to trade slaves in the Caribbean and even sail directly to Africa to pick up their human cargo.40 Manhattan merchants responded eagerly to these new opportunities and Chesapeake tobacco growers were equally enthusiastic. A formal commercial relationship between Chesapeake and Dutch merchants developed during the English Civil War period in the 1640s and had been encouraged by colonial governments and the WIC. With the end of the first Anglo-Dutch War in 1654, planters in Virginia and Maryland hoped to continue this tradition by forming close associations with Manhattan partners who gave them access to Holland’s lucrative tobacco market as well as to a supply of slaves.41 38

Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 30–37. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 935; Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 169; Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 134–135. 40 Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 145; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 28; Johannes Postma, “A Monopoly Relinquished: The West India Company and the Atlantic Slave trade,” de Halve Maen, Vol. LXX, No. 4 (Winter 1997), 82. 41 Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 112–126; April Lee Hatfield, “Dutch Merchants and Colonists in the English Chesapeake: Trade, Migration, and Nationality in 17th-century Maryland and Virginia,” in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton, UK, 2001), 297. 39

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 105 As new slave and tobacco trade opportunities combined with the continued export of furs and foodstuffs arriving from the Hudson River valley, New Amsterdam’s position as New Netherland’s staple port seemed to guarantee future prosperity to the local inhabitants. However, an unexpected threat to Manhattan’s regional hegemony soon came surprisingly from the WIC. In 1655, Petrus Stuyvesant and Company forces attacked and conquered the New Sweden colony, which had long been New Netherland’s fur-trading rival. The WIC quickly ceded much of this newly acquired territory to the city of Amsterdam, whose leaders had supported the company’s military efforts with the loan of the fighting ship De Waagh. Within a year, Amsterdam began to organize its own colony of New Amstel, hoping to secure a source of products normally acquired in the Baltic trade.42 The Company encouraged New Amstel trade by eliminating duties for several years, guaranteeing military protection, and ordering Stuyvesant to support New Amstel’s Director Jacob Alrichs “in everything with advice and deed.”43 And in what could only be interpreted as a challenge to New Amsterdam’s municipal status, New Amstel was to enjoy local government similar to that recently established in Manhattan. As colonists began to arrive in New Amstel in 1657, Manhattan merchants surely wondered about the true intentions of the WIC and questioned the extent of the Company’s support.44 As New Amstel challenged New Amsterdam’s commerce and position, ostensibly with WIC encouragement, public debts that accrued during the war years presented an additional financial burden to city residents. Manhattan’s forty-three wealthiest citizens promised to contribute 5000 guilders, to be repaid at ten percent interest, to repair the fort and build a protective wall along the city’s northern border. Construction costs quickly increased to 7000 guilders. As the magistrates struggled with this escalating debt, a new confrontation with native Indian tribes—the so-called “Peach War”—forced the magistrates to fortify the new wall with materials costing an additional 4000 guilders. Rising defense costs were to be paid by the broader community which, on 11 October 1655, promised voluntary

42 Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Correspondence, 1654–1658 (Syracuse, NY, 2002), xvii. 43 Ibid., 110. 44 Resolution of the Common Council of the City of Amsterdam,” 2 March 1656, “Conditions Offered by the City of Amsterdam to Emigrants to New Netherland,” 12 August 1656,” DRCHNY, I:617, 630.

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contributions, “each according to his condition, state and circumstances,” ranging from six to 150 guilders per person. Those “disaffected and evil minded” people who challenged the court’s authority by not contributing voluntarily were treated punitively—the court assessed their individual circumstances on the spot and levied an appropriate (and usually high) tax.45 Many of these recalcitrant tax payers were non-resident traders, an amorphous, unorganized group that, in the minds of New Amsterdam’s merchant leaders, posed the most serious threat of all to Manhattan’s future. Local merchants had complained about competition from these “hit and run capitalists” since the 1640s, and in light of new commercial opportunities after 1654, Manhattan’s merchants were especially sensitive to competition from “sojourners.” In a series of formal protests and petitions, merchant leaders singled out schotzen or “peddlers” as the principal threat to local trade.46 The greatest number of sojourners arrived in New Amsterdam directly from Holland. Backed by the same capital that supported Manhattan’s merchants, these self-styled free traders of New Netherland represented an especially serious threat to local merchants because they could do exactly what Manhattan merchants were doing for their local and regional clients—provide markets for Amsterdam’s goods and supply commodities for the Amsterdam market.47 45

RNA, I:92–93, 363, 366, 374, 369; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 64. “Peddlers” and “schotzen” have been mistakenly referred to as “Scotsmen” and “Scots Traders” in several translations of documents. The Dutch word “schotzen” (roughly translated as “Scotsmen”) meant “peddler” and probably did not refer to any significant number of traders from Scotland. The heaviest migration of actual Scots to New York occurred in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. See Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 58, 95, 239 n. 72. The term “sojourner” aptly describes their commercial activity and helps avoid confusion with merchants from Scotland. Cathy Matson refers to this group as “internal petty traders” and suggests that they were different from “foreign merchants’ agents” and “Boston’s ‘Scotch Merchants and Petty Traders.’” Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998), 21, 22. 47 See, for example, the agreement signed on 4 May 1649 by two residents of Amsterdam, Willem Jacobs and Hendrick Gillis Wageman, with Pieter Coenen, an Amsterdam merchant. Jacobs and Wageman, about to sail for New Netherland on board De Valckenier, accepted two hundred guilders in cash from Coenen that they would use to “navigate, trade, and barter,” and then return to Amsterdam. Jacobs and Wageman agreed to pay 3 1/2 percent per month for this front money, and Wageman’s brother, a plumber in Amsterdam, offered himself as security for the deal. Bottomry Bond, VDV-47 (4 May 1649), “English Translations of Notarial Documents in the Gemeente Archief in Amsterdam Pertaining to North America.” Collections of Historic Hudson Valley (formerly Sleepy Hollow Restorations), 46

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 107 Sojourners posed a double threat to Manhattan’s merchant leaders not only by challenging their trade but also undermining their basis for leadership. By 1654, many prominent Amsterdam investors had come to prefer doing business with resident factors in New Amsterdam.48 Closer direct relationships with Amsterdam partners promised to stabilize and regularize trade for Manhattan merchants, whose prospects for a prosperous future were thus enhanced. Not surprisingly, connections to Amsterdam investors became an unofficial requirement for a municipal leadership position and a key factor in determining membership in the city’s fledgling merchant elite. Those with connections to Amsterdam’s Verbrugge family, for example, were Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt (a seven-term Burgomaster), Govert Loockermans (two-term Schepen) and kinsman Johannes Pietersen Verbrugge (six-term Schepen).49 These men and other Manhattan leaders felt an urgent need to act against sojourners and proceeded to do so. Sojourners not only threatened merchant interests, but by 1656, they challenged all Manhattan residents by undermining the local system of currency exchange. Like most North American colonies, New Amsterdam had adapted to the lack of hard currency by relying on various local mediums of exchange. In addition to using tobacco, beaver pelts, and other forms of “commodity money,” Manhattanites relied on belts of Indian wampum (sewant)—carefully strung, tubular beads manufactured from seashells by Indian tribes on Eastern Long Island.50 According to the magistrates, sojourners devalued

Rockefeller Archives, Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Hereafter cited as Amsterdam Notaries. Other sojourners included Jelmer Thomas who received 1000 Carolus guilders worth of goods from Amsterdam’s Dirck Kerbrinck. Bottomry Bond, VDV-51 (25 February 1651), Ibid.; Peter Smit and Cornelis Thomasen received an astounding 3225 guilders on bottomry from Amsterdam merchant Hans Hontum. Bottomry Bond, DEW-27 (30 November 1650), Ibid; Dirck Jansen Kroon had six creditors in Amsterdam by 1654, total debt was 253 beavers. Power of Attorney to Jan Sybingh. LOE-3 (20 May 1654), Ibid. 48 A fuller discussion of how these commercial relationships grew is found in Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 83–106. 49 Ibid., 40–41, 51, 52, 322–356. See also Maika, “Leadership in Manhattan’s Merchant Community” (2002). 50 Elizabeth Shapiro Pena, “Wampum Production in New Netherland and Colonial New York: The Historical and Archaeological Context.” Ph.D. Diss., Boston University, 1990, 21–36. See also Charlotte Wilcoxen, Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century (Albany, 1987), 28, 30 n. 8; Frederic Shonnard and W.W. Spooner, History of Westchester County, New York From Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900

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strung wampum by accepting and trading in “loose wampum,” unstrung beads that diminished the currency’s quality and contributed to wampum inflation. These itinerant traders further offended the local currency by offering ten to twelve guilders in wampum for each beaver pelt, while New Amsterdam merchants sought a stable eightguilder price. Local residents relied on wampum for most of their smaller transactions and had long been sensitive to fluctuations in value. In 1657, the magistrates’ call for protection against currency inflation and itinerant traders particularly resonated with New Amsterdam’s bakers, who were directly affected by wampum inflation since they accepted wampum as payment for their wares. Furthermore, resident bakers keenly felt competition from “seasonal bakers” who baked only during the trading season, the time of the year when full-time bakers made their greatest profit. Although Stuyvesant issued protective regulations in support of resident bakers, wampum inflation remained a serious problem in October 1656.51 In the four years after New Amsterdam became a chartered city, a series of new economic pressures threatened the potential prosperity that was anticipated at the end of the First Anglo-Dutch War. Manhattan’s leaders looked to the creation of formal municipal citizenship—the burgher right—as the most viable solution to their current distress. As they turned once again to the urban culture of Patria, city magistrates began negotiations with Director General Petrus Stuyvesant, in whom they found a sympathetic ear.

Negotiating the Burgher Right In a strongly worded petition to the Director General and Council on 22 January 1657, Manhattan’s municipal magistrates targeted sojourners as the major threat to the city’s commerce. New Amsterdammers suffered great injury and loss of profit due to the “daily increasing multitude” of them who came “over here every year in

(Harrison, NY: 1974; rep. 1900), 44; Maria Van Rensselaer, History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1909), I:61, 438. 51 Simon Middleton, “‘How it came that the bakers bake no bread’: A Struggle for Trade Privileges in Seventeenth-Century New Amsterdam,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., Vol. LVIII, No. 2 (April 2001), 339, 357.

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 109 the ships of the Fatherland.” They complained that these free traders were “unwilling for the most part to sell their goods” in Manhattan. Instead, they bypassed Manhattan’s wharves on their way to Fort Orange or other places, thus violating the staple right privilege that was supposed to guarantee exclusive trading status to New Amsterdam as the central port for all of New Netherland. After completing their trade, the complaint continued, they “go away back again on the first opportunity, so that this place not only does not derive any profit from such persons, but this good Commonalty suffers, on the contrary, great injury thereby.” As a remedy to the sojourners’ disruptive trading practices, and as a legitimate reward to the residents of New Amsterdam, the magistrates demanded “that no man shall be able to prosecute public trading here unless they are known as City Burghers; also that persons who are not settled residents here shall not be allowed to trade to any quarter here about with this place.” In short, their solution was the burgher right, “one of the most important privileges in a well governed city.”52 In their petition to Petrus Stuyvesant, the magistrates again turned to Old World municipal traditions for an effective remedy, specifically the European custom that required both residency for a specified period of time and ownership of real property as requirements for municipal citizenship. In Europe, these requirements grew out of a suspicion of newcomers and the need to maintain the stability of the city. In old Amsterdam it was actually a crime for an “outsider” to pass himself off as an “insider.” This restriction was relaxed in the seventeenth century, as Amsterdam’s remarkable growth resulted in more opportunities for newcomers to join the ranks of the insiders by paying a fee or marrying a citizen.53 For Manhattan’s insiders 52 See petition “To the Honorable Director General and Supreme Council of New Netherland,” 22 January 1657, RNA, II:272–3. Staple right status was originally granted to New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company in 1633 and required the discharge of cargo and the payment of duties or some other form of recognition. These privileges were similar to those granted to many European river cities. Van Rensselaer, History of the City of New York, I:141. 53 Many European cities had restrictions against outsiders. In Bordeaux, for example, a person could claim citizenship if he owned a “substantial home” and lived there for 5 years. Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950, 141–2, 129. In Venice, a 15 and a 25 year residency requirement existed as far back as 13th century; in 16th century Marseilles, a 10 year residency, ownership of a domicile and marriage to a local girl was required. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Vol. I (New York, 1981), 518. In London in the 14th and 15th centuries, an individual had to

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who anticipated their city’s future commercial growth, newcomers would be welcome only if they demonstrated a commitment to reside in and contribute to the local community. The New Amsterdam merchants’ efforts to apply traditional residency and property ownership requirements had to be reconciled with the new commercial strategy of the Dutch West India Company. Since giving up its fur trading monopoly, the Company had directed that there be fewer restrictions on private traders, thus hoping to stimulate the colony’s growth as well as increase customs revenues. For example, as they considered the treatment of sojourners bound for New Amsterdam aboard The Jager in 1647, WIC Directors in Amsterdam believed that their activities should not be “constrained any more than [those of ] free men going to Brazil.”54 Seven years later, the Directors reminded Stuyvesant that restrictions on traders such as having to build a house and requiring them to remain in the colony were “repugnant, servile, and slavish.” Yet WIC Directors did agree that some preferences be shown to local residents in Manhattan, and they expressed a willingness to require all traders to at least keep an open store in New Amsterdam to help provision local residents and compel them to contribute “to the ordinary and extraordinary taxes” the inhabitants had to pay.55 The Company’s position had never satisfied the protectionist concerns of Manhattan’s resident merchants, who were now more suspicious of WIC directors than ever before. Thus, merchant leaders were eager in their petition to point out to Stuyvesant that sojourners had refused to follow Company directives by keeping an open shop in Manhattan and contributing to the community. The petitioners pressed this point further by linking sojourner activity to a violation of the “12th Article of the Freedoms which the Honorable

reside in the city or lose his freedoms. Robert Francis Seybolt, The Colonial Citizen of New York City: A Comparative Study of Certain Aspects of Citizenship Practice in Fourteenth Century England and Colonial New York City (Madison, Wisconsin, 1918), 32. Amsterdam’s growth is described in Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 582. More on Amsterdam citizenship rights is found in Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth Century Elites (London, 1974), 23–4. On Amsterdam citizenship, see Jan Wagenaar, History of Amsterdam (1767). I am grateful to Martha Dickinson Shattuck for making this resource available to me. 54 “Letter from the Directors of Amsterdam to the Council of New Netherland,” April 1647, Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 6. 55 “Letter from the Directors in Amsterdam to the Director General and Council,” 1 March 1654, Gehring, Correspondence, 1654–1658, 5.

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 111 Lords Patroons granted to this place”: the staple right which guaranteed privileged status to New Amsterdam as the central port for all of New Netherland.56 The staple right argument carried considerable weight with Stuyvesant, who had previously supported the merchants’ claim that residency be required to trade.57 In light of the Company’s position on sojourners, however, Stuyvesant found himself searching for a compromise strategy. He turned for advice to Nicasius de Sille, a man “experienced in the law and military,” whom the Company had recently appointed as Stuyvesant’s First Councilor.58 De Sille’s response gave credibility and additional legitimacy to the merchants’ request. He confirmed the magistrates’ claim that their staple right status was similar to that granted to the Dutch city of Dort (Dordrecht); Article 9 of Dort’s municipal charter guaranteed that all goods and merchandise subject to the staple right duty be sold only within city boundaries and, de Sille suggested, only by city residents. “Such peddling or small traders should not be preferred to our land-holding inhabitants,” de Sille reported, referring to peddlers as “sneaks and cheats,” and urging Stuyvesant to take action against them.59 The merchant magistrates must have been pleased with de Sille’s support for their position linking staple right privileges with residency, knowing that the councilor’s opinion would have influence with the Director General. But the magistrates tried to influence Stuyvesant’s decision further by linking the sojourner threat to his general distrust of all non-Calvinists—Lutherans, Quakers, Catholics, Anabaptists—in New Netherland. When some twenty-three Sephardic refugees arrived in 1654 from Dutch Brazil, Stuyvesant had immediately sought their departure, but was ultimately instructed by WIC officials in Amsterdam to allow them to stay. Nevertheless, Stuyvesant continued to discriminate against them by restricting their military service, trading rights, and ability to own real estate.60 It was no

56

RNA, II:262. See petition “To the Honorable Director General and Supreme Council of New Netherland,” 22 January 1657, Ibid., II:272–3. 57 “Burghers of New Amsterdam and Freeman of New York” in New-York Historical Society Collections (New York, 1885), 1–2. Hereafter cited as N-YHS Coll. 58 Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 213. 59 “Advice given by Mr. Nicasius DeSille,” N-YHS Coll., 8. 60 James H. Williams, “The Jewish Struggle for Equality in New Netherland and New York” Paper presented at the John Carter Brown Library, 18 June 1997, 8–13. Cited with permission of the author.

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accident that in the discussion following the commonalty’s recommendation concerning currency issues, the Burgomasters and Schepens reminded the Director General of the damage done to the local economy by “Jews and other foreigners” who sold retail.61 With the aid of his Council, Stuyvesant devised a compromise that adhered to the Company’s directives, yet was guided by a desire to address the concerns of Manhattan’s merchants. In keeping with Company policy, and with its stern warnings in mind, Stuyvesant recognized the rights of “newly arriving traders, . . . skippers, sailors, or peddlers (Schotsen), or whatever they may be called” to carry on trade into the interior of New Netherland but only as long as they opened a shop to sell goods in New Amsterdam. The Company had neglected to specify citizenship in its directive, and Stuyvesant used this opening to make the right to keep shop dependent on municipal citizenship and residency. Drawing on custom in all well-governed cities in the Netherlands, Stuyvesant introduced the stipulation that in order to keep an open store, an individual had to first request the burgher right, pay for it, and take the burgher oath. The subsequent shop to be opened, in either a rented or purchased house, would satisfy “fire and light,” a legal condition that essentially mandated temporary residency by renting or owning real property. If a “merchant of convenience” decided to leave New Amsterdam, he would not be prevented from doing so, nor would he be forced to keep fire and light in his absence. However, when he returned, he would have to once again establish residency and acquire the burgher right before he could keep an open shop.62 As he clarified the process of acquiring the burgher right, Stuyvesant further satisfied Manhattan’s merchants by giving the city magistrates exclusive power over citizenship. Newly arrived traders were required to “request from the Burgomasters and Schepens the burgher right, on condition of duly paying for it, taking the oath of fidelity to the supreme government of Director General and council of New Netherland.” The Court could then issue certificates of citizenship, and keep an accurate register of those favored with the burgher right, a copy of which was delivered to the Provincial Secretary as a cour61

RNA, II:262. “In Council at Fort Amsterdam the 23d of January, 1657, Considerations and advice of the Honorable Director General concerning the Memorial of the Burgomasters and Schepens, submitted to this Board January 23d, 1657,” N-YHS Coll., 5–7. 62

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 113 tesy. All fees collected for the granting of the burgher right went directly to the municipal government, to be “expended principally in the strengthening and circumvallation of this City.” And, in a final bow to the WIC directors, Stuyvesant recognized that the burgher oath could not “bind a man” for a longer time than his convenience required.63 Stuyvesant’s compromise satisfied the concerns of his superiors, especially that trade be kept open in New Amsterdam. But overall, the burgher right was a resounding victory for Manhattan’s merchant community. As they prepared for the opening of the new trading season in 1657, they had succeeded, for the present, in protecting their privileged trading status. Stuyvesant reaffirmed New Amsterdam’s monopoly of New Netherland’s trade “by virtue of the Staple Right, as observed in the Fatherland, no goods or merchandise, coming either from the Fatherland or from neighboring places, shall be carried into the country in the ships, yachts or barks by which they were brought, except upon payment of Staple Right and freight.”64 The New Amsterdam burgher right essentially granted this monopoly to established city residents, but with privilege came responsibility. How did the citizens of New Amsterdam understand their new role? For those who took the burgher oath in April 1657, what did it mean to be a burgher in New Amsterdam?

Inclusion and Exclusion On 9 April 1657, the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens made final preparations for residents to become official city citizens. Those who would claim the burgher right would have eight days to register before the city magistrates, who allotted two hours in the morning and five hours in the afternoon for the process. Those who did not appear during these times would lose their right to claim the privilege of citizenship. To insure their loyalty and commitment, all who registered would have to take the proper oath.65 63 Ibid., p. 7: “In Council at Fort Amsterdam, the 2d. of February, 1657, Friday,” Ibid., 16: “In Council at Fort Amsterdam the 6th. of February, 1657, Ibid., 17. 64 “In Council at Fort Amsterdam the 23d of January, 1657, Considerations and advice of the Honorable Director General concerning the Memorial of the Burgomasters and Schepens, submitted to this Board January 23d, 1657,” Ibid., 7. 65 “The Oath taken by the Burghers; drawn up by the Right Honorable Director General and Council,” Ibid., 18–19.

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Those who took the burgher oath knew full well to what basic privileges they would now be entitled, and realized the unique application of these traditions in New Amsterdam, New Netherland’s staple port. From their homeland experiences in Dutch cities or towns, they understood that a burgher’s ability to trade was facilitated by the guarantee that he and his goods were free from arrest without due process and condemnation by the court. These commercial advantages were shared by both males and females, husbands and wives.66 Citizenship could be inherited by native-born children of both sexes; those who married native-born daughters would also become burghers. In Manhattan, the original burgher right cost residents nothing; only newly admitted citizens were required to pay a fee.67 Yet to many city leaders, the actual words of the burgher oath contained both a promise of security and a troubling concession. They were pleased that magisterial authority was reinforced by all new burghers having “to show in the first place . . . all reverence and respect” to the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens while also recognizing the ultimate sovereignty of the States General, and the WIC and its officials. The individual bound himself to the city corporation “as a faithful Subject and good burgher,” guaranteeing a formal commitment to his local government. But the oath’s last line—that a burgher be held to his commitment only for “as long as I (the burgher) shall continue in this Province”—turned Stuyvesant’s compromise into a persistent reminder of the limitations imposed on them by the West India Company.68 Thus, although the new burgher right benefited many of Manhattan’s residents, it did not finally resolve the issue that had antagonized local merchants for so many years; the problems caused by sojourners would remain as long as the WIC supported an open trade policy. 66 A fuller discussion on women and the burgher right in New Amsterdam is in Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 206–208. 67 The wording of the original granting of the Great and Small Burgher Right suggests that those who currently reside in the colony would not have to pay the fees required of “all others (my emphasis) who desire and are inclined, or hereafter may be desirous and inclined, . . . to receive it (the Great Burgher Right) on paying thereof the sum of Fifty guilders Dutch money.” A similar clause exists for Small Burghers. Fees for certificates, however, would be paid by original Great Burghers (3 guilders) and original Small Burghers (18 stivers). N-YHS Coll., 15–17. 68 “The Oath taken by the Burghers; drawn up by the Right Honorable Director General and Council,” N-YHS Coll, 18–19.

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 115 Once the burgher right had been guaranteed by Stuyvesant, Manhattan’s merchant leadership requested that a further distinction be made. Taking full advantage of the Company’s desire to follow Amsterdam custom, the magistrates requested the establishment of the Great and Small Burgher Right as a way to confirm existing status differences and define the extent to which New Amsterdam’s citizens would participate in community governance.69 Amsterdam had experienced significant population growth, its numbers increasing from 30,000 in 1590 to more than 150,000 in 1650. In response, the city’s government experimented in 1652 with the Great and Small Burgher Right (Groot Burgerrecht, Klein Burgerrecht) as a way to distinguish between prominent and less prominent citizens and, as has been suggested earlier, as a way to limit the number of those who could hold political power.70 New Amsterdam’s merchant magistrates had similar goals in mind. The Great Burgher Right protected the local position of New Amsterdam’s emerging elite by guaranteeing them the exclusive right to hold a position on the city court. Those qualifying as original Great Burghers were past and present magistrates, Company officials and commissioned officers, and past and present ministers. Future Great Burghers included descendants of the original cohort as well as those who won the municipal court’s approval, which, not surprisingly, was comprised exclusively of those with the Great Burgher Right. It was this same court that was given authority over the admission of all new citizens.71 Great Burgher status both reflected and insured the position of the local merchant elite, whose membership was informally determined by access to overseas capital and by direct relationships with Amsterdam merchants as factors or family members. Small Burghers, who lacked these overseas connections, were

69

RNA, II:287. Maarten Prak, “Burghers, Citizens, and Popular Politics in the Dutch Republic,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), 444. The distinction was abolished in 1668. Burke, Venice and Amsterdam, 24, 27; Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic, 39, 51. The use of a great and small burgher right actually existed in many Dutch towns before it was used in Amsterdam. At Nijmegen (Gelderland), the distinction existed as early as 1567. See J.A. Schimmel, “Burgerrecht te Nijmegen 1592–1810: Geschiendenis van de verlening en burgerlijst” (Tilburg: Stichting Zuidelijk Historisch Contact, 1996) [series: Bijdragen tot de Geschiendenis van het Zuiden van Nederland, VII]. I am grateful to Willem Frijhoff for this reference. 71 RNA, II:287. There were thirty-one original Great Burghers. See Original Great Burgher List, Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 514. 70

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not given access to positions on the municipal magistracy. However, they were eligible for appointments as collectors, inspectors, and farmers of various excises, positions that could be financially profitable.72 Although such appointments were available to Small Burghers, they were actually limited in number. What then could Small Burghers expect from municipal citizenship? That many were motivated by the possibility of craft protection is suggested by the way in which these individuals chose to identify themselves. Some fifty-two of the 207 individuals who registered as original Small Burghers identified themselves as butchers, shoemakers, carpenters, glaziers, cartmen, surgeons, bakers, coopers, hatters, chairmakers, wood sawyers, smiths, masons, and painters. Given the absence of craft guilds in New Amsterdam and New Netherland, it is likely that some of these local tradesmen held out hope that certain craft privileges would accompany citizenship, as was the case in European cities.73 But we should still wonder why so many Manhattan residents of various occupations claimed commercial privileges. The reason was that, in Manhattan’s commercially charged environment, Small Burghers as well as Great Burghers understood the many opportunities available in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World. An individual could invest a large or a small amount in one or several overseas or regional voyages. Thus, even the “smallest” burgher could participate in trade to some degree, regardless of his primary occupation. Indeed, in Manhattan, occupations were not mutually exclusive nor did they always require full-time commitment as they would in more mature societies. We find many Small Burghers who identified themselves as tavern keepers, brewers, and carpenters who were actively involved in commerce. Truly, in the words of Nicasius de Sille, “All the people here are traders.”74

72 In Holland, tax offices, especially tax farming, would offer “small fry and punters without capital” access to investment capital. A. Th. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (New York, 1991), 164, 173. 73 Graham R. Hodges, “Legal Bonds of Attachment: The Freemanship Law of New York City, 1648–1801,”in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright, eds. Authority and Resistance in Early New York (New York, 1988). The list even included a drummer, a chimney sweep, and a schoolmaster. An additional fifteen were known to be tavern keepers. See Maika, “Commerce and Community,” Appendix A. See also Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 42. 74 De Sille’s quote is in Stokes, Iconography, IV:148.

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 117 The easy availability of the Small Burgher Right made inclusion as a municipal citizen essentially a matter of choice for most newlyarrived Christian Europeans. Between 1657 and 1665, at least ninetytwo new arrivals agreed to pay the reasonable sum of twenty guilders for the Small Burgher Right. Among the new burghers were those who were obviously interested in the commercial benefits it had to offer. Nicholas Boot, for example, was already well known in New Amsterdam before taking the burgher oath on 4 July 1658. A regional trader in tobacco and slaves, Boot regularly traveled between Virginia and New Amsterdam; he was probably in the Chesapeake region when the original burgher right was created in Manhattan. As the tobacco trade improved, Boot apparently saw the benefit of purchasing the burgher right, and established fire and light in a house on Marckvelt Street.75 Other new burghers arrived from the Netherlands and identified themselves as craftsmen. Among them were tailors, masons, glaziers, shoemakers, coopers, wheelwrights, bakers, and carpenters—men who took the burgher oath in order to establish shops within the city.76 Douwe Clasen, a mason from Medemblink, became a Small Burgher on 2 May 1658, soon after he arrived on The Jan Baptiste. Clasen apparently worked his craft in Manhattan until he decided to leave “for the North” three years later. Claes Mareschal came to New Amsterdam in 1659, took the burgher oath on 19 May 1659, and worked as a glazier. His work was so highly valued that he was asked to repair the glass windows in the local Reformed church.77 Some craftsmen, like Claes’ brother Evert (also a glazier), were interested in taking advantage of the commercial opportunities open to Small Burghers. Evert arrived on the same ship as Claes, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Evert took the burgher oath several days before his brother and soon was involved in trading for Virginia tobacco. Evert’s wife Aaltje (now a burgher by marriage) 75 Boot took the oath as “Nicolas Joannes Bootsen,” and perhaps again as “Claes Bootsen” on 4 July 1659. N-YHS Coll., 25. On Boot’s trade, see for example, RNA, II:54, 110; Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 124–125; in Virginia, RNA, II:276, and Hatfield, ”Dutch Merchants and Colonists in the English Chesapeake,” 300. On his residency, see RNA, III:203, and Van Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 42. 76 The list of those leaving the Netherlands aboard WIC ships is “Early Immigrants to New Netherland; 1657–1664,” in DRCHNY, III:33–42. Privately-owned vessels also arrived with new immigrants but these lists have been lost. 77 RNA, III:287, IV:47.

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joined her husband in the tobacco trade, though apparently she did not travel to Virginia with him. By 1663, the Mareschals were using a ship owned by Nicholas Boot to freight their tobacco from the Chesapeake to New Amsterdam.78 Some individuals were excluded from the burgher right by virtue of previously arranged bonds of service. In the Netherlands, citizenship assumed a commitment of free individuals, unencumbered by other formal obligations or feudal restrictions. As reflected in the burgher oath, the same traditions carried over to New Amsterdam, where all those individuals who bound themselves legally to other commitments were excluded from citizenship. One such group was indentured servants. A considerable number of unidentified servants arrived with their masters from 1657 to 1664 and, although specific names and numbers are unavailable, they were most likely excluded from the burgher right because of their bonded status; those under indenture would not be eligible for citizenship until their service contract had expired, thus guaranteeing their labor for a specific period of time.79 Soldiers in the Dutch Atlantic were also excluded from local citizenship while in the WIC’s service, but it was understood that once released from their commitment to the Company, they could take the burgher oath. In 1638, the States General had decided that WIC soldiers whose commitment had expired were eligible to obtain the burgher right in Dutch Brazil if the governor and council agreed.80 The same procedure applied to soldiers in New Amsterdam. As Renier Cornelis left Amsterdam aboard The Otter in April 1660, it was clearly noted next to his name on the roster of soldiers that he would need to be discharged from Company service before he could pursue his trade. Cornelis’ shipmate on The Otter, fellow soldier Jacob Leisler, began his career as a New Amsterdam burgher only after leaving the service of the WIC.81 78

RNA, IV:315. “Servants are included in the lists found in “Early Immigrants to New Netherland; 1657–1664,” in DRCHNY, III:33–42. 80 It is unknown, however, if any soldiers actually applied for such status. Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien. Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Den Haag, 1921), 298. I am grateful to Wim Klooster for this reference. 81 “List of Soldiers, embarked for New Netherland in the Ship Otter, 27th April 1660,” DRCHNY, III:37. More complete information on this list of soldiers is found in “ Roll of Soldiers being sent to New Netherland aboard the ship Otter, April 79

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 119 Enslaved Africans were also excluded from citizenship. Although the same legal rationale that kept indentured servants and WIC soldiers from the burgher right was most likely applied to individuals bound to their masters in slavery, the differences in the type of bond created a more permanent exclusion from the burgher right for the enslaved. Unlike bonds of indenture which expired after a specified number of years, bonds of chattel slavery demanded labor for life. Theoretically, a servant or soldier whose bond had expired could then commit himself to the municipal community by purchasing the burgher right. For chattel slaves, their bond of servitude excluded them forever from the community. Such a clear distinction is surprising given the ambiguous status that existed previously for enslaved Africans. Although their bound condition was apparent, slaves were nevertheless able to exercise certain economic and political rights, were permitted to marry and have children, and many were baptized in the Reformed Church. In 1644, the WIC granted eleven petitioning slaves “half-freedom,” setting them free to live as other local inhabitants but requiring them to work for the WIC when necessary, and not freeing their children.82 If enslaved peoples were excluded because of their bond as chattel slaves, opportunities that may have opened with “half-freedom” were now surely closed. As the number of slaves increased and slave ownership widened in New Amsterdam, the establishment of the burgher right may have played a role in hardening the local institution of slavery.83 24, 1660,” New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13:106, New York State Archives, Albany, NY. Also in The Papers of Jacob Leisler Project, New York University, #1021 (photocopy and translation). It is unclear exactly when Leisler took the burgher oath but, given the fact that he was an established merchant trading in furs and tobacco within a year of his arrival, he must have taken it before then. David William Voorhees, “‘In Behalf of the True Protestants Religion’: The Glorious Revolution in New York,” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1988, 210. 82 Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY, 1966), 18; Peter R. Christoph, The Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” The Journal of AfroAmerican historical and Geneaological Society, 5 (Fall Winter 1984), 109–112; “Act of the Director General and Council, 25 February 1644,” A.J.F. Van Laer, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch Volume IV, Council Minutes, 1638–1649 (Baltimore, Md. 1974), 212–213; Dennis J. Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture in Early New York,” de Halve Maen Vol. LXXIII, No. 2 (Summer 2000), 28; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 50–53. 83 On the growth of slavery, see Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 29; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 76.

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The apparent exclusion of free blacks from the burgher right must also be understood in this context. The number of free blacks was probably increasing at the same time the enslaved population was getting larger. It has been estimated that by 1664, seventy-five of the 375 Africans in New Amsterdam were free.84 However, none of the names of the few known free Africans appear on the burgher lists, though the name of Small Burgher Anthony More (“More” being a word used to signify African descent) suggests that he may have been an exception to the rule.85 Some free Africans may have actually owned real property beyond the city walls, thus disqualifying them from the burgher right’s residency requirement. Those individuals excluded from the burgher right because of their commitment to their masters or to the WIC were nonetheless considered city “inhabitants.” Other inhabitants deliberately chose to be excluded from the burgher right for various reasons. Many who arrived after 1657 decided not to pay for citizenship and found work in the city as laborers or moved to neighboring communities to work on farms.86 Ship captains, regional partners of Manhattan’s merchants who arrived in town to deliver and receive goods, or those who came with powers of attorney from partners living in different locations also chose not to become municipal citizens. Another group of “foreigners” who refused the burgher right were those who stopped in Manhattan on their way elsewhere. All inhabitants and foreigners were nonetheless able to appear in the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens to bring suit or to defend against claims while they were in town, although they were subject to confiscation of property and other punishments not meted out to burghers. New Amsterdam’s city court took full responsibility for applying and maintaining the burgher right, determining who would be included and excluded in the expected commercial growth of the city. Faced with a “surge of immigration” in the years immediately following

84

Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 61; Hodges, Root and Branch, 29. Comparing the names Domingo Angola, Manuel Peters, Pieter Tambour does not show any matches. Names of freedmen are in Christoph, “The Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 109–119. Anthony More took the burgher oath on 18 July 1658. N-YHS Coll., 25. 86 A comparison of the list of known burghers to the lists of “Early Emigrants to New Netherland, 1657–1664” confirms this conclusion. Edmund B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany, 1850), III:33–42. This list is not a complete list of immigrants since only WIC ships are listed. 85

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 121 the creation of the burgher right, the magistrates tried to be flexible enough to encourage new arrivals to take their place as honorable burghers, yet vigilant enough to protect merchant interests from sojourners. Magistrates acquainted new arrivals with the benefits and costs of burgher right, and aggressively solicited their immediate commitment to the local community. The court hoped to encourage new burghers though a flexible system of payment for the burgher right, accepting bonds and alternative payment methods rather than demanding immediate payment in cash.87 At the same time, city court members were vigilant in supervising the residency requirement. Even those who had previously established themselves as Manhattan residents were susceptible to this scrutiny.88 Finally, the Court also examined an individual’s business activities to determine if citizenship was actually necessary. Those individuals who came only to collect debts or were just passing through the city were excused from payment. Men like Gerrit Hendricksen Van Rys, who was found to be trading for himself and yet did not request the burgher right, was ordered to pay.89 In the minds of the magistrates, Van Rys and others like him were the sojourners or peddlers they had long resisted. In spite of the city government’s scrutiny, sojourners continued to arrive in New Amsterdam, many of whom avoided community responsibility by rejecting the burgher right. Merchants continued to complain about them, emphasizing once again that a quid pro quo of support for the community was expected in return for trading privileges. Sojourners continued to challenge both the staple right and the burgher right as they bypassed New Amsterdam on their way

87

Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 224. The municipal government, with the support of the Director General, issued a “Notice” concerning the burgher right on 18 June 1660 to “those who have come in the last arrived ship, the Guilded Beaver, and those who may yet come.” RNA, VII:253. An example of the court’s vigilance is found in the case against Dirck van Schelluyne, a Manhattan notary, merchant, and original Small Burgher. Van Schelluyne was found in violation of the residency requirement because instead of keeping fire and light by paying rent for his room, he was sleeping and writing at the house of Secretary Johannes Nevius. He had “no room of his own, for which he pays rent, nor keeps fire and light at his place.” The court ruled that van Schelluyne thus had no “fixum domicilium,” and therefore was not entitled to the burgher privilege of freedom from arrest within the city. On Schelluyne’s residency problem, see Ibid., II:390, 27 May 1658. Schelluyne appealed to Director General and Council on 27 May 1658. Ibid., II:391. Unfortunately, we do not know how the case was finally resolved. 89 Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 225. 88

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to Fort Orange and seriously damaged trade especially “during the period of the tobacco and beaver trade, which is the most important in this country.”90 How could sojourners have continued to be such a problem after the burgher right was formally established and the staple right confirmed? Apparently, sojourners were not restricted or discouraged from their independent ways as they left Holland, because some Amsterdam investors continued to rely on them. When they appeared in New Amsterdam or Fort Orange, sojourners sometimes found a willing market among a needy and ever-increasing population who, in spite of regulations, were willing to purchase goods at cheaper prices, paying cash to avoid credit and interest payments. Given the many inlets and small harbors in the surrounding area, it was exceedingly difficult for the municipal court or the WIC to enforce commercial regulations, especially when cooperation from some local residents was not always dependable. The wording of continued complaints against sojourners suggests that some peddlers actually subscribed to the burgher right, paid the fee, but did not remain long enough in New Amsterdam to support the community before they traveled away from Manhattan. They continued to “travel through and fro,” sometimes absenting themselves from New Amsterdam for as long as four consecutive months. Without keeping fire and light for this period of time, these sojourners did not have to bear such burdens as contributing to the city’s defense, a requirement that became even more important in the years that followed the establishment of the burgher right. Subsequent petitions from merchants and magistrates continued to raise these concerns, offering such solutions as increasing the residency requirement to three years and charging as much as 1,000 guilders for the burgher right and an additional twenty guilders if an individual wanted to trade up river.91 Although it is difficult to assess the actual extent of the sojourner threat, raising the cry against them resonated with city burghers, who very much defined themselves in opposition to rootless traders.

90 Complaints are found in “Remonstrance—to the Honorable Lords Burgomasters of this City of New Amsterdam in N. Netherland,” 12 September 1659, “ In Council at Fort Amsterdam” 25 May 1660, “To the Noble, Very Honorable Director General and council of New Netherland,” 31 January 1661, N-YHS Coll., 27–29, 32, 33–34. 91 Ibid., 28–29, 35.

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 123 At the same time, the continuing controversy illustrates an interesting paradox. Essentially, the burgher-sojourner conflict reflected two different views about the best way to participate in Atlantic commerce. Manhattan burghers had defined their local position in terms of privilege and preference, coupled with responsibility within the local community, very much in keeping with Dutch municipal traditions. Burghers found stability in the order and structure that would come from a well-regulated local community. Sojourners were truly “hit and run capitalists,” choosing to avoid the actual and perceived costs of community membership and seeking profits by the quickest, least restrictive methods. Strangely enough, sojourners found support from a WIC that profited from commercial regulation and a stable colony. The end of WIC control in New Netherland and New Amsterdam in 1664 in some ways benefited Manhattan’s burghers and their leaders whose position was sustained by English governors sent to represent a newly developing, restrictive, mercantilist system.

Adapting the Burgher Right In August 1664, the arrival in New Amsterdam’s harbor of English naval vessels brought home to city residents the unofficial conflict that had been raging between the Netherlands and England for more than a year. In March, 1665, the second Anglo-Dutch war was formally declared, but its effects had already been felt in Manhattan as trade with the newly renamed city of New York was disrupted. Holland investors were tentative about investing in this uncertain environment, and English investors were reluctant to enter the New York trade. Manhattan merchants tried with some success to renew their business connections overseas, but sojourners were not as fortunate; the business risks of war seem to have eliminated the challenge Manhattan merchants had so long been facing.92 With the signing of the peace treaty at Breda in 1667, the Netherlands officially ceded its colony of New Netherland to England. The WIC was gone, but city government—and the burgher right—remained. As quickly as it had been renamed, New York City became the capital of the English colony with a commercial monopoly equivalent 92 A fuller discussion of immediate post 1664 trade is found in Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 133–156.

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to its position as staple port under the Dutch. Thus the cornerstone of the burgher right—privileged commercial status for Manhattan’s port—was reaffirmed.93 The same burgher right requirements and burgher privileges were also retained, and English provincial officials continued to support the local court’s control over citizenship and its supervision of trading privileges.94 What could have been the most dramatic challenge to Manhattan’s concept of citizenship—the change from Dutch to English control— actually supported and expanded it. English governors found it easy to support local citizenship traditions in New York because of the similarity between Manhattan’s burgher right and England’s freemanship. In London, for example, freemen had to establish residency by keeping “Dun and Scot” or “Scot and Lot,” a provision meant to provide protection against outsiders that essentially held the same meaning as fire and light both in Amsterdam and New York.95

93 “An Order Requiring Shipmasters to Report on Arrival,” 13 September 1664. Peter and Florence Christoph, eds., New York Historical Manuscripts: English—Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York, 1664 –1673, 1673–1682. Orders, Warrants, Letters, Commissions, Passes and Licenses Issued by Governor Richard Nicolls and Francis Lovelace (Baltimore, 1982), 52. Hereafter cited as General Entries, 1664–1673; Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 56. 94 In June, 1670, New York’s Mayor and Aldermen complained to Governor Lovelace that strangers were trading in Esopus and Albany. Like Stuyvesant, his Dutch predecessor, Francis Lovelace supported the burgher right’s commercial privileges. He ordered that no stranger or strange vessel could trade in the colony of New York without first unloading their goods in New York City and paying duties. Such strangers then had to transport their goods into the interior, using only “Vessels belonging to this Port and may go up themselves with leave to negotiate there having first obteyned, the Priviledge of being free burghers of this Citty.” General Entries, 1664–1673, 357. 95 Graham Russell Hodges recognizes the similarities between the Dutch burgher right and English freemanship in New York City. “Legal Bonds of Attachment: The Freemanship Law of New York City, 1648–1801,” 228, 222. An interesting comparison between London and New York City freemanship is found in Robert Frances Seybolt, The Colonial Citizen of New York City: A Comparative Study of Certain Aspects of Citizenship Practice in Fourteenth Century England and Colonial New York City (Madison, 1918), though he mistakenly believes that the duty of residency was not reproduced in colonial New York. See especially 4–18, 33; On London freemanship and its relationship to New York City, see also Richard B. Morris, Selected Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674–1784 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 33. Bristol citizenship followed similar patterns. See Patrick McGrath, ed. Merchants and Merchandise in Seventeenth-Century Bristol (Bristol, 1958), especially Appendix C, “Numbers of Those Admitted to the Freedom of Bristol as Merchants, 1600–1699.” The close connection between early English governors and New York City merchants is described in Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977) and Mary Lou Lustig, The Imperial Executive in

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 125 The willingness of English provincial authorities to support Manhattan’s burgher right was no doubt due to their desire to encourage trade and collect revenues for the royal purse. Since large-scale English investment capital did not accompany the English fleet in 1664, trade with Amsterdam was essential for the colony’s survival. In fact, the few successful English merchants at this time were those who traded in partnership with Amsterdam merchants who, in turn, were regular partners with Manhattan burghers.96 At the same time the early English governors confirmed Manhattan’s burgher right tradition, they added another dimension to citizenship. Article Three of the Articles of Capitulation in 1664 transformed Manhattan burghers into “free Denizens” with the right to “enjoy their Lands, Houses, Goods, Shipps, wheresoever they are within this Country, and dispose of them as they please.” Denization gave New York’s merchants the same rights and privileges as Englishmen to trade within the nascent English empire while maintaining local citizenship rights.97 Instead of nullifying or undermining the burgher right, the coming of English rule had the effect of actually broadening trading opportunities for the local merchant community. The notion of a provincial level of citizenship had existed in seventeenth-century Manhattan before the English intrusion in 1664. While under Dutch West India Company jurisdiction, New Amsterdam merchants and residents had traditionally recognized their provincial and transatlantic connection to the Netherlands, acknowledging in their burgher oath the sovereignty of the States General of the Netherlands and the jurisdiction of the Dutch West India Company. But both Great and Small Burghers bound themselves most immediately to their municipality. They pledged themselves to New Amsterdam magistrates and promised “to obey them in all honest and just matters as a faithful subject and good Burgher is bound to do.”98 When Manhattan residents took the required oath of allegiance to the new English government, the distinction between the burgher

America: Sir Edmund Andros, 1637–1714 (Madison, NJ, 2002). See also, Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 230. 96 English Governor Francis Lovelace, for example, participated in these early partnerships. See Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 142–148. For other examples, see Ibid., 392–397. 97 “Articles of Surrender Consented to by Colonel Nicolls, His Delegates, and Director General Stuyvesant’s Delegates,” (27 August 1664, old style) in Ibid., 35. 98 N-YHS Coll., 18–19.

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right and denizen status remained clear in their minds. In their arrangement with the English provincial government, they bound themselves as true subjects of the King of Great Britain, promising to obey his commands or those from his governors or other officers. This oath was separate from and in no way conflicted with the burgher oath; Governors Richard Nicolls and Francis Lovelace firmly supported a distinct burgher right, and no suggestion was made to nullify or in any way modify a burgher’s original arrangement with city government. Similar guarantees were offered when a Dutch fleet arrived in New York City in August, 1673, to reclaim Manhattan for the Netherlands. As New York City’s name changed again to New Orange, for a brief fifteen months, the Dutch provincial officials retained the burgher right, and Manhattan’s municipal government continued essentially the same as before, “authorized and empowered to govern the inhabitants of this city, as well burghers and Strangers.” The 1673 oath of fidelity to the States General and the Prince of Orange was practically identical to the oath administered by the English in 1664. It was clear that a burgher’s relationship with the provincial level of government was separate from and did not interfere with municipal citizenship.99 Upon the arrival of English Governor Edmund Andros in November 1674, provincial jurisdiction changed hands for the third time in ten years. The blending of Dutch and English investment capital that had begun in a limited way after 1664, became the predominant feature of New York’s trade.100 Many institutional features remained unchanged. Municipal citizenship in Manhattan continued to serve as an analogue to provincial and imperial citizenship; all those who satisfied the city’s essential requirements for municipal citizenship by taking the oath of allegiance, maintaining a residence and paying the required fees were also considered free denizens of the English empire.101

99

The oath administered to the magistrates is in RNA, VI:398–399. For oath administered to the inhabitants and to the English, see Ibid., VII:2. 100 A full discussion of the blending of Dutch and English investment capital after 1674 is found in Maika, “Commerce and Community,” 384–427. 101 Pre-1674 denization documents are similar to the ones issued after the arrival of Governor Andros. For Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt’s Certificate of Denization, 30 December 1664, see John Jay Papers, Micro. 2, #15F, New-York Historical Society. Certificates of denization were issued to Govert Loockermans (19 December 1664), Allard Anthony and Balthazar de Haart (16 January 1665), and Nicholas de

the burgher right in seventeenth-century manhattan 127 Changes in local citizenship after 1674 reflected the blending of English and Dutch municipal cultures. Adapting to the English concept of freemanship, city magistrates used the terms Burghership or Freedom interchangeably, at one point identifying municipal citizens as “Free-men or made Free or Burghers of this Citty.” As the court reaffirmed the importance of residency as a requirement for citizenship, persons were reminded to keep “Fire and Light” as well as “pay Scot and Lot,” combining phrases found in Dutch and English municipalities.102 The formal distinction between Great and Small Burghers disappeared, both imitating its elimination in Amsterdam in 1668 and reflecting the lack of an equivalent form in English municipalities. Yet for the first time, merchants and traders were distinguished from handicraft professions by being required to pay different amounts for citizenship.103 Though such a practice was typical of more fully developed English municipalities, in New York it pointed to the beginning of a clearer occupational division taking place within a maturing community. As the institution of municipal citizenship came to more closely follow the “Usage and Practice of Corporations in England,” it remained firmly grounded in Manhattan’s seventeenth-century traditions, a phenomenon best explained by the close connection between citizenship and trade.104 In the first decade of the eighteenth century, individuals still came to City Hall to request citizenship. The city’s continued success was due to expanding and innovative commercial activity. And municipal citizenship remained the gateway to that commerce.

Meyer (31 March 1665). General Entries, 1664–1673, 56, 101, 105. The clearest references to the relationship between municipal citizenship and denization are found in the denization certificates for Isaack Greveratt (9 Nov 1670) who was “here at the Surrender,” and for Peter Ruyters who was made a denizen at the same time he became a burgher (1 Oct 1670). Ibid., 390. According to the surrender agreement, “All people shall continue free denizens . . .” See “Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland,” 27 August 1664 (Old Style), DRCHNY, II:250. James Kettner talks about the relationship between local citizenship and English citizenship in The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1978), 83. 102 At a Mayor’s Court, 5 June 1675. Kenneth Scott, ed., New York Historical Manuscripts: English. Minutes of the Mayors Court of New York, 1674–1675 (Baltimore, 1983), 44. 103 N-YHS Coll., 40–41. 104 Ibid., 52.

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For seventeenth-century Manhattan residents, formal citizenship in the incorporated city became an essential element in defining who they were and how they related to the Atlantic world. By taking the oath as a New Amsterdam burgher and behaving like a good burgher, individuals publicly acknowledged several important features of themselves and their community. They recognized that the commercial order and stability they sought could best be provided by Dutch municipal traditions, and they supported their leaders’ efforts to acquire and institutionalize those ideas found to be most practical and appropriate. Their position was essentially protectionist but adaptable, and they demonstrated a willingness to make financial and social sacrifices for their privileges. As they bound themselves to their corporation, New Amsterdamers also solidified a social hierarchy that placed prominent merchants as Great Burghers at the top, offered Small Burghers a secondary but safe position, and allowed for the exclusion of others who were unable or unwilling to make similar sacrifices. With municipal culture as an essential component of the community’s foundation, Manhattan’s municipal citizens successfully met the late seventeenth-century challenges of war, jurisdictional change, new immigration, economic uncertainty, and finally Leisler’s rebellion, and emerged with a sense of promise and possibility about their future.

JORIS DOPZEN’S HOG AND OTHER STORIES: ARTISANS AND THE MAKING OF NEW AMSTERDAM Simon Middleton

In February 1665 Allard Anthony, New York City sheriff, brought the tavern keeper Joris Dopzen to court and charged him with a breach of the municipal order concerning the slaughter of livestock in the town. The order granted a slaughter monopoly to a group of local butchers in return for which they worked at regulated rates and collected a municipal tax on the value of every beast butchered. Anthony alleged that Dopzen had “killed a hog and entered it at thirty guilders zeewan . . . [and] had it not killed by the sworn butchers.”1 Some time after, the sheriff reported, Dopzen confessed to under-valuing his hog when he boasted to “others that it cost him thirty guilders in beavers” and that he had thereby defrauded the city of its rightful excise. Anthony demanded that Dopzen be fined and his butchered hog confiscated. The case collapsed, however, when Dopzen’s wife came forward and declared that she had “bought the hog for thirty ells of blue osnaburgh linen.”—confusing the issue of value still further—and that she had not known that only the official butchers could slaughter and that she had received a permit from the market supervisor who “did not inform her differently.” Faced with conflicting testimony, the magistrates waved aside the sheriff’s call for a fine. But they insisted that Dopzen pay the municipal excise, ordering him to forfeit thirty Dutch stivers as “it was

1 Zeewan or sewan was the Dutch word for wampum, a currency made of black/blue and white shells found along the coast of New England and Long Island which Europeans traded for Indian furs and in particular beaver pelts; beaver pelts also served as commodity money—along with linen, tobacco, grain and other trade goods calculated in the Dutch currency of stivers and guilders—in New Amsterdam. However, beavers held their value better than zeewan, most likely because they could be traded for European goods, and were more highly prized. For wampum and the Indian trade see Daniel K. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse. The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992), 84–86; Lynn Ceci, “The Value of Wampum among the New York Iroquois: A Case Study in Artifact Analysis,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 37 (1982): 97–107.

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understood that the hog was in proportion worth more than was given in.”2 What are we to make of incidents such as this and what might they tell us of artisanal trade and municipal regulation in New Amsterdam and early New York? It is more than fifty years since Richard Morris presented hundreds of examples of such regulatory tête-à-têtes drawn from colonial records in his study of government and labor in early America. Morris described what he considered the early American reception of English mercantilist attitudes and practices rooted in the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers and “Tudor industrial code.”3 In the 1950s the consensus historians’ account of the seventeenth-century origins of laissez-faire capitalism eclipsed Morris’s thesis: according to these scholars, individualistic early American artisans had pursued their own interests freely and in ways that marked them as ambitious men-on-the-make and progenitors of American manufacturing and industrial might. In the 1960s and 70s the historiographical pendulum swung back in Morris’s favor: social and labor historians revived the findings of Government and Labor in their account of the decline of a community-centered, or “moral,” economy in which artisans’ struggled to defend customary ways and rewards. In this respect the major interpretive trends of the last half century or so have doubly obscured the distinctiveness of artisanal trade and regulation in New Amsterdam. Firstly, behind what Joyce Goodfriend has described as an Anglocentric reading of colonial history that marginalizes the experience of Dutch and other non-English peoples. Secondly, by a debate between competing views of the transition to capitalism that elides the distinctiveness of earlier colonial tradesmen, characterizing them in relation to their nineteenth-century descendants as either forward-looking and aspiring “entrepreneurs” or as backward-looking and nostalgic “craftsmen.”4 2 Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols., (1897; reprint, Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1976), 5:186. Hereafter, RNA. 3 Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). The force of Morris’s interpretive framework was such that it even drew in scholars studying non-English settlements such as New Amsterdam, see Harold C. Syrett, “Private Enterprise in New Amsterdam,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 11 (October, 1954): 536–550. My assessment of Morris draws upon Christopher Tomlins, “Why Wait for Industrialism? Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America—An Historiographical Argument,” Labor History, 40 (1999), 5–33. 4 For the consensus historians’ account see Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsmen

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As long ago as 1977, Michael Zuckerman declared his personal dissatisfaction with the latter approach, arguing that it was less important to ascertain the priority of communalism or individualism than it was to plot the pattern within which both could burgeon at once. More recently, Craig Muldrew, an historian of early modern England, has echoed Zuckerman’s dissatisfaction and called for a “thickly researched” approach to the study of markets, motives, and commerce.5 Work completed in the last decade or so has responded to these and other challenges. Scholars have demonstrated that artisanal working practices varied across colonial time and space and that the regulation of trade and labor, where enforced, was similarly heterogeneous.6 These and other studies cast doubt upon Morris’s account of the transplantation and enduring vigor of English mercantilist practices in early America. Yet while Morris’s thesis concerning the reception of English ways is increasingly untenable, his still unparalleled empirical research in colonial legal records continues to attest to the tenacity of regulatory thinking in early American political economy and to require a response. Perhaps the best place to begin is with Christopher Tomlins’s observation that what Morris’s archival gleanings revealed was less the imprint of a monolithic Tudor “industrial code,” and more the influence of various early modern political and legal cultures reflecting the disparate origins of settler groups and the conditions they encountered in the New World.7 Thanks to the continuing renaissance in New World Dutch Studies we now know a great deal more than did Morris of the political and legal culture of New Netherland. Scholars have demonstrated

(1950; reprint, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1990), 165, 173; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 74, 89. For the social and labor history revival of Morris’s work see Graham Hodges, “In Retrospect: Richard B. Morris and Government and Labor in Early America (1946),” Reviews in American History, 25 ( June 1997), 360–368. Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History, 80 ( January, 1998), 5–28. 5 Michael Zuckerman, “The Fabrication of Early American Identity,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 34 (April, 1977), 183–85; Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England,” Social History, 18 (1993), 163–83. 6 For example, Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: Norton, 1995); Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen. Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994). 7 Christopher Tomlins, “Why Wait for Industrialism?” 22.

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that communities such as New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan Island—and Beverwijck (later Albany) to the north—were more than fur-trading outposts of the Dutch West India Company’s far-flung commercial empire: these early communities also sustained hardy settler groups who pursued diverse trades and commercial opportunities while struggling to replicate the Old World orderly society they had left behind.8 A major theme in the emerging revisionist literature is the campaign by a merchant-led settler lobby to secure local administrative reforms and protectionist commercial advantages—in the settlers’ more pithy style “privileges and exemptions”—for the fifteen hundred or so burghers who comprised New Amsterdam’s mid seventeenth-century population. These privileges and exemptions, the reformers argued, were essential for the town’s social order and commercial success. Equally important however, and just as in the United Provinces, urban privileges and exemptions were also considered indispensable guarantees of residents’ rights and liberties as burghers and freeborn subjects of the Dutch Republic.9 The strug8 Alice P. Kenney, Stubborn For Liberty. The Dutch in New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1975); Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664,” (Ph.D. Diss., Boston University, 1993). For overviews of the recent flourishing of studies on Dutch New York see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Historiography of the Dutch in Colonial America,” in Eric Nooter and Patricia U. Bonomi, eds., Colonial Dutch Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 6–32; the essays in Nancy Anne McClure Zeller, ed., A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rennsselaerswijck Seminar Papers (Albany, N.Y.: New Netherland Publishing, 1991), especially Stefan Bielinksi, “How a City Worked: Occupations in Colonial Albany;” Wayne Bodle, “Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980–1994,” William and Mary Quarterly, 51 ( July, 1994): 357–358; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History.” 9 “Remonstrance of New Netherland and the Occurrences There. . . .,” in E.B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of The State of New York, 15 vols., (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1856), 1:318. Hereafter, DRCNY. The New Amsterdam merchants’ challenge to the West India Company’s administration figured prominently in older histories of early New York, for example Hugh Brodhead, History of the State of New York (New York, 1853), 1: chs. 14, 15; 2: 246; Maria Schuyler van Rensselaer, History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909), 1:243–346. These historians’ whiggish view of the reformers’ struggle as the beginnings of an American democratic tradition was subsequently criticized by Philip L. White, “Municipal Government Comes to Manhattan,” New York Historical Society Quarterly, 37, (1953), 146–57, and Langdon G. Wright, “Local Government and Central Authority in New Netherland,” New York Historical Society Quarterly, 57 (1973), 7–29. More recent studies have considered the merchants’ efforts to secure local rights and privileges as a piecemeal transplantation of Dutch practices intended to order trade and ensure community harmony. See Kenney, Stubborn For Liberty, 36–39, 45–50; Oliver Rink, Holland on the Hudson. An Economic

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gle for privileges and exemptions, which was largely won by the early 1660s, sponsored the development of a distinct urban community based on a set of civic, republican, and mercantile principles that Donna Merwick has gathered together under the term burgerlijk which (she argues) served as the New Amsterdammers’ “central cultural metaphor” and “organizing principle of personal space, of social class, of events and actions, [and] of cultural time.”10 All of which brings us back to the spat concerning Joris Dopzen’s hog and what it and similar exchanges might tell us of the part played by local tradesmen in the formation of New Amsterdam’s distinctive municipal community. Quite apart from the fact that this falling out took place months after the English conquest and, most likely, involved a batavianized Englishman (George Dobson) in a dispute concerning the salience of Dutch regulations, the thing that is most striking is Dopzen’s attempt to evade the slaughter tax by under-valuing his hog and entering its cost in zeewan rather than in beavers—an evasion subsequently undone by his indiscreet bragging. Like most everyone else in New Amsterdam and early New York, Dopzen and his wife had diverse commercial interests and combined their hog rearing with trading in furs and tobacco, and tapping from their licensed tavern on Smith Street. Dopzen’s attempt to evade the city’s excise, and seven other court appearances for tavern-related misdemeanors in the preceding five years, suggests that he was an established, knowledgeable, and at times even roguish local trader.11 Considered thus, Dopzen’s boast about the under-valuing of his hog discloses a conceit recognizable by anyone who has ever fiddled their taxes or beaten a parking ticket: a conceit which bespeaks not ignorance, but an intimate knowledge of the city and its regularities; a

and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community. Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. Diss. New York University, 1995), part one. 10 Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 11 The Dopzens were charged with tapping after hours and during public prayer, receiving solders in the dead of night, entertaining sailors “whereby their masters received no service,” and allowing disorderly behavior in the tavern to spill out on to the city’s streets. Smith Street was not the most salubrious of neighborhoods, but the Dopzens’ offences were fairly run-of-the-mill misdemeanors; two months after his court appearance in February 1665 Joris Dopzen was assessed for taxes at the same level as a respectable baker, cooper, and ships carpenter. RNA 3: 159, 163, 172, 247, 286; RNA 4: 205, 320.

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knowledge that made evasion both possible and self-gratifying and ultimately worth boasting of as something ‘gotten away with’. It is in this regularity, I will argue, that we can discern the transformation of New Amsterdam in the 1650s and early 1660s: a regularity manifest in the municipal apparatus of enforcement, comprising sworn butchers and slaughter permits, market inspectors, and the sheriff; a regularity that scarcely skipped a beat following the English conquest and which was discussed on the streets and in taverns, where tax evaders boasted of their exploits and good fortune on some occasions and doubtless lamented their arrest and charge on others; and finally, a regularity whose effects on the city’s residents are evident in Joris Dopzen’s attempt to evade, rather than simply disregard, the municipal order relating to slaughtering in the city. My focus on the civic-minded behavior disclosed by otherwise unsensational incidents and individuals culled from aggregate data takes us into the realm of microhistory and the study of everyday life. One could name any number of inspirational scholars in this field, but the following comments are informed by Alf Lüdtke’s call for investigations of “the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the nameless multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations;” and by Michel de Certeau’s focus on the everyday actions of people who are too often subsumed within aggregate categories or who remain in the background of activities considered more historically telling. Responding to the stimulating questions posed by these authors, my purpose is to point to the ways in which the concerns and practices of ordinary working men and women figured in the establishment of New Amsterdam. To see how, as De Certeau has argued, the mundane and run-of-the-mill mattered because it was “everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things” that were critical for the production and reproduction of general and systemic “modes of operation or schemata of action.”12 Returning to Joris Dopzen and his hog we can begin by asking how it was that the workaday trials of this otherwise undistinguished

12

Alf Lüdtke ed., The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experience and Ways of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), introduction. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1–3. I should acknowledge that there is much more to De Certeau’s notion of everyday life and the “tactics” adopted by consumers within cultural systems than I have “poached” for the purposes of this paper.

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burgher figured in the production and reproduction of the modes of operation that transformed New Amsterdam from a chaotic frontier settlement to a colonial facsimile of an orderly Dutch town. Simply put, my claim is that it was through the regularization of artisanal work and daily life that tradesmen contributed to the idea and practice of New Amsterdam as a distinctive municipal community modeled on those found in the United Provinces: Dopzen’s attempted evasion, his ill-advised boast, arrest, court appearance and penalty all bespeak a social order derived from Dutch practice and protocols which—however rude and unpolished—nevertheless prompted and at times constrained New Amsterdammers to behave in distinct, ‘civic’ ways. Thus rather than simply highlighting the oft noted efforts of early American colonists to recreate their Old World lives—and bearing in mind the disparate geographic origins of many in New Amsterdam—this essay emphasizes the manner in which the regularization of skilled work and daily life figured in a dynamic and (re)productive way in the creation of New Amsterdam as a distinctly batavian trading space and city.13 *

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In 1621 the West India Company established the colony of New Netherland under the terms of a charter granted by the States General of the United Provinces. The charter granted the Company a twentyyear trade monopoly and absolute authority—subject to the States General’s oversight—to govern as it saw fit. New Amsterdam soon emerged as the colony’s main port, but in the first two decades there were various checks on the development of artisanal enterprise: the

13 Alice Kenney and others have emphasized the urban and Dutch immigration to New Netherland, see Kenney, Stubborn For Liberty, 69–91; Merwick, Possessing Albany, passim; Shattuck, “A Civil Society,” introduction. However, David Cohen and A.G. Roeber have highlighted the numerical significance of non-Dutch immigration by peoples drawn from towns and rural villages in modern-day Germany, France, Belgium, and Scandinavia. See, David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch were the Dutch of New Netherland,” New York History, 62 (1981), 43–60; A.G. Roeber, “The Origins of Whatever Is Not English Among Us: The Dutch-Speaking and German-Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991), 221–229.

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Company’s intention to profit from exporting furs and supplying the colony prompted it to prohibit tradesmen such as weavers and dyers from working in New Netherland and to forbid others from taking on apprentices and passing on “their handicrafts upon which trade is dependent;” conditions in the Dutch Republic made New Netherland unattractive to Old World artisans many of whom, the Company shareholder’s ruefully observed, were “disinclined to go far from home on uncertainty.” However, probably the greatest disincentive for artisanal enterprise in early New Amsterdam was the fur trade, the ubiquity of which was such that by the 1630s “earning a beaver” had become idiomatic for engaging in commerce of any kind. Skilled and ambitious male immigrants gave up their trades upon arriving in New Netherland in favor of farming, land speculation and a chance at the big time in the fur and tobacco trade.14 The growth of artisanal occupations in New Amsterdam depended on the presence of a local market for trade skills and a more or less organized community within which they could be deployed. This emerged in the twenty years after 1640, following reforms introduced in response to the States General’s fears, prescient as it turned out, that the burgeoning English settlements to the north would soon squeeze the Dutch out of the continent. Under the terms of the 1640 Revised Freedoms and Exemptions the Company relinquished its trade monopoly, hoping that private enterprise would encourage commercial expansion and an increased revenue derived from duties and taxes. The Company also undertook to govern New Netherland “according to the style and order of the province of Holland and the cities and manors thereof . . . [and] as far as possible, the ordinances received here in Amsterdam.”15 What this implied in prac-

14 DRCNY 1:39, 65. Jacob A. Schiltkamp, “On Common Ground. Legislation, Government, Jurisprudence, and Law in the Dutch West Indian Colonies: The Order of Government of 1629,” in De Halve Maen, 70 (Winter, 1997), 73–80; Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland, 1623–1639 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 79; Merwick, Possessing Albany, 205. For the careers of some of New Netherland’s other early residents see Morton Wagman, “Struggle for Democracy in New Netherland,” (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1968 ), 268–269, 299–302, 316–324. 15 DRCNY, 1:110–115; E.B. O’Callaghan, The History of New Netherland (New York: Appleton, 1845–48), 2 vols., 1:392–93; White, “Municipal Government,” 146–57; Albert E. Mckinley, “The English and Dutch Towns of New Netherland,” American Historical Review, 6 (October, 1900), 1–18.

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tice, however, was not always clear. The switch to free trade brought increasing numbers of families and independent merchants to New Netherland who pressed the Company for local administrative privileges in accordance with Dutch laws and customs. In the absence of such an administration the New Amsterdammers feared “the establishment of an Arbitrary Government,” likening their condition to that of slaves living under the Company’s “tyrannical power.” In 1649, following the arrival of New Netherland’s last Dutch Director General, Peter Stuyvesant, a well-organized merchant pressure-group— the Nine Men—issued a remonstrance and launched a successful campaign for commercial advantages and administrative authority that they argued would be the “mother of population” and prosperity.16 The Court of Burgomasters and Schepens established in 1653 afforded these city merchants a role in local affairs subject to Stuyvesant’s oversight as the Company’s representative and head of the provincial government. The municipal and provincial governments collaborated on various measures: the burgomasters lobbied for and secured the establishment of a public weigh house with reliable scales, gaugers and assizers of barrels, and inspections of the tobacco brought into and dispatched from New Amsterdam. However, the precise terms of the relationship between provincial and municipal government remained unclear: the merchants’ determination to administer New Amsterdam “after the manner of the Fatherland” and Stuyvesant’s insistence on the Company’s and his own continued dispositive authority spawned frequent disputes. The doggedness with which provincial and city governments pursued their respective objectives suggests that something more than narrowly construed commercial interests were at stake: the wrangling between Stuyvesant and the townspeople also bespeaks a struggle between opposing, or at least conflicting, visions of the town and its administration.17 The Company’s continued commitment to free trade as the likeliest route 16 “Petition of the Commonalty of New Netherland &c to Director Stuyvesant,” in DRCNY, 1:550–555. 17 For this process in other colonial contexts see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); James T. Lemon, “Spatial Order: Households in Local Communities and Regions,” in J.P. Greene and J.R. Pole eds., Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 86–122.

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to commercial growth and profits lay at the centre of this struggle. For despite its undertaking to govern the colony according to the “style and order of the province of Holland,” the Company took a dim view of the protectionist privileges and exemptions that were typical in Dutch towns and favored by the burgomasters in New Amsterdam. This left Stuyvesant in a tricky position, having to negotiate between the policy objectives of his distant employers and the demands of a local merchant lobby for restrictions favoring residents.18 Stuyvesant’s predicament was clearest in the disagreement over the restrictions placed on nonresident itinerant fur traders and the regulation of artisanal working practices. Locals disdained the itinerants who competed with them for Indian-supplied pelts, often traveling several miles into the interior to meet native traders on their way out to the established residential settlements. The itinerants were also blamed for flooding the market with low-grade zeewan—leading to inflation and rising prices—and then quitting New Netherland at the end of each season without contributing to the costs of local government. Stuyvesant attempted to prohibit the itinerants from trading unless “they take up their abode here in New Netherland for three consecutive years and . . . build in this city New Amsterdam a decent citizen dwelling.” However, the Company’s Amsterdam Board considered the itinerants essential for its sought-after free-trade expansion and struck down Stuyvesant’s orders, never wavering from its view that “the [fur] trade should be open to everybody.”19 In keeping with this liberal policy, the Company also disapproved of restrictions on artisanal working practices. Yet in a noteworthy vacillation it was prepared to countenance some measures that provided for local needs. Thus the Company advised against monopoly grants for the local production of bricks and salt which they considered “very pernicious and impracticable,” and struck down orders fixing

18 For example the 1654 disagreement between Stuyvesant and the burgomasters regarding the disciplining of unruly servants during Shrove-Tide festivities RNA 1:172–73. 19 New York Historical Society, Collections, 18 (New York, 1885), 1–4; RNA 1:1–108. Syrett, “Private Enterprise in New Amsterdam,” 536–550. As an alternative the Amsterdam Chamber recommended that itinerant traders should keep an open store, thereby qualifying for tax payments, in the town. E.B. O’Callaghan, ed., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674, (Albany, 1868), 148–50. For the Company’s arguments against restrictions on independent fur traders, DRCNY, 14:84, 194, 208.

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the prices of wine and bread, arguing that “in the infancy of a newly opened country . . . growth must be promoted . . . by encouraging unlimited privileges, [rather] than by prohibitions.” However, the same Board affirmed regulations on coopering and the sale and butchering of cattle and an order restraining brewers from also retailing liquor in taverns as it was “pursuant to the ordinances and customs of Holland.”20 The Company’s wavering on restrictions on artisanal working practices—in contrast to its steadfast opposition to limitations on access to the fur trade—points up the distinctive character of craft work that afforded it a special place in the debate concerning trade and governance in New Amsterdam. The Amsterdam Board could scarcely avoid treating certain skilled occupations as special cases, since the provision of decent food, precisely manufactured barrels, and controls on the sale of alcohol were critical to the settlement’s commercial and community well-being. However, the regulation of artisanal occupations raised the question of the salience of metropolitan practices and precedents which even the Company invoked to bolster the authority of its orders. Thus in 1654 the Board ended an admonition of Stuyvesant’s effort to regulate the pay of journeymen carpenters and masons with the exhortation that he “act strictly in accordance with the laudable customs and ordinances of this city [of Amsterdam] . . . at least in so far as the nature and condition of the country and its inhabitants may admit.”21 The acknowledgement of the limits imposed by the local conditions and inhabitants is one indication among many of the extent to which the administration of New Amsterdam rested on compromise and negotiation rather than Directoral fiat. And it was in these negotiations that the regularization of artisanal working practices and daily life provided grounds for the reformers’ assertion—over and above the Company’s chartered authority—of the continued force of Old World urban rights and privileges in New Amsterdam. This assertion was evident in the Nine Men’s Remonstrance in 1649, following the establishment of

20 See the ordinance against retailing by brewers, 12 July 1648 in Charles Gehring, trans and edit., Laws and Writs of Appeal, 1647–1663 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 12; on city porters see RNA, 7:145–147, and E.B. O’Callaghan ed., Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, 2 vols., (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1866), 1:185. Hereafter, Calendar. 21 “Letter from the Directors to Stuyvesant, March 1654” in DRCNY, 14:251–253.

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the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens in 1653, and culminated with the introduction of the burgher right in 1657.22 The introduction of the burgher right established a civic status that restricted access to craft employment and the fur trade to residents and those who owned or rented real property in the town. The burgomasters hailed the measure, which was modeled directly on the practice of Amsterdam, as “one of the most important privileges in a well governed city,” not least because it distinguished between great and lesser burghers—between those entitled to hold local government office and ordinary tradesmen and farmers—thereby confirming the status of the emerging urban elite. Lesser burghers now bore formal civic duties to contribute to the city’s defenses, to obey orders relating to the maintenance of property and the conduct of commerce, and to respect municipal officers.23 Thus Saartje Steendam was fined for mocking the municipal Fire Wardens as “Brick Sweeps . . . with a laughing mouth . . . [since] such words must not be spoken to public servants.” In 1658, the burgomasters sought further controls over local residents proposing that Stuyvesant “fix certain hours of the day when working-people should go to their work and come from their work, as well also their recess for meals,” and requesting that “the Director General and Council . . . establish Guilds.” The following year the spiraling costs of local necessaries prompted a second petition from the municipal leaders, this time recommending that “all bakers, brewers, shopkeepers . . . sell their goods at reasonable prices to the people.” Stuyvesant obliged them with revised rates for zeewan exchange and an order requiring brewers, bakers, tapsters, shop keepers and ships chandlers to sell “daily household commodities” at fixed prices.24 22 See accounts of proceedings against the carpenter Sibout Classen and the baker Joost Teunissen in DRCNY, 1:312, 327. Also see disagreements over collection of excise tax, arrangements for defense of the city, and the punishment of unruly servants in RNA, 1:65–68, 72–74, 90–92, 172–73. For similar tensions between concerns of the Company shareholders and civic leaders with urban traditions at heart, see the draft of a colonization plan agreed between the City of Amsterdam and the West India Company in 12 July 1656, see DRCNY, 1:618–624. 23 Lesser burghers were defined as all native-born residents and anybody who had lived in the town for a year and six weeks, or married “native born daughters of Burghers,” or paid twenty guilders. The ordinance of 1657 was reissued by Stuyvesant his council in 1660 and by the burgomasters and schepens in 1660 and 1661, see New York Historical Society, Collections, (1885), 12–36. 24 Guild proposal, RNA 2:410; “daily household commodities.” RNA 1:40–42; baking regulations, RNA, 1:43, 46, 47, 48.

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Given these and similar municipal resolutions, it is perhaps not surprising that scholars have generally considered the burgher right as a tool in the hands of a governing elite who were intent upon securing the benefits of long-sought-after commercial protections.25 Yet there are other considerations that belie the impression of the burgher right as an adjunct of elite rule, not least the alacrity with which ordinary residents and newcomers registered for the lesser right and its concomitant privileges.26 The introduction of the burgher right capped almost ten years of municipal activism by merchant reformers, but the administration of New Amsterdam remained a far from top-down affair. Whatever authority the burgher right afforded the ruling elite depended to a great extent on the deference of local residents. For example, Stuyvesant’s support for the burgomasters’ proposals to regulate local workers and prices did nothing to guarantee their success: the plan to establish guilds came to naught and the year following his orders concerning working practices and rates, Stuyvesant lamented that “the expected reduction of prices for necessary commodities and labor did not follow . . . for everything remains as dear as formerly.”27 In fact, rather than being imposed from on high, the regulation of artisanal trade in the late 1650s and early 1660s emerged through a dialogue between the municipal government and leading practitioners in which public duties were balanced by privileges claimed by ordinary burghers. Insofar as they contributed to this dialogue, New Amsterdam’s tradesmen figured in the production of the idea of New Amsterdam as a distinct civic and commercial space, or city.

25 For example, Kammen, Colonial New York, 55; A.G. Roeber, “‘The Origin of Whatever is Not English among Us,” 224. 26 Between 1657 and 1661 some 210 tradesmen registered for the lesser burgher right. New York Historical Society, Collections, 18 (1885), 16–32. Joyce D. Goodfriend analysis suggests a total able-bodied male population of 315 in 1664, in Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot. Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14–15. 27 “Letter from Director Stuyvesant and the Council to the Directors in Holland, 23 July 1659” DRCNY, 14:438–9.

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The burgher right afforded resident artisans a preferential position in local trade and before the law that they were keen to defend. Registered burghers were protected from seizure of goods for debt, providing they appeared in court; as we have seen they also enjoyed exclusive access to the handicraft and retail trades. Thus in the 1660s David Wessels and Fredrick Arenzen, a turner and a chair maker, complained to the burgomasters that some people come from out of town to the city “asking for work or to make chair matting” who were “allowed to earn the wages” thereby depriving the two tradesmen of “support for themselves and their families.”28 In addition to this general prohibition on strangers trading, individuals secured supplementary privileges, such as an exclusive right to tap beer and wine at the ferry station, which they expected the city to defend from encroachment by residents and non-residents alike. Still others parlayed their duty to serve the city into sources of subsidiary income and status enhancements: low level municipal appointments—as inspectors of bread, or chimneys, or cans and ells—came with small but doubtless welcome fees; an officer’s post in the militia or night watch elevated one burgher above another and further distinguished male residents from the “strangers,” free blacks, who did not qualify as burghers, and female settlers who mostly held burgher privileges by virtue of their relationship to significant male others. Between the general privileges enjoyed by all burghers and the idiosyncratic liberties secured by some lay the supplementary privileges claimed by artisans in behalf of their particular trades. Just as the burgomasters held city tradesmen to occupationally-specific duties— such as the manufacture of bread and barrels of the correct weight and size—so skilled workers claimed reciprocal privileges they deemed essential for their trades and over and above the preferences enjoyed by all. I have written elsewhere of the bakers’ success in wringing concessions from the authorities, but they were not the only ones.29 28 I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498–1909, 7 vols., (1915–1928; reprint, Martino Fine Books, The Lawbook Exchange, Union New Jersey, 1998), 2:219, 247. 29 Simon Middleton, “How it came that the bakers bake no bread: A struggle for trade privileges in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam,” William and Mary Quarterly (April, 2001), 347–372. Also see regulations relating to tavern keepers discussed in Kenneth Scott, “New Amsterdam’s Taverns and Tavern Keepers,” De Halve Maen, part 1, 39, no. 1 (April, 1964), 9, 10, 15.

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In 1652 the town’s surgeons complained of the damaging competition (and occasionally hazardous service) offered by ship-based and transient practitioners and petitioned the provincial government that “nobody else, but they shall be allowed to shave” paying customers in New Amsterdam. The surgeons secured their privilege, and a prohibition on unregistered practitioners, although the townspeople reserved the right to shave each other “for friendship’s sake, [or] out of courtesy and without receiving payment.” In the spring of 1657 Stuyvesant and the burgomasters expanded the city’s force of public porters, modeling their occupational duties and privileges on the porters in Amsterdam. Finally, in October 1660, and following a petition by six local men, the authorities established a group of sworn butchers who enjoyed a privileged monopoly of local slaughtering in return for fulfilling specified duties “in accordance with the laudable custom of our Fatherland and for the accommodation of the Burghers.”30 The granting of this latter privilege is noteworthy, of course, as the order which provided the grounds for Joris Dopzen’s arrest and charge with tax evasion five years later. That the organization of city slaughtering followed a petition by local butchers underscores the extent to which tradesmen played a role in the establishment of aspects of municipal regulations. Ordinary burghers appear to have regarded these regulations less as unswervable dictats and more as civic duties whose authority resided, both objectively and rhetorically, in the urban Dutch tradition of active citizen participation in public life. In this respect the heterogeneous schedule of municipal ordinances and regulations that directed the lives and commerce of local tradesmen also provided residents with a measure of comfort: the municipal government and the obedience it commanded (most of the time) provided a daily reminder that the supervision of the settlers’ day-to-day lives lay in the hands of their civil representatives rather than a quasi-military Company administration beholden to a distant board of shareholders. In conclusion, in the decade or so following the establishment of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens New Amsterdam was

30 “Council Minutes. Resolution on a petition of the Nine Men . . .; surgeons; Anabaptists,” DRCNY 14:155; RNA 1:263–64; RNA 7:145–47, 258–259. John R. Aiken, “New Netherlands Arbitration in the Seventeenth Century,” The Arbitration Journal, 29 (September, 1974), 145–160.

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transformed from a fractious frontier settlement to a municipal community whose order and prosperity rested on popular deference to local rule of the kind that the Company’s sole administration had conspicuously failed to inspire. As Michel de Certeau, has observed the idea of a city rests upon “the production of its own space” and the repression of “physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compromise it.”31 And, in the regularization of artisanal work and daily life, both burgomasters and burghers figured in the introduction of reforms that wrestled space for New Amsterdam’s civic and commercial autonomy away from the Company’s claim to absolute administrative authority. In the process the everyday lives of ordinary residents came to resemble those of the urban Dutch brede middenstand or, roughly translated, the English middling sort: men and women who balanced their pursuit of private commercial ends with civic-minded adherence to a regulatory order overseen by a local burgher government which exacted duties and distributed privileges in the name of the common good: thus tappers such as Lourens Cornelisen van der Wel also served as a gunner in the artillery post mounted on the city’s north wall; or the baker Andries de Haes who, with others, was required to provide for the public bread supply also served as keeper of the keys for the meat market; or the cabinetmaker Lodowyck Pos, who pursued his trade and ran a tavern with his wife by day and served as a captain of the watch that patrolled the streets at night.32 It is here in the stories of these individual and otherwise undistinguished New Amsterdammers that the larger story of the transformation of New Amsterdam in the 1650s and early 1660s resides.

31

De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91–96. Van der Wel, RNA 1:149–50; Pos, RNA 2: 99; Laws and Ordinances, 237; for others see RAN 1:152, 155, 186, 192; RNA 2: 99; Laws and Ordinances, 237. The sense of city as a conglomeration of commercially ambitious and civic-minded individuals is captured best in I.N. Phelps-Stokes’s superb breakdown of city households based the 1660 Castello Plan of New Amsterdam, Stokes, Iconography, 2:215–341. For the brede middenstand see Simon Schama, Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), preface; Gabrielle Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid. De Burgers van Haarlem in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 2001). 32

NEW NETHERLAND’S DIRECTORS: A NEW LOOK

NEGLECTED NETWORKS: DIRECTOR WILLEM KIEFT (1602–1647) AND HIS DUTCH RELATIVES Willem Frijhoff

An odious reputation Unlike the story of his successor as Director of New Netherland, Pieter Stuyvesant, there is nothing glorious about the memory of William the Testy, alias Willem Kieft. Even before his tragic death in the shipwreck of The Princess Amelia on September 27/28, 1647 he had earned himself the reputation of a “virtual dictator”, and an “arrogant, shortsighted, and bigoted” administrator, being the author, or the motive, of the first, cruel, and ignominious Indian War, a true despair for the young colony, and a dishonor for the memory of the Dutch.1 Indeed, at present Kieft’s memory mainly survives in ‘Kieft’s war’ and in his questionable fame of having been the first European to pay a bounty for an Indian scalp.2 In fact, in his satirical pieces on William the Testy, Washington Irving, followed by his disciples and imitators, simply continued and amplified a form of mud-slinging that had started during Kieft’s lifetime.3 Kieft’s black

1 Short biographical notes in: Dictionary of American Biography, V:2 (New York, 1933; 2d ed. 1961), 370–371 (by A. Hyma); American National Biography, XII (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 657–658 (by Samuel Willard Crompton), quotation 657. The most recent story of Kieft in his New Netherland context: Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland. A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2005), 133–147, 278–281, 383–385. 2 James Axtell, “The unkindest cut, or Who invented scalping?: A case study”, in: James Axtell, The European and the Indian. Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 16–35. 3 Diedrich Knickerbocker [pseudonym of Washington Irving], A History of NewYork, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), book IV. For a Dutch version of Kieft’s black legend: Pieter Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche stam (paperback ed., Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1961), II, 576–579; Ewald Vanvugt, Bloed aan de klomp. De eerste vaderlandse schandaalkroniek: Nederlandse schurken in het buitenland (Hilversum: Centerboek, 1989), 67–70; W.J. van Balen, Holland aan de Hudson. Een verhaal van Nieuw Nederland (Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Boek- en Courant Mij, 1943), 106–112. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and

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legend was nourished by his main opponents: captain David Pietersz de Vries and jonker Adriaen van der Donck, who have both left substantial narratives of Kieft’s administration, not to forget minister Everhardus Bogardus, of whose infuriated sermons against Director Kieft only a small fragment has been conserved. As early as 1649, Director Kieft is presented in an Amsterdam pamphlet as the archvillain of the West India Company (WIC) who slaughtered “fifteen hundred poor Africans [sic]”.4 I have discussed elsewhere Dominie Bogardus’s problems, both psychological and ethical. His memory remains subject to contrasting interpretations.5 But the intrepid De Vries, who enjoys the reputation of a straightforward sailor, an adventurous entrepreneur, and a shrewd negotiator, still waits for an historian able to disentangle in his journal fact and fiction, events and interpretation, stupid prejudice and sound judgment.6 De Vries, who in 1630 preferred a patroon’s position to that of Commander of New Netherland proposed to him by WIC director Samuel Godijn, seems to have never

the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 249, 276–280, though acknowledging Kieft’s patrician stature, seems also to endorse his black legend. Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World. The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York, etc.: Doubleday, 2004), 112–128, 170–180, rightly rehabilitates the skills of Van der Donck, but at the expense of a still rather traditional vision of Kieft’s personality and his administration. 4 Amsterdams Dam-Praetje, Van Wat Outs en wat Nieuws en Wat vreemts (Amsterdam: Jan van Soest, 1649), f. E3r. 5 Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995); idem, “The healing of a lay saint: Evert Willemsz. Bogardus’s conversion between personal achievement and social legitimation”, in: De Halve Maen. Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, 68:1 (Spring 1995), 1–12; idem, “Experience and Agency at the Crossroads of Culture, Mentality, and Contextualization. The Biography of Everhardus Bogardus (c. 1607–1647)”, in: Hans Erich Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben [Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 18] (Göttingen: Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte / Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 65–105; idem, “The West India Company and the Reformed Church: Neglect or Concern?” in: De Halve Maen. Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, 70:3 (Fall 1997), 59–68. 6 How to interpret, for instance, De Vries’s prediction of Kieft’s downfall made at his departure from New Netherland on October 8, 1643, but published long after Kieft’s shipwreck? See David Pietersz. de Vries, Korte Historiael ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge (Alkmaar: Symon Cornelisz Brekegeest, 1655), 183; new ed. by H.T. Colenbrander [Werken Linschoten Vereeniging, no. 3] (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911), 271; partial transl. in J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664 (New York, 1909; reprint New York: Barnes & Noble, 1953) [hereafter NNN ], 234. Jacobs, New Netherland, 111, is equally doubtful about De Vries.

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digested the fact that the WIC in its turn rejected his 1636 proposal to appoint himself Director of New Netherland, but chose instead a year later, while he actually was in patria and available, the apparently inexperienced Kieft.7 The same objection holds, and perhaps still more, for the more subtle writings of Van der Donck, who was a would-be nobleman, an unemployed law-student, and an ambitious colonist, and who discovered in New Netherland opportunities that probably were not available to him in his native Brabant. He too has to be read with the caution that self-styled politicians deserve. Burdened with such an odious reputation, it has been Willem Kieft’s real misfortune to remain unmarried, without children and in the long run destitute of relatives, even remote. Besides, no reference has been found until now in the Amsterdam notarial records referring to the deceased Director’s heritage. Neither do New Netherland documents mention any properties left by Kieft after his departure. Just like most colonial officials, Kieft considered his office a temporary job. New Netherland was definitely not his new fatherland; he didn’t really invest his money there nor build a family, but expected to be recalled home, to old Amsterdam, when in the summer of 1643 his term as Director would come to an end.8 The terrible war of those years must have forced him to stay some more years in America, but the appeal of the WIC directors who in 1646 appointed Stuyvesant as his successor, and the need to justify himself in Amsterdam and The Hague brought him the relief he looked for. Since there was no reason to return to New Netherland after 1647, he must have taken all his personal belongings with him on the way back to patria, and sadly enough everything was lost in the shipwreck. His financial assets, his claims on his mother’s inheritance, and whatever real property he may have possessed in Holland returned to his family.9 In fact, at Willem’s death his father’s branch

7 De Vries, Korte Historiael, 147 (orig. ed., 94); cf. Charles McKew Parr, The Voyages of David De Vries: Navigator and Adventurer (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969), 201–203. 8 A.J.F. van Laer, transl. and ed., New York State Library. Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, being the letters of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1630–1643, and other documents relating to the colony of Rensselaerswyck (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1908) [hereafter VRBM ], 624. 9 Unfortunately, the registration of the collateral death duties at Amsterdam starts in 1658 (Gemeentearchief Amsterdam [hereafter GAA], Particulier archief [hereafter PA] 5046).

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died out. There was no male descendant left, only brothers-in-law and grandchildren bearing different family names. Actually, other Kieft branches still survived at Amsterdam. One of those, the connections of which with Willem Kieft’s family need further scrutiny, rose steadily to immense wealth, in particular when, more than half a century later, during the great European wars, Isbrant Kieft (d. 1711) made himself a fortune as a trader in gunpowder, manufactured in his factory ‘De Kievit’ on the Overtoomseweg outside the town.10 But his branch too died out at the death of Isbrant’s daughters Anna Maria and Regina Catharina Kieft, married to the brothers Jacob and Jan Balde. This Jan Balde (1682–1763), merchant-banker and entrepreneur on the Herengracht canal, consul to the king of Denmark and Norway since 1700, manipulated millions of florins. In 1742 he enjoyed an annual income of 30,000 guilders, had six servants and possessed a carriage with four horses. At his death he was said to be the richest man of Amsterdam. His eldest son Jan Jr. left in 1751 a fabulous estate of ƒ 706,600. But since he died childless, it was his younger brother IJsbrand Kieft Balde11 who finally inherited the fortunes of his father and uncle. He lived a wealthy existence as Lord of Loenen, Nieuwersluis, and other places, but had no male descendants either.12 Thus the Director’s memory has never been cherished, cleaned or purified by loving descendants, ready to extol his merits whatever errors he may have committed during his lifetime—as Stuyvesant’s good luck has been. Family memory is indeed in the heart of historical continuity, especially during the Ancient Regime when kinship had such an overwhelming importance for all dimensions of individual and social life. The more so in America, where family ties preceded feelings of ethnicity or national consciousness and are still such powerful social institutions. But Kieft left America without reaching the Netherlands. Since no private documents by Willem Kieft’s

10 Cf. on this branch: I.H. van Eeghen, “De familiestukken van Metsu van 1657 en van De Witte van 1678 met vier levensgeschiedenissen (Gillis Valckenier, Nicolaas Listingh, Jan Zeeuw en Catharina van de Perre)”, Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 68 (1976), 78–107. 11 The name IJsbrant/IJsbrand, frequent in the Kieft family, may be spelled also Ysbrant or Isbrant. 12 J.E. Elias, De vroedschap van Amsterdam 1578–1795 (2 vol.; Haarlem 1903–1905), II, 887–889.

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hand have been found until now, either in the USA or in the Netherlands, we will probably never know his intimate convictions. A recent biographical note asserts bluntly: “Even a sympathetic historian cannot rehabilitate the reputation of Kieft”. But we may at least try to redress the balance.13 I will therefore inquire into Willem Kieft’s social background, his family and kinship, his cultural environment, education and mental equipment, in order to restore something of the world that must have been his. Such a reconstruction will at least provide us with some clues to his personal universe and his agency, and with a better understanding of the seminal importance of his administration for the future of the colony. It may also give us a bit more sympathy for his personality.14

Kinship networks Before making an assessment of anyone’s life story during the early modern period we should, indeed, take a good look at his or her family and kinship, and at the political, economic, social, and cultural networks in which he or she was involved. Such social bonds provided the material, physical, social, and symbolic capital that allowed each person to play honorably his role, to represent him or herself in the public sphere, and to perform efficiently in the social context. There is more than one reason to take these networks seriously, in particular that of the family. At present, family relations are mainly conceived of in terms of lineage, not of clan or kinship.

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S.W. Crompton, in: American National Biography, XII (1999), 657. Ellis L. Raesly, Portrait of New Netherland (New York: Columbia University, 1945; repr. 1965), 75, tried a first rehabilitation of Kieft’s personality; he was followed by J.W. Schulte Nordholt, “Nederlanders in Nieuw Nederland. De oorlog van Kieft”, in: Bijdragen en mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 80 (1966), 38–94, who however had to regret that virtually all the sources stem from his opponents (58–59). Recently, a reevaluation of Kieft’s administration has been started by Evan Haefeli, The Origins of American Religious Freedom: Reformation Politics in the Middle Colonies, 1628–1720 (unpublished Ph.D. Diss. Princeton University, 2000), and “Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America”, in: Michael Belleisles (ed.), Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York & London: New York University Press, 1999), 17–40; and by Christopher Pierce, “[Re]Casting the Politics of Taste” [unpublished chapter of his Ph.D. dissertation, Edinburgh University, 2002], who proposes a reevaluation of Kieft as an early urban planner. This article does not intend to replace their studies but to provide a new background to such reevaluations. 14

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They are considered as agnatic, patrilinear structures, family communities arranged top-down around a father, a patriarch who, together with his family name, provided his offspring with honor, status and wealth. In the sixteenth-century Netherlands, on the contrary, and certainly until far into the seventeenth century, families were essentially thought of as kinship networks, in which the collateral and matrilinear relations were as important as the paternal lines and could even dominate them. Quite frequently individual children or even whole families adopted their mother’s surname instead of their father’s. The important thing was the moral cohesion of a huge number of brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, with their wives, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as the group of descendants of the same ancestors, grandparents or even further back. Once born into such a cognatic group, or married into it, they considered themselves as pertaining to the same kin, regardless of family name, lineage or descent.15 There is no doubt that in Holland too the clan system prevailed until the later Middle Ages, although in actual fact most family networks were characterized by a mixture of agnatic and cognatic elements, of lineage and clan. The problem is to know when exactly the clan system lost its pertinence, indeed disappeared, how quickly and in which fields of social life successively. In recent years, some scholars have discussed the passage from the clan system to the lineage system, especially in the Germanic world to which the Northern Netherlands pertained. There is reason to believe that this passage was gradual, and that agnatic structures became dominant in certain domains of life before imposing themselves in others. The slow passage to the lineage system favored the spread of the nuclear family, and hence the rise of the individual’s role in the public world of the early modern Dutch towns. It is however quite probable that

15 See Jacques Heers, Le clan familial au Moyen Age (Paris: PUF, 1974); Michael Mitterauer & Reinhard Sieder, The European family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); for Holland: P.C. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Maagschap en vriendschap. Een beschouwing over de structuur en functies van verwantschappen in het laat-middeleeuwse Holland’, in: Holland, 17 (1985), 69–108; Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17 de en 18 de eeuw (Utrecht: HES, 1985).

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the evolution from clan to lineage differed from town to town and that its importance for economy and politics developed differently in function of local necessities. In Leiden, for instance, the biggest town in late medieval Holland, but much more an industrial than a merchant city, as early as in the late 15th century the local power elite acted essentially according to lineage rationality.16 Amsterdam, on the contrary, seems to have conserved much longer the clan system in its power structures, in spite of its late but speedy rise and its economic modernity.17 In several seminal publications, S.A.C. Dudok van Heel has convincingly shown that political power in mediaeval and early modern Amsterdam was divided between two alternating kinship networks descending from a small number of agnatic cores, and that religious choice was at least partly a function of clan membership. The most powerful network, the one that made Amsterdam great in international trade, was a ‘liberal’ clan descending from the Boelen and Heynen ancestors, in particular burgomaster Andries Boelen (1455–1519) whose Christian name Andries became symbolic for many generations of clan members from different families. The clan rose to great power after 1628 under the rule of the Bicker family, and was master of Amsterdam until 1666. In 1650, burgomaster Andries Bicker was even credited with monarchical pretensions.18 Opposite that there was an ‘orthodox’, more inner-directed clan. Sternly Catholic before the Reformation, it was succeeded by a network professing an orthodox Calvinistic faith after 1578. At the defeat of Willem Kieft’s relative Reynier Pauw half a century later, in 1628, it lost its power for a long period.19

16 Hanno Brand, Over macht en overwicht. Stedelijke elites in Leiden (1420–1510) (Leuven & Apeldoorn: Garant, 1996), 273–301; idem, “Les élites de Leyde et leurs familles à la fin du Moyen Age: morphologie, rapports et structures”, in: Revue historique, 125, no. 619 (2001), 613–638; Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 17 Cf. Jan de Vries & Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Succes, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Society, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Clé Lesger, “De economie, 1578–1650”, in: W. Frijhoff & M. Prak (eds.), Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, II–1 (Amsterdam: SUN, 2004), 103–187. 18 Borgemeester Bickers laurecrans of victorywaghen (s.l.: 1650) [Royal Library, Pamphlet Knuttel no. 6816]. 19 S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, ‘Oligarchieën in Amsterdam voor de alteratie van 1578’, in: M. Jonker, L. Noordegraaf & M. Wagenaar (eds.), Van stadskern tot stadsgewest. Stedebouwkundige geschiedenis van Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Verloren, 1984), 35–61; the same, “Het Amsterdamse patriciaat in de jaren 1564–1578 van de Opstand”,

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The huge Boelen-Heynen kinship has indeed been decisive in sixteenth and seventeenth century Amsterdam for structuring the local power relations, alternating the ruling clans, and developing international commerce, and even for religious choice. In 1566–67 this broad kinship formed the nucleus of a major, coherent group of opponents to the ruling Catholic clan, dedicated to Protestantism, and therefore forced to flee the persecution of heresy. For these political opponents Protestantism became a group asset much more than a matter of faith. They came back to power after the Alteration (i.e., the changeover of Amsterdam to the side of the Revolt and the Reformation on May 26, 1578), made the Reformed creed the public religion of the town and expanded the city’s economy beyond the country’s borders. During the first half of the seventeenth century they developed into the ‘libertine’ group of ruling families known as the Bicker-De Graeff faction.20 Willem Kieft’s uncle IJsbrant Willemsz had married Mary Claes Boelendr, who pertained directly to this kinship network. Her father, the landlord Claes Boelen, a wholesale trader in French wine like the Kiefts themselves, had fled the city as a Protestant in 1567, entered the town council shortly after his return in 1578, and was burgomaster in 1582.21 The same held for Willem’s maternal grandfather Jan Jacobsz Huydecoper, whose convictions were however much closer to Calvinist orthodoxy. We may assume that Amsterdam’s commercial vocation commanded the formation of large networks of cooperating merchant elites. Kinship structures were at that moment their most appropriate form. As early as 1906, the social historian Willem van Ravesteyn suggested that Amsterdam enjoyed from the start a particular power

in: Bulletin Werkgroep Elites, no. 9 (September 1989), 5–22. See also Willem van Ravesteyn Jr., Onderzoekingen over de economische en sociale ontwikkeling van Amsterdam gedurende de 16de en het eerste kwart der 17de eeuw (Amsterdam: S.L. van Looy, 1906), 301–305; Clé Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Opstand. Kooplieden, commerciële expansie en verandering in de ruimtelijke economie van de Nederlanden ca. 1550–ca. 1630 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001), 142–147. 20 On the Amsterdam factions, see: J.E. Elias, Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche regentenpatriciaat (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1923), 102–105; D.J. Roorda, Partij en factie. De oproeren van 1672 in de steden van Holland en Zeeland, een krachtmeting tussen partijen en facties (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1961); S. Groenveld, Evidente factien in den staat. Sociaal-politieke verhoudingen in de zeventiende-eeuwse Republiek (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990). 21 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 113–118.

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structure, due to its commercial origin and evolution.22 Unlike other towns of Holland, the town government of Amsterdam was dominated from the very beginning by merchants who regulated not only the commercial fate of the town but also the life of the burghers’ community. Guilds, including merchants’ guilds, were not allowed to exert political power. On the contrary, town government resided exclusively in the local merchant elite, with its oligarchic pretensions. After the Alteration a new group of wholesale merchants took over the city’s administration and evolved quickly into a community of truly international traders. The ruling merchants were connected by tight kinship relations and they regrouped themselves into factions for the negotiation and exercise of political power. Since liberty is a keyword for commercial prosperity, town policy was virtually always in favor of freedom of commerce, openness to foreigners, and hospitality for refugees, not to forget connivance with dissenters. Commercial liberty was in Amsterdam equivalent to civil liberty and religious toleration, as the influential liberal burgomaster and merchant Cornelis Pietersz Hooft (1547–1626) showed in his Memorials and Advises.23 Yet in his comparative analysis of the elites of Amsterdam and Venice, Peter Burke has suggested that Amsterdam families were more individualistic, that the clan system functioned less well in that city on the political and social level, and that economic cooperation could be as easily established or broken between loose partners as between family members.24 We must probably distinguish between several rhythms of evolution: cultural and mental structures evolved much less quickly than commercial practices and crude power plays. One clue for this differentiation is the long survival of the political factions, power groups in which the interests of the extended family and the cognatic network played an essential role, even if the nucleus of factions itself did not forcibly coincide with family clans. The so-called contracts of correspondence between factions, meant to regulate the distribution of vacant offices among their members

22

Van Ravesteyn, Onderzoekingen, 45–54, 169–170; Elias, De vroedschap, I, p. XLI. H.A. Enno van Gelder (ed.), Memoriën en adviezen van Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft (Utrecht: Kemink, 1925); idem, De levensbeschouwing van Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, burgemeester van Amsterdam (1547–1626) (Amsterdam, 1918; reprint Utrecht: HES, 1982). 24 Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam. A study of seventeenth-century elites (2d ed.; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 20–31. 23

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until far into the eighteenth century, are but one illustration of this more or less informal institution.25 When modern economic practices arose, lineage became predominant, and the inheritance system adopted communitarian, non-agnatic rules, such as equal sharing of the heritage among the surviving children or their descendants. Yet the oligarchization of the power elite imposed a long survival of the mental framework of thinking and acting in terms of clans. Recent research—in particular Luuc Kooijmans’ illuminating study on the younger generations of the Huydecoper family, Willem Kieft’s maternal line—has shown that networks of ‘friendship’ played an essential role in the survival strategies of even the richest families of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.26 Friendship could stand for kinship, or for professional fraternity, based on the reciprocity of services or gift exchange, and on the negotiation of cultural, social, political and economic capital. Such networks are like other dimensions of history writing: once you are ready to see them, they become self-evident and appear to play an overwhelming role. The impact of this new vision is considerable, especially for New Netherland studies. Usually the WIC officials and New Netherland colonists are taken for persons in their own right, styled in present-day fashion, and longing for an individual, fresh destiny in a new world. We must however realize that they acted also as elements of clans, kinship or patronage networks, companies, public bodies and institutions, a considerable part of which continued to remain closely linked up with the Old Continent.

Father’s family, or mother’s? Willem Kieft was one of those individuals whose life may be understood better when placed at the intersection of such a series of overlapping networks. A correction to current historiography about Willem Kieft’s birth date will bring us immediately into the heart of the first

25 J.L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 26 Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997). Unfortunately, his analysis starts only in the second half of the seventeenth century, after Willem Kieft’s death, with his cousin Joan Huydecoper Jr., the family being by then at its zenith.

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and foremost network, that of the family and its specific culture. There is no Kieft family archive left, but some papers have been conserved by his mother’s family, Huydecoper—which, incidentally, demonstrate the importance of the maternal line in keeping the family’s heritage. Luckily these papers include the notes taken by Willem’s father Gerrit Willemsz on the births and deaths of his children, on the back side of his marriage contract. They show that Willem, though customarily named after his paternal grandfather, was not the first-born son. In fact, he was not born in the year 1595 (or 1597), as is generally stated, but seven years later. Actually, a Willem Gerritsz [Kieft] was born at Amsterdam in 1595 and baptized on 13 September in the Old Church, as the eldest son of Gerrit Willemsz. But this was his homonymous brother who died prematurely in 1602 as a six-year old child, just before the birth of the future Director of New Netherland, who took over his name and perhaps also his father’s expectations.27 According to his father, who throughout his notes kept to the traditional and commercial dating customs, the second Willem was born ‘on a Saturday in 1602, one month and a day before the Amsterdam fair’. This fair was traditionally scheduled to start on Sunday after Saint-Lambert’s (17 September).28 In 1602, when Saint-Lambert’s fell on Tuesday, that happened on Sunday 22 September. Supposing that his father counted four weeks for a month, Willem was born on Saturday, August 24, 1602. His name has not been found in the Amsterdam baptismal registers but it appears clearly from his father’s notes that Willem must be identical with the apparently misnamed Jacob, son of merchant Gerritt Willemsz and Machtelt Jans, who was baptized in the Old Church on September 10, 1602.29 When Willem was appointed Director General in September 1637, he was therefore only 35 years old, just a few years more than the 27 The births and deaths of the children are listed on the back side of his marriage contract: Utrecht Archive, Family archive Huydecoper [hereafter FA Huydecoper], no. 25. 28 On the Amsterdam fair, see J. Vriese, “De Amsterdamse kermis”, in: Ons Amsterdam, 9: 9 (September 1957), 274–276. An interesting poem of 1662 by A. de Haes sums up all the commodities that could be bought in the more than 200 stalls of the fair, held on the Nieuwmarkt; published by C. Cath. van de Graft, “De Amsterdamse kermis in 1662”, ibid., 3:5 (May 1951), 150–151. 29 GAA, Baptismal registers, no. 4, f. 43. Indeed, his elder brother Jacob, born on September 12, 1600, had already been buried in the Old Church on June 20, 1601. Yet, the confusion between the two names remains intriguing.

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minister who would become his main opponent, Everhardus Bogardus, born in about 1607 in another Holland town, Woerden.30 The confusion between the elder and the younger brother Willem existed already when in the eighteenth century the Huydecoper family made up their genealogy. From their records it migrated elsewhere: among the children of his mother Machteld Jansdr Huydecoper, Willem Kieft is now currently given the first place, before his brother Jan, perhaps because of the supposed importance of his function as Director. There exists however not the slightest doubt that Willem really was the youngest son of the family. When his father died in 1622, his elder brother Jan as the first-born heir took over the family business. Henceforth Willem, then 19 years old, had to make his own living. That was where all his troubles started.

The Kiefts, burghers of old Amsterdam A reconstruction of Willem Kieft’s family along the paternal line makes clear that it was basically an old, local Amsterdam family long since established in the heart of the city.31 On the 1585 taxation list of the Amsterdam citizenry Willem’s grandfather Willem IJsbrantsz, a merchant and brewer, was taxed for 60 guilders. He then occupies the 25th place in town by order of contribution (and presumably also of wealth). Great-aunt Stijn IJsbrants (ƒ 50) has the 47th and great-uncle Michiel Cornelisz de Lange (ƒ 40) the 93th place. The other great-uncles Pieter IJsbrantsz (ƒ 30), Jacob Jansz Vinck (ƒ 20) and Jan IJsbrantsz de Jonghe (ƒ 20) still count among the 312 richest citizens, paying 20 guilders or more. In fact four children or sons-in-law of great-grandfather IJsbrant Jansz are found among the 174 citizens assessed for ƒ 30 or more.32 Clearly, the

30 Willem Frijhoff, “The Healing of a Lay Saint: Evert Willemsz. Bogardus’s Conversion Between Personal Achievement and Social Legitimation”, in: De Halve Maen, LXVIII: 1 (Spring 1995), 1–12. 31 I am indebted to S.A.C. Dudok van Heel for having generously sent me the relevant parts of his huge, forthcoming study on the Boelen-Heynen kinship. 32 J.G. van Dillen, Amsterdam in 1585. Het kohier der capitale impositie van 1585 (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1941); S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, “Waar waren de Amsterdamse katholieken in de zomer van 1585? Enkele aantekeningen bij de uitgave van het kohier van 1585”, in: Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 77 (1985), 13–53. The tax list contains 2939 names, which must represent the richer part of the approx. 30,000 inhabitants.

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Kieft kinship pertains at that moment to the established core of the Amsterdam trading families. Its members lived mostly on the prestigious Oude Zijde (Old Side of the town), in the main commercial streets where the biggest fortunes were settled (the Dam, the West side of the Warmoesstraat, the Voorburgwal), and played a central role in the town’s economy, as brewer, clothier merchant, shipbuilder, or wholesale grocer.33 They were not involved in the really international trade, although they participated in the long-distance commerce with France and the Baltic, and occasionally invested in shipping. Their trade conserved a regional scale, at most a European dimension. Some of the families with which the Kiefts established marriage ties rose in one generation into much greater wealth and got a much more prominent status. Their trading ambitions would soon embrace the world, but in 1585 they were still basically on the same social level: thus Boelen (Claes Cornelisz, landlord in the Warmoesstraat and burgomaster, ƒ 30), Ruytenburch (Pieter Gerritsz, wholesale grocer on the Middeldam, ƒ 30), Pauw (Reynier Adriaensz, corn-trader, ƒ 18), and Huydecoper ( Jan Jacobsz, fell-monger, ƒ 30). The involvement of the Kieft family in the huge old Amsterdam kinship system appears best in the burial place of the family members. Both Gerrit Willemsz and his sons Jan and Jacob the elder were buried in a vault on the southern side of the high choir of the Old Church, by then certainly the most prestigious burial place of the city. A blue tombstone identified by a mark covered the vault. This mark is reproduced in the notes on the births and burials of the Kieft family, probably by Willem Kieft himself.34 It appears from the burial books of the Old Church that this vault originally pertained to the Boelen clan. After his marriage with Marritgen Claesdr Boelen in 1587, Gerrit’s brother IJsbrant Willemsz bought it on May 28, 1591, apparently

33 On the Warmoesstraat: J.W. Verhey, “Warmoesstraat, Nieuwendijk en Damrak in het midden van de zestiende eeuw”, in: Michiel Jonker & Leo Noordegraaf (eds.), Van stadskern tot stadsgewest. Stedebouwkundige geschiedenis van Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Verloren, 1984), 63–87; R.E. van der Leeuw-Kistemaker, Wonen en werken in de Warmoesstraat van de 14de tot het midden van de 16de eeuw (Amsterdam: Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1974). On the importance of the brewery in Holland, see R.W. Unger, A history of brewing in Holland 900 –1900. Economy, technology, and the state (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 34 FA Huydecoper, inv. no. 25. When Jan Gerritsz died, Willem as the only surviving brother was the natural keeper of the family’s records.

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from Andries Boelen’s heirs.35 It served as a burial place for the whole Kieft family, although in 1602 Gerrit’s first-born son Willem may according to his father’s notes have been buried in the nearby vault of his grandmother Huydecoper.36 The former Boelen vault remained in the Kieft family until far into the eighteenth century, while the adjacent vault of the Boelen heirs was in 1658 transferred to their patrician descendant, burgomaster Andries de Graeff, who by then was probably the city’s most powerful man. Just like Willem’s great-grandfather IJsbrant Jansz, his grandfather Willem IJsbrantsz occasionally called himself Kieft or Kievit, i.e. the Peewit, perhaps the name of their house or their brewery. As a family name it was however scarcely, or intermittently, used until the first half of the seventeenth century. In fact, the use and transmission of family names in Holland did not conform to the same logic as nowadays.37 Willem’s father always simply called himself Gerrit Willemsz, never Gerrit Kieft.38 His son Jan was mostly known as Jan Gerritsz or Jan Gerretsen, seldom Jan Gerritsz Kieft. It was only the younger son Willem who called himself straightforwardly Willem Kieft, and as far as I know he never used the patronymic form Willem Gerritsz alone.39 This fact testifies in itself to his sense of identity in a dynastic family vision: rejecting his patronymic name for a family name, he proclaimed his ambition to pertain to the rising new bourgeoisie or the regent class.40 The name Kieft was already in use in the family at the time of Willem’s birth. Actually, the kievit or peewit figured in the coat of

35 GAA, Dutch Reformed Consistory, Burial books of the Old Church [microfilms 872–873], no. 74 (1523), f. 2v; no. 75 (1614), f. 102v; no. 76 (1640), f. 134r. 36 Vault no. 133 in the High Choir, see www.gravenopinternet.nl. 37 Cf. M. Thierry de Bye Dólleman, “Gewoonten en gebruiken met betrekking tot de naamgeving aan kinderen vóór 1600”, in: Holland, 6 (1974), 288–297. 38 He signed his marriage contract as ‘Gerriet Wijllemss’, his wife as ‘Machtelt Jans’; FA Huydecoper, no. 25. 39 In New Netherland he signs as “Willem Kieft”, sometimes perhaps as “Willem Kieftz”, as may be inferred from the facsimile of his signature in E.B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, or, New York under the Dutch (New York: Appleton, 1846), I, folding page. 40 However, patronymic names make research delicate in a growing metropolis like Amsterdam where too many people bore such quite ordinary name combinations as Gerrit Willemsz or Jan Gerritsz. Documented family relations, real property or other contextual indications must therefore be used to establish the links with or within the Kieft family and their kinship, and in some cases doubts may remain.

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arms which his uncle Jan IJsbrantsz painted on December 19, 1615, together with a dedication of his hand and a sonnet, in the album amicorum of the Amsterdam fencing master Gérard Thibault.41 Willem’s father adopted the same coat of arms, which must have been engraved on the signet ring that was customary for commercial correspondence. Indeed, the author of the eighteenth-century Huydecoper genealogy states that Gerrit Willemsz “bore a blue field charged with a white fasce and underneath the fasce a white upright peewit”.42 In fact, this description fits the coat of arms of ‘W. Kieft’ (i.e. Willem IJsbrantsz Kieft), the Director’s first cousin and a regent of the Civic Orphanage, that in 1656 was painted on the ceiling of that Orphanage and is still visible in the Regents’ room of the Amsterdam Historical Museum. Other copies appear on the Kieft branches of the heraldic trees of the Huydecoper family, displayed until the present day on the walls of their former manor Goudesteyn, now the town-hall of Maarssen, province of Utrecht. The peewit is also referred to in New Netherland by tailor Hendrick Jansen (Snyder) in his 1643 quarrel with the Director, but as the etymology of the family name is quite obvious, that may be fortuitous.43 It remains unclear whether the heraldic figure of the peewit has been taken from the name, or the name has been adopted from the sign of a house in Amsterdam. From the start of our documentation Willem’s father appears as a merchant engaged in foreign, but intra-European trade. On December 8, 1594, being 23 years old and still unmarried, he protested against the greed of his stepmother, the widow Erm Bartholomeusdr [Banninck], who during his travels abroad apparently had tried to deprive him of a part of his mother’s and grandmother’s inheritance.

41

The Hague, Royal Library, ms. 133 L 4, f. 108v–109r. See H. de la Fontaine Verwey, “Gérard Thibault en zijn Academie de l’Espe”, in: Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 69 (1977), 36, 40, 54; reprinted in: H. de la Fontaine Verwey, Uit de Wereld van het Boek, III (Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1979), 141, 145, 159. 42 FA Huydecoper, no. 6, Genealogy Huydecoper, f. 7: “Hij voerde een blauw veld, beladen met een witte fasce, en onder de fasce een witte staande Kievit”; GAA, toegangsnr. 5015, ms. Genealogy Huydecoper, p. 4. See also “Regenten en regentessen der Burgerlijke Godshuizen en stedelijke gestichten”, in: Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 4 (1906), 94. Cousin Willem IJsbrantsz figures on the six regents’ group portrait painted in 1663 by Jurriaan Ovens and still conserved in the Regents’ Room of the Amsterdam Historical Museum. 43 New York State Archives, Dutch Colonial Mss., II, f. 53b; transl. in: A.J.F. van Laer (ed.), New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch (4 vol.; Baltimore, 1974) [hereafter NYHM], II, 120–121.

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In July 1595, having come of age, he examined his stepmother’s papers and discovered that the accounts of his rights had been tampered with. However, unwilling to quarrel with family members, he asked her to settle instead the debt of ƒ 1,879 he owed to his brother IJsbrant, with which she agreed.44 Gerrit’s own father Willem IJsbrantsz already traded in copper with the third son of king Gustav Vasa, duke Charles of Sweden (1550–1611), who in 1589 had seized the power in the Swedish state and in 1604 became king Charles IX. His sons IJsbrant Willemsz and Gerrit Willemsz and his son-in-law Gerrit Dircksz Niesen joined him in the trade with Sweden, employing Jan Pietersz Soet as intermediary.45 Gerrit Willemsz was the most active of the three: he traded in and outside the Dutch Republic in company with his uncle Jan IJsbrantsz and until 1602 with their associate Pieter Wybrantsz.46 For the copper trade Gerrit must have sojourned several times in Stockholm and in Lübeck, which was by then the Holy Roman Empire’s copper staple, his absence preventing him from caring about his father’s inheritance for which his brother-in-law Gerrit Niesen acted as his deputy.47 His two houses and warehouses on the Oostersekaai and the Oudeschans, both on the island Uylenburch, the booming international trading district of early seventeenth-century Amsterdam created in the 1590s, were built just opposite the place where in the early 1640s the new warehouses of the West India Company [hereafter WIC] were to rise. Gerrit’s houses were named after the important Hanseatic cities in the Baltic area he was trading with: ‘The Arms of Lübeck’ and ‘The Arms of Riga’, though ‘The Arms of Lübeck’ may initially have been the property of his wife.48 The trade with the Baltic was indeed at the heart of Amsterdam commerce: it was the moedernegotie, the mother of commercial prosperity, responsi-

44 GAA, Notarial archives [hereafter NA], no. 3 (not. J.J. Pylorius), f. 142v–143, 240 (Dec. 8, 1594; July 4, 1595). 45 GAA, NA, no. 20 (not. S. Hendrickx), omslag H, f. 32–33 (Oct. 11, 1604). Gerrit Dircksz Niesen (d. 1610), merchant in company with his uncle Jacob Jansz Vinck (town councilor 1591–1615, alderman 1592), married in 1600 Trijn Willemsdr Kieft; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 470–471. 46 GAA, NA, no. 34 (not. J. Ghijsberts), f. 96–96v ( Jan. 12, 1602). 47 GAA, NA, no. 34 (not. J. Ghijsberts), f. 536–537 ( July 20, 1603); no. 36 (id.), f. 510v–511 (April 19, 1608); no. 200 (not. J.F. Bruyningh), f. 113v ( Jan. 8, 1619). 48 ‘The Arms of Lübeck’ on the island Uylenburch was included in the estate of his father-in-law Jan Jacobsz Huydecoper, 1624; Van Ravesteyn, Onderzoekingen, 299.

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ble for more than half of Amsterdam’s European profits.49 Willem Kieft’s paternal uncle Reyer Claesz lived as a merchant in that other great Hanseatic city on the Baltic, Dantzig (Gdansk, Poland).50

Brothers and sisters Gerrit’s children were interested in commerce with foreign countries too. Jan Gerritsz, the elder son, traded in wine on the French port of Nantes. Several chartering contracts have been preserved of his wine trade in company with different partners, or on his own.51 After his untimely death on August 21, 1628 at the age of 31, his 23-year old widow Jannetgen Elberts continued the trade as a wijnkoopvrouw (a female wine merchant), probably together with her brother-in-law Jan Schaep until her second marriage with another wine merchant, Gijsbert van Schendel, in 1633.52 A year later, mother Machteld Huydecoper sold for 14,000 guilders a house on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, called ‘Kampertoren’, adjacent to the Kreupelsteeg in front of the Old Church. Apparently it was from this house that Jan Gerritsz had run his business. It had lost its use for Jannetgen Elberts because of her remarriage with another merchant, although the deed specifies that the house really was Machteld’s property.53 Jan Gerritsz was certainly a bon-vivant. Together with twenty other young merchants, all of them ‘amateurs [liefhebbers] of the Dutch poetry’ and some with fashionable Italianized names, he promised in August 1622 to sponsor a weekly allowance for the gifted, popular young poet Jan Jansz Starter (1593/94–1626). Having left the court of the Frisian stadholder, and burdened with debts, Starter badly needed money to make himself a living.54 Each sponsor had

49 On the volume of Amsterdam’s commerce in 1636: J.R. Bruijn, “Scheepvaart in de Noordelijke Nederlanden 1580–1650”, in: Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, VII (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1980), 137–155 (here 138–139). 50 Reyer Claesz, born in 1577, widower of Trijntgen Jansdr Appelman, married February 11, 1618, with Trijn Willemsdr Kieft, widow of Gerrit Dircksz Niesen, mentioned above. 51 GAA, NA, no. 221 (not. Jac. Meerhout), f. 153 (Sept. 6, 1623); no. 739 (not. H. Bruyningh), f. 143v (Sept. 19, 1623); no. 225 (not. Jac. Meerhout), f. 7 (March 27, 1624). 52 GAA, NA, no. 238 (not. Jac. Meerhout), f. 49v (Febr. 13, 1629). 53 GAA, NA, no. 409 (not. Jacob Jacobs), f. 247 (March 1st, 1634). 54 GAA, NA, no. 366 (not. Willem Cluijt), f. 551–552 (Aug. 25, 1622). Published

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to contribute during that year two Flemish pounds, i.e. twelve guilders, and was entitled to benefit occasionally from the poet’s skills. Twenty years later, the Amsterdam glazier and poet Jan Vos (c. 1616–1667), though Catholic, enjoyed a similar form of protection from Willem Kieft’s uncle Joan Huydecoper: in exchange for his celebratory poems on Joan Huydecoper’s qualities as an affable and charitable administrator and on the members of his family, Vos got commissions for window-panes and other glass-work in the town’s public buildings, including the new Town Hall, the ‘eighth miracle of the world’.55 Willem’s two sisters were also engaged to merchants. Lijsbeth married Johan Schaep, a member of a family which pertained to the old Amsterdam patriciate but at that moment was settled in Gouda, where Lijsbeth’s father-in-law had been bailiff of the town. Her ambitious son Dirck Schaep, Willem Kieft’s nephew, was a town secretary of Amsterdam from 1655 to 1697 and served as extraordinary envoy to Sweden in 1673–1675, where he was knighted on November 18, 1674.56 But life was uncertain. When in 1636 Machteld Huydecoper’s sister Anthonette, married to the Haarlem brewer and alderman Job Gijbelant, died without descendants, there was only one adult male in her generation at hand to care for Machteld’s interests in the inheritance.57 Her husband, her son Jan, and her son-inlaw Jan Schaep had died, and Willem was abroad. This surviving male was Coenraet van Ceulen, who in 1632 had married Willem’s younger sister Stijntgen. Coenraet traded with

in: De Navorscher, 71 (1922), 80; Maandblad Amstelodamum, 31 (1944), 35–36; W.J.C. Buitendijk, “Starter en Amsterdam”, in: It Beaken, 15 (1953), 200–210 (incorrect identification); René van Stipriaan, Het volle leven. Nederlandse literatuur en cultuur ten tijde van de Republiek (circa 1550 –1800) (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2002), 112. On Starter: Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek [hereafter quoted as NNBW ] (10 vol.; Leiden: 1911–1937), VIII, 1286–1290. 55 NNBW, III, 1347–1349; J.A. Worp, Jan Vos (Groningen: Wolters, 1879); J. Koopmans, “Jan Vos en het Amsterdamsche Maecenaat”, in: De Beweging (1915) IV, 42–68; Kooijmans, Vriendschap, 114–116. Unfortunately, no poem has been conserved on a member of the Kieft branch. 56 Elias, De vroedschap, II, 868–869; N. Plomp, “Drie eeuwen Van der Heede’s in het oosten van Holland”, in: Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, 39 (1985), 53–100, here 97. 57 GAA, NA, no. 418B (not. Jacob Jacobsz), f. 364. Van Ceulen obtained also power of attorney for his mother-in-law after the death of Job Gijbelant himself on Oct. 9, 1638: Archiefdienst Kennemerland, NA Haarlem. Inv. no. 171 (not. Jacques van Bosvelt), f. 109 (Dec. 29, 1638).

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Russia in, among other commodities, linseed and caviar.58 Apparently the Czar had granted him the status of a ‘Muscovian trader’, that is the privilege to trade on the port of Archangel[sk], where Coenraet stayed repeatedly.59 In 1628 he declared to have bought in 1626 at Archangel, together with his associate Hendrick Campherbeeck Jr. (1586–1639), a quantity of linseed for which they had paid cash.60 At the time, 25 years old and still unmarried, Coenraet must have lived more or less permanently in Russia.61 He associated himself at first with the important merchant Josua Rendorp (a Lutheran, his senior by 21 years, and therefore most probably his mentor in commercial matters), then with Campherbeeck (his senior by 13 years), but occasionally also with well-known Muscovian traders and merchants like Georg Everhard Klenck, or Jan de la Dale. Coenraet remained however a small entrepreneur, always on the second stage of the business ventures. Was he a relative of Pieter van Ceulen, who under the firm ‘Pieter van Ceulen & Jean Pellicorne’ farmed in Russia from 1634 to 1637 the very lucrative trade in Armenian caviar?62 The latter pertained probably to the prominent merchant family Van Collen, exiled from Aix-la-Chapelle (Germany), since his associate Jean Pellicorne married in 1626 Susanna van Collen, whose sister Geertruyd had in 1619 married the international merchant Marcus de Vogelaer (1589–1663/64). This De Vogelaer, one of the most important, wide-ranging and wealthy traders of Amsterdam, of Flemish origin, and, as a director of the WIC, leader of its

58 Documents concerning his trade and shippings to Archangel in Russia: GAA, NA, no. 781 (not. J. Verheij), f. 745 (Dec. 16, 1626); no. 661 (not. Jan Warnaertsz), 1e pak, f. 173 (April 28, 1627); no. 765 (not. J. Verheij), f. 282 ( July 2, 1627); no. 783 (id.), f. 784 (May 6, 1628); no. 766 (id.), f. 98v (May 29, 1628); no. 784 (id.), f. 642 (Dec. 21, 1628); no. 911 (not. P.L. Eyloff ), f. 23 ( June 16, 1629); no. 664 (not. J. Warnaertsz), 1e pak, f. 216v ( June 12, 1630); no. 770 (not. J. Verheij), 1e omslag, f. 18 ( July 6, 1632); no. 790 (id.), f. 323 ( June 30, 1634); no. 792 (id.), f. 975 ( June 19, 1636). 59 The genealogies in FA Huydecoper, no. 6, explicitly claim this status for him. 60 GAA, NA, no. 784 (not. J. Verheij), declaration of June 2, 1628. See also NA, no. 783 (id.), f. 784 (May 6, 1628). 61 I am grateful for this interpretation to Eric H. Wijnroks. Van Ceulen is however not included in his study Handel tussen Rusland en de Nederlanden. Een netwerkanalyse van de Antwerpse en Amsterdamse kooplieden, handelend op Rusland (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003). 62 See Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, Archangel. Nederlandse ondernemers in Rusland 1550–1785 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2000), 87, 193.

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commercial faction directly interested in the trade with New Netherland, must have been one of Willem’s protectors.63 Interestingly, he was also the patron of Willem’s future opponent, dominie Bogardus.64 Coenraet van Ceulen had still other assets.65 After Willem Kieft’s appointment as Director of New Netherland, he saw new chances for benefits. On August 24, 1641 a curious agreement was made up between Coenraet van Ceulen and Jacob Burchgraeff, a wealthy citizen who owned the beautiful manor Elsenburch on the river Vecht built by Philip Vingboons in 1637, next to Joan Huydecoper’s manor Goudesteyn. They agreed on the following: if, counting from July 22, 1641, the shares of the WIC on the Amsterdam stock market would make at least 130% during one year, Burchgraeff would pay ƒ 300 to Coenraet van Ceulen; if not, Coenraet would owe ƒ 100 to Burchgraeff.66 Clearly, Coenraet’s interest in the WIC had been aroused by his brother-in-law, but his sense of reality may also have been informed by Kieft’s letters. War speculation was not always profitable. Occasionally, Coenraet traded in New Netherland commodities too. In 1644 he sold a cargo of beavers to merchant Jan de Vogelaer (c. 1594–before 1664), brother and associate of Marcus, the WIC director. Instead of the proposed cash payment, with a discount, Coenraet stipulated long term full payment na coopmans stijle (‘in merchant’s style’).67 He also acquired several tracts of land on Manhattan. The Harlem farm called Otterspoor (approximately between 111th and 125th Street), opposite the farm of Dr. Jean de La Montagne, which Coenraet van Ceulen had acquired in 1639 from Jacob van Curler, through the intermediary of secretary Van Tienhoven, was afterwards called Van Keulen’s Hook.68 Another bowery, in a place called Bestevaers Kreupelbosch (above Beeckman Street, near Gold

63

Veluwenkamp, Archangel, 81–90, and passim; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 566; H.J. Koenen, “De familie van Jacob Cats’ vrouw”, in: Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad, 12 (1895), 169–171. On Van Collen: Elias, De vroedschap, II, 642–647. 64 Frijhoff, Wegen, 658–665. 65 He cannot be identical with the timber merchant Coenraet Willemsz van Ceulen (GAA, NA, no. 675 (not. Jan Warnaertsz), f. 29–30v: Febr. 11, 1637), since the latter was buried in the Old Church on March 13, 1641. 66 GAA, NA, no. 685 (not. Jan Warnaertsz), f. 273. 67 GAA, NA, no. 848 (not. Jos. Steijns), deed 152 ( July 7, 1644). 68 NYHM, I, 22 (Aug. 22, 1639), footnote 1; Carl Horton Pierce, New Harlem, Past and Present (New York: New Harlem Publ. Cy, 1903), 14, 25–26.

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Street), owned together by Elias de Raedt, director of the WIC, and Coenraet van Ceulen, was leased in 1640 for tobacco growing, Willem Kieft acting as his intermediary.69 In 1641 Coenraet was indeed involved in the tobacco trade, in connection with the New Netherland colonist Jochem Pietersz Kuyter.70 He served also as power of attorney for several West India Company officials.71 Apparently he was Willem Kieft’s commercial representative in his home town. Soon after Willem’s death he sold his farm in New Harlem.72 In 1661, this huge bowery was divided into 22 smaller farms of six acres each.73 He conserved however a tract of land, for the cultivation, lease, or sale of which his widow gave in April 1650 power of attorney to Jacob van Couwenhoven, who was leaving for New Netherland.74

Youth, education, training We know nothing for sure of Willem Kieft’s education.75 There is no reason to doubt the statement of the author of Breeden-Raedt, who asserts that Willem Kieft had been educated as a merchant ever since his youth.76 There is no trace of a university education at Leiden or elsewhere, neither for Willem himself nor for his elder brother Jan, and it is not very probable that his father could afford a private tutor, like Willem’s cousin Michiel Pauw, who in 1634,

69

NYHM, I, 311–312 (Dec. 14, 1640). NYHM, I, 345–346 (Aug. 10, 1641). 71 NYHM, I, 141–142: for Claes van Elslant, on April 29, 1639; I, 222–223: for Ulrich Lupoldt, on August 6, 1639; II, 468–469: for Jean de La Montagne, on August 9, 1647. 72 On Jan. 20, 1649 he gives procuration to Cornelis van Tienhoven to sell his land: GAA, NA, no. 1088 (not. J. van de Ven), f. 68–68v. This is the Harlem farm called Otterspoor. 73 Pierce, New Harlem, 26. 74 GAA, NA, no. 603 (not. Laurens Lamberti), f. 369v (April 16, 1650). 75 It goes without saying the Washington Irving’s story about Kieft’s education at a celebrated academy of The Hague is entirely fictitious. 76 Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien (Antwerpen: Francoys van Duynen, 1649), f. B2v: “van Amsterdam gebooren / van jeugd’ aen op gevoedet tot een Coopman”; transl. as Broad Advice, in: Henry C. Murphy (transl.), Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland and Breeden Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien (New York, 1854), 139. 70

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living at The Hague, engaged the philologist and future Leiden professor Johannes Fridericus Gronovius (1611–1671) to privately teach his two sons and his nephews.77 Willem was however well educated in Latin. He corresponded in that language with the English governors of New Haven and Boston.78 He had good manners too. In the rare documents with a more personal touch left from that period, Kieft appears as a courteous man and a cultivated intellectual. In John Winthrop’s History of New England he figures as a “discreet”, “sober”, and “prudent” man.79 The French Jesuit refugee Isaac Jogues kept an excellent memory of the hospitality he enjoyed at the fort in 1642.80 To the visiting Roger Williams, Kieft argued in 1643, with an implicit reference to Hugo Grotius’s recent Latin treatise on the origin of the Native Americans (1642), that they had descended from Icelandic navigators and that the word sachem came from the Icelandic language. Apparently he was able in New Amsterdam to follow closely—probably with the help of the WIC directors—the learned book production in his fatherland and he continued to read Latin literature.81 Kieft also collected plants and minerals, made experiments with them, and repeatedly sent specimens to the WIC directors.82 He recognized a huge bird of prey as a grand duc, used

77 J.F. Gronovius to Claudius Salmasius, August 22, 1634, in: Petrus Burmannus (ed.), Sylloges epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum, II (Leiden: Samuel Luchtmans, 1727), 524–526, nr. 278. 78 To the governor of Massachusetts, July 20, 1643 etc.: O’Callaghan, History, I, 279, referring to John Winthrop, A Journal of the transactions and occurrences in the settlement of Massachusetts (Hartford, 1790), 303–330; John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 (2 vol.; Boston: Lettle, Brown & Cie, 1853), II, 7. Governor Theophilus Eaton of New Haven to Director General Stuyvesant, 8 October 1647: about two letters “neither of them written either in Lattin, as your predecessour vsed, or in English as your selfe haue formerlie done” [New Netherlands Documents, 11:3e]. See also A. van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Nederland (The Hague: Michiel Stael, 1650), transl. in NNN, 310–311. On July 9, 1642 Kieft drafted in Latin some conditions for the English at Hartford; text in William Smith, The History of the late province of New York (2d ed., New York, 1829), 7. 79 Winthrop, The History of New England, I, 360; II, 7, 385. 80 Isaac Jogues, Novum Belgium. An Account of New Netherland in 1643–4 (New York: John Gilmary Shea, 1862), also in: NNN, 259–260. 81 Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), quoted in Raesly, Portrait, 75, and Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, 388, n. 30. For the debate between Grotius and Johan de Laet, see: Benjamin Schmidt, “Space, Time, Travel: Hugo de Groot, Johannes de Laet, and the Advancement of Geographic Learning”, in: Lias, 25:2 (1998), 177–199. 82 National Archive (The Hague), Staten-Generaal, inv. no. 12564.30A (A. van der Donck and others, Naerdere Aenwijsinghe ende Observatie op het Requeste, July 26,

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by the French aristocracy for hunting, and knew its price.83 But ultimately his learning remained bookish, he didn’t really understand the native languages and still less the native culture.84 Normally, the children of Amsterdam’s merchant elite received their education at one of the two Latin (or grammar) schools of the town, both of excellent reputation. Since his father lived on the Old Side of the town, Willem must have attended the school on the Old Side, in the Koestraat. Born in 1602, he probably did not leave the Latin School before the end of the 1610s. The rector (headmaster) of that school was in those years Matthew Slade (or Sladus, d. 1628), an English-born man of stern Reformed conviction who by writing sharp pamphlets against the Arminians took an active part in the doctrinal war of the decade 1610–1619, and assured the link between the Dutch and the English theologians.85 The foundation of the Amsterdam Illustrious School, a civic equivalent of Leiden University, in January 1632 came too late for Willem Kieft’s education, but occasionally, when staying in Amsterdam, he may have attended some of the lectures meant for merchants interested in culture. The Athenaeum’s first professor Caspar Barlaeus had in his inaugural lecture coined for those amateurs the title mercator sapiens, that quality of ‘learned merchant’ that was typical of the civic culture in the metropolis of Amsterdam.86 After having finished his education at the Latin School, Willem Kieft, like many other Dutch young men from merchant families,

1649); Van der Donck, Vertoogh (NNN, 299); A. van der Donck, Beschryvinge van NieuwNederlant (Amsterdam: Evert Nieuwenhof, 1655), 28–30; Letter of H. Doedens, Dec. 15, 1646, in: “Origineele brieven van H. Doedens aan Ant. van Hilten betreffende de West-Indische Compagnie, 1641–1648”, in: Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, 25 (1869), 434–435. I have not been able to consult the English translation of Van der Donck’s book: Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands. Edited with an Introduction by Thomas F. O’Donnell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968). 83 Van der Donck, Beschryvinge, 39. 84 See, for instance: De Vries, Korte Historiael, 269 (orig. ed., 182); NNN, 211–216, 232–233. 85 On Slade: NNBW, II, 1323–1324. 86 Catherine Secrétan (ed. and transl.), Le ‘Marchand philosophe’ de Caspar Barlaeus. Un éloge du commerce dans la Hollande du Siècle d’Or (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 33–40; Willem Frijhoff, “What is an early modern university? The conflict between Leiden and Amsterdam in 1631”, in: Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 149–168.

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was sent to La Rochelle for his practical education as a merchant and to learn the French language.87 The exchange of merchants’ sons for training in commerce and linguistic abilities was common practice between the French and Dutch international traders. Thirty years later, for instance, Kieft’s brother-in-law Johan van Walbeeck, tutor to their young nephew Pieter van Rijn, signed for the boy a five-year contract as apprentice in a merchant firm at Bordeaux.88 The French connection gives us at the same time some idea of the position of Willem’s father as a trader. The Atlantic port of La Rochelle, famous for the salt and wine trade, was an international center of commerce, and since the 16th century it had turned more and more towards the New World. The Dutch traders occupied an important place in the town, and the trade with South-Western France made up about one tenth of Amsterdam’s European commerce. In fact virtually all the Dutch trade with La Rochelle remained in the hands of the Dutch themselves.89 Kieft’s most redoubtable critic, captain David Pietersz de Vries, was himself born in 1592/93 at La Rochelle from a family of skippers and merchants settled at Hoorn, the capital town of West-Friesland.90 He may even have met Kieft during his stay at La Rochelle in 1624–25.91 For the Reformed Dutch merchants, La Rochelle had another advantage: it was one of the strongholds of French Calvinism until the fatal siege of the town by Cardinal Richelieu’s army in 1627–28. Even after the reduction of the town on October 28, 1628, which gave a severe blow

87 Breeden-Raedt, f. B2v: “die een tijt lang te Rochelle sijnen en sijner Meesteren Handel waer-ghenomen ofte verwaer-loost hebbende aldaer is komen te failleren” (Broad Advice, 139). Cf. Willem Frijhoff, “La formation des négociants de la République hollandaise”, in: Franco Angiolini & Daniel Roche (eds.), Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1995), 175–198. 88 J.G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van het bedrijfsleven en gildewezen van Amsterdam, vol. III: 1633–1672 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 528–529, no. 1031 (March 29, 1649). 89 Étienne Trocmé & Marcel Delafosse, Le Commerce rochelais de la fin du XV e siècle au début du XVII e (Paris: A. Colin, 1952); Marcel Delafosse (ed.), Histoire de La Rochelle (Toulouse: Privat, 1985); Kevin C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650. Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Bruijn, “Scheepvaart”, 138–139. 90 On De Vries’s life, see the introductions by H.T. Colenbrander in his edition of Korte Historiael (1911), and by M. Visser (ed.), Straat- en bochtvaarders, zijnde het Korte Historiael ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge van Drie Voyagiens door David Pietersz. de Vries (Utrecht: W. de Haan, 1943). 91 De Vries, Korte Historiael, 67–77 (orig. ed., 41–48; not in NNN ).

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to its trade, its international position remained strong, though henceforth a Catholic Counter-Reformation offensive was started and Huguenots were repressed. After his return to Amsterdam, some time after his father’s death in 1622, Willem participated in the corn trade in the Baltic region, the ‘mother trade’ of Amsterdam. Willem’s mother must have taken over her husband’s trading activities, with the help of her two sons. Willem Kieft was, for example, one of ten merchants from Amsterdam and Oostzaan who in October 1628 gave power of attorney to Carel van Cracouw, since 1627 commissioner of the States General at Elsenør (Denmark) in the Sound, to obtain payment from the king of Denmark for 196 ‘last’ of rye (at 102 gold guilders the ‘last’92) and four ‘last’ of wheat (at 156 gold guilders the ‘last’), brought on their ships from Pomerania to Denmark.93 His real interest must however have been in La Rochelle’s wine trade, probably as successor to his brother Jan, wine trader on Nantes, and possibly in association with his sister-in-law Jannetgen Elberts, the widowed wijnkoopvrouw.94

Bankrupt The La Rochelle bankruptcy for which Willem Kieft got such a bad press in New Amsterdam must have taken place in 1632 or 1633.95 Actually, the Amsterdam notary Gerard Rooleeu registered that year the protest of a bill of exchange at La Rochelle on October 4, 1632.96 This bill of 404 guilders value, held by Johan Schaep, merchant at

92

A Amsterdam ‘last’ was equivalent to about 3015 litres; cf. J.M. Verhoeff, De oude Nederlandse maten en gewichten (2d ed.; Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut, 1983), 111. 93 GAA, NA, no. 237 (not. J. Meerhout), f. 36v (Oct. 6, 1628). On Cracouw: Schutte, Repertorium, 238–239. 94 For the position of female merchants in the Dutch Republic, see E.M. Kloek, “De vrouw”, in: H.M. Beliën, A.Th. van Deursen & G.J. van Setten (eds.), Gestalten van de Gouden Eeuw. Een Hollands groepsportret (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1995), 241–280; Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen & Marijke Huisman (eds.), Women of the Golden Age. An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994). 95 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 188, footnote z, quotes the ‘Stamboek Huydecoper’ with the date 1633. 96 GAA, NA, no. 760 (not. G. Rooleeu), f. 499, 534v.

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Amsterdam, in whom we may recognize Willem’s brother-in-law, and drawn on Willem Kieft, was refused by the drawer Jacob Rutgertsz [Moller], merchant at Amsterdam, since there were no securities at hand. This was one of Kieft’s misfortunes in trade which have since then pursued him and soiled his reputation. Some echoes of the gossip have come to us through the documents. On July 7, 1644, for instance, skipper Laurens Cornelissen was obliged to declare in New Amsterdam that he had never—neither in Holland nor on his journey on board ‘De Maecht van Enckhuijsen’ to New Netherland— said anything against Willem Kieft, “on behalf of any action or fraudulent departure done by him in France at La Rochelle”.97 But Laurens Cornelissen may have sought revenge for having been indicted by Kieft. The skipper had accused Kieft of having withdrawn from the Company’s goods a box with pearls which he had given to his mother, “as was well known”.98 New Netherland gossip alleged that Kieft fled La Rochelle after a bankruptcy and therefore was hanged in effigie, as a sign of dishonor.99 He must have fled the town indeed: on March 7, 1633 the Rotterdam wine merchant Seger Gorisz, who had ordered from ‘Guilliame Kieft’ at La Rochelle twenty barrels of wine and paid them with a bill of exchange, gave power of attorney to Nicolaes Hermansz van Ravesteyn to take delivery of the wine, Kieft “being fugitive”.100 The formula implies a commercial breakdown but not forcibly a fraudulent behavior, the more so since he was rapidly given new opportunities by honest merchants. As for the hanging ritual, this was undoubtedly in use, but was Willem really one of its victims? He has violently denied so. Research

97 New York State Archives, Dutch Colonial Mss., II, 117b (NYHM, II, 233–234): “wegen enige handelinge in ofte uijtrijden, twelck [Kieft] in Franckrijck tot Rochelle gedaen”. Other interests must have been at stake in Laurens Cornelissen’s case, for on August 26, 1644 Director Kieft was given power of attorney at Amsterdam to claim from Laurens Cornelissen van der Wel, when all was said and done, the sum of f 3,850–5; GAA, NA, no. 1809 (not. Albert Eggericx), f. 49. 98 Breeden-Raedt, f. D1v: “dat hy gheseght hadde een Doosje met Peerlen aen zijn Moeder bestelt te hebben / het welcke waerachtigh sijnde / ghelijck noch huyden ten dage bekent is” (Broad Advice, 158). 99 Breeden-Raedt, f. B2v: “aldaer is komen te failleeren, waer over sijn Portraict aldaer na costuymen aen de galg is geslagen / gelijck noch verscheyden levende getuygen weten te seggen / die ’t met haer ogen gesien hebben”, B4v (testimony); Broad Advice, 139, 144). 100 Gemeentearchief Rotterdam, NA, no. 149 (not. Adriaan Kieboom), p. 890, deed no. 523.

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in the archives of the Présidial criminel of La Rochelle for the year 1633 revealed no reference to a process, a bankruptcy or a pendaison in effigie involving Willem Kieft, but unfortunately the register of 1632 is lost.101 However, given the slow pace of justice, such a trial could barely have taken place less than three months after the refusal of the bill. When Willem Kieft’s first cousin Joan Huydecoper Jr. sojourned at La Rochelle in July 1648, he witnessed the pendaison in effigie of the relapsed Calvinist Pierre Jarrige on the square in front of the castle, but the letters Joan Jr. wrote from that place to his father and other acquaintances bear no trace of the memory of a similar ritual performed for his unfortunate cousin, sixteen years before.102 Whatever may have happened, it is clear that Willem had got a financial problem indeed. And he was not alone in his misery. Between 1625 and 1650, due to the uncertainty of the wine crops, many Dutch merchants went bankrupt in the French seaports, at least 23 at La Rochelle alone.103 Kieft’s real problem however was certainly not financial but moral. Bankruptcy brought loss of honor. Bankrupt merchants had to quit their political functions and to earn themselves new financial and social credit. The shame of their failure made them temporarily unfit for new social assignments. That is the problem Willem Kieft had now to face.

Redeeming Christian slaves For the restoration of his honor and his credit, Willem made a judicious choice: charity. According to an informant who unfortunately remains anonymous, he was employed to redeem some enslaved Christians from their ‘Turkish’ captivity, most probably in North Africa, more precisely the Ottoman province of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was commonly called. After the Dutch fleet had

101

Letter of the director of the departmental archives of Charente Maritime at La Rochelle, M. Paul Even, to the author, Nov. 4, 1998. The name of Willem Kieft doesn’t appear in any of its biographical instruments. 102 FA Huydecoper, no. 53, letters of July 15–16, 1648 to his father, Mr. Forendal and Mr. Flandren. 103 Jean Meyer, “La Hollande vue de la France (XVIIe siècle)”, in: W. Frijhoff & O. Moorman van Kappen (eds.), Les Pays-Bas et la France des Guerres de Religion à la création de la République Batave (Nijmegen: Gerard Noodt Instituut, 1993), 35–51, here 45.

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fought the Algerian privateers during two decades—there is an echo of this struggle in the memoirs of captain De Vries—, the States General decided in 1630, notwithstanding the great number of vessels captured year after year by the Algerians, to concentrate on the reduction of the privateers of Dunkirk, whose harmful activities close to the Republic were much more dangerous for the survival of the state.104 Henceforth, the redemption of the Christians enslaved by the Moors was left to private initiative or to the stricken families themselves. Willem Kieft must have been one of the negotiators employed by the unlucky relatives. He succeeded in freeing the captives for whom the lowest ransom was asked, but not the better priced Christians: their families had to add more money.105 Did Kieft betray the rich for his own benefit, as was suggested? Ransoms could be high indeed: several hundred guilders for an ordinary seaman, and up to five thousand for a skipper, on top of which came up to 50% legal dues claimed by the pasha of Algiers and other expenses. A redeeming expedition could therefore involve much money. But the ransoms were not really fixed, and prices would go up when money seemed to flow freely. It was a matter of tight negotiation, and the Moors often threatened to maltreat the unfortunate slaves if the proposed sum seemed too low. Besides, during private redeeming expeditions (as the one by Willem Kieft must have been), the agent normally advanced the money and tried to get it back afterwards. Fraudulent behavior was then easy, or could easily be suspected when the price was high.106 It is true that the rumor about Kieft’s misadventure can also be read in another way: starting his work with the lowest ransoms may be seen as a proof of shrewd negotiation, since the prices for the higher ranks would not be affected unduly.

104 See for an overview of the relations between the Dutch Republic and Algeria: Gerard van Krieken, Kapers en kooplieden. De betrekkingen tussen Algiers en Nederland 1604–1830 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1999), who quotes David Pietersz de Vries (97–98, 102–103) but not Willem Kieft. 105 Breeden-Raedt, f. B2v: “de Negotie sulcken man nu een tijt lang gemist hebbende / wort geimployeert om eenige gevangen Christenen uyt Turckyen te verlossen. Het gelt wort aen sulcken faillant vertrouwt / hy vertreckt en lost eenige / daer het minste voor te betalen viel / maer de andere welckers Vrienden ’t meest gelt op gebracht hebben liet hy sitten / daer de Ouders en Vrienden daer na noch eens gelt toe moesten fourneeren”; Broad Advice, 139. 106 See for the redemption procedures: C.J. den Ridder, “Gedenk de gevangenen alsof gij medegevangenen wart. De loskoop van Hollandse zeelieden uit Barbarijse gevangenschap, 1600–1746”, in: Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis, 5:1 (1986), 3–22.

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It is tempting to identify the anonymous informant as Kieft’s old enemy, captain David Pietersz de Vries, who may have found here another occasion to denounce the lack of courage of his bourgeois opponent. Wasn’t he a native of La Rochelle where the Kiefts were known as merchants? Didn’t he fight the Moors in the Mediterranean in earlier years? Hadn’t he once shown the courage to snatch away a Dutch slave from his Algerian master?107 Remarkably, this is the only occasion on which Kieft is credited with greed. In New Netherland he was reproached only once for financial misconduct. But this was a loan (against due interest!) he took on his authority as a Director from the deacons’ funds when he was short of cash.108 In fact, Kieft was often blamed for his lack of competence, his excess of ambition, his pride or anger, his want of faith or humanity—but he was from the outset one of the very scarce faithful and non-corrupt Company officers, and that reputation may well have contributed to his appointment and maintenance by the WIC directors.109 Anyway, self-enrichment is not exactly the meaning of the phrase in BreedenRaedt: the suggestion is that Willem Kieft was not clever enough to deal on the proposed terms with the Turks, but let them extort more money than was initially asked. As his New Netherland experience was to show profusely, Kieft never was a good negotiator with nonEuropeans indeed. On August 4, 1633 Willem Kieft was again in Amsterdam, where he accepted on behalf of his two young nieces the estate of his deceased brother Jan Gerritsz.110 Since he acted as their legal guardian, we may assume that his bankruptcy was annulled by then. Three weeks later, in advance of his departure, Willem Kieft, “a merchant at present in this town”, gives power of attorney for his commercial interests to his brother-in-law Jan Schaep.111 Apparently, he traveled

107

De Vries, Korte Historiael, 40–41 (orig. ed., 25; not in NNN ): on May 2, 1621. O’Callaghan, History, I, 395; NNN, 327, and 362 (answer by Van Tienhoven). Later a similar reproach was made to his brother-in-law councilor Johan van Walbeeck, who was accused of having paid only 250 guilders annual rent for a large tract of land near Mauritsstadt [Recife] in Brazil. See F.L. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado no Brasil holandês, 1630–1654 (Sâo Paolo, 1986), transl. The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654 (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), 125. 109 Cf. his own opinion on this matter in his dispute with Bogardus: A. Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in Noord-Amerika, 1624–1664, II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), p. XXV (original document lacking). 110 GAA, NA, no. 640 (not. Sibrant Cornelisz), f. 116–116v. 111 Ibid., f. 123 (Aug. 27, 1633). 108

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a lot around Europe, but there is no more sign of any activity at La Rochelle. Neither is it clear whether the ransom expedition must be placed before or after 1633/34. At any rate, on December 23, 1634 Willem’s mother and her sons-in-law Jan Schaep and Coenraet van Ceulen stand together as security for Willem Kieft, when Paulo de Wilhem wants to employ him for his affairs in the Mediterranean.112 Would a person convicted of fraud have been reemployed so soon by such a shrewd, well placed, and religiously orthodox merchant as was Paulo [Le Leu] de Wilhem (1581–1648)? This son of a refugee from Tournai traded with Italy and the Levant as a ‘Strait trader’.113 Since 1621 the agent ( factor) of king Christian IV of Denmark, he had married into one of the main Amsterdam trading families, whereas his younger brother David (1588–1658) was married to Constance Huygens, daughter of one of the stadholder’s mightiest clients, Christiaen Huygens, former secretary of William of Orange, then secretary of the Council of State of the United Provinces.114 From January 15, 1632 to April 15, 1635 De Wilhem was one of the directors of the Levantine Trade, and his offer of employment for Willem Kieft must be related to his trading activities prior to the crisis of the Levantine commerce in 1635, when he withdrew from office.115 This crisis may have endangered Willem Kieft’s job as a merchant. On the other hand, his newly acquired knowledge of the Mediterranean probably qualified him to act as a mediator for the liberation of the Christian slaves out of Algerian captivity. Unfortunately no traces of his whereabouts have been retrieved for these years. Yet his family and friends must have been busy to restore his honor. When the States General appointed him Director General of New Netherland on September 2, 1637, he was according to Captain David Pietersz de Vries active in France from where he hurried over to Holland, using the horses of the postal service.116 After his unlucky

112

GAA, NA, no. 694B (not. Jan Warnertsz), portefeuille 64; no. 701, f. 772. ‘Straetse handelaers’ traded in the Mediterranean beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. 114 Elias, De vroedschap, II, 603, 605; C.C. van Valkenburg, “Het regentengeslacht (Le Leu) de Wilhem”, in: Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, 25 (1971), 132–180, Paolo: p. 148, David: p. 160. On Huygens: NNBW, I, 1179–1180. 115 Maria C.A.E. Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs: the ‘Flemish’ Community in Livorno and Genoa (1615–1635) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), 62, 192. 116 De Vries, Korte Historiael, 231 (orig. ed., 149; NNN, 202). 113

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efforts in Algiers he may therefore have resumed the wine trade with the Atlantic ports. In spite of his haste he found the time to repeatedly discuss in Amsterdam the matters of New Netherland with Kiliaen van Rensselaer, with whom he became well acquainted.117 But De Vries rightly stated that Willem’s experience as a public administrator really was next to zero.118 Something else must therefore have motivated his election. It was Elias de Raedt (d. 1663), merchant at Amsterdam and director of the WIC, who stood before the States General in order to propose his appointment.119 Three years later De Raedt acquired a tract of land on Manhattan as an associate of Coenraet van Ceulen, Kieft’s brother-in-law.120 Did their association precede Kieft’s nomination? Does it point to some previous link between them? Or was this a consequence of it?

Rising power: The Huydecoper connection In order to understand better why Willem may have appeared as a suitable candidate, we must now return to his extended family, his kinship network, in particular from the maternal side. Huydecoper, the family name of Willem Kieft’s mother, was indeed a high-sounding name in the Dutch Golden Age. Just like her husband Kieft, Machteld Huydecoper pertained to an old family from the province of Holland, not to the new, expanding network of immigrant merchants coming from the South. Socially speaking, Willem’s maternal relatives were at the time of his birth already more prominent in

117 VRBM, 352–354 (Rensselaer to Wouter van Twiller and to Jacob Albertsz Planck, Sept. 21, 1637). 118 De Vries, Korte Historiael, 252 (orig. ed., 165; NNN, 214–215). 119 The day before (Sept. 1st, 1637), De Raedt had been appointed as the WIC commissioner for the States General: National Archive (The Hague), States General (1.01.04), no. 5756, exh. C.426. See also E.B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, or, New York under the Dutch (New York: Appleton & Cie, 1846), I, 174 Elias was knighted by Charles II in 1663. His father Elias (1561–1631), a merchant from ‘sHertogenbosch, was in 1602 one of the main shareholders of the VOC; Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 148. On this family: J.W. des Tombe, “Het geslacht Schoock en aanverwante families”, in: De Navorscher, 56 (1906), 649–665; Elias, De vroedschap, 761. 120 NYHM, I, 311–312 (Dec. 14, 1640). Elias’s sister Catharina de Raedt (1596–1628) was related by marriage (1622) to the De Pickere and Coymans families, and hence to Joan Huydecoper, which may enlighten the relation.

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Amsterdam than his father’s. Moreover, maternal kinship networks were in Amsterdam at that time still as important for the children’s future, if not more, than that of their father. In the historian’s eye the Huydecoper story seems, at any rate, much more exciting than that of the Kiefts. In fact, due to their well preserved family archives, the Huydecoper family has been at the core of two important historical studies of the last decade: a study on kinship networks and another on elite educational practices.121 As Benjamin Roberts, the author of the latter study puts it: the Huydecoper family “symbolized the prosperity of Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. Huydecoper managed to unify wealth, politics, and the cultural elite status in Amsterdam”.122 The Kieft family, on the contrary, though of old Amsterdam extraction and of medium wealth, appears as a rather dull conglomerate of traders at the upper middle-class level, with much less social ambition or perhaps, for whatever reason, unable to realize the ambitions they had. Actually the Huydecopers came from the countryside, the Westland district south of The Hague. They were formerly called Bal van Wieringen or Van Rijswijck, after their places of residence. In the first half of the sixteenth century Jacob Andriesz Bal van Rijswijck married Machteld Geurtsdr, from the ancient Amsterdam family Van Beuningen. This union gave him an entrance into the local merchant elite and access to political power in a time of expanding markets. The fortune of the Huydecopers rose steadily, since they combined commercial acumen, social intelligence and, at the crucial moment, the right religious faith.123 Machteld Huydecoper’s father—Willem Kieft’s maternal grandfather—was born as Jan Jacobsz Bal (1541/42–1624). He took his new family name Huydecoper from his occupation, the tannery and the trade in pelts—a huidenkoper being a fell-monger—, but the name came at the same time from his paternal grandmother Luytgen Willemse Huydecoper.124 The maternal transmission of trade and name still was an essential feature of Amsterdam society. In 1564

121

Kooijmans, Vriendschap, 113–131; Benjamin Roberts, Through the keyhole. Dutch child-rearing practices in the 17th and 18th century. Three urban elite families (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), 50–54, and passim. 122 Roberts, Through the keyhole, 50. 123 FA Huydecoper, nos. 3, 6, 21, 22. 124 Genealogies in FA Huydecoper, no. 6; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 92–93.

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Jan Jacobsz married firstly Lijsbeth [Elisabeth] Hendricksdr Wou, a daughter of Hendrick Willemsz, timber-merchant in the Kalverstraat, and Antonia Jansdr. She was buried in the Old Church on January 6, 1595.125 On May 2, 1596 Jan Jacobsz married again, this time with Lijsbeth Gerritsdr van Gemen, born at Deventer in 1566. The second Lijsbeth outlived almost everybody in this story and died at Amsterdam on September 27, 1652. A prominent Calvinist, Jan Jacobsz was forced to flee to the EastFrisian town of Emden in 1567/68. At his return in 1578, the year of the Alteration, he became a town councilor, until his death in 1624. He was elected an alderman in 1578 and reelected as such many times. In 1580 he became colonel of the civic guard on the New Side of the town.126 Since 1586 he was several times city treasurer, but his real interest was trade, not administration or politics. For his tannery he rented the huge Nieuwezijdskapel, i.e. the former ‘Holy Shrine’, a famous pilgrim’s chapel of the Miraculous Holy Eucharist.127 Jan Jacobsz was sufficiently detached from the Catholic faith not to fear heavenly punishment for this public sacrilege. In 1585 he bought for 2,280 guilders part of the former St. Margaret’s convent on the Nes and made his living there in a house which he called ‘In den Soutberch’ [The Salt Mountain], since he stored there the quantities of salt he needed for his tannery. He owned also a brick-yard and a dye-house outside the city, and invested money in its new extension. He pertained in fact to the closed clan of owners of grounds outside the town who due to their political foreknowledge of the town-development were in the 1610s able to collect enormous fortunes, scandalous even by the standards of that time.128 In 1606 he moved to Sint-Anthonis Breestraat, in a house under the sign ‘In ‘t Huys van Nassauwen’ [at present Jodenbreestraat no. 5], a name also given to his country-house on the river Amstel. He was one of these new magistrates who elevated Amsterdam’s commerce

125 The Huydecoper family vault is still visible in the middle of the high choir of the Old Church [no. 133]. 126 Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 21 (1924), 78. His company was painted in 1578: Christian Tümpel, “De Amsterdamse schuttersstukken”, in: M. Carasso-Kok & J. Levy-van Halm (eds.), Schutters in Holland. Kracht en zenuwen van de stad (Zwolle: Waanders & Haarlem: Frans Halsmuseum, 1988), 86–90. 127 J.Z. Kannegieter, “De Alteratie van Amsterdam en enkele er op volgende gebeurtenissen. Nieuwe feiten en verhalen”, in: Maandblad Amstelodamum, 48 (1961), 182. 128 Elias, Geschiedenis, 63–68.

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to the wholesale trade level and inaugurated investments in international commerce.129 Gradually he became one of the great merchants of Amsterdam. In 1602 he was already one of the biggest investors of the newly established United East India Company [hereafter VOC].130 In 1618 he became a director of the Magellan Company trading on South America. In 1608 he bought a homestead and a lot of 33 acres near Maarssen on the river Vecht, called ‘De Gouden Hoeff’, which his son Joan transformed later on into the beautiful country-seat Goudesteyn.131 At his death, he left a considerable estate of 170,000 guilders, which made him one of the wealthiest citizens of the town.132 Out of Jan’s two marriages eight children survived: several daughters from the first marriage, and a son Joan from the second. In fact, a son Jacob (1568–1599) had been born out of the first marriage, but Jacob preferred adventure to trade and after his participation as a midshipman in Cornelis de Houtman’s first voyage to the East Indies in 1595–97, he died sadly from scurvy in October 1599 during Olivier van Noort’s voyage around the world.133 The alliances of Jan Jacobsz’s daughters, Willem Kieft’s maternal aunts, speak a language of growing social success, but it has to be noted that they married wholesale traders and manufacturers from old local families, not international merchants of foreign origin. Jan Jacobsz’s family policy aimed at a sound integration into the ruling political class, not at an ambitious commercial expansion. Aeltgen [Alida] Jansdr (1565–1600) married Hendrick Servaes (1559–1642), a wealthy woolen draper and caffawercker134 in ‘De Lieven Heers Rock’ [angle Nieuwendijk and Gravenstraat] and regent of the Burgerweeshuis or Civic Orphanage, who lived later on the Keizersgracht [no. 131].

129

Lesger, Handel, 149–150. J.G. van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister van de Kamer Amsterdam der OostIndische Compagnie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958), 133: he invested ƒ 12,000 at the start of the VOC. 131 Gary Schwartz, “Jan van der Heyden and the Huydecopers of Maarsseveen”, in: The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, 11 (1983), 197–220. 132 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 92. 133 G.P. Rouffaer & J.W. IJzerman (eds.), De eerste schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indië onder Cornelis de Houtman 1595–1597 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929) [Werken Linschoten-Vereeniging, no. 32], III, pp. LXIII–LXIV, 237; J.W. IJzerman (ed.), De reis om de wereld van Olivier van Noort 1598–1601 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1926) [Werken Linschoten-Vereeniging, no. 27–28], I, 27, 167; II, 60–63. 134 Caffa = flowered velvet. 130

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He shared the shipping investments of his father-in-law and left at his death an estate of 164,800 guilders.135 Among the paintings he owned were the Four Evangelists by Jan Lievensz, Rembrandt’s associate at Leiden, sold after his death for ƒ 120 to merchant Jan Vogelesangh, another member of the Kieft kinship.136 Hendrick’s son Jacob Servaes (1589–1663), a woolen draper like his father, was a commissioner of the Insurance Chamber of the town and captain of the civic guard. His two daughters married on the highest social level: Lijsbeth Servaes in 1619 to Jacob Dircksz [Brouwer], a brewer, and from 1637 bailiff (schout) of the town,137 Marritgen in 1616 to Roelof Egbertsz de Vrij (1592–1636). Roelof ’s father, burgomaster Egbert Roelofsz, was a well-to-do merchant in the Warmoesstraat [no. 121]138 near the Old Church, who in 1567 as one of the prominent Calvinists had been forced to flee the town. He was one of the first members of the new town council after the Alteration.139 Teuntgen [Anthonia, or Anthonette, as she used to call herself ], Jan Jacobsz’s third daughter (1573–1636), married in 1596 Job Claesz Gijbelant (1572–1638), a brewer who lived and worked on the Bakenessergracht at Haarlem.140 Job became a town councilor of Haarlem in 1603, was alderman in 1604, and captain of the St. George’s militia from 1603 to the political purges by prince Maurice in 1618. As a member of the liberal faction, and possibly of Arminian persuasion, he was then removed from all his offices and didn’t come back in any position of political power. However, economically he kept doing well: in 1624 he was a director of the Magellan Company— the only commercial company beside the WIC that was then authorized to trade on South America.141 The brewing business was the

135 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 95–96; Van Ravesteyn, Onderzoekingen, 299–300; Maandblad Amstelodamum, 49 (1962), 86; 55 (1968), 93–94, 210–211. 136 GAA, FA Hasselaer [PA 292], inv. no. 141. Cf. I.H. v[an] E[eghen], “De aantekeningen van Jan Vogelesangh”, in: Maandblad Amstelodamum, 52 (1965), 6. 137 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 418. 138 This house was formerly called ‘De Meercat’; see J.G. Kam, Waar was dat huis in de Warmoesstraat? (Amsterdam, 1968), 336–338. See also ibid., no. 74 (‘De Gulden Ketel’), p. 75. 139 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 37–38; Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 186; Van Nierop, Beeldenstorm, 32–33, 37, 109. 140 As both Teuntgen and Machteld are said to be born in 1573, they may have been twin sisters, which would explain Machteld’s choice of Gijbelant as her executor in 1629. 141 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 93; Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 133. His

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second important trade of Haarlem, and the wealthy brewers were weighty men in town. Job was in fact guardian to his niece Anneken Harmensdr, the first wife of the painter Frans Hals. Actually, in 1666 Frans Hals was buried in the vault of brewer Claes Joppen Gijbelant, Job’s father and also the maternal grandfather of Hals’s first wife.142 No portrait of the Gijbelants by Hals is known, but in 1611 his colleague Frans de Grebber pictured Job Gijbelant as a distinguished magistrate, with his office in the background, on the wall a picture of Sodom and Gomorra as a token of his ethical concerns.143

Two Directors: Kieft and Van Walbeeck Quite evidently, Jan Jacobsz’s sons-in-law were prominent entrepreneurs and traders, loyal though certainly not rigid Protestants, and members of the traditional local merchant elite. Several of them were established in the “richest and most prominent” commercial artery of the town, the Warmoesstraat.144 Their families rose quickly into the Amsterdam patriciate. One of these sons-in-law warrants a closer look. Lijsbeth Huydecoper (1580–1601) was married to Pieter Jacobsz van Rijn (1579–1639). He was a rich clothier merchant established on ’t Water, angle Vijgendam, at the sign ‘In Sinter Claes’ [at present Dam no. 2–2a, where the old front-stone still stands out]. In 1602 he bought a house in the Warmoesstraat ‘In den Rooden Haen’ [no. 123], next to burgomaster Egbert Roelofsz.145 In 1631 his fortune was estimated at 120,000 guilders.146 Pieter’s father Jacob Egbertsz,

probate inventory of Dec. 29, 1638, in: Archiefdienst Kennemerland, NA Haarlem, inv. no. 171 (not. Jacques van Bosvelt), f. 109–117; cf. Pieter Biesboer, Collections of Paintings in Haarlem, 1572–1745 (Los Angeles: The Provenance Index of the Getty Research Institute, 2001). 142 M. Thierry de Bye Dolléman, “Nieuwe gegevens betreffende Anneke Hermansdr, de eerste echtgenote van Frans Hals”, in: Haarlem Jaarboek (1973), 249–257; Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz / The Hague: Sdu, 1990), 5, 50, 373. 143 Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Reproduced in: Slive, Frans Hals, 26, and: C. Willemijn Fock (ed.), Het Nederlandse interieur in beeld 1600–1900 (Zwolle, 2001), p. 49, fig. 16. 144 See the panegyrical description of this street in M. Fokkens, Beschrijvinge Der Wijdt-Vermaarde Koop-stadt Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Markus Willemsz Doornik, 1662), 92. 145 Kam, Waar was dat huis, 339–340; Van Ravesteyn, Onderzoekingen, 327. 146 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 269–270.

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a merchant (cramer) in the family shop on the Dam, was alderman in 1603 and councilor from 1605, but his bankruptcy in 1611 forced him to leave the city and his office. He went to the nearby town of Naarden, where he died in 1619. His father’s ill fate did not prevent Pieter Jacobsz from occupying a prominent place in the city. As a lieutenant of the crossbow company (voetboogschutterij ) of Captain Jacob Pietersz Hoochkamer, he is a central figure of the huge painting of that civic corporation made by Jacob Lyon in 1628.147 Pieter Jacobsz van Rijn married no less than five times. He lost his first wife Lijsbeth Huydecoper the year after their marriage, probably in childbirth. His second marriage, in 1603, with Saertje Pietersdr Boom, daughter of a prominent rope-maker and burgomaster, was equally short-lived, apparently for the same reason. In 1604, three years after his first marriage, he took his third wife Grietgen. She was the daughter of Elbert Lucasz [Helmer] (c. 1557–shortly before 1632), a rich merchant and entrepreneur, director of one of the first trading companies and a subscriber to shares for ƒ 12,000 of the VOC, of which he became a director too.148 At her death in 1628 she left ƒ 192,000 to her six children. Pieter Jacobsz’s fourth and fifth marriages deserve our special attention, since they are connected with Kieft’s kinship along other lines. The fourth marriage was concluded on February 15, 1632 with Weyntgen van Foreest (1599–1636), widow of Cornelis Barendsz van Neck (1587–1631). Cornelis Barendsz was a former commissioner of the Magellan Company on the island of Ternate in the East Indies, and later bailiff of the island of Texel off the coast of Holland. He was also a nephew of Jacob Cornelisz van Neck (1564–1638), the famous admiral who during his voyages of 1598–1603 laid the foundations of the Dutch commercial empire in the East Indies, and who was later a councilor and burgomaster of Amsterdam, and a deputy to the Council of State.149 Weyntgen van Foreest herself was a daughter of Jacob Dircksz van Foreest and Maritgen van Walbeeck. Shortly after Weyntgen’s death, Pieter Jacobsz married for the fifth time, on

147 At present exposed in the public gallery of the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. See Carasso-Kok, Schutters in Holland, 349, no. 175 (ill.). 148 Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 117; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 270. 149 J. Terpstra, Jacob van Neck, Amsterdams admiraal en regent (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen,1950), 113–114; NNBW, VIII, 1204; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 336.

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27 September 1637, with Weyntgen van Walbeeck (1599–after 1651), a first cousin to his former wife, daughter of her uncles Jacob van Walbeeck and Weyntgen van Foreest, and the widow of Evert Jacobsz Worst (c. 1590–1625), son of a ships’ captain, cattle trader and burgomaster, and himself a burgomaster in his native town of Kampen.150 Through these tightly interwoven alliances the kinship network appears as particularly dense, marriages were concluded with close neighbors, and investments were a family matter. In 1602, for instance, Dirck Jacobsz van Foreest, his son Jacob Dircksz, and his son-in-law Jacob van Walbeeck took together for ƒ 10,200 shares in the VOC.151 Jacob van Foreest and Maritgen van Walbeeck had a son Jacob, born in 1597 and merchant on the Montelbaensburgwal (or Oudeschans), the broad canal where the Kiefts lived too.152 His cousin Johan van Walbeeck was a child from the Van Walbeeck-Van Foreest union who lived also on the Oudeschans. Baptized in the Old Church on August 15, 1602, he was to become the last brother-in-law of Willem Kieft, who was born less than a fortnight after him. They must have been together in the Latin School and may have been close friends. His father Jacob Johansz van Walbeeck was born in 1568 at Deventer where grandfather Johan had been an alderman and a merchant, probably trading in stockfish on Norway (a Bergenvaarder).153 In 1602 Jacob took for ƒ 1,200 shares of the VOC.154 Johan Jr. matriculated at Leiden university on November 8, 1619 in philosophy and again on April 13, 1627 in mathematics, i.e. military engineering.155 He earned himself a great reputation as mathematician and WIC official. He served first as mathematician and the Admiral’s secretary on the Nassau fleet, 1623–1626. He was probably the author of the journal of this famous travel, which was

150 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 270, 337; K. Schilder, “Het geslacht Worst”, in: Gens nostra, 30 (1975), 106–137, here 109–110; The Hague, Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, Familiedossier Van Walbeeck. 151 Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 146–147. In 1585, Dirck van Foreest was taxed for ƒ 15; Van Dillen, Amsterdam in 1585, 116. 152 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 105. On July 1st, 1625 he married Sara, daughter of Michiel Cornelisz Blaeuw, merchant on the same canal. 153 GAA, Marriage registers, no. 405, f. 122v; cf. Elias, De vroedschap, I, 270; The Hague, Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, Familiedossier Walbeeck. I am preparing a study on this fascinating relative of Willem Kieft. 154 Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 146. 155 Album studiosorum Academia Lugduno-Batavae, MDLXXV–MDCCCLXXV (The Hague, 1875), 144, 199.

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published with some drawings by his hand.156 In 1627 he was the secretary of Dr Laurens Reael, a former liberal governor of the East Indies and then Ambassador to the Danish king, and was in 1628–29 again employed as mathematician by the VOC. In 1629–30 he was Vice-commander for the WIC of the ship Neptunus at Pernambuco in Brazil under Admiral Hendrick Loncq. On April 22, 1630 he was appointed political councilor and in December 1630 Admiral of the WIC fleet in Brazil.157 He was President of the Political Council of Brazil in 1632 and led the expedition to Rio Formoso (March 1632) but went back to patria on March 8, 1633. On May 4, 1634 the WIC sent him as Commander (opperdirecteur) of the squadron that was to conquer the island of Curaçao, which they achieved on July 29, 1634.158 He was then Director of Curaçao until 1638/39. It must have been at his return to patria in the spring of 1639 that he married the widowed Lijsbeth Kieft, his former neighbor. Together they went back to Brazil, where in January 1640 Johan was appointed assessor and secretary of the High Council, and advocaat

156 [ Johannes van Walbeeck], Iovrnael Vande Nassausche Vloot / Ofte Beschryvingh vande Voyagie om den gantschen Aerdt-kloot / ghedaen met elf Schepen: Onder ‘t beleyd vanden Admirael Iaques l’Hermite, ende Vice-Admirael Geen Huygen Schapenham, inde Iaeren 1623, 1624, 1625, en 1626 (Amsterdam: Hessel Gerritsz ande Iacob Pietersz Wachter, 1626). The 1631 second Dutch edition was reprinted by W. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, De reis om de wereld van de Nassausche vloot 1623–1626 [Werken Linschoten Vereeeniging, no. 65] (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). The Latin and German translations by Adolph Decker were published as early as 1628 by Th. de Bry. English edition: The Voyage of the Nassau Fleet round the globe, under the command of Jacques L’Hermite, ed. by John Harris, in: Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, vol. I (London, 1744). See: K. Zandvliet, “Johan Maurits and the Cartography of Dutch Brazil, the South-West Passage and Chile”, in: E. van den Boogaart, in collab. with H.R. Hoetink and P.J.P. Whitehead (eds.), A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil: Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604 –1679 (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 494–518, here 510–512. 157 On his work in Brazil, see: Johannes de Laet, Historie ofte Iaerlijck verhael van de verrichtinghen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie. Zedert haer begin, tot het eynde van ‘t jaer sesthien-hondert ses-en-dertich (Leiden, 1644); new ed. in 4 vol. by S.P. L’Honoré Naber [Werken Linschoten Vereeniging, nos. 34, 35, 37, 40] (The Hague, 1931–1937), II (1932), 112, 144, 157–158; III (1934), 83–89; IV (1937), 95–117, 301–311. 158 The documents related to this expedition have been published by J.H.J. Hamelberg, De Nederlanders op de Westindische eilanden (Amsterdam, 1901); Joh. Hartog, Curaçao. Van kolonie tot autonomie, I (tot 1816) [Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen, III, 1] (Aruba: D.J. de Wit, 1961), pp. 101–143. For the general context: Gedenkboek Nederland-Curaçao 1634–1934 (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1934); Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971), pp. 234, 237, 266–278; idem, A short history of the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname (The Hague/London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 22–29, 108.

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fiscaal. He was also an elder of the Reformed Church at Mauritsstadt (Recife).159 Between March 1641 and October 1646 he and his wife acted many times as godparents for children baptized at Mauritsstadt.160 Finally he resigned from office and went back to Amsterdam in or shortly after April 1647, when they settled again on the Oudeschans. His wife was buried on April 29, 1649, Johan followed her some months later to the grave, between 25 June and 17 October 1649. They had no children, but Johan left a considerable estate of about ƒ 150,000, including eight slaves in Brazil.161 Willem Kieft may have met him on Curaçao on his voyage to New Netherland on board the WIC ship ‘De Harinck’, in the last months of 1637 or the first of 1638. We know that his ship had wintered in the Bermudas which it left after the 4th of February 1638 for New Amsterdam where it arrived on 28 March.162

Trouble: status and religion In February 1595 Machteld Huydecoper, aged 21, had been the first of Jan Jacobsz’s children to marry.163 Since her husband Gerrit Willemsz was the son of a well-known brewer of old Amsterdam extraction, her choice socially anticipated those of her sisters in later years. Yet her father did not agree with this alliance. In the codicils added in 1608, 1612, and 1620 to his will of March 16, 1606,

159 See “Classicale Acta van Brazilië”, in: Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, XXIX (1873), 407; Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church, 125. 160 C.J. Wasch, “Een doopregister van de Hollanders in Brazilië”, in: Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad, 5 (1888), no. 5–10, pp. 172, 197–200, 225–228, 253–256, 282; 6 (1889), no. 1–4. 161 GAA, NA, no. 899 (not. Jac. van Zwieten), f. 551–554: division of the estate, Oct. 16, 1649. Johan’s elder brother Pouwels (1591–1647), a merchant trading on Riga, unmarried, made his will on 5 Febr. 1647, leaving his possessions to his sisters and his brother Johan; GAA, NA 585 (not. Laurens Lamberti). See further on Johan van Walbeeck: J.C. Mollema, Geschiedenis van Nederland ter zee, IV (Amsterdam: Joost van den Vondel, 1942), 267, 272, 274, 285–286, and biographical note E 32; Hannedea C. van Nederveen Meerkerk, Recife. The rise of a 17th-century trade city from a cultural-historical perspective (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989), 41. 162 Cf. De Vries, Korte Historiael, 231 (orig. ed., 149; NNN, 202); VRBM, 400; NYHM, I, 130–132. ‘De Harinck’ made this voyage several times. In the winter of 1636/37 it came also to Curaçao; G.J. van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, I (The Hague: Rijksuitgeverij, 1934), 118. 163 FA Huydecoper, no. 25: marriage contract of Febr. 26, 1595 (banns on Febr. 4).

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Jan Jacobsz stated repeatedly that Machteld had married against the wish of her father and mother. This entitled him to deny her the legal share of ƒ 3,000 out of her mother’s heritage. He refused therefore to hand over her legal portion, but conserved it for the grandchildren, who were to receive ƒ 1,000 each.164 Machteld would simply enjoy the usufruct of the sums she might receive on top of her legal portion (which sums themselves were however to be reserved again for her children), but—just like her younger sister Geertruyt, who had married the affluent soap-boiler Jacob Lucasz Rotgans165—she was not allowed to use them for the discharge of her husband’s debts. It is not quite clear what discontent may have motivated this long lasting refusal. Was it really Machteld’s decision to marry without the formal agreement of her parents? In fact, as the parents’ assent was compulsory by law, they would have been able to prevent the wedding. Or was her choice prejudicial to the family? Gerrit Willemsz [Kieft] appears to have been indebted frequently—but then, who was not in that time? Besides, seven years after his daughter Machteld’s marriage Jan Jacobsz associated with the same Gerrit Willemsz and his other son-in-law Job Claesz Gijbelant in his participation in the VOC: Jan Jacobsz took shares for ƒ 12,000, Job Gijbelant for ƒ 1,800, Gerrit Willemsz for ƒ 2,400.166 It is true that the Kieft family did not really pertain to the ruling patriciate, as Huydecoper himself did indeed since 1578—but neither did several others of Jan Jacobsz’ sons-in-law. Was there perhaps an incompatibilité d’humeurs? Was it the sequel of a faction feud? Or was it religious dissension? The rather orthodox Calvinist Huydecoper may have been reluctant to marry his daughters to this more liberal Kieft branch.167 In fact, Huydecoper’s children were known as liberal Protestants themselves. When in the summer of 1628 a petition in favor of a more tolerant attitude

164 GAA, NA, no. 13 (not. Sal. Henrix), f. 29 (April 3, 1608); no. 14 (id.), f. 22v (Oct. 11, 1612); no. 17 (id.), f. 1 (Sept. 9, 1620). 165 Jacob Lucasz Rotgans (1581–after 1629) was established ‘In de Blaeuwe Croon’ on ’t Water [Damrak]. 166 Van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister, 133, with an erroneous identification of Gerrit Willemsz. 167 However, Willem Kieft’s first cousin Willem IJsbrantsz Kieft (1595–1670), the future administrator of the Civic Orphanage and lieutenant of the civic guard, was in 1629 the Calvinistic candidate for the city council (vroedschap) and was later a deacon of the Reformed Church; Elias, Geschiedenis, 106.

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towards the Amsterdam Arminians was signed by 247 burghers, most of them probably Remonstrants themselves, we find among the subscribers not only Kieft’s young uncle Joan Huydecoper, but also a Johan Schaep who may have been Willem’s brother-in-law, and “Machtelt Jans, Weedu van Gerret Willemß Saliger”, i.e. Willem Kieft’s own mother.168 Indeed, Machteld Jansz’ name figures with her husband’s family name on the very first list of members of the Remonstrant Community of Amsterdam, 1631, as widow of Gerrit Willemsz Kieft.169 In 1633, prior to his widow’s remarriage, the inheritance of Machtelt’s son Jan Gerritsz was registered in the interest of his two minor daughters Maria and Machteld, who stood under the guardianship of their uncles Willem Kieft and Jan Schaep. The estate consisted of a house at the Middelburgwal, the central canal of Friedrichstadt on the Eider in the German duchy of Holstein, and a lot on the adjacent Marketplace, estimated at respectively 5,600 and 600 guilders, and a loan of 800 guilders to Pieter Engelgraven.170 This Pieter Nicolai Engelraeve (1585–?), a former minister at Boskoop (Holland), had been dismissed as a Remonstrant in 1619, became a minister and notary in Holstein, and finally converted to Catholicism about 1630.171 Just like their investments in Friedrichstadt, a trading town founded in 1621 by the Dutch Remonstrant refugees under the protection of the duke of Holstein, this contact may point at some involvement in the Arminian cause by Jan Gerritsz or his wife. It testifies to the liberal attitude of the Kieft family in religious matters, and may give some clues to the protection that Willem Kieft apparently enjoyed during many years.172

168 GAA, PA 612 (Archief Remonstrantse Gemeente), inv. no. 290 (petition to the States of Holland, after their decision of July 25, 1628), autograph. Joannes Tideman, De stichting der Remonstrantsche Broederschap, 1619–1634, II (Amsterdam: Y. Rogge, 1872), 434–436. Cf. E. Lievense-Pelser, “De eerste remonstranten in Amsterdam”, in: Holland, 9 (1977), 67–82. 169 GAA, PA 612, inv. no. 293, f. 97 (microfilms 971–972). 170 GAA, NA, no. 640 (not. Sibrant Cornelisz), f. 116 (Aug. 4, 1633): Willem Kieft was apparently present, since he approved the deed as guardian of the children. 171 NNBW, VII, 412. 172 On this foundation: Joannes Tideman, Frederikstad aan de Eider en hare Hollandsche gemeente (Rotterdam: Van der Meer & Verbruggen, 1852), 24; Ferdinand Pont, Friedrichstadt an der Eider (2 vol.; Friedrichstadt and Erlangen, 1913–1921); S.C. Sutter, Friedrichstadt an der Eider. An early experience in religious toleration (Ph.D. diss. Univ. of Chicago, 1982).

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The real cause of Jan Jacobsz’ displeasure, the one that must have motivated his change of mind shortly after 1606, must probably be sought in the growing gap in wealth and status between the two families, added to Gerrit Willemsz’s bad luck in some business affairs. Did he experience a misfortune comparable to that of Jacob Egbertsz van Rijn, the father of his brother-in-law Pieter Jacobsz, who became a bankrupt in 1611 after having upgraded his activities from local commerce to international trade? The Huydecopers were not yet at the zenith of their power, but they were unmistakably rising. The gap must have reached its acme when Willem Kieft sojourned in France and in New Netherland. His uncle Joan Huydecoper, who though being Machteld’s half-brother was virtually of the same age as his nephew Willem himself, became by then one of the most prominent and internationally styled entrepreneurs of Amsterdam. At the same time, kinship strategy may have favored Willem’s own rise into the supreme colonial office, in order to allow him a new start after his commercial misadventures, and to definitely restore his public honor.

A powerful uncle: Joan Huydecoper Sr. This Joan Huydecoper was born in 1599, four years after his halfsister Machteld’s marriage, and died on October 21, 1661. He is one of the main characters of the Dutch Golden Age and one of the foremost examples of economic success, social intelligence and political brokerage.173 In 1637 he bought from count Johan Albrecht of Solms the Lordship or manor of Thamen and Blokland, but the States of Utrecht refused to agree with the transaction and in 1639 he had to resign from his manorial rights. A year later however he took possession of the newly formed Lordship of Maarsseveen and Neerdijk, where he sojourned every now and then in his princely manor Goudesteyn, re-designed by the leading town architect Philip Vingboons. Among the burgher aristocracy of Amsterdam Joan Huydecoper inaugurated a new trend of country houses on the river Vecht, starting from his own huge property which he sold in por-

173

Elias, De vroedschap, I, 384–385.

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tions to the interested townspeople.174 Councilor [vroedschap] of Amsterdam from 1630 to his death in 1661, he was for the first time alderman in 1629, and was six times burgomaster between 1651 and 1660. He became a director of the VOC in 1634 (until 1650), councilor in the Admiralty in 1653, treasurer of the city in 1658, and was captain of a company of the civic guard since 1647. He was created a Swedish knight in 1637 and a knight in the French Order of Saint-Michel in 1650. Initially inclined towards the Arminian persuasion, he owed the conservation of his position to his well-timed political changes. In the early 1650s he moved from the orthodox to the liberal faction in the town council. As a member of the building committee of the new Town Hall, he made a major contribution to its rich decoration program, without forgetting to assure his own glory: Artus Quellinus, the main sculptor of the Town Hall, was commissioned to make his bust. His position reached its zenith in 1655 when, as presiding burgomaster of Amsterdam, he was on behalf of his city sent to Berlin as a godfather to the newborn son of the Brandenburg elector Frederick William, the ‘Grand elector’ who was married to a daughter of stadholder Frederick Henry, and again to London in 1660, at the coronation of King Charles II of England.175 He lived first in his father’s house on the Sint-Anthonis Breestraat, then on the Lauriersgracht. The construction of a superb town house, barely less than an urban palace, in 1639–1642 by his protégé Philip Vingboons on the Singel [no. 548] consecrated his social prestige.176 Huydecoper loved to play the grand seigneur, and acted as a patron for poets, painters and architects. On July 20, 1621 he married Elisabeth de Bisschop (1591–1622), and after her untimely death, probably in childbirth, he remarried on July 9, 1624 Maria Coymans (1603–1647). She was a daughter of the very wealthy merchantbanker Balthasar Coymans (1555–1634) and Isabeau de Pickere,

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The seignory remained family property until 1938 but the manor itself was entirely rebuilt in 1754. At present it serves as the town hall of Maarssen, but the Huydecoper family portraits, genealogical trees and busts are still on display inside the building. 175 J.F.L. de Balbian Verster, “Amsterdam en de Groote Keurvorst”, in: Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 16 (1918), 115–168. 176 Koen Ottenheym, Philips Vingboons (1607–1678), architect (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1989), 25–45. The house was destroyed by a bomber crash in April 1943, but the façade has been saved.

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immigrants from the Southern Netherlands but better known as members of the international trading elite of that time. In the Amsterdam tax record of 1631 Balthasar Coymans with an estimated property of ƒ 400,000 appears as the second largest fortune of the city. Joan Huydecoper’s own children married into the best families of the town and of international commerce and finance: Coymans again, Hinlopen, Wicquefort, Bartholotti.177 But Joan did not neglect his poorer relatives. His cash-book mentions several substantial loans to members of the Kieft branch.178 Kinship played an important role in the social life of early modern society. It was the basic guarantee against bad luck, and an essential asset in the battle for success and the survival strategy.179 Family members who could afford it lent money to their close relatives before forcing them to look for loans outside the family. On 7 December 1626 Machteld Jansdr remitted ƒ 4,800 on the bank account of her half-brother Joan Huydecoper, probably money she had lent after her husband’s death. In March 1642 Joan gave her another loan of 7,000 guilders at the rate of 5%. On two occasions Machteld’s son Jan borrowed money from his prosperous uncle. An entry in Joan’s cash-book on June 1, 1623 mentions a loan of ƒ 1,000 at the rate of 5% to Jan Gerretsen Kieft. A year later, on August 10, 1624, a bond of ƒ 6,000 at 6¼% was signed before the aldermen by ‘my cousin Jan Gerretsen Kieft’—in fact Joan’s nephew, but they were approximately of the same age. Two years later this bond appears among the property of Joan Huydecoper’s young daughter Isabel. The interest was paid regularly, but on May 30, 1631 ‘cousin’ Jannetgen Elberts, Jan’s widow, redeemed the bond: Jan Klock acquitted in her name the 6,000 guilders. On June 1st, 1633, Jannetgen Elberts, ‘our cousin’, received a sum of 200 guilders and 8 stivers, probably not as a loan but as a payment for the wine she used to sell. The list of the 197 guests who were formally invited to the three-day wedding-party of Joan’s daughter Maria Huydecoper and Jacob Hinlopen in November 1642 shows that all the surviving

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FA Huydecoper, no. 3 and 6: genealogies; cf. on this family strategy: Kooijmans, Vriendschap, passim. 178 FA Huydecoper, no. 30, f. 6, 8r, 9r, 12r, 13r, 14v, 30v, 34v. 179 Willem Frijhoff & Marijke Spies, 1650: Hard-won Unity. Transl. by Myra Heerspink Scholz (Assen: Van Gorcum / Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 215–217.

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Kiefts and their in-laws were present in a prominent place among the invitees.180 At Joan Sr.’s funeral in 1661, however, virtually no male descendants of Gerrit Willemsz Kieft were left to be included among the 367 invited guests.181

Settling the family inheritance Willem Kieft’s mother made at least two wills. They give us some idea of the family’s wealth. Her first will was made on October 23, 1629, after the death of her husband and of her eldest son Jan. She lived in the house ‘Het Wapen van Lübeck’ (The Arms of Lübeck) on the Oostersekaai, in the heart of the new trading quarter quite near the harbor in the river Y. Before any other clause she bequeathed to her two unmarried children Willem and Stijntgen 600 guilders each. Jan and Lijsbeth had already received the same sum at their marriage.182 Lijsbeth lived at that time in her mother’s house together with her husband Jan Schaep (whose children later inherited the house), as did apparently also stepdaughter Jannetgen Elberts, widowed shortly before, with her two children. Son Willem Kieft and son-in-law Jan Schaep were appointed as Machteld’s executors or in their place her brothers-in-law Job Claesz Gijbelant and Reyer Claesz. Willem Kieft’s mother died shortly after her son was drowned in the shipwreck of The Princess Amelia (September 27/28, 1647).183 On October 2, 1647, at half past seven, she made her last will before notary Jan Bosch.184 Four presumably surviving descendants are named as her heirs: her daughter Lijsbeth (who had just come back from Brazil), son Willem (thought to be in New Netherland), daughter Stijntgen, and grand-daughter Machteltgen (daughter of her deceased son Jan). A codicil of 6 October adds to these heirs Dirck Schaep, son of the first marriage of her daughter Lijsbeth, who had

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FA Huydecoper, no. 100. FA Huydecoper, no. 39–2: only Willem van Ceulen (ex Stijntgen Kieft), no. 17 on the list. 182 GAA, NA, no. 399 (not. Nic. Jacobs), f. 318. 183 On this shipwreck, see Frijhoff, Wegen, 794–801. 184 GAA, NA, no. 989 (not. Jan Bosch), f. 303, 305 (Oct. 2 and 6, 1647). Copy of the 2 October will, dated Dec. 23, 1656, and of the codicil, in FA Huydecoper, no. 26. 181

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no children from her second husband. Machteld’s son Willem and her nephew Jacob Servaes185 were appointed executors. In fact, Willem had already perished. Since he left neither wife nor child, he disappeared from that moment as an heir from the documents and his legal part was added to that of his siblings.186 Late in October his death became known in Holland; in January 1648 it was known in New Netherland. It was a public fact when after Machteld’s death her will had to be executed.187 On proposal of Coenraet van Ceulen, their brother-in-law Johan van Walbeeck was then named executor in Willem’s place on January 22, 1648.188 Though not really considerable, Machteld’s estate was certainly not negligible. A preliminary clause of Machteld’s will was intended to preserve the capital of her daughter Stijntgen and the inheritance of her children against the creditors of Stijntgen’s husband Coenraet van Ceulen, who seems to have been burdened with debts. His Russian ventures may have been too uncertain to secure the living of his many children. A second clause stipulated that the 1,400 guilders which Machteld had taken from her son Willem’s capital (probably his father’s inheritance) and given as a loan to brewer Willem Willemsz Amelant, now bankrupt, was to be restored to Willem Kieft prior to the division of the estate. Finally her grandson Dirck Schaep should receive, with the interest due, the 3,000 guilders sent by his mother, Machteld’s daughter Lijsbeth, at his

185 Jacob Servaes (1596–1664) was the son of her brother-in-law Hendrick Servaes, and just like his father a woolen draper, living on the Oude Turfmarkt; he married Margaretha Megen and got two sons who went to live at Utrecht: Johan as a (secular) canon of the cathedral, Jacob as a justice in the provincial court. Elias, De vroedschap, I, 96. FA Huydecoper, no. 3, f. 7, gives 1589–1663 as his living dates. 186 FA Huydecoper, no. 6, genealogies: Willem is stated ‘unmarried’. Actually, there still exists in the Swansea area of present-day Wales (UK) a Kieft family going back to one William Kieft, born c. 1715 in Westleigh, Devon. Family legend tells that they descend from the Dutch Governor Willem Kieft, who had chosen to land and settle there rather than face the Dutch government at home. I have not yet been able to check the origin of this intriguing story that has only recently come to my attention. For the genealogy of this William Kieft and his descendants, see http://www.geocities.com/pitkin_mary/Kieft/index.htm. 187 The first survivors arrived on 23 October, see Frijhoff, Wegen, 794–795; Letter of H. Doedens from Amsterdam, October 26, 1647, in “Origineele brieven van H. Doedens”, p. 487. GAA, NA, no. 1294 (not. H. Schaeff ), October 29, 1647, gives the first mention of the shipwreck in a series of notarials deeds by the survivors. 188 FA Huydecoper, no. 27: “alsoo de voorss. Willem Kiefft, comende uijt nieuw nederlandt in ‘t herwaerts keren, onderwege (helaes) is gebleven”.

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intention from Brazil. Apparently they had been lost in Coenraet’s financial troubles. On September 8, 1648 the real property of the estate was assigned by lot to the three surviving heirs.189 Johan van Walbeeck, as guardian of his stepson Dirck Schaep, received the house under the sign ‘Het Wapen van Riga’ (The Arms of Riga) on the “other side” of the Oudeschans, valued at ƒ 5,400 and occupied by Coenraet van Ceulen. The children, still minors, whom Coenraet had gotten from Stijntgen Kieft who probably died about that time, inherited a house in the Brugstraat [Oudebrugsteeg?] and two small houses on the island Vlooyenburg [the site of the present-day town hall, near the Waterlooplein], valued together at ƒ 6,700. The most important asset, the house called [The Arms of ] ‘Lübeck’ on the Oudeschans, was valued at ƒ 9,000, but mortgaged for ƒ 3,000. It went to Machteld’s granddaughter Machteltgen Jansdr Kieft. The paintings belonging to her grandmother’s estate were divided into three parts by notary Nicolaes de Vlieger and assigned by lot in the same way. Unfortunately, no specification of the pictures was made. On June 25, 1649 the division of the estate was brought before notary Joost Michielsz Wissinck, but the death of Johan van Walbeeck delayed the final settlement. Dirck Schaep, Johan’s stepson out of Lijsbeth’s first marriage, signed the documents in his place on October 17, 1649.190

Economic and social capital The 1631 assessment list for the 0.5% taxation of the capital of all those inhabitants of Amsterdam who possessed more than one thousand guilders enables us to get a fair idea of the economic position of the Kiefts after the town’s tremendous growth since the taxation of 1585.191 In fact, the list was made up as early as 1628, which

189 FA Huydecoper, no. 27. The original registers of the notaries De Vlieger and Wissinck are lost. 190 FA Huydecoper, no. 27: deed of June 25, 1649, signed Oct. 17, 1649 (not. Joost Michielsz Wissinck). 191 J.G. Frederiks & P.J. Frederiks, Kohier van den tweehonderdsten penning voor Amsterdam en onderhorige plaatsen over 1631 (Amsterdam: Ten Brink & De Vries, 1890), 2, 11, 20, 30, 38, 69–70. Cf. table 5.4 in Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 227–231.

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explains why the widow Machteld Huydecoper is listed together with her son Jan Gerritsz who actually died in August 1628 but had apparently been in charge of the firm on the Oostersekaai. Machteld and her son were taxed together for a capital of ƒ 20,000, but her son-in-law Jan Schaep, next to her name on the list, must have lived under the same roof. Since he was taxed for ƒ 6,000, the family capital may be put at ƒ 26,000. Jan IJsbrantsz Kieft, their cousin on the Herengracht, was equally assessed for ƒ 20,000. The neighboring widow Van Walbeeck on the Oudeschans, whose son was to join the family soon, is listed for the same sum, the Van Foreest relatives next door ( Jacob’s widow and Jacob Junior) for ƒ 33,000. Since 1585, this branch of the Kiefts had apparently been forced to make a step backward in town. Economically, they did not pertain any more to the local elite but appear as a family of medium wealth, on the lower level of the group of 269 merchants who disposed of a capital between 20,000 and 50,000 guilders, well under the 125 inhabitants assessed up to 100,000 guilders, and far from the top of 57 merchants and bankers possessing up to 500,000 guilders capital. Kiliaen van Rensselaer, for instance, was taxed for ƒ 100,000, but he was still in his mid-career. Willem Kieft himself is not named on the list: he must have dwelled abroad in those years. His maternal uncle, the clothier merchant Hendrick Servaes, was taxed for ƒ 36,000. His younger uncle Joan Huydecoper, his second cousins and several other members of his kin scored however decidedly higher. Huydecoper, still only 29 years old, was assessed for ƒ 75,000, plus ƒ 20,000 for his young daughter as heir to her grandfather. Reynier Adriaensz Pauw, the richest of this kinship network, possessed a capital of ƒ 200,000, Willem Pietersz van Ruytenburch and his wife ƒ 94,000, but no member of the kin could rival truly international merchants and bankers like Balthasar Coymans—Joan Huydecoper’s father-in-law—or Guillelmo Bartholotti (both ƒ 400,000), or the Poppen Heirs ( ƒ 500,000). From the first range, still theirs in 1585, the Kiefts had definitely receded to a second level position in the town’s economy. The name Pauw refers to a last element of the kinship pattern that must be analysed briefly. By his great-grandparents Willem Kieft was twice—along the Kieft and the Ruytenburch lines—a second cousin to the ambitious and versatile politician Adriaen Pauw, Lord of Heemstede (1585–1653). This mighty opponent of stadholder Frederick Henry and one of the major framers of the Peace of

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Westphalia (1648), was pensionary of Amsterdam between 1611 and 1627 and grand pensionary of the province of Holland from 1631 until his disguised disgrace in 1636, when the stadholder sent him on a diplomatic mission to Paris. He came back in office from 1651 to his death.192 He was by then certainly the mightiest man in the Dutch Republic. The grand pensionary’s grandfather Adriaen Pauw (1516–1578), a well-to-do corn merchant and soap-boiler, and an agent of the king of Denmark at Amsterdam, was born at Gouda where his father was an apothecary and alderman. His family however had formerly pertained to the Amsterdam patriciate and he soon returned to Amsterdam, where he was a prominent leader of the Calvinist faction. He had to fly to Emden in 1568, and returned to Amsterdam ten years later, after the Alteration, to become councilor and alderman, but died almost immediately.193 His son Jacob (1558–1620) moved as a brewer to Delft, where he became burgomaster and founded the still existing ennobled branch of the family. A younger son Reynier (1564–1636) took over his corn trade at Amsterdam. This Reynier, a mighty merchant, councilor and many times burgomaster of Amsterdam, was one of the creators of the ‘Compagnie van Verre’, which started the East India trade before the foundation of the VOC.194 Quite naturally he became a director of the VOC and was one of the founders of the WIC. Together with his descendants Reynier Adriaensz was ennobled by the English king James I on February 12, 1612, and by the French king Louis XIII in February 1622. In fact, Reynier Pauw was a fierce Calvinist who headed since 1611 the Counter-Remonstrant, orthodox faction of the town council. He was also a strong partisan of stadholder Maurice of Orange, whom he assisted in 1618 at the deposal of the ‘libertine’ town councilors. He was the virtual master of Amsterdam until his removal from the office of burgomaster at the election of February 1st, 1622, and, after a short comeback with an attempt to seize the power in town, his final eviction from office in 1628.195 192 NNBW, IX, 714–717; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 192–193; A. de Fouw, Onbekende raadpensionarissen (The Hague: Daamen, 1946); S. Groenveld, “Adriaen Pauw (1585– 1653), een pragmatisch Hollands staatsman”, in: Spiegel historiael, 20 (1985), 432–439; idem, “Factiën”; Frijhoff & Spies, 1650: Bevochten eendracht, 103–104. 193 H.J. Koenen, Adriaan Pauw. Eene bijdrage tot de kerk- en handelsgeschiedenis der zestiende eeuw (Amsterdam: D. Groebe, 1842). 194 Lesger, Handel, 168–177. 195 NNBW, IX, 769 –776; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 185–186; J.G. van Dillen,

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Power and self-consciousness Willem Kieft’s kinship network shows therefore that he wasn’t at all the man from nowhere whom his enemies have depicted so nastily. From the paternal side he pertained to the most prominent merchant nucleus of old Amsterdam and the maternal links bind him to the foremost families of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Though not very rich himself, his social capital was considerable. His father’s first cousin Reynier Pauw was until far into the 1620s the most powerful man in the city. Willem’s own second cousins were the former grand pensionary (the virtual prime minister of the Republic) and his brother Michiel (1590–1640), a director of the WIC from its beginning to 1636 and founder of the patroonship Pavonia, which he sold to the WIC in 1637, the year of Kieft’s appointment.196 In fact, during Willem Kieft’s lifetime, virtually all the members of his kinship network reach their social zenith. They obtain the highest offices in city and state, buy a manor or a seigniory, build town and country-houses, get a knighthood from a foreign prince, and adopt a truly aristocratic lifestyle. No wonder that Willem Kieft himself felt like an aristocrat, far beyond the common people of New Netherland, those peasants, craftsmen and small traders who never really pertained to his social and mental world. He claimed the respect ordinarily due to a Dutch regent, as he thought himself to be. A glimpse of the tension he must have experienced between his public self-presentation as a regent and his private personality is given in Van der Donck’s remark about the Director’s “own ungovernable passions, which showed themselves principally in private”.197 When on Christmas 1637 Kiliaen van Rensselaer addresses Kieft for the first time as Director, he calls him ‘Heer Commandeur’, and there is every reason to believe that he did not only pay him the respect due to a superior official, but

“Documenten betreffende de politieke en kerkelijke twisten te Amsterdam (1614–1630), in: Bijdragen en mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 59 (1938), 191–249. See also: H.A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1972), 75–92. 196 NNBW, IX, 768–769; H.J. Koenen, Pavonia, eene bijdrage tot de kennis der voormalige Nederlandsche koloniën (Arnhem, 1846), also in: Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidkunde, 5 (1847), 114–132. 197 Van der Donck, Vertoogh (NNN, 334).

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recognized in Kieft an authentic patrician, a class higher than Rensselaer himself, notwithstanding his better fortune.198 Kieft’s attitude towards men who dared to contest his supreme authority is revealing. There is no reason to suspect the testimony of the author of Breeden-Raedt who in 1649 contended that Kieft was so proud of the commission he had got from the WIC directors, the States General and the prince stadholder, that he considered himself, together with his councilor La Montagne, invested with a more sovereign and absolute power than his own superiors in patria, similar to that of the prince himself, and he was supported in this opinion by others in the colony.199 As Van der Donck observed, Kieft must have expected that his New Netherland administration would establish his name in history.200 He was extremely sensitive about any infringement of his territorial rights and authority by the neighboring English, Swedes and French, and was continuously at pains to secure the boundaries of his colony.201 Since Kieft considered himself as a delegate sovereign he permitted not a single form of appeal from his judgments to the courts in patria, the States General, or the authorities of the Reformed Church.202 In fact, he considered his own court as the supreme place of appeal from the local courts in his territory, those of the patroonships, and those of the newly founded villages.203 On the authority of his opponents, Kieft has been credited with high-handedness and despotism. Yet, reading the sources well, it appears clearly that there was nothing arbitrary in his actions against the commonalty.204 He simply was

198 VRBM, 392; afterwards Van Rensselaer used the correct title of ‘directeur’, VRBM, 456. 199 See for example Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 43 (NNN, 324); secretary Van Tienhovens answer in NNN, 361. Kieft’s commission has however not been found in the registers of the States General. 200 Ibid., 44 (NNN, 325). 201 Cf. Winthrop, The History of New England, I, 360; II, 7, 116–117, 385; Van der Donck, Vertoogh (NNN, 311–317); De Vries, Korte Historiael, 233 (orig. ed., 150). 202 Breeden-Raedt, f. D1v; examples ibid., f. D1v–D2r (Broad Advice, 159–160) and in Van der Donck, Vertoogh (NNN, 332–337): proceedings against the English minister Francis Doughty and the merchant Arnold van Hardenberg, both having dared to appeal from Kieft’s sentences. Stuyvesant would however adopt the same attitude. 203 O’Callaghan, History, I, 394–395 (according to his secretary Cornelis van Tienhoven). For examples of appeal to the Director’s court: NYHM, IV, 110 ( June 6, 1641, the local courts of the English villages), 241 (Oct. 8, 1644, the court of Rensselaerswyck); VRBM, 474–477, 487, 659. 204 Van der Donck, by accusing Kieft to have used the produce of the excises

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not prepared to share his sovereign power with them. This concept of sovereign power must indeed have been crucial to Willem Kieft, notwithstanding his unconditional faithfulness towards the directors of the WIC, his overlords. Nevertheless, this concept is revealing for his Republican state of mind, and his adherence to the Republican constitution of the Dutch Republic, in which sovereignty was not vested in a prince, but was considered to repose in the local governments, in the regent colleges with which Kieft’s family was closely related and whose ideology he basically shared. The symbiosis between fort and church was under Kieft’s rule not of a confessional nature but much more Erastian, keeping the state in control and considering public order as the supreme duty of a regent. Kieft was a man of order indeed, stern, and loyal to the Company. But his order was civic, not theocratic. Commercial benefit and public interest guided his policy, not religion. Kieft was distrustful of the church’s or the minister’s political ambitions, and equally distrustful of popular emotions, as expressed in drinking, rioting, street violence, democratic aspirations, or Orangist sympathies. His policy in religious matters reflects a typical Dutch regent’s concern to keep the church subservient to the state. Kieft violently rejects Dominie Bogardus’s criticism of his policy, and argues that he has the power to act as he actually does: he “will justify himself in the right place, a matter that is not of your [the minister’s] concern”.205 Unsurprisingly Kieft preferred the construction of a new inn for visiting merchants, the so-called Stadthuys (similar to the City Inn on the Amsterdam harbor), to a new church, and when in 1642 he finally built this church, under the pressure of the church party headed by the orthodox diehard captain David de Vries, it was within the fort, under Kieft’s close and everyday supervision, and with an inscription upon it which seemed to extol the Director’s merits.206 Besides, marriages were already celebrated in the Director’s office, not in the church—just like the non-Reformed citizens of old Amsterdam married before the aldermen in the Town Hall.207 Kieft for the WIC, not for the commonalty, constructs an opposition between the WIC and the colony’s population which in Kieft’s eyes must have been dangerous for the existence of the colony itself (NNN, 327–329). 205 Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk, II, p. XXIV. 206 De Vries, Korte Historiael, 249–250 (orig. ed., 163–164); Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 28–29 (NNN, 325–326). 207 GAA, NA, no. 1287 (not. Hendrick Schaef ), f. 9v ( Jan. 19, 1643).

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was certainly more a moral than a religious man, Reformed by family tradition, but educated by his mother as a liberal Protestant, not as a stern Calvinist, and not at all interested in theological casuistry. After his break with minister Bogardus, in January 1645, he avoided attending the weekly church service and Holy Communion for the next two and a half years.208 Church attendance should not encroach upon his political duties. His only intellectual partner, the one he took immediately into the political council of the colony, was the learned physician and Huguenot Dr. Jean Mousnier de La Montagne (c. 1595–c. 1670), born in Saintes in Western France, in the region Willem Kieft had traded with.209 Academically trained at Leiden University, La Montagne was a man of similar interests, a moderate Reformed believer like Kieft, able to converse on his level, and in French. Socially his equal, he would never let the Director down. Willem’s own intellectual interests went towards culture; he was respected for his culture by one of the very few other intellectuals of the colony, Adriaen van der Donck. But it was a regent’s European culture: Kieft did not have the social intelligence to deal with native cultural complexions. For him New Netherland was simply an extension of the fatherland, where he was to return in due time.

Kieft’s background These data permit us to draw a clearer picture of Willem Kieft’s social, cultural and religious background. It is that of a well-educated, medium prosperous merchant family of old Amsterdam extraction, related to the old clans of the town, and moderately devoted to the Reformed creed, but rather to its liberal variant, not to truly rigorous Calvinism. None of the Kiefts were directly involved in the 1566–67 troubles of beginning Calvinism at Amsterdam.210 Starting with Willem’s own mother, many of their clan were of Arminian persuasion, and several sons-in-law, such as Raep, Vinck and Van

208 Breeden-Raedt, f. C4v (Broad Advice, 156). See for the quarrel between Kieft and Bogardus: Frijhoff, Wegen, 699–762. 209 NYHM, I, 1 (April 8, 1638); IV, 3. 210 Henk van Nierop, Beeldenstorm en burgerlijk verzet in Amsterdam 1566–1567 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1978).

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Neck, were said to be waggelmussen, waddlers who benefited from Calvinism without being orthodox believers themselves.211 Most of them preferred the prestigious burgher office of a churchwarden to the ecclesiastical function of a deacon or elder.212 Apparently their Protestantism was more civic than dogmatic. They were brewers and wholesale merchants who subsequently were engaged in trade with other countries of Europe. They may have dreamed of having their share in the truly international trade, but their mentality was that of the established local bourgeoisie. They failed to expand their ambitions and remained halfway. Though the family was more interested in trade than in intellectual life, they were certainly not uncultivated. Their culture was however a broad, humanistic culture, shared by the large majority of the early seventeen-century burghers of Holland. It was marked by a basically positive attitude towards the future of society, with some neo-Stoic flavor in the face of adversity. Though related to powerful regents and burgher aristocrats they were not yet considered patricians themselves. There is reason to believe that the younger branch of the Kieft family, to which Willem pertained, performed less well socially than the older branch, which achieved some alliances with the city’s patriciate. Several relatives of the older branch became officers of the civic guard, those prominent burghers who considered themselves as the fine fleur of the citizenry and expressed their status symbolically in huge group paintings. The most famous of these is Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642), a picture of the company of captain Frans Banning Cocq.213 The lieutenant of this company, represented next to the captain, was Willem van Ruytenburch (1600–1652), lord of the town and manor of Vlaardingen and Vlaardingerambacht, councilor of Amsterdam since 1639, and alderman in 1641.214 He was the youngest

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Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zijne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen [etc.], I (Amsterdam: Isaac Tirion, 1760 [reprint Alphen aan de Rijn: Repro-Holland, 1971]), 492–493, after a 1626 poem, published in J. van Lennep (ed.) De Werken van Vondel, II (Amsterdam: Binger, 1856), 593–598; Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam, I, 298. 212 Egbert Pietersz Vinck became 1578 churchwarden of the New Church, Claes Boelensz 1579 and Lucas Jacobsz Rotgans 1629 of the Old Church, Cornelis IJsbrantsz Kieft 1631 of the Westerkerk (according to the lists in Wagenaar, Amsterdam, III, boek 2, pp. 117, 134). 213 On the civic guard, see Paul Knevel, Burgers in het geweer. De schutterijen in Holland, 1550–1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994). 214 S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, “Van Ruytenburch: een Amsterdams geslacht van

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son of Pieter Gerritsz Cruydenier (1562–1627), a rich grocer-apothecary (i.e. a wholesale merchant in precious and exotic herbs) in the house ‘Ruytenburch’ on the Warmoesstraat no. 198 [angle Vijgendam], which suggested to him his new family name Van Ruytenburch. Pieter Gerritsz had been a co-founder of the silver Company of Rio de La Plata in June 1598, together with his cousin, the Amsterdam merchant Laurens Bicker, who acted as admiral of the fleet commissioned by the States General. In 1611 he had bought from the prince de Ligne, count of Aremberg, for 26,000 guilders the Vlaardingen manor to which he added in 1615 the manor Ter Horst.215 This typical social climber was a second cousin to Willem Kieft.216 In 1650, at least seven of the 270 officers commanding the 54 companies of the Amsterdam civic guard belonged to Willem Kieft’s close kinship. His uncle Joan Huydecoper Sr. and his first cousin Jacob Servaes were captains of a company, highly valued (and expensive) charges that were considered as a decisive step towards the burgomaster’s office, as happened indeed to Joan Huydecoper in 1651. The brothers Cornelis, Floris and Willem IJsbrantsz Kieft (first cousins of the deceased Director of New Netherland) were lieutenants, Huybert Kieft and Joan Huydecoper Jr. ensigns.217 Socially, lieutenants at Amsterdam were of a slightly lower origin than captains; ensigns were traditionally unmarried young men.218 The elder and finally wealthier branch, to which these officers Kieft pertained, did not however reach the Amsterdam council or the major town offices during Willem’s lifetime, although in 1640 his cousin Willem IJsbrantsz Kieft (1595–1670) was appointed regent of the Civic Orphanage, a function which normally served as a final step to the council.219 True

kruideniers met adellijke pretenties”, in: Matthijs A. Struijs (ed.), Vlaardingen en Vlaardinger-Ambacht, een heerlijkheid (Vlaardingen, 1990), 9–13. 215 Elias, De vroedschap, I, 429–430; Lesger, Handel, 146–147; J.W. IJzerman (ed.), Journael van de reis naar Zuid-Amerika (1598–1601) door Hendrik Ottsen [Werken LinschotenVereeniging, no. 16] (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), p. XII. 216 Carasso-Kok & Lévy-van Halm, Schutters in Holland, 208; Elias, De vroedschap, I, 425; Kam, Waar was dat huis, no. 198, p. 198–200. 217 The 1650 list of officers is reproduced on the last pages of: Amsterdams Iournael. Vervatende kortelijk van dag tot dag, Alles wat gepasseert is van den 30 Julij tot den 4 Augusti des Jaers 1650 (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1650 [printed in Holland]). 218 Knevel, Burgers, 112–155. 219 Anne E.C. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age. Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana & Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 89–114 (Kieft: 105).

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‘regents’, i.e. the burgomasters, councilors, aldermen, commissioners, treasurers, company directors, churchwardens, orphan and insurance masters of Amsterdam, are found among their next-of-kin, the Ruytenburch, Pauw, Huydecoper, Raep, Rotgans, and Servaes families, not among the Kiefts themselves.220 In 1648, at the celebration of the Peace of Westphalia, Govert Flinck painted Joan Huydecoper’s proud company. Five years later this Joan Huydecoper Sr. rose to the prestigious position of an administrator (overman) of the crossbow company (voetbooggilde) and its building, the St. George’s Doelen or Voetboogdoelen. In 1656, Bartholomeus van der Helst painted him again, together with his three fellow administrators.221 When Maritgen IJsbrantsdr [Kieft], the Director’s first cousin, died in 1661, she left a typical middle class estate. Besides her furniture, paintings, silverware, and books, her possessions included an orchard, estate and farm house under the jurisdiction of Velsen, between Brederode castle and the village of Santpoort, one twelfth of the house ‘Den Hamburg’, her grandfather’s inn on the Warmoesstraat [no. 50] at Amsterdam, a patent on her father’s brewery ‘Het Witte Hart’ worth ƒ 1,125, and finally a number of bonds and other securities—nothing spectacular, just an honest heritage.222 The international orientation of the family remained functional; it was clearly not a matter of ambition. With the exception of some shares in the VOC, for which Gerrit Willemsz must have benefited from the clairvoyance of his father-in-law Huydecoper, no huge investments in the international trading companies are known. No close member of the family has been found among the first investors of the WIC in 1622–26: not Willem Kieft himself, not his parents (his mother was widowed during the year 1622) nor his brother Jan, his sisters, or his brothers-in-law.223 Although the Kieft family did not manage to put itself on the power level achieved by their relatives Pauw or Huydecoper, they remained close to the center of decision in the Dutch metropolis. Whenever necessary, ties of kinship could

220 See the lists in O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1663). 221 Carasso-Kok & Lévy-van Halm, Schutters in Holland, 274–275, no. 89. 222 GAA, FA Heshuysen (toegangsnr. 225), no. 486: division of the estate of Maritge IJsbrants Kieft, 1661. 223 National Archive (The Hague), Oude WIC, inv. no. 18*: Groot Capitaell Boeck van Actien.

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compensate for an economic gap between relatives. The Kiefts were therefore able to benefit from the network of power relations that prevailed in Amsterdam during the first half of the seventeenth century, before the end of the Eighty Years War. Willem Kieft’s appointment as Director of New Netherland, unexpected as it may seem in our eyes and scandalous in those of his competitors, was certainly its perfectly logical outcome.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON? THE EARLY YEARS OF PETRUS STUYVESANT1 Jaap Jacobs

As an historiographical category the biography poses problems. Not the least of these is the inclination of many biographers to explain later events in the life of their protagonist, including his or her character, by examining family background, education and early life. It is tempting to do so, of course, especially as the necessarily narrative argumentation of a biography lends itself to such an approach. But it can easily lead to simplifying reductionism or even determinism. Applying this principle to Petrus Stuyvesant, for instance, one would say that because he was the son of a Calvinist minister, he could not become anything but a staunch and perhaps even zealous Calvinist. The magnifying glass of the biographer, by focusing on an individual rather than a group, might cloud the insight that many sons of many Calvinist ministers did not become staunch Calvinists. Some became libertines. Then, if that happened to be the case with his protagonist, the biographer could easily change his tune, explaining the course of his protagonist’s life by his desire to distance himself from his background and especially from his father, which would be a reasonable possibility in the twentieth century, but is far less likely an outcome in the seventeenth century. Without taking recourse to developmental psychology, it is obvious that some kind of connection between early years and later life exists. In the battle between individual choice and predisposition, it is often difficult to decide which is paramount. In the case of Petrus Stuyvesant, evidence of his religiosity is clear. Both his policies and 1 This essay is based on the first chapter of the Stuyvesant biography I am currently writing. The English version was prepared in February and March 2004 during a Barbara S. Mosbacher Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence RI, for which I am very grateful. The help of Goffe Jensma, who provided me with his Stuyvesant dossier containing many photocopies of original documents, has been very important. I thank the following people for commenting on the English version: Barry Sell, James Muldoon, Dennis Landis, Ineke Schippers, Aglaia Cornelisse, and Firth Fabend. I dedicate this essay to my father: Harry Jacobs.

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many documents, including the correspondence with his superiors, the directors in Amsterdam, as well as the assessment of the New Amsterdam ministers who in 1661 wrote to the Amsterdam classis that Stuyvesant was “a great liefhebber [devotee] and advocate of the true reformed religion”,2 are sufficient proof of this for the time that he was in office. After 1664, out of office, he served as an elder in the New York Dutch Reformed Church for a number a years. So we can conclude that he was a devoted Calvinist. But how did he turn out that way and what did it mean to him? Unlike another seventeenth-century Dutchman, Arnoldus Buchelius, Stuyvesant has left us no autobiography or other personal documents that outline his religious development.3 Additionally, information on his early years is scarce and details about them have often been taken out of context and misinterpreted. What I will try to do is to provide an overview of what evidence exists, including some biographical information on his father, and investigate similarities and differences between father and son. Finally, I will return to the question in the title of this essay: Like father, like son?

Balthasar Petrus Stuyvesant was born between February 1611 and April 1612, most likely in the small hamlet of Peperga in the province of Friesland. His father was Balthasar Johannesz., possibly the son of a tavern keeper in Dokkum. Balthasar entered the Frisian university at Franeker in 1605, and as the average age for going to university was between seventeen and twenty years, we may presume he was born around 1588.4

2 Gemeentearchief (hereafter abbreviated as GA) Amsterdam, archive of the Amsterdam classis (379), inv. no. 157, p. 432 (15 December 1661; Edward T. Corwin (trans. and ed.), Ecclesiastical Records. State of New York. 7 vols. Albany: James B. Lyon, state printer, 1901–1916, 1:515). 3 Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic. The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999; Judith Pollmann, Een andere weg naar God. De reformatie van Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641). Amsterdam: Samenwerkende Uitgeverijen Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2000. 4 J.H.P. Kemperink, “Pieter Stuyvesant. Waar en wanneer werd hij geboren?”. In: De Navorscher. Nederlands Archief voor Genealogie en Heraldiek 98–3 (1959), 49–59; Goffe Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”. In: De Vrije Fries, jaarboek uitgegeven door het Fries genootschap van Geschied-, Oudheid- en Taalkunde en de Fryske Akademy

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Balthasar is mentioned for the first time in the Frisian archives in 1602, when a burgher of Leeuwarden, the capital of this northerly Dutch province, posted the required bail for a subsidy from the States of Friesland that would allow Balthasar to start his training for the ministry. The burgher was Willem Laurens, but so far no family connection between Laurens and the Stuyvesants has been established. The bail procedure was regular and even mandatory from April 1602 onwards. Many such bail bonds exist, and they do not pertain only to students with less affluent parents, which of course included tavern keepers. Several Frisian ministers posted bail for their sons or for other family members. Franciscus Avercampius, minister in Ee near Dokkum, did so for his son Henricus, and Jacobus Rodolphi, minister at Oldebercoop, was surety for his son Fabio Jacobi. Ministers from other provinces also took advantage of the availability of student subsidies in Friesland. An example is the Leiden minister Festus Hommius, who helped out aspiring student Sixtus Hommius. The subsidy put a condition upon Balthasar “in the exercise of his study not to move into any other faculty than that of the Holy Scripture”. Another restriction also applied: he had to serve the church of Friesland forever, in preference to all other provinces.5 These conditions make clear that the States of Friesland intended that the subsidies stimulate the university education of suitable candidates for the ministry and thus improve their overall quality. After the Reformation several new ministers had been called in Friesland, but their theological knowledge was not always up to par, resulting in many disconcerting diversions from orthodoxy.6 The system of subsidies actually predated the founding of the Franeker university and it was not confined to the university level. Pupils who wished to attend Latin schools throughout Friesland were also eligible. Regardless of the institution, they were called alumni, literally ‘foster-children’. Their number and the level of the support they received varied over time. Several ordinances of the university

74 (1994), 21–41, esp. 23 and 31, n. 6; J.J. Kalma, Een kerk onder toezicht. Friese synodeverslagen 1621–1650. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1987, 417. 5 Tresoar (the provincial archive in Leeuwarden formerly known as Rijksarchief Friesland), archive States of Friesland, inv. no. 3104, sub dato 18 November 1602; Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyveant”, 24 and 32, n. 11. 6 W. Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk. Een studie over het gereformeerd protestantisme in Friesland, 1580–1650. Hilversum: Verloren, 1999, chapter 3.

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during the first half of the seventeenth century make clear that the alumni were rigorously selected and were guided with a firm hand. To gain admission to the university a diploma from a Latin school was required and the candidate had to pass a preliminary exam. The subject of study of course had to be theology. If the student diverged from his subject, the sureties had to reimburse the subsidies already received.7 So, Balthasar Stuyvesant became a student in theology at the university at Franeker. If his father was indeed a tavern keeper, then getting a university degree, which meant a move up the social ladder, was a sure sign of personal ambition. In order to be eligible for a subsidy, Balthasar had to have a good knowledge of Greek and Latin, which he presumably acquired at the Latin school of Dokkum. The university at Franeker had been founded by the States of Friesland in 1585 with the aim of educating new ministers for the Calvinist Reformed Church in its territory. Acquiring its own university was a sign of prestige for any independent state, which all Dutch provinces in essence were.8 Over the gate of the university a motto, flanked by the arms of Friesland, the stadtholder and the city of Franeker, was chiseled into stone: “Christo et Ecclesiæ” [for Christ and the Church]. It was a battle cry, heralding the militant brand of Calvinism that the founders hoped would spread throughout Friesland. In comparison with the university of Leiden, founded ten years earlier, Franeker was a strict Calvinist institution. The Franeker professors of theology were more orthodox than those at Leiden, and the influence of Counter-Remonstrantism with its emphasis on predestination was greater.9

7 J.J. Kalma, “’s Lands voedsterlingen en de Friese kerk. Het alumniaat in Friesland, studiebeurzen voor predikanten in spe”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 147–160, esp. 150–151; A.P. van Nienes et al., De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, 1585–1812. Leeuwarden: Rijksarchief Friesland, 1985, 69–70. 8 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 33, n. 21; R.E.O. Ekkart, Franeker professorenportretten. Iconografie van de professoren aan de academie en het rijksathenaeum te Franeker, 1585–1843. Franeker: Wever, 1977, 75; G.Th. Jensma, “Inleiding”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 11–39; Willem Otterspeer, Groepsportret met dame. Het bolwerk van de vrijheid. De Leidse universiteit 1575–1672. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2000, 50. 9 Van Nienes, De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, introduction, 66; P. Karstkarel

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Graduating from Latin school and acquiring a subsidy fulfilled the basic conditions to proceed to university. On the 22nd of May 1605 Balthasar enrolled at Franeker.10 Coming from Dokkum, he was an exception, for during the two centuries of its existence, the university of Franeker drew only a few students from Dokkum.11 The date of his enrollment did not imply that Balthasar started his university training in May 1605.12 An explanation for the timing of his enrollment is that it signified his intention to formally pass his disputatio [disputation]. In the early years of the seventeenth century it was not unusual to attend classes at university for a while and enroll later. The regular classes were the lectio, a form of lecture, and the privatissimum, during which the professor discussed the material with only a few students, as in a tutorial system. Later in the curriculum the disputation took place: a public debate over a number of theses. The student defended the theses against other students, in a session presided over by a professor. The Franeker university scheduled two disputations per month, which were tightly regulated. The exchange of ideas had to proceed in an orderly fashion, without quarrels. The theses were usually printed in a run of 100 to 150, as the university by-laws required their extensive dissemination. Copies had to be sent, for instance, to all who had ever obtained their doctorate at Franeker. Prior to sending them to the printer, the theses had to be approved by the presiding professor.13

and R. Terpstra, “Van Jeruzalem tot het Friese Athene: het kruisherenklooster en de academiegebouwen te Franeker”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra, (eds.) Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 206–222; S. Zijlstra, “De universiteiten van Leiden en Franeker”. In: Ph. Breuker and A. Janse (eds.), Negen eeuwen FrieslandHolland. Geschiedenis van een haat-liefde verhouding. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, Fryske Akademy 1998, 164–172, esp. 165; Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 161. 10 S.J. Fockema Andreæ and Th.J. Meijer (eds.), Album studiosorum Academiae Franekerensis (1585–1811, 1816–1844). Franeker: Wever, 1968, nr. 872. 11 J.A.H. Bots and W.Th.M. Frijhoff, “De studentpopulatie van de Franeker academie: een kwantitatief onderzoek (1585–1811)”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 56–72, esp. 62, 64–65. 12 A grant of twelve guilders by the States of Friesland that Balthasar received in August 1604, nine months earlier, may have been a reward for graduating from the Latin school at Dokkum. Tresoar, archive States of Friesland, inv.no. 2658, fol. 64v (6 August 1604). 13 Otterspeer, Het bolwerk van de vrijheid, chapter 14; Van Nienes, De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, 100–101.

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Balthasar Stuyvesant conducted his disputation in 1605, probably in the fall.14 His theses were printed in a short work of eight pages, printed at Franeker by Rombertus Doyema and Theodoricus Joannis, the usual university printers, entitled Disputatio theologica Secunda de Essentia Divina Ad quam, Auspice & Duce eadem, Præside & tutelâ Clarissimo Doctissimoq. Viro D. Henrico Antonide, SS Theologiæ Doctore, & in illustri illustrium Frisiæ Ordinum Lycæo (quod est Franequeræ) Professore ordinario. efiw dÊnata respondebit Balthasarus Joannis Doccumianus Frisius [Second Theological Disputation on the Divine Nature, on which, under the Government and Guidance, Presidency and Protection of the Honorable and Highly Learned D. Henricus Antonides, Doctor of the Most Holy Theology and Ordinary Professor in the Excellent Lyceum in Friesland (which is located in Franeker) will answer to the best of his ability: Balthasar Joannis, from Dokkum in Friesland].15 The booklet provides information on four aspects of the life of Balthasar Stuyvesant. First, De Essentia Divina contains data on his fellow students. Balthasar belonged to a group of five students who maintained close contact with each other and wrote each other congratulatory poems upon completion of their disputations. His four friends were Focco Franciscus Unia, Henricus Avercampius, Regnerus Barelts, and Joannes Backemude. Unia was a law student from Dokkum and his name was entered in the album studiosorum on the same day as Balthasar’s. The poem he composed on the occasion of Balthasar’s disputation makes it clear that they lived in the same house. Henricus Avercampius, who enrolled four days after Balthasar, was like Balthasar an alumnus, with his father Franciscus as surety. In the early seventeenth century Franciscus Avercampius was still a minister in Ee near Dokkum. Balthasar and Henricus may have met at the Latin school there. Later Franciscus became minister in Jelsum, and subsequently, from 1610 onwards, in Oldeholtpade in Weststellingwerf, where he died in 1637. The third student, Regnerus Barelts, enrolled a month before Balthasar, Focco and Henricus. Regnerus Barelts originated

14 F. Postma and J. van Sluis, Auditorium Academiae Franekerensis: Bibliographie der Reden, Disputationen und Gelegenheitsdruckwerke der Universitaet und des Athenaeums in Franeker 1585–1843. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1995, 20. 15 A copy is preserved in the provincial library of Friesland, now merged with the provincial archive into Tresoar. I thank Casper de Jonge, Leiden University, for his assistance in translating the title.

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in Holwerd and also read theology. Barelts performed his disputation in 1606, for which occasion Balthasar wrote a eulogy. It is not known when the fifth member of this little group, Joannes Backemude from Leeuwarden, enrolled, but we do know he wrote a Carmen Gratulatorium [Congratulatory Song] for Balthasar’s disputation, in 1605. His own disputation also in 1605, De creatione et coniugio [On the Election and the Union] under the supervision of Antonides, makes it clear that he too trained for the ministry.16 So the group consisted of five students, of whom four originated in the vicinity of Dokkum and Dongeradeel, and of which four studied theology. These five young men may even have lived together in the same house in Franeker, a common practice in student groups like this one.17 Balthasar’s eight-page booklet also suggests that he had good contacts in Dongeradeel, for it is dedicated to the vroedschap [city council] of Dokkum, and especially to six men who had furthered Balthasar’s education. The first is Sixtus van Scheltema, who during his distinguished career occupied high military and administrative positions in Friesland. The second is Frans Fokkes van Unia, former delegate in the States of Friesland, the father of Focco Franciscus Unia. Numbers three and four are local officials: Klaas Hobbes Vallinc and Thomas Joannis were Dokkum city secretary and treasurer respectively.18 Perhaps the latter two were responsible for the award of ƒ 7:10 that Balthasar received from Dokkum in April 1606 as recognition for dedicating his theses to the magistrates.19 Finally, Balthasar thanked his teachers at the Dokkum Latin school, Stephanus Ubels and Boëtius Ludolphi. The third piece of information is that the De Essentia Divina tells us Balthasar’s disputation was presided over by Henricus Antonides Nerdenus (1546–1614, professor from 1585 until his demise), the same professor under whom his roommate Barelts studied as well.

16 Similarly titled theses were also defended in 1605 by Nicolaus Olisius. A year later Backemude again entered into a disputation, this time on De Mediatore QEANQRWPW, which contains a laudatory poem by Philippus Butenpost. Both disputations are included in the volume kept at the Leiden University Library, sign. SEM.REM 5216:3, 5. 17 Fockema Andreæ and Meijer, Album studiosorum Franekerensis, nrs. 871, 873 and 863; Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 33, n. 23; Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 476; Stuyvesant dossier Jensma. 18 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 25, 33, n. 21. 19 Ibid., 25, 33, n. 22.

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Antonides was the author of a student manual for disputations, the Systema theologicum Disputationibus publicis propositum in Academia Franequerensi [Theological System Proposed in Public Disputations at the Franeker Academy]20 and he also wrote treatises on the practical duties of ministers. Although he was active in the fight to put down Catholic and Mennonite theological misconceptions, within the Calvinist church Antonides was a champion of reconciliation. In the same decades that Antonides taught at Franeker, so did Sibrandus Lubbertus (ca. 1555–1625, professor from 1585). Lubbertus was one of the celebrities of the university. A vigilant opponent of papism, arminianism and socianism, he regularly engaged in polemics, with among others Conradus Vorstius, the successor of Arminius in Leiden.21 Two rather different professors then, both Calvinist, but with opposite temperaments. But does this mean that Balthasar Stuyvesant had a choice as far as lectures and disputations were concerned? I am inclined to answer that question with a careful yes. Evidence of conflicts between professors over lecture schedules, allegations of drawing away each other’s students, and the fact that lower attendance could result in a lower salary for professors, all suggest that students did have some freedom of choice. Whether Balthasar preferred the irenicism of Antonides over the polemics of Lubbertus, who sometimes used the disputations under his supervision to attack the contrary-minded, is a matter of conjecture. We cannot know one way or the other. However, we can hope to extract from the booklet some information on the fourth matter, Balthasar’s theological preferences. Here too caution is required. His theses had to be approved prior to defense and the disputations, although public, were intended as an exercise for students. In many cases it is unclear who the author of the theses was: the professor or the student who defended them. The

20 I have used the copy of the Leiden University Library (included in the volume with sign. SEM.REM 5216:3, 5). Although the Systema dates from 1611, several disputations from later years are included in this copy. 21 W. Nijenhuis, “Inleiding”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 227–235; C. van der Woude, Sibrandus Lubbertus. Leven en werken, in het bijzonder naar zijn correspondentie. Kampen: Kok, 1963, chapter nine on the opposition against the appointment of Vorstius in Leiden; W.B.S. Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool en het Rijks Athenaeum te Franeker. Leeuwarden: Friesch Genootschap van Geschied-, Oudheid- en Taalkunde, 2 vols., 1878–1889, 2:29–34, 36–40.

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latter is the most likely, although this does not mean that much original thinking was required. It is even doubtful whether the students were free in the choice of their subject. In the case of compilations of theses subsequently published under the name of the professor it is even less likely. The Franeker university did not until 1625 ordain that disputations had to include material that had earlier been treated in lectures, but it is possible that Antonides had already applied that principle twenty years earlier.22 A printed collection of seventy-five disputations under his supervision conveys the impression that a number of subjects were treated sequentially. The numbering, in the case of Balthasar secunda [second], also points in that direction. A couple of years earlier Adamus Vestermannus or Adam Westerman, who later wrote the Christelijcke Zee-vaert ende wandel-wegh, hoe een schipper, coopman ende reysende man in de vreese Godes in zijn uyt ende in reyse . . . hem houden ende draghen sal (Amsterdam: by Broer Jans, 1639) [Christian Sea-faring and Land-travelling, how a Skipper, Merchant and Traveling Man in the Fear of God during his Outward and Homeward Travels shall keep and conduct Himself ], had defended theses supervised by Antonides. Like Balthasar’s, Westerman’s theses also carried the number two, but the title is slightly different: De Dei Unitate in essentia trinitate in personis quam præeunte Sancti Spiritus luce [On the Divine Unity, in Essence a Trinity of Persons preceded by the Light of the Holy Spirit]. Also, the theses are phrased slightly differently from those of Balthasar. The subject however is essentially the same.23 This all indicates that the student could not choose his subject matter, but that the exercise consisted of defending in one’s own words the ideas of another. In the case of Balthasar, his theses pertained to the essence of God, as distinct from divine works, which were the subject of the first disputation. In nineteen theses over three pages he expostulates upon the divine characteristics and how these can be proven, to wit from scripture and by reason. He further explains the role of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Divine Trinity. His last thesis contends that perfection is the most essential characteristic of God. God’s perfection consists of infinity

22 Otterspeer, Het bolwerk van de vrijheid, 236; Van Nienes, De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, 101. 23 Leiden University Library, sign. SEM.REM 5216:3, 5; Postma and Van Sluis, Auditorium Academiae Franekerensis, 11–24.

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(infinitas) and ubiquity (ubiquitas), immutability (immutabilitas) and eternity (æternitas), goodness (bonitas) and beatitude (beatitudo), omniscience (omniscientia) and omnipotence (omnipotentia), and, finally, dominance (dominium) and liberty (libertas). About the personal theology of Balthasar not much more can be said than that he restricted himself to what was usual for students of theology in those days. A year after his own disputation, Balthasar Stuyvesant wrote a poem for his roommate Regnerus Barelts, which was included in Regnerus’s Disputationum Theologicarum Quartam de Imagine Dei ad quam homo conditus est [Fourth Theological Disputation on the Image of God on which Man is Molded].24 It is the only text of which we are sure that Balthasar is the writer and it therefore warrants our attention, even if it may not be an epitome of neo-Latin poetry. Æ Quora navigio sulcans ut Nauta secundo Sollicitus duci flumine semper aimat. Possit ut optatam pertingere tutius oram Turbinis omnis ubi vis furibunda nihil. Sic tibi sacra BARELTS in amore est pagina summo, Pagina sacra tibi spesque fidesque, salus. Hæc tibi læatitia est, hæc est tibi sacra salutis Anchora, & hanc dulcis mellis adinstaramas. Omnibus ut possis optatum ducere vitam Tutius ad finem, & scandere tecta Dei, Scandere tecta Dei nullis agitata procellis, Tecta voluptatis plenaque lætitia. Quod sint vera meu tibi quæ cecinisse poëma Cernis, sacra docent hæc tua scripta fatis. Nec tantum tua scripta docent, verum quoque veræ A teneris tua mens Relligionis amans. His maneas cœptis, neque cursu tramite flectas, Et sanctis gratus fedibus hospes eris. C.C.C.C. scripsit Balthasarus Ioannis Docc. Fris. Like any worried sailor, who cuts through the waves, and wishes that he and his ship were carried downstream, In order to safely reach the edge of all currents, the coast where violence is expended.

24 Similarly titled theses were also defended in 1605 by Hero Otthonis and on 25 November 1608 by Hermannus Episcopius; Leiden University Library, sign. SEM.REM 5216:3, 5.

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So thou, Barelts, cherish a fiery love for the sacred page; the sacred page and hope and faith signify: your salvation. This is your message, the holy anchor of your salvation, which you love like sweet honey. So that you can in everything direct your life to the desired goal and enter into the house of God. Entering the house of God, which no storm will touch, house full of pleasure, full of joy. That which you see is truly consecrated, as I sang in my poems, as your writings amply show. And not just your writings, also your mind, which is filled with true religion. May you stay with what you have started and not stray from your course to a sidetrack, And in the holy house you will be a welcome guest. C.C.C.C. has written. Balthasar Joannis, Frisian from Dokkum.25

In this way Balthasar describes Barelts’s love for Holy Scripture, which like a beacon shows the way through worldly problems to the house of God. The metaphor of the worried sailor is often used in the seventeenth century and is not necessarily dictated by personal preference.26 The emphases, indicated by repetitions, are noteworthy: pagina sacra (the bible), scandere tecta Dei (entering the house of God) and tua scripta (your writings, in this case the theses of Barelts). They all point to the source, the goal and the means, and thereby signify the role of the disputation in the study of theology. Balthasar Stuyvesant did not go on after his studies to earn a doctorate. Although this was usual in other disciplines, for future ministers it was not required, since they would be subjected to ecclesiastical examinations anyway. In Friesland candidates were only examined once, whereas in other provinces of the Dutch Republic they were usually examined twice.27 It is unknown when Balthasar was examined,

25 Stuyvesant dossier Jensma, translation into Dutch by mr. J. Rinzema and G. Jensma, translation into English by Jaap Jacobs. 26 Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief. Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002, 215–234. An example is the madrigal “Anchor ch’in alto mar di scogli pieno” of the Amersfoort composer Joannes Tollius in his Opera Omnia, vol. IV, Madrigali a 6 voci, ed. S.H. Groot. Amersfoort: 2003, 116–122. 27 Bots and Frijhoff, “De studentenpopulatie van de Franeker academie”, 67; S. Zijlstra, Het geleerde Friesland—een mythe? Universiteit en maatschappij in Friesland en Stad en Lande ca. 1380–1650. Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy, 1996, 133; Kalma, Friese synodeverslagen 1621–1650, ii.

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but it is clear that between 1605 and 1609 he entered into the ranks of the servants of God’s Word in Friesland.

Peperga and Scherpenzeel Those servants were hard pressed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Friesland had officially been reformed since 1580, but that does not mean that Calvinist theology was widespread among the populace. Some of the Frisians still adhered to the Church of Rome, others had turned neutralist, and various other Protestant denominations existed, of which the Mennonites were the most numerous. After the religious upheavals during the Twelve Years’ Truce, the majority of Frisian Remonstrants, always few in number, decided to break with the established Calvinist church. Lutheranism had not made much of an impact in Friesland. And finally several people belonged to the undecided. Quantitative data on all of these groups at the beginning of the seventeenth century is lacking, but the members of the Reformed Church may be presumed to have formed less than ten percent of the total population.28 That percentage is not very high, especially when the ambitions of the Reformed Church are taken into account: to reform both public and private life. These two goals required different means for achievement. For the first, reforming public life, the assistance of the secular government was required, for this goal aimed to obstruct various sects and forms of idolatry, remove altars and statues from the church buildings controlled by the government, enforce observation of the Sabbath and of days of prayer, regulate marriages and oversee the salaries of ministers and schoolmasters. The Reformed Church’s main problem was that, in contrast with other European

28 W. Bergsma, “Kerk en staat in Friesland na 1580”. In: J. Frieswijk et al. (eds.), Fryslân, staat en macht. Bijdragen aan het historisch congres te Leeuwarden van 3 tot 5 juni 1998. Hilversum, Leeuwarden: Verloren, Fryske Akademy 1999, 158–172; W. Bergsma, “Religieuze verhoudingen in Friesland en Holland tijdens de Republiek”. In: Ph. Breuker and A. Janse (eds.), Negen eeuwen Friesland-Holland. Geschiedenis van een haat-liefde verhouding. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, Fryske Akademy 1998, 157–163; Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende tot publieke kerk; chapter 2; for the percentage p. 147; J.J. Kalma, “‘De religie daer was gecomen in cleyn respect’. Friese onkerksen in de 17de eeuw”. In: De Vrije Fries, jaarboek uitgegeven door het Fries genootschap van Geschied-, Oudheid- en Taalkunde en de Fryske Akademy 68 (1988), 25–36.

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countries, it had a privileged position in the Dutch Republic, but it was a public church rather than an official church. Its dependence on secular government was considerable, financially, organizationally, as well as concerning the appointments of ministers. In Friesland, much more than in Holland, the right to appoint ministers (the patronaatsrecht or patroon’s right) belonged to the secular authorities.29 For its second ambition, the reformation of private life, the Reformed Church controlled its own instruments, principally preaching and ecclesiastical discipline. The Reformed Church had a monopoly on public worship and its services were open not just to members of the Church, but to anyone. The so-called “liefhebbers van de gereformeerde religie” [devotees of the Reformed religion] could be induced by preaching to become full members, which required both an inquiry into the life of the candidate and a public confession of faith. Once these stages had been passed, one could become a member and could participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Members of the church were subject to censuur, ecclesiastical discipline as exercised by the consistory. Not everyone was prepared to subject himself to this discipline, which at least partly explains the relatively small size of the Reformed Church.30 The minister played a pivotal role in all of this and the low number of ministers was thus a considerable problem. In the 1580s Friesland counted about a hundred ministers; forty-five years later there were 172. The quality of ministers also left something to be desired, as in some cases converted priests came into Reformed pulpits, while others had no formal theological training whatsoever. After the founding of the university at Franeker, these two problems gradually began to diminish and by about 1650 almost 200 ministers served in Friesland, mostly university educated. Among the tasks of the minister, preaching and making house-calls in the presence of an elder prior to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper were the most important. The minister was also charged with the supervision of the schoolmasters, who catechized the young. In the decades after 1580 the ministers were the cornerstone of the church and their prime duty was to build up the local congregations.31 29

Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende tot publieke kerk; 158, 162–163, 192–195. A.Th. van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen. Het kopergeld van de Gouden eeuw. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 1991, 289–299. 31 Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 182–184, 207–211. 30

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While such general remarks provide a picture of the religious situation of Friesland as a whole, they do not inform us about the villages where the ordained minister Balthasar Stuyvesant carried out his duties as a servant of the Word. Little information is available on Weststellingwerf in the south of Friesland where Stuyvesant spent the first fifteen years of his career. He first worked in Peperga and Blesdijke, but around 1619 he was called to Scherpenzeel. Weststellingwerf was a frontier area, religiously as well as militarily. Its ministers were few and poorly educated and it was close to the Spanish-held towns in Drenthe, such as Coevorden. As a new minister whose education had been subsidized by the States, Balthasar Stuyvesant was sent to an area where ministers were most needed.32 By this time he was married to Margaretha Hardenstein, earlier the wife of Petrus Monches, also called Monchovius, a minister in Parrega, a small village in the west of Friesland. When Monches died in 1602, Margaretha was about twenty-seven years old. For Margaretha the demise of her husband must have been both an emotional and a financial loss. Indications are that she originated in a wealthy merchant family in Zwolle, but this should not imply that she could afford to remain without a steady income. The classis of Bolsward was lenient in allowing her some income for eighteen months, which was unusual in the early seventeenth century when no regular pension was as yet available for widows of ministers. For a woman of her age a second marriage was the obvious choice, especially as she had no children from her first marriage.33 We do not know how Balthasar and Margaretha met. During his time at Franeker Balthasar may have come into contact with Pelegromius or Palgrum Hardenstein, likely a family member of Margaretha. Pelegromius, son of Henrik Hardenstein, burgemeester of

32

Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 244–245, 250, 527–531. J.J. Kalma, Een kerk in opbouw. Classisboek Bolsward-Workum 1600–1633. Transcriptie met inleiding, verklarende aantekeningen, registers en literatuurlijst van J.J. Kalma. Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy, 1981, 2, 8, 10–15, 17, 19–20; Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 25; Ariadne Schmidt, “‘Dat oock de weduwen ende weesen der dienaren niet vergethen werden’. De ontwikkeling van de zorg voor predikantsweduwen in Leiden in de 17de eeuw”. In: Leids Jaarboekje 92 (2000), 38–53; G. Groenhuis, De predikanten. De sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden voor ± 1700. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1977, 139–140, 143–145. In Friesland the States did not grant ministers’ widows a pension until 1651: J. van Leeuwen, Alphabetisch register, of Algemeen repertorium op het Groot plakkaat- en charterboek van Friesland. Workum: Brandenburgh, 1857, 379. 33

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Zwolle, enrolled in 1604 and later became schepen in his hometown. In 1622 he was the Zwolle delegate to the meeting of the States of Overijssel, another indication of his status. He married Grietje Toelinck in 1613, conceived five children and died in 1624. If he was related to Margaretha, then she originated from a well-to-do family.34 The banns were published in Zwolle on 18 April 1607 and Balthasar and Margaretha probably married three weeks later. Their first child, Petrus, was born in 1611 or 1612, and a daughter, Anna or Anneken, followed in 1613. Possibly Balthasar had already left university and started his career as a minister in Peperga shortly after the wedding. The first documentary evidence dates from 1609. In September of that year he received a subsidy of eighteen guilders from the States of Friesland to purchase books and cover some other matters. This is an indication that his salary in Peperga was not high. On average a village minister received about 300 guilders. In the larger towns and cities the salary was higher, although few clergymen could match the 900 guilders that the famous Johannes Bogerman earned in Leeuwarden. Such differences in remuneration were one of the causes of mobility among the clergy in Friesland. Most of them started off in small rural villages, as the cities preferred men with experience. Yet the extent of mobility should not be exaggerated: 51% of the Frisian ministers worked only in one location during their career, 32.5% served two, and only 16% served in three or more. Balthasar Stuyvesant belongs to the last category, with calls to Peperga, Scherpenzeel, Berlikum and Delfzijl, respectively.35 The most remarkable feature of Balthasar Stuyvesant’s career was his tendency to upset the established authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical. In 1619, in Scherpenzeel, he became involved in a conflict connected with the election of a grietman, the highest local official.36 Three years later he tried to obtain a call to Berlikum, a 34 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 25–26, 33, n. 26; J. van Doorninck, Geslachtkundige aanteekeningen ten aanzien van de gecommitteerden ten landdage van Overijssel zedert 1610–1794: met eenige berigten omtrent de voormalige havezathen in dat gewest. Deventer: J. de Lange, 1871, 443, 504. 35 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 25; Tresoar, archive States of Friesland, inv.no. 2660, fol. 87. The remark “dienaer des Godtl Woorts tot Peperga” [servant of God’s Word in Peperga] was added later. That could be an indication that Stuyvesant was only recently called to Peperga; Kalma, “’s Lands voedsterlingen”, 156; Zijlstra, Het geleerde Friesland, 131–133. 36 Tresoar, archive of the Frisian stadtholders, inv.no. 70 I (16), inv.no. 70 II (43), 2, inv.no. 265, folder “Weststellingwerf ”. Two letters by Marcus Lycklama à

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village in the north of Friesland. Larger and certainly more wealthy than Scherpenzeel, Berlikum probably offered a higher salary than Scherpenzeel and it was also closer to the Frisian capital of Leeuwarden, offering better opportunities for intellectual company. It could thus serve as a springboard for a coveted call to one of the major Frisian cities. The proximity to the Latin school at Leeuwarden would also be a benefit to young Petrus’s education. But Balthasar, by giving guest sermons and accepting a call without the prior approbation of secular and ecclesiastical authorities, disregarded the standard procedures of the Reformed Church and thus invoked the wrath of the classis of Leeuwarden. With the support of the village of Berlikum, Stuyvesant managed to obtain approval for his call from the States of Friesland, which had a long-running conflict with the classis of Leeuwarden and the Synod of Friesland on precisely the issue of the ultimate right of approbation of calls. Having thus alienated himself from his ecclesiastical colleagues, the chances of promotion to an important city ministry evaporated.37 It was not the only setback for Stuyvesant. In 1625 Margaretha died and was buried in the church of Berlikum. Two years later Balthasar married Styntje Pieters from Haarlem, the widow of Adriaen Gerritsz. Balthasar and Styntje had four children: Margaretha (1628), Catharina (1629), Trijncke (1630) and Balthasar (1631). Margaretha

Nijeholt to Johannes Saeckma (27 October 1617 and 9 January 1618) are also indications. See the Codex Saeckma on the internet: http://www.mpaginae.myweb.nl/ BrvnSaeckma/brsframe.htm. For patronage see Hotso Spanninga, “Patronage in Friesland in de 17de en 18de eeuw: een terreinverkenning.” In: De Vrije Fries, jaarboek uitgegeven door het Fries genootschap van Geschied-, Oudheid- en Taalkunde en de Fryske Akademy 67 (1987), 11–26. 37 Petrus Nota, Tweetal van kerkelijke leerredenen gedaan, de eene ter inwijinge van de nieuw gebouwde kerk te Berlikum, en de andere ter inwijinge van het nieuwe orgel; in gemelde kerk opgerigt. Benevens een aanhangel betreffende de oudheden en voornaamste gebeurtenissen van den dorpe Berlikum. Franeker: Dionisius Romar, 1781, 116–117; Van Leeuwen, Alphabetisch register, 378; Kalma, Classisboek Bolsward-Workum, 240–241; J.J. Kalma, Een kerk in opbouw. Classisboek Sneek, 1583–1624. Transcriptie met inl., verklarende aantekeningen, register en literatuurlijst van J.J. Kalma. Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy, 1978, 484; G.F. baron thoe Schwartzenberg en Holansberg (ed.), Groot placaat en charterboek van Vriesland Leeuwarden: Willem Coulon, 6 vols., 1768–1795, 5:270–273; Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 26–27, 34, n. 31; Kalma, Friese synodeverslagen, 1621–1650, 124–125, 139. It is possible that Lubbertus refers to this affair in his letter to Saeckma of 28 May 1622. Codex Saeckma on internet: http://www.mpaginae. myweb.nl/BrvnSaeckma/brsframe.htm.

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is the only one to whom later references can be found and presumably the other three children died in infancy.38 His career having come to a halt, Balthasar made things worse for himself by getting embroiled in 1632 with the grietman of Menaldumadeel, Tierck van Heerma, in a case in which ecclesiastical discipline was challenged in a secular court.39 Stuyvesant had, from the pulpit, publicly upbraided the grietman for his drunkenness during an earlier service. Balthasar had now fallen out of grace with the secular authorities as well as the ecclesiastical. Thus it is not surprising that he tried to move to a new location. In 1633 he tried to arrange an exchange with the minister in Oldeholtpade, the father of his student friend Franciscus Avercampius. But the classis of Zevenwouden did not approve and this time Balthasar did not succeed in getting his way.40 The States of Friesland became aware that Stuyvesant’s position was untenable and he was offered the vacant position of minister to the Frisian garrison in Delfzijl. Balthasar accepted, although he must have realized that this appointment was in fact a demotion, both statuswise and financially. Some opposition arose from the ecclesiastical authorities in Groningen, but to no avail. It did not matter anyway. Balthasar Stuyvesant died in Delfzijl on 26 May 1637, about 52 years old.41

School and university We know nothing about Petrus’s early years, although some suppositions make sense. The faltering career of the father had some influence, no doubt, on the son, but during his first years this was probably minimal. The boy was probably initiated into intellectual pursuits by his father and attended the village schools of Scherpenzeel

38 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 36, n. 60; Nota, Tweetal van kerkelijke leerredenen, 116–117. 39 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 27; Tresoar, archive nedergerecht Menaldumadeel, inv.no. 11, fol. 364 (2 September 1632). 40 Kalma, Friese synodeverslagen, 1621–1650, 132–133. 41 Jensma, “Over de jeugd van Pieter Stuyvesant”, 29–30, 36, n. 56; I have used the notes from the archive of the States of Friesland, the archive of the Gedeputeerde Staten of Groningen and of the archive of the classis Appingedam in Jensma’s Stuyvesant dossier.

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and Berlikum. The next step was attending a Latin school. Several of these existed in northern Friesland, and of those Leeuwarden was the closest. The Latin school of Leeuwarden was the oldest and largest of the province and it probably had the best teachers as well.42 But Berlikum was too far from Leeuwarden to commute by foot daily. It is likely that Stuyvesant as a teenager lived there, either with family or with a friend of his father. In 1606, Leeuwarden was a city with almost 2,000 houses and about 11,000 inhabitants. In the 1620s when Stuyvesant attended Latin school, it was probably a little bigger, although still well short of the 15,000 that it counted in 1666.43 In any case, Leeuwarden was considerably larger than the villages where Stuyvesant had lived previously. It was one of the largest cities in the Dutch Republic outside of the province of Holland. After Latin school, Petrus followed in his father’s footsteps: he went to Franeker. When Stuyvesant arrived in 1629, the university had been in existence for forty-four years. In 1630 it counted fourteen chairs, three more than when Balthasar had been there. That does not mean that it counted fourteen professors as well, as some of them occupied more than one chair.44 It is difficult to estimate the number of students in 1630. Enrollment figures up to 1635 were about 78 per year, but we do not know how long students stayed at university.45 Among the fellow students of Stuyvesant we find some celebrities, like René Descartes, who enrolled in Franeker in 1629, but moved on to Leiden a year later. It is unlikely that Stuyvesant was ever in contact with him, if only because Descartes did not attend lectures or associate with fellow students. In December 1629, Stuyvesant became a member of the Leeuwarden nation, one of the many associations of students in which they organized themselves according to geographical background. As some of

42 E.H. Waterbolk, “Vormende krachten bij de oprichting der hogeschool te Franeker”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 40–55, esp. 53; Zijlstra, Het geleerde Friesland, 265–267. 43 J.A. Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland. Economische en sociale ontwikkelingen van 1500 tot 1800. Wageningen, Leeuwarden: De Tille, 1972–1973, 46. 44 F.R.H. Smit, “Over honderdzevenzeventig Franeker professoren”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 102–118, esp. 110. 45 Nijenhuis, “Inleiding”, 228.

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these associations specialized in holding symposia [drinking parties] they were prohibited by academic law in November 1628. The fine, however, was so low, only a few pounds Flemish, that contraventions occurred regularly.46 The fact that students, as citizens of the academy, were exempt from city excises on alcohol would not have helped. Upon becoming a member of the Leeuwarden nation, Stuyvesant in his own hand penned a short poem: Chrysost.: Fide Deo, defide tibi, diffide patronis, Diffide patri et regibus. Soli fide Deo, qui cum spes deficit omnis Hominesq. jam te deserunt, Tunc tibi fides est Domini, tunc incipit ille Laetosq. donat exitus. Petrus Stuijfsandt anno 1629 mense 10bris. Chrysostomos Trust to 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 Stuijfsandt anno 1629 in the month of December.47

Such poems and mottoes are usual among the liber nationalis, especially in the early years. They are mostly in Latin, occasionally in Greek, Hebrew or another language. References to the bible, to Seneca and especially to Terentius occur frequently, but Stuyvesant’s choice is exceptional: a poem of the church father Joannes Chrysostomos (c. 349–407), the patriarch of Constantinople who introduced important reforms in the liturgy of the eastern church. Chrysostomos is also known for his books on priesthood, which in the nineteenth

46

C.M. Ridderikhof, “De Franequer Los-Kop”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 119–132, esp. 123. 47 J. Visser, Album collegii studiosorum ex gymnasio Leovardiensi (1626–1668). Franeker: Wever, 1985, 27. Also Bergsma, Van Gideonsbende naar publieke kerk, 48, which provides a translation into Dutch.

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century induced Pope Pius X to appoint him patron saint of Christian preachers. Not just Roman Catholics were interested in this church father. Calvin also devoted attention to him. As a preacher, Chrysostomos, literally ‘golden mouth’, was known for his eloquence, but also for his inclination not to mince words in reprimanding people in authority, which occasionally led to trouble, a characteristic he had in common with Balthasar Stuyvesant. But for a freshman with the ambition of becoming a minister, Chrysostomos’s writing on preaching may have been more important in Petrus’s choice, even if made through a book of citations. The meaning of the poem— distrust everything but God—may have been a Calvinist topos, but even so the choice is understandable for a minister to be. The fact that the Latin is occasionally faulty, such as defide instead of diffide in the first line, indicates that young Petrus still had something to learn.48 A month after registering with the Leeuwarden nation, on 12 January 1630, Petrus formally enrolled at the university: “Petrus Stuifsandt. Frisius, ling et philos. Stud.”49 The reference to linguistics and philosophy indicates that he followed lectures at the artes faculty, which prepared students for the serious stuff: theology, law or medicine. The courses of the artes faculty, including Hebrew, philosophy and Greek, were intended to ease the transition from the Latin school to the university. The artes faculty at Franeker could boast of some famous professors, like Sixtinus Amama, a promising Hebraic scholar. Amama died in December 1629, only thirty-six years old, but it is possible that Stuyvesant attended some of his lectures. He was succeeded by Bernardus Fullenius and if Stuyvesant ever studied Hebrew, then Fullenius must have been his main teacher.50 One of the professors

48 J.N.D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: the Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. London: Duckworth, 1995; A. Ganoczy and K. Müller, Calvins handschriftliche Annotationen zu Chrysostomus. Ein Beitrag zur Hermeneutik Calvins. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981. Chrysostomos wrote in Greek, but his works were mostly published in Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is likely that Stuyvesant read the Latin version, but the choice for this poem may have been made by his father. 49 Fockema Andreæ and Meijer, Album studiosorum Academiae Franekerensis, nr. 2617. I have also made use of a photocopy of the original as included in Jensma’s Stuyvesant dossier. 50 L. Fuks, “Hebreeuwse studies aan de Franeker universiteit”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 409–243, esp. 416–417.

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in philosophy was Arnoldus Verhel, born in Amersfoort. In 1618 he was appointed extraordinary professor, but two years later he was promoted to an ordinary professorship, a position he kept for fortyfour years. Another professor in philosophy was Johannes Hachting, whose subject was logic. He died in 1630. Stuyvesant may have learned Greek from the German Georgius Pasor, who had first been professor in Herborn and came to Franeker in 1626.51 It is likely that Stuyvesant intended to proceed to theological studies after his propaedeuticals. It is even possible that he already had attended some theology lectures in 1629 and 1630. Of the professors who had taught his father none were left in Franeker. Sibrandus Lubbertus had died four years before Stuyvesant enrolled. There was another star, however: the Englishman William Ames or Guilelmus Amesius, who had been appointed to a professorship in 1622 and who mainly taught biblical exegesis. He was a supporter of puritanical pietism, a movement within Calvinism in which personal conversion and the practice of a Christian life were emphasized. It was also called the Nadere Reformatie [Further Reformation]. Amesius’s convictions led him to criticize vehemently the occasionally profligate life of the Franeker student. He even mockingly suggested that a conspiracy was at work to change the motto of the university from Christo et Ecclesia to Bacchus et Bacchantibus. When elected rector of the university in 1626–1628 Amesius tightened the rules on student behavior. One of his measures was to prohibit the conventicula [meetings] of the nations. In taking this kind of action Amesius underlined his role as one of the leaders of a militant branch of the Further Reformation that actively tried to transform society along Calvinist tenets. Although he was supported by a number of his colleagues, he encountered considerable opposition. Disillusioned, Amesius even considered accepting a call by the Puritans in New England, but he finally decided in 1633 to go to the English church in Rotterdam, where he died the same year. Some of his students did cross the Atlantic, such as William Aspinwall and Nathaniel Eaton, who in 1632–1633 studied in Franeker and later became the first master of Harvard College. The widow of Amesius also went to New England, with their fourteen-year old son.52

51 52

Ekkart, Franeker professorenportretten, 94, 106. Nijenhuis, “Inleiding”, 230; Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames.

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A supporter of Amesius was his fellow theologian Meinardus Schotanus (professor 1626–1632, 1636–1637), who in early 1630 also became the university librarian. The third theology professor was the Polish Johannes Maccovius (professor 1615–1644), a powerful and colorful personality, not much loved by his colleagues, but popular among students. In contrast to Amesius and Schotanus, Maccovius specialized in theoretical theology, focusing primarily on predestination. Maccovius often ran into conflicts with Amesius, partly due to his tumultuous way of life.53 Like his father, Petrus would have had a choice among different professors in theology, with different styles and different temperaments. First, however, he had to do his propaedeuticals in the artes faculty.

Books A glimpse into what Stuyvesant studied during his time in Franeker can be gleaned from the books he used there.54 Two lists are available of the books that were auctioned off after Stuyvesant left Franeker. It is not entirely certain that all of these books were Petrus’s property; some may have belonged to his father. An additional possibility is that Balthasar Stuyvesant acquired them while he was a student and gave them to his son in 1629. The first list, mostly books in Latin, is the more interesting of the two. A number of the works on it pertain directly to courses that Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism. Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1972, 71–95; Keith Sprunger, “William Ames and the Franeker link to English and American Puritanism”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 264–274; Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647. Nijmegen: SUN, 1995, 448; Fockema Andreæ and Meijer, Album studiosorum Franekerensis, nr. 2910; John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vol. 1. 1642–1658. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, 1873, 2. 53 M.H.H. Engels, “De Franeker academiebibliotheek 1626–1644”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 161–176; Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames; 74–77; Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, 2: 90–94. 54 I have used the copy in Jensma’s Stuyvesant dossier, drawn from the collection of inventories compiled by Ph.H. Breuker of the Fryske Akademy, which I thank for granting me permission to use it. The original is in Tresoar, archive nedergerecht Franeker, inv.no. 191, fol. 515–520.

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Stuyvesant junior would attend at the artes faculty, for instance the courses on languages. The list contains a Latin-Greek dictionary and a Latin grammar, probably the one compiled by Vossius, which was regularly used in the Dutch Republic. For Hebrew Stuyvesant had two grammars: one by Johann Buxtorf and another by Sixtinus Amama, both Franeker professors. With only a few titles, history is the least well represented among the artes courses, and two of the history titles are ecclesiastical history to boot. Stuyvesant’s bookshelf held a two-part work on the history of Johannes Hus, the Historia ecclesiastica [Ecclesiastical History] by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, a copy of the Rerum Frisicarum historiæ [Events in Frisian History] by Ubbo Emmius and a book by Quintus Curtius Rufus, possibly his biography of Alexander the Great, which seventy years later was also read by Johann Sebastian Bach.55 Works by Caesar and Livy also fall into this category. The list of philosophical works is considerably longer. Some of these are typical textbooks, like the Philosophiæ practicæ systema methodicum [Methodical System of Practical Philosophy] by Clemens Timplerus and the Systema logicæ [System of Logic] by Bartholomaeus Keckermann. The latter author was an Aristotelian and, considering the state of philosophy in the early seventeenth century, it is not surprising to encounter further Aristotelian books on Stuyvesant’s bookshelf. An edition of the Conimbricensis (commentaries on Aristotle by the Jesuits of the university of Coimbra in Portugal) is included, as well as Casparus Bartholinus’s Enchiridion logicum ex Aristotele [Manual of Aristotelian Logic]. But the teaching of philosophy in Franeker was not completely Aristotelian: the Institutionum logicarum [Principles of Logic] by the eclectic Leiden professor Franco Burgersdijk was also used. And Stuyvesant owned a book by Petrus Ramus, his Dialecticæ [Dialectics]. Among the classical authors we find several which were used in philosophy, such as Cicero, of which Stuyvesant owned a copy of the letters and speeches, and Quintilian’s Institutionum oratorium [Principles of Oratory]. A little light reading was found in the comedies of Plautus and Terentius and the poetry of Horace and Virgil. Also the Adagia [Adages] by Erasmus and a work which is indicated as “Delic: poet:” (Deliciæ poeticæ [Poetical Delights], presumably a collection

55 Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach. The Learned Musician. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, 57–58.

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of neo-Latin poetry) are not to be considered textbooks. The same applies to the Atlas minor of Gerard Mercator of which Stuyvesant had a copy. So far the library of Stuyvesant fits in with his status as an artes student: plenty of philosophy, linguistics and classics. But he also had a number of religious books, including bibles in several languages, such as the New Testament translated into Greek by Benedictus Arias Montanus. Stuyvesant owned separate editions of some parts of the Old Testament, such as the Psalms of David, translated into Latin by Helius Eobanus Hessius, two versions of the Proverbia Salomonis [Proverbs of Solomon] and a catechism by Zacharius Ursinus. The list also contains some titles that point to a theological interest, such as the Historiæ Ioannis Cochlaei de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri [History by Johannes Cochlaeus of the Acts and Writings of Martin Luther]. A book indicated only by “Antisocin:” is possibly one of the pamphlets Lubbertus wrote against Vorstius, although it could also be by Joachim Beringer. If the list of Latin books leads us to assume that, considering the emphasis on artes textbooks, they belonged to Stuyvesant junior, this is less clear for the sixty-seven books in Dutch. The majority of the Dutch works are of a religious nature and it is likely that at least part of them had belonged to Stuyvesant senior. An indication of this is the inclusion of several protocols of synods, writings against Mennonites and Catholics, and pamphlets with titles such as Een fondament ende claer aenwijsinghe van die salichmakende heere Jesu Christi [A Fundament and Clear Indication of Our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ], Corte verclaringhe over die woorden Pauli geschreven tot den Romeinen [Short Explanation on the Words written by Paul to the Romans] and Het offer des heeren [The Sacrifice of the Lord], that are inspirational material for preaching rather than textbooks. As ever with such inventories of books, interpretations are limited. Even if it is possible to establish that someone owned a specific book, this does not mean that the owner read it. And it certainly does not indicate that the reader agreed with its contents. Nevertheless, the lists do tell us something about the intellectual and religious background of both father and son. First, the emphases in the Latin books point to interest in philosophy and theology, for which linguistic expertise served as an instrument. History was hardly of importance, but the inclusion of classical authors does indicate that Balthasar and Petrus were interested in poetry, even though many of the poets

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were used as a means to teach Greek and Latin. Based on the work with religious content, and on the information on Balthasar related earlier, I am inclined to position father and son in the orthodox Counter-Remonstrant center of Dutch Calvinism, possibly with a slight inclination to militancy. I say Counter-Remonstrant mainly because no indications to the contrary have come to light, but also because Franeker, through the presence of men like Lubbertus, was more than other Dutch universities a Counter-Remonstrant bulwark. In the lists of books we find anti-Mennonite and anti-Catholic books (Tegens die wederdopers [Against the Anabaptists], Grondelicke onderwijsinge tegen alle dwalingen der wederdoopers [Thorough Explanations of all the Errors of the Anabaptists], Die voornaemste misbruicken der misse [The Main Misuses of the Mass], all of which have a certain militant character. The lists of books provide no arguments to place father and son squarely in the Pietist movement, although the backgrounds of some of the Franeker professors suggest that they may have come into contact with it.

What went wrong? Petrus Stuyvesant did not go on to become a Dutch Reformed minister. He may not even have acquired a university degree, although that is almost impossible to ascertain for any seventeenth-century student, unless they went on to get a doctorate. Indications exist that something went wrong, but those indications are indirect and date from much later. The first questions then are: did something go wrong, and if so, when? It is likely that Stuyvesant left Franeker either in late 1630 or early 1631. The first indication of this is the auction of his books. The documents contain a number of notes referring to the payment of debts, which, as Jensma has suggested earlier, point to an extensive clearance. The date of the auction of the Latin books is likely 14 February 1633, but the Dutch books had already been sold on 12 November 1632. Even before this, beginning on 5 January 1631 and continuing through to 2 December 1635, Balthasar was paying debts incurred by himself and by his son.56 If debts were at the root

56

Tresoar, archive nedergerecht Franeker, inv.no. 191, fol. 515–520. The upper

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of Petrus’s departure from Franeker, then he probably left nearer the first date. A second indication is found in a document relating to Balthasar’s inheritance. During the division of his belongings in April 1638 reference is made to an earlier agreement of 22 May 1631, an ‘Acte van Scheidinge’ [Act of Separation], which so far has not been found.57 There are several possible explanations as to why such a document was drawn up, and the most likely is that in this way the claim of Petrus and Anna on their mother’s estate was acknowledged and had already been paid in part. An imminent departure overseas of Petrus may have been the direct reason to do so. So, the ‘Acte van Scheidinge’ also points to the first half of 1631. Admittedly, these are only vague indications, but there is simply no further information. The auction papers also provide a reason for Petrus’s departure from the university: debts. It is of course only one of several possibilities, but the indications are strong. Considerable amounts of money were involved. On 5 January 1631, Balthasar sent the Franeker city secretary a sum of money with a skipper, on 7 March his wife went to Franeker with ƒ 19:13, and a couple of months later ƒ 13:15 was paid through professor Fullenius, an acquaintance of Balthasar. Some of these sums were used to pay off debts of Balthasar to the widow of Sixtinus Amama. It is possible that she was Petrus’s landlady. Petrus had some small debts of a couple of guilders, among others to fellow student Rudolphus Meijerus, and ƒ 8, possibly for privatissima with logic professor Johannes Hachting, who had died in late 1630. Yet as to debts some doubts arise. Balthasar Stuyvesant had obtained a subsidy from the States of Friesland to go to university, and this must have been an option for Petrus also. But in the ordonnantieboeken [books of payments] in which the payments from confiscated Roman Catholic properties are recorded, Stuyvesant junior cannot be found, so perhaps he did not seek financial support. 58 It may be that

edge of the document, which presumably gave the date, has worn away, but a note in a modern hand by pencil provides a date of 14 February 1633. Whether that is correct I have been unable to establish. 57 The original of this is in Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden, weesboek X7. I have used a photocopy and a transcription in Jensma’s Stuyvesant dossier. 58 Tresoar, archive States of Friesland, inv.nos. 2670 and 2671 (ordonnantieboeken 1627–1637).

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Stuyvesant senior, who through the subsidy of the States of Friesland was forced to remain a minister in that province, did not think such an obligation a good idea for his son. He had himself benefited from it in the beginning of his career, but when relations with his colleagues became strained, it had prevented him from leaving Friesland. The clearing of debts can also be explained in other ways: Balthasar’s family had grown by the addition of four children between 1628 and 1631. The costs involved may have been considerable. If Petrus in 1631 decided, for whatever reason, to leave university, then the sale of his books, together with a number from the collection of his father, was a logical step. Some further clues come from the 1649 pamphlet Breeden-Raedt, in which Stuyvesant is described as a minister’s son from Friesland, who in Franeker robbed the daughter of his own landlady and was caught and excused on his father’s behalf, from which otherwise could easily have followed his first scandal.59

This is a partisan source, written by an anonymous enemy of the rule of the West India Company in New Netherland and Brazil with the specific aim of discrediting the Company. It provides some details that are correct, such as Petrus’s geographical origin, the occupation of his father and the location of the university. But the accusation of theft may be gratuitous. It is difficult to corroborate with other sources. As pointed out earlier, the details of the auction suggest the possibility that the widow of Sixtinus Amama was Petrus’s landlord. Amama was only thirty-six years when he died and as far as we know he and his wife Meinu van Adelen had just one son, Johannes, and no daughters. So the Breeden-Raedt is of little help to us. A further indication that something went wrong is the little drawing next to Stuyvesant’s name in the liber nationalis: a well with gallows, death bones, a quartering block and a prison, with the text “ob contemptum legum” [because of contempt for the laws]. The drawing contains a year, 1658. This drawing poses some problems. Similar drawings have been included next to twelve others in the liber nationalis, out of a total of 463 names. A separate list in the liber

59 Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien: Gelreland, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Vriesland, Over-Yssel, Groeningen, gemaeckt ende gestelt uyt diverse ware en waerachtige memorien door I.A.G.W.C. Antwerpen: F. van Duynen, 1649, D 2v.

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supplies the names of twelve culprits, with reference to an Index eorum quorum nomina stigmate notavit lex Remnia [index of those whose names the law of Rhemnius has blackened with a sign]. Yet the stipulations of this lex Remnia are unknown. It could be a reference to one of the leges later in the liber. The drawing could then be interpreted as a punishment for leaking information on the activities of the nation. The gallows would signify garrulus [garrulous]. But it may also pertain to the obligation on members of the nation not to leave the university without saying goodbye to their friends, of course with proper drinks, an infraction known as inhonorem discessum. Next to the names of some of the twelve who were struck from the membership list obvious reasons for their dishonor are supplied. Johannes Petri was barred for inhonorem discessum, Elconius Elcoma and Gerardus Hartsburgh were punished for not paying their membership fee.60 So, the drawing next to Stuyvesant’s name, especially considering the year 1658, is no proof that a serious incident caused his departure from Franeker more than twenty years earlier. On the contrary. Many of the nations also acted as clubs of friends whose contact continued after university, like fraternities. And then the alumni, here used in the modern English meaning and spelling, were expected to pay lifelong contributions. If this were true of the Leeuwarden nation, then it provides an explanation for the 1658 reference. Perhaps from that year onwards Petrus failed to pay his dues and was thus expelled.61 Nevertheless, let us assume that a serious incident took place. After all, such happened to several students in Franeker. At the end of the seventeenth century such a story was recorded in a pamphlet entitled De Franequer Los-Kop [The Franeker Rake], the fictitious adventures of a student dismissed from the university on account of drunkenness. The “rake” had to appear before the academic council, consisting of rector and assessors, which carried out university jurisdiction. This body, also called the senatus judicialis, had the power to try all civil and criminal matters in which citizens of the university

60 Visser, Album collegii, 9, 13, 15, 35, 168. It is remarkable that the liber nationalis contains short biographies of many of the students, with details as to admission to ministership, calls, and deaths. In the entry on Stuyvesant such information is missing. His subsequent career was either not known in Friesland, or not considered worthy of note. 61 I thank Willem Frijhoff, Free University, Amsterdam, for this suggestion.

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were involved.62 Numerous cases were brought to the attention of the senatus judicialis, as students, then as now, often amuse themselves with matters that are not merely intellectual. Many of the smaller misdemeanors were punished by temporarily revoking privileges, imposing house arrest or other forms of confinement, or dealing out fines. Fighting, drawing knives, dueling, causing grievous bodily harm, attending symposia, insulting professors and the disruptions of academic occasions occurred regularly. More serious were fights in which blood was drawn, the windows of the city hall were damaged, the city guard was attacked, and a church service was disrupted with a drawn sword. These cases were punished with dismissal. But in many cases the sentence was mitigated if the culprit begged for clemency. The jurisdiction of the university court did not extend to capital matters: crimes punishable with death had to be tried by the provincial court of Friesland.63 The book of criminal sentences for the years during which Stuyvesant attended university contains a few cases in which the names of the students are not mentioned. These are not many, on average three or four per year. Some cases of theft occur, for instance of chickens or firewood, but the number is minimal, especially when compared to the number of fights.64 However, the book of criminal sentences for these years is incomplete, which prevents us from finding definitive answers there.65 Yet, if Stuyvesant was indeed guilty of theft, as the Breeden-Raedt suggests, even then dismissal from the university was by no means a certainty. A number of years later an incident took place in Franeker which makes that abundantly clear. In 1648, Nicolaus Amama was accused of stealing books from the library, just about the worst crime any academic can commit. He was arrested and several measures

62 Ridderikhof, “De Franequer Los-Kop”, 125; A.H. Huussen jr., Veroordeeld in Friesland. Criminaliteitsbestrijding in de eeuw der Verlichting. Leeuwarden: Hedeby Publishing, 1994, 66–78. 63 A.H. Huussen jr. and B.S. Hempenius-van Dijk, “De Franeker academie en het Hof van Friesland, 1585–1811”. In: G.Th. Jensma, F.R.H. Smit and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1985, 133–146, esp. 134. 64 Ridderikhof, “De Franequer Los-Kop”, 129–130. 65 Van Nienes, De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, 229–281 contains a list of all criminal and civil sentences pronounced by the university court. Stuyvesant is not mentioned; Ridderikhof, “De Franequer Los-Kop”, 126.

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were taken, such as a ban on attending privatissima. Also, his belongings were seized. His brother, Gellius Amama, did not help the case by insulting the Senate. Yet it all came to a good end. After appearing before the Senate, admitting guilt and begging for clemency, he was again admitted to the university in 1653.66 Still another explanation for Stuyvesant’s departure from the Franeker university can be found. Especially in the seventeenth century it was not unusual for Frisian students to attend several universities sequentially, occasionally even abroad. If we apply this hypothesis to Stuyvesant, then it becomes tempting to link his departure from Franeker with that of Amesius. The battle over theological matters and student discipline between Amesius and his supporters on the one side and a number of colleagues, especially Maccovius, on the other side, may have played a role. Stuyvesant may have left because he shared Amesius’s grievances. The demise of artes professors Sixtinus Amama in late 1629 and Johannes Hachting a year after, may also have been of importance. In the years that Stuyvesant attended Franeker, many other Frisians studied in Leiden and Groningen, and abroad in Louvain, Bremen, Königsbergen and especially Orléans.67 But foreign trips are expensive and though it is possible, it is not likely that Stuyvesant undertook one. It is more likely that Stuyvesant attended another Dutch university. Groningen, also in the north-eastern part of the Dutch Republic, is a possible candidate, especially as Balthasar was appointed as minister of the Frisian garrison in nearby Delfzijl. However, both the possibility of heavy debt and the auction of the books argue against this hypothesis. Also, Stuyvesant is not listed in any of the matriculation registers of likely universities.68 The lack of information makes it impossible to state with any certainty what happened to Petrus and why he left Franeker. Perhaps

66 Van Nienes, De archieven van de universiteit te Franeker, 70; Tresoar, archive university Franeker, inv.no. 17, pp. 154–155. 67 Bots and Frijhoff, “De studentenpopulatie van de Franeker academie”, 58–59. For Frisian students and their careers in general, see Zijlstra, Het geleerde Friesland. 68 For his Het geleerde Friesland Zijlstra has researched the matrikels of numerous European universities and included all Frisians he found in his database. If Stuyvesant was mentioned with his place of origin in any of these then Zijlstra would doubtless have noticed. The same applies to the occurrence of the family name. Yet matrikels are sometimes unreliable. The fact that Stuyvesant is not mentioned is not proof that he only studied in Franeker.

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the comedy Het Franeker Studentenleeven [Franeker Student Life] provides a clue, even though it was written many years later. A student who has misbehaved is admonished by his father, who ends his tirade with and if you make the slightest mistake again, I will put you aboard an East-Indiaman and send you off as a soldier.69

Conclusion There is no firm indication that any misdemeanor lay at the root of Petrus’s departure from university. Stuyvesant was not forced to join the East India Company, but neither did he follow in his father’s footsteps into the ministry. He joined the West India Company, probably in 1632 or 1633.70 As Balthasar had not been very successful in his career as a minister, we may wonder if his stagnating fortunes played a role in the career choices of his son. By 1631 it must have become clear to Balthasar that he was stuck. As suggested by Jensma, he may have talked the situation over with his son, with the two eventually deciding that for Petrus to become a minister in Friesland was not the right move. As we have seen, Balthasar’s career problems were at least partly of his own making, and resulted from traits in his character. In the conflicts that he got involved in, he displayed stubbornness, a characteristic he shared with his son. But Balthasar also had an inclination to challenge authority, both secular and ecclesiastical, something foreign to Petrus’s nature. More important to an understanding of their characters is the underlying foundation that father and son had in common: they were both firm believers, belonging to the orthodox mainstream of Dutch Calvinism. Religiosity had been instilled in Petrus’s upbringing both by the occupation of his father and that of his mother’s first husband. His years in Franeker enhanced his theological background to a level beyond that of an average member of the Reformed Church. Also, Petrus later married a minister’s daughter. His career choice does not represent a departure from his religion. On the contrary, joining the

69

Ridderikhof, “De Franequer Los-Kop”, 131. Three and five year contracts were standard with the WIC and Stuyvesant was back in the Dutch Republic by late 1638. 70

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vigorously anti-Spanish West India Company may have been inspired by religious motives. Petrus’s deference to authority, in which he showed himself to be different from his father, made him eminently suitable to serve the Company and to further his career, unlike his father.

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Auction List The following list was compiled using a transcript in Jensma’s Stuyvesant dossier, which I collated with a photocopy of the original from the same dossier. The photocopy originates from the collection of inventories of books compiled by Ph.H. Breuker of the Fryske Akademy, which I thank for permission to use it. The original list is in Tresoar, archive nedergerecht Franekeradeel, inv.no. 191, fol. 515–520. This volume contains numerous book auctions, among which are several from ministers. The numbering system of the books as given below is in agreement with the original, and the same applies to the prices, given in guilders, stivers and pennies. In some cases (44/45, 46/47, 51/52 and 53/54) one amount was paid for two books. I have left out the names of the buyers. Only in the cases with “venditor” (seller, meaning that the buyer is the same as the seller) a V is added to the number. The abbreviation marks have also been omitted. The identification of the volumes in smaller typeface is mine. I am much indebted to Dennis C. Landis, Curator of European Books, The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, for his assistance. 0

adagia. Eersm: 1–6–.. The collections of adagia [proverbs] by Erasmus, of which several printings are known in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. 1 Opa Cicer: 2 tom: 1–14–.. The Opera Omnia of Cicero in two volumes. Several editions were published around 1600. 2 Joh. Hus 2. tom: 1–1–.. Most likely the two volume Historia Ioannis Hussi et Hier. Pragensis: monumenta etiam Hussi, cum quibusdam memorandis de injusta condemnatione et indigno utriusque martyris supplicio, narrationibus, a martyrum dicipulis conscriptis (Norimbergae, 1588). 3 colleg. conimbris: 2. tom: 4–10–.. An edition of commentaries on Aristotle by the Jesuits of the university of Coimbra in Portugal. 4 V Hist: eccles: 2–2–.. Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Historia ecclesiastica, integram ecclesiae christianae conditionem, indè à Christo . . . nato, juxta seculorum seriem, exponens . . ., of which a late edition was issued in 1624 in Basel. 5 Lavaterus in prov: 1–5–.. In librum Proverbiorum sive Sententiarum Solomonis, regis sapientissimi, commentarii, . . . by Ludovicus Lavaterus from 1572. 6 V Atlas minor: 3–..–.. Very likely a Atlas minor by Gerard Mercator of which between 1607 and 1628 several appeared in print. 7 Novum test: interl: grae: Ar: Mont: 0–14–.. Benedictus Arias Montanus, Novum Testamentum Graece, cum vulgata interpretatione Latina Graeci contextus lineis inserta . . .: atque alia, Ben[edicti] Ariae

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8 9

10 V

11 12 V

13 V

14

15 V

jaap jacobs Montani Hispalensis operâ à verbo reddita, ac diverso characterum genere distincta, in ejus est substituta locum / editio postrema, multà quàm antehac emendiator . . ., first printed in 1557. The last possible printing Stuyvesant may have owned is from 1627. Plauti Comoed: 0–10–.. Possibly the Amsterdam edition of 1629: M. Accii Plauti comoediae superst. XX, ad doctissim: virorum editiones repraesentatae Comoediae superst. XX. Antisocin: 1–3–.. Possibly one of the pamphlets by Lubbertus against Vorstius who was accused of socianism. It could also be [ Joachim Beringer], Antisocinus: hoc est, solida et exacta confutatio omnium et singulorum errorum, quos olim Ariani, Ebionitæ, Samosateniani, Pelagiani, & Thritheitæ, horribili audacia propuganârunt . . . (Francofurti, 1612). Catech: Vrsini. 0–21–.. Either Zacharius Ursinus, Corpus doctrinæ christianæ ecclesiarum à Papatu reformatarum, continens explicationes catecheticas D. Zachariæ Ursini, post varias editiones . . . ita recognitum ac restitutum, ut novum opus haberi possit, of which several editions appeared, or by the same author, Explicationum catecheticarum D. Zachariae Ursini Silesii absolutum opus . . ., of which also several editions were issued. Log. Syst: meth: Cl. Timpl: 0–16–.. Most likely Clemens Timplerus (Klemens Timpler), Philosophiae practicae systema methodicum, printed in 1608, 1610 and 1611. Log. Syst: Harm: Alstedij 0–16–.. Most likely a work by Johannes Henricus Alstedius ( Johann Heinrich Alsted), but the title word ‘Systema’ yielded no result. Possibly his Logica theologica (Francofurtum, 1625) or, less likely, his Theologia catechetica, exhibens sacratissimam novitiolorum christianorum scholam, in quâ summa fidei, et operum duarum christianismi columnarum, ex Bibliis parvis methodicè proponitur & expodnitur/tres in partes tributa, of which a imprint was issued in Hanover in 1622. Log: Barth Keckerm: 0–18–.. Very likely a work by Bartholomaeus Keckermann, possibly his Gymnnasium logicum, id est de usu et exercitione logicae artis ll. III from 1608 or his Systema logicae compendiosa methodo adornatum. Test: graecum. 0–4–.. A bible in Greek. Possibly the Greek New Testament of Benedictus Arias Montanus, as listed under no. 7. Another possibility is Théodore de Bèze, Testamentvm Novvm: sive nouum foedus Iesu Christi, D.N. Cuius Graeco contextui respondent interpretationes duæ (Genevæ, 1588, reprinted 1589, 1590 and 1611). But that would mean that the list contains two Greek New Testaments, which strikes me as odd. If no. 46 is also a New Testament, there would be three. Dict. lat-grae: D. Haeschelij. 2. lib: 0–10–.. A Greek-Latin dictionary in two volumes. I have not been able to identify Haeschelij.

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Synt: log: Amandi pol: 0–6–.. Amandi Polani a Polansdorf, Symphonia catholica, seu consensus catholicus et orthodoxus dogmatum hodiernae Ecclesiae ex praescripto Verbi Dei reformatae et veteris apostolicae catholicae, maxime illius quae primis aliquot seculis floruit (Genevae 1612), but it may also be another work by Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf. The title words suggest Thomas Sagittarius, Syntagma Thesum Logicarum ex consensu et autoritate amplissimæ Facultatis Philosophicæ (Ienæ, 1598), but that would mean the scribe got the author’s name entirely wrong. 17 Instit: log: Jacobi Martini. 1–1–.. Jacob Martini, Instutiones logicæ. Ed. renovata (1614) or his Institutionum logicarum libri VIII ([Wittenberg], 1611). 18 Bib: Latina. 1–..–.. A bible in Latin. 19 Log: franconis Burgerd: 1–..–.. Franco Burgersdijck, Institvtionvm logicarvm libri duo: . . . in usum scholarum . . . ex Aristotelis, Keckermanni, aliorumque praecipuorum logicorum praeceptis recensitis, novâ methodo ac modo formati, atque editi Institutionum logicarum libri duo (Lvgdvni Batavorvm, 1626). 20 Rhet: Syst: meth: Clem. timpl. 0–17–.. Clemens Timplerus (Klemens Timpler), Rhetoricæ systema methodicum Libris V Comprehesvm; in Qvo Modvs Bene Dicendi, Generalis Et Specialis, Politicus & Ecclesiasticus, Per Preacepta Et Qvaestiones breuiter ac perspicue declaratur (Hanoviæ, 1613). 21 Lexi: Grae-lat: Pasoris 1–11–.. George Pasor, Lexicon Græco-Latinum, in Novum Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Testamentum: ubi omnium vocabulorum, tam appellativorum themata, quàm nominum propriorum etyma, exquisitè indicantur, & grammaticè resolvuntur . . . authore Georgio Pasore; cum indice Græcarum et Latinarum N.T. . . . (Herbornæ Nassoviorum, 1626). 22 Jnstit: orat. Quintiliani. 0–6–.. Of Marcus Fabius Quintilianus’s Institutionum oratorium libri XII several editions are known. 23 V Rer. fris: Hist: Vbb. Emmij 4. lib: 1–4–.. Of the Rerum Frisicarum historiae by Ubbo Emmius several editions are known. 24 Com: in oes Ep: Ap: Ben. Aret: 3. lib: 1–10–.. Benedictus Aretius has published many bible commentaries, including those on Paul’s letters, but I can not find any Commentarii in omnes Epistolas Apostolicorum. 25 Enchir: Log: Casp: Barthol: 0–3–.. Caspar Bartholin (Casparus Bartholinus), Enchiridion logicum ex Aristotele, et opt. eius interpretum monumentis ita concinnatum . . . (1608). 26 V Poëm: Hor. Flacci. 0–12–.. There are several editions of the poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The diaeresis could point to the Poëmata omnia (Amstolodami, 1618).

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27 V Gram: Ebr. Buxtorphij. 1–1–.. Possibly the 1629 edition: Johann Buxtorf, Thesaurus grammaticus linguae sanctae Hebraeae .. (Basilea, 1629). Another possiblity is Johannes Buxtorfius, Epitome grammaticæ Hebræeæ.: Breviter et methodicè ad publicum scholarum usum proposita; adjecta succincta de mutatione punctorum vocalium instructio, & textuum Psalmorumq; aliquot Hebraicorum Latina interpretatio . . . (Basilæ, 1629). 28 Isag: in Org: Arist: R. Gockl: 0–14–.. Without doubt the Stagiritae Organum by Aristotle. But Rodolphus Goclenius did not edit that. 29 Ep: Ciceronis. 0–3–.. There are of course several editions of the letters of Cicero, but the Epistolarum selectarum ll. III: editio in usum scholarum Holl. (Lugd. Bat., 1626) is the most likely. 30 Gram: Ebr. S. Amama 0–9–.. Probably Sixtinus Amama, Petri Martinii Morentini Navarri Grammatica Hebræa, ad ultimam authoris recensionem accuratè emendata/brevibusque insuper notis illustrata à Gul. Coddaeo; unà cum ejusdem auctoris Technologia, item Grammatica Chaldaea, quatenus ab Hebraea differt. Accessêre hâc editione Commentariolus de recta lectione linguae Ebaeae, & regularum textualium syllabus Sixtini Amama Grammatica Hebræa (Amstelrodami, 1621). There are also two imprints from 1625 and a Dutch version from 1628. 31 Opusc: Greg: Nysseni. 0–9–.. Gregorius Nyssenus, Opvscvla qvinqve . . . /Græce nunc primum edita studio & opera Davidis Hoeschelii (Lvgdvni Batavorvm, 1593). 32 Gram: lat: 0–6–.. Likely the Latina grammatica; ex decreto Holl. ordinum in usum scholarum adornata van Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Lugduni Bat., 1628. 33 Jnst: log: Gocklenij 0–16–.. There are numerous Institutiones logicarum, Institutionis logicae and Institutionum logicarum, among others by Franco Burgersdijck. But Rodolphus Goclenius did not publish anything which resembles the description. 34 Orat: Cic: 3. lib: 1–2–.. There are several options. Possibly M.T. Ciceronis Orationes: Aliquot. Selectiores in gratiam eloquentiae studiosorum seorsum editae, quarum catalogum cal libri exhibit (Amstelodami, 1624). 35 Probl: log: Gockl: 1–3–.. Rodolphus Goclenius, Problematum logicorvm Rodolphi Goclenii professoris academici in schola Marpurg. Pars tertia (Marpurgi, 1591). 36 V Terentius. 0–2–.. There are several editions of the work of Marcus Terentius Vallo, among which the Opera Omnia, Amstelod., 1623. 37 Metaph: major Casp. Barthol: 0–11–.. Possibly Casparus Bartholinus, Enchiridion metaphysicum ex philosophorum coryphæi, Aristotelis, optimorumque eius interpretum monuments adornatum (s.l., 1611, reprinted 1613 and 1621).

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39

40

41

42

43

44

45 46 47

48

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Eob: Hessus. 0–8–.. A work by Helius Eobanus Hessus, who, amongst others, published the Davidic Psalms and the Iliad in Latin. Those are all old sixteenth-century editions, the most recent dating from 1578. Metaph: Cor: Martini. 0–4–.. Cornelis Martini, Metaphysica Commentatio Compendiose, Svccincte, Et Perspicuè, comprehendens universam Metaphysices doctrinam In usum & commodum Candidatorum Philosophiæ concinnata a . . . (Argentorati, 1605, reprint 1612) of zijn Metaphysica, brevibus quidem, sed methodice conscripta . . . ( Jenæ Ad Salam, 1622). V Delic: poet: 0–3–.. Perhaps Pt. Bethius, Deliciae musarum, hoc est Collectiones poeticae artificiosi quidam Logogryphi, et diversa Carmina . . . (Colo. Agr, 1632)? It is the only title I found which contains both title words. There are other possibilities with just Deliciae, such as Jacob Marcus, Deliciae Batavicae: Variae elegantesque picturae omnes Belgii antiquitates, et quidquid praeterea in eo visitur, representantes, quae ad album studiosorum conficiendum deservire possunt (Amstelodami, 1618) of which there are several imprints. Q. Curtius. 0–7–.. Very likely Quintus Curtius Rufus, presumably his biography of Alexander the Great, which was known under several titles in the early seventeenth century. Such as Rerum Alexandri Magni libri VIII superstites; Acc. Titi Popmae notae (Lugd. Batavorum, 1622). Cochlaus, d—actis & script: Lutheri. 0–3–.. Historiae Ioannis Cochlaei de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri Saxoniss. chronographicè ex ordinee ab A.D. MDXVII. usque ad annum MDXLVI. inclusivè, fideliter descipta, et ad posteros denarrata. Cum indice et edicto Wormatiensi . . . (Coloniae, 1568). Dial: Rami 0–5–.. The Dialecticæ by Petrus Ramus, of which several imprints are known. For instance Petri Rami Veromandui regii professoris Dialecticæ libri duo (Bremæ, 1612). Virgil: Several printings of Virgil are possible. One of them is Pvblii Virgilii Maronis Mantvani opera omnia,/clarissimorvm virorvm notationibvs illustrata; opera & industria Ioannis A. Meyen (Francofvrti, 1629). Metaph: Anonymi 0–1–.. Perhaps issued by Metaphors Anonymous. Test: Grae: See under no. 14. Comment: Caes: 0–2–.. C. Ivlivs Caesar, Commentarii.: Nouis emendationibus illustrati; eivsdem lobrorvm, qvi desiderantvr fragmenta./Ex bibliotheca Flvlvii Vrsini Romani . . . (Antverpiæ, 1622). Syst: log: plen: Keck: 1–5–.. Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema logicae, tribus libris adornatum, pleniore praeceptorum methodo, et commentariis scriptis ad praeceptorum illustrationem

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50 51

52 53 54

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jaap jacobs et collationem cum doctrina Aristotelis, atque aliorum, tum veterum, tum recentium logicorum sententiis ac disputationibus (Francofurti, 1628). Psalm: lib: Ebr: 0–7–.. Possibly Martin Bucer, S. Psalmorum libri quinque ad Ebraicam veritatem versi, et familiari explanatione elucidati, first issued in 1529. There are many later imprints. Lib: Genrs: Ebr: 0–16–.. Presumably a book with Hebrew generations. Psalt: Eob: Hessi. 0–8–.. A book by Helius Eobanus Hessus, who published the Davidic Psalms and the Iliad in Latin. Those are all old sixteenth-century editions, the most recent from 1578. In this case it must be a psalter. Hom: Georg: Vicelij. Georg Witzel, Homiliæ Orthodoxæ . . . (Cöln, 1539) or a later edition. Prov: Sal: frans en latijn Doubtlessly an edition of the Proverbia Salomonis in French and Latin. Livij Decas 5. 0–4–.. Either T. Livii Patavini Historiarvm ab vrbe condita decas IV in vsvm scholarvm Societatis Iesv Historiarum ab urbe condita decas IV in usum scholarum Societatis Jesu (Monachii, 1624), or Livius Harderwijck, Decas problematum theologicorum . . . (Franekerae, 1612). Probably the first. Titus Livius 2–4–.. See under no. 54.

FAMILY RESEARCH AS A KEY TO NEW NETHERLAND’S HISTORY

THE STATE OF NEW NETHERLAND GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH—2001 Harry Macy, Jr.

In this paper I will attempt to summarize the current state of research and publication in New Netherland genealogy—the ongoing effort to reconstruct the families of New Netherland, determine their Old World origins, and trace their descendants. I will focus on developments of the past ten years.1 Genealogies of New Netherland families, when properly compiled, can be immensely helpful to historians, saving them extensive research time and probably offering them a more comprehensive view of a family than they might obtain by their own efforts. Genealogies can be particularly useful when they reveal relationships which help to explain an individual’s political, economic or social activities. For the social historian, properly-compiled genealogies can offer a goldmine of evidence for establishing patterns of marriage and re-marriage, childbearing, mortality, and migration. Unfortunately, too many of the genealogies of New Netherland families that fill the shelves of our libraries and now multiply in cyberspace cannot be called properly-compiled. Historians as well as genealogists may be seriously misled if they rely on these genealogies indiscriminately. And historians who have suffered from reliance on poor genealogies may develop a mistrust of all genealogical work. It is important to note that this problem is not confined to New Netherland genealogy. The same criticism can be leveled at much of the genealogical work that has been done on families of the other American colonies as well.

1 For an overview of the earlier years of New Netherland genealogy see Harry Macy, Jr., “Why New Netherland Genealogists and Historians Need Each Other— An Editor’s Perspective,” de Halve Maen 67 (1994): 79–86. For an excellent view of New Netherland genealogy from another perspective see Nico Plomp, “NieuwNederlanders en hun Europese achtergrond,” Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 50 (1996): 131–146. Both of these articles are based on papers delivered at the Rensselaerswijck Seminar XVII (1994).

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The first published genealogies of the families of New Netherland appeared in the middle of the 19th century. Until about 25 years ago the number of persons who were doing this research and publication remained relatively small, as few people were interested in genealogy, and only a fraction of them had New Netherland roots. Over the last quarter-century the picture has changed significantly, due to a number of factors, the most recent of which is the advent of the Internet, which in just the past five years has caused an explosion of interest in genealogy. Reports vary wildly, but it is clear that millions of people, in the United States and a number of other countries, are now pursuing genealogy as a hobby. For those who do not live near a genealogical library, the Internet now offers access to many research sources and the opportunity to converse with others who share an interest in a family. Websites relating to genealogy are said to be the second most heavily visited group on the Internet. Almost all would-be genealogists are now computer users, and genealogy software is making it easier for them to keep the results of their research in order and to publish those results. As a result of these trends it follows that the number of persons pursuing New Netherland genealogy has risen considerably. However, thus far there has not been any significant increase in the number of persons doing New Netherland genealogy at a professional or scholarly level. This phenomenon can also be seen in genealogy as a whole. Despite the remarkable growth in interest in the field, and despite a flood of “how-to” books and educational programs, scholarly genealogy remains the province of a very small group of people. How do we define scholarly genealogy? Very few academic institutions offer courses in this subject, and almost none offers a degree. The development of genealogy as a scholarly field of study has had to take place outside of the academy.2 Standards have been set and accepted, and are reflected in the better genealogical publications. These standards require that a published genealogy show that the writer is familiar with the literature and has used all available resources. Every claimed family relationship, such as parent and child, or husband and wife, must be doc-

2 For some background of scholarly American genealogy see Harry Macy, Jr., “Recognizing Scholarly Genealogy and its Importance to Genealogists and Historians,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 150 (1996): 7–28.

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umented, as must every date, place, or event that has been attributed to an individual’s life. Documentation must be to a primary source if possible, or failing that, to a trusted transcription or translation of a primary source. If primary sources give conflicting or inadequate evidence, the writer must present the arguments for his or her interpretation of that evidence. If secondary works must be cited, the sources used by the authors of those works should be specified if possible. And if previous accounts of the family have been published, the writer should identify them and discuss any differences he or she may have with the earlier authors’ conclusions. The initial goal of a genealogist is to reconstruct a family, establishing all the relationships and determining, as far as possible, the relevant names, dates, and places. The next step is to try to add more biographical detail about each individual family member, making them more than just names with dates. But it is increasingly accepted that the genealogist must go still further, and present the family in a broader historical context, showing how lives may have been shaped by events and trends in the larger society, and by the customs and experience of their ethnic or religious group. This, of course, requires that scholarly genealogists become familiar with the work of their historian colleagues. The final requirement for a scholarly genealogy is that it be consistently presented in a format that has been accepted as a standard for the field. In the United States, the most widely accepted standard is that known as the Register format. The scholarly genealogical journals in this country all use this format, with minor variations. Other countries may have their own formats, such as that used in the Netherlands, which differs considerably in appearance from the American standard though it serves the same purpose. Having set forth the requirements of scholarly genealogy, it must be emphasized that it represents an ideal seldom realized. A large number of researchers who are attempting to do New Netherland genealogy either do not accept the importance of these requirements or are unwilling to take the time to conform to them. For most of them, genealogy is a hobby, and it becomes a less attractive one when it requires this type of work. When they publish the results of their efforts, they are usually doing so without the benefit of a genealogical editor or anything resembling peer review. If they bother to cite their sources, too often they have relied heavily on secondary works, without any critical evaluation, and thus may have copied

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and perpetuated past errors and also created new ones. Their work is rarely going to add to our knowledge of families of the New Netherland period. This is not to say that the average genealogist is making no contribution to the field. Occasionally they will reveal newly-discovered information on a family’s Old World origin. And their reconstruction of nineteenth and twentieth century descendants of the family may be the most valuable and reliable portion of their work, as it is likely that no one else has tread that ground before them, forcing them to use primary sources to obtain their data. Rather than publish their genealogies in book form some will just submit a manuscript version to a library. Many others are now posting the results of their work on the World Wide Web. They may set up their own websites or they may contribute their data to large databases like the Ancestral File of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter LDS Church), or the commercially-operated World Family Tree, also available on CD-ROM. Anyone may submit genealogy to these databases, and while documentation is encouraged it is not required. Also, two or more submitters may turn in conflicting accounts of a family and all will be posted without comment. Such databases can be useful for clues, for leads to further research. Unfortunately, many would-be genealogists are copying information from one of these databases and citing the database as their source, without attempting to determine where the information originated or whether it is valid. For example, one recently published genealogy of a New Netherland family at first glance looks like it is heavily documented, but closer examination reveals citation after citation to the World Family Tree, with no mention of the original source of the data. One also wonders how the researcher who picks up such a book a few decades from now will be able to check an author’s source if all that is given is an Internet address that no longer exists or a CD-ROM that by then may have gone the way of the phonograph record or 5¼" floppy disk. Had the author also cited a paper or microfilm version of the source it no doubt would still be retrievable. Of course, some genealogies that have appeared in recent years have been very well done. Over the past ten years (1991–2001) in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (hereafter The NYG&B Record ) 32 book genealogies dealing with New Netherland families have been reviewed. This is an average of only three a year, and not all have received favorable reviews. Some of the best titles were

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Marjorie Chamberlain’s two volumes on the Dikeman family, the first of which received the NYG&B Book Award; the work of Folkerts and Wijmer on the Van Voorhees origins and Florence Christoph’s recent mammoth genealogy of that family; Cynthia Biasca’s Bradt genealogy accompanied by Peter Christoph’s book on that family’s early history; William Brower Bogardus’ tabulation of the descendants of Anneke Jans, a small part of his database of over 500,000 descendants; the descendants of New Netherland families in Frank Doherty’s award-winning Settlers of the Beekman Patent; Ethel Konight Kolenut’s work on the Ackerson-Eckerson family; and the Van Tuyl genealogy by Rory Van Tuyl and Jan Groenendijk.3 These are books by genealogists, but some historians have also been producing works in which good genealogical research has played a major role. Firth Fabend’s dissertation on the Harings4 stands out in this regard, as does David Voorhees’ still largely unpublished research into the Leisler family network. These historians are showing us how valuable genealogy can be to their craft, and they are also showing genealogists how family history can be so much more than the bare bones of a family lineage. It is interesting that the list of the better genealogical book authors is essentially different from the list of leading authors in the genealogical journals. Most of the authors who have chosen to write articles for the journals over the past ten years do not have books to their credit. However, the primary route into scholarly genealogy in this country has been through publication of articles in the journals. These articles are subject to professional editing and some of the journals utilize peer review. The journals’ role in the development of reliable New Netherland genealogy has been of prime importance.

3 Marjorie Dikeman Chamberlain, Johannes Dyckman of Fort Orange and His Descendants, 2 vols. (1988, 1994); Jan Folkerts, D.J. Wijmer et al., Through a Dutch Door, 17th Century Origins of the Van Voorhees Family (1992) and Florence A. Christoph, The Van Voorhees Family in America, The First Six Generations (2000); Cynthia Brott Biasca, Descendants of Albert and Arent Andriessen Bradt (1990) and Peter R. Christoph, A Norwegian Family in Colonial America (1994); William Brouwer Bogardus, Dear ‘Cousin’: A Charted Genealogy of the Descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1996); Frank J. Doherty, The Settlers of the Beekman Patent, Dutchess County, New York, 7 vols. to date (1990–2004); Ethel Konight Kolenut, The Ackerson/Eckerson Family in America (1991); Rory L. Van Tuyl and Jan N.A. Groenendijk, A Van Tuyl Chronicle (1996). 4 Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies 1660 –1800 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

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Unfortunately, the number of journals publishing New Netherland genealogy has shrunk, in spite of the growth of interest in the field. The NYG&B Record has always been the principal such journal, and it continues to publish a significant amount of New Netherland genealogy.5 The Record is, however, supposed to cover New Yorkers of every background, from the 17th century to the present, so its issues can include only a limited number of articles devoted to New Netherland families. Nevertheless, in the past twenty years there have been over 100 articles in the Record that deal with origins or descendants of New Netherland families. Two-thirds of these, or 65 articles, have appeared in the past ten years. A second major journal for New Netherland genealogy used to be the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey, but for many years now its editors have published very little genealogy at all, limiting most of their issues to transcripts or abstracts of source records. In fact, in the past twenty years only two New Netherland families have been treated in the GMNJ.6 For nine years from 1983 to 1992 New Jersey Dutch genealogy had one other outlet, the Somerset County Genealogical Quarterly, ably edited by Fred Sisser and largely written by him as well. Although most of his pages were filled with transcripts or abstracts of records, Sisser did include five excellent genealogies of Somerset County families of New Netherland origin.7 The Holland Society’s de Halve Maen also formerly published a great deal of genealogy. From 1981 to 1991 there were at least 18 5 In 2002 The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society published on CD-ROM Worden’s Index to The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 1870–1998, by Mrs. Jean D. Worden, containing an every-name index to the first 128 volumes of The Record along with article indexes by title and author. Each disc in the CDROM edition of The Record (published 2003–05) also contains article indexes 1870–2001. Earlier subject indexes published on paper were compiled by Mrs. Worden, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 113 Years Master Index 1870–1982 (Franklin, Ohio: the author, 1983) and by Harry Macy, Jr., Articles in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 1983–1995, Indexed by Surname or Location (New York: NYG&B Society, 1995, with a supplement for 1996–2000). For a subject index to all American genealogical periodicals from 1847 to date, consult the PERiodical Source Index (PERSI), widely available in print or electronic formats. 6 The two articles are Terhune-Briggs (1994) and Simonson (2000). Earlier articles are indexed in Kenn Stryker-Rodda, Index to the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey [Vols. 1–50, 1925–1975], 4 vols. (1973–82). In 2004 the GMNJ came under new editorship and it is expected that future issues will contain more compiled genealogy. 7 Van Neste (1984–88), Peterson (1987), Lane (1988), Van Veghten (1990), Covert (1991).

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articles that were either pure genealogy or biographical sketches including genealogical data, half of them written by David Riker. Since David Voorhees took over as editor the publication of genealogical material has largely ceased and de Halve Maen has become the premier historical journal which we all admire.8 The only other New York journal that has published New Netherland genealogy is the The Dutch Settlers Society of Albany Year Book, which in the last twenty years has included four genealogical articles.9 There is another periodical which does not carry compiled genealogies but has included many articles of value for New Netherland research. This is The NYG&B Newsletter, which began publication in 1990.10 Most of the relevant articles in the Newsletter have been contributed by Henry Hoff, and they include one of particular value that provides a checklist of sources to use in tracing a New Netherland family.11 Many of his articles identify material available in published or manuscript form on New Netherland families, which might not be found when searching library catalogs for those surnames. A particularly useful recent article by Mr. Hoff identifies sources available for researching each of New York’s manors.12 Other articles in the Newsletter focus on NYG&B Library holdings of interest, particularly church records. The present writer also contributed an article on the recent 375th anniversary of the arrival of the first European settlers, noting what has been published on the four families in that group that are known to have left American descendants.13 The NYG&B Society publications catalog lists the feature articles in each issue of the Newsletter since 1990, and articles more than two years old have been posted on the Society’s website www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org. 8 Articles in de Halve Maen can be found through William B. Bogardus, Directory of Genealogical and Historical Articles Published in de Halve Maen from 1923 to 1991 (1992); Louis Duermyer, The Holland Society of New York Index to Publications 1885–Jan. 1977 (1977); and Roger D. Joslyn, Index to de Halve Maen Vols. 52–61 1977–1988 (1990). 9 Ten Broeck (1981–84), Fonda (1981–84, 1984–87), Blanchan (1987–89), Salisbury (1994–97). 10 In 2004 The NYG&B Newsletter was renamed The New York Researcher. 11 Henry B. Hoff, “Researching New York Dutch Families: A Checklist Approach,” The NYG&B Newsletter 7 (1996): 12–14. 12 Henry B. Hoff, “Manors in New York,” The NYG&B Newsletter 10 (1999): 55–58, 11 (2000): 13–17. 13 Harry Macy, Jr., “375th Anniversary of the Eendracht and Nieuw Nederland,” The NYG&B Newsletter 10 (1999): 3–4.

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Another publication was the Dutch Family Heritage Society Quarterly, which rarely carried genealogical articles but contained useful information on research sources, Dutch customs and history, and queries. Its scope also included all Dutch immigration to this country, not just that of the New Netherland period. Occasionally a New Netherland family has been the subject of an article in one of the other U.S. genealogical journals, but in the past ten years there appear to have been only twelve such articles, five of which were published in The American Genealogist.14 More significant has been the increase in articles appearing in publications in the Netherlands. Especially important have been Marcel Kemp’s 1992 article in De Nederlandsche Leeuw on Krommerijners in the New World, identifying twenty New Netherland settlers from the Province of Utrecht,15 and six essays in the 1996 Jaarboek of the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie which are a goldmine of information on New Netherland families.16 In this country, with only The NYG&B Record continuing to publish a significant amount of New Netherland genealogy on a regular basis, there was an obvious opportunity for another journal to enter the picture, and that happened in 1996 when Dorothy Koenig launched New Netherland Connections. Ms. Koenig, a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, has produced a very professional and valuable new publication. She specified at the beginning that she would publish “works in progress,” implying that her articles might not be the finished products that would be accepted by The NYG&B Record, but in fact there have been many excellent arti-

14 The five articles in The American Genealogist cover Lootman (1991), Beeck (1994), de Vries (1997), Garrison (1999) and Freer (1999). For the other journals consult PERSI (see note 5, above). 15 M.S.F. Kemp, “Krommerijners in de nieuwe wereld,” De Nederlandsche Leeuw 109: 10–11 (Oct.-Nov. 1992), cols. 405–433, partially translated by John H. van Schaick, “Utrecht Farmers in New Netherland,” The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record [hereafter The NYG&B Record ] 127 (1996): 1–6, 92–98. 16 Articles in Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 50 (1996): Willem Frijhoff, “Dominee Bogardus also Nieuw-Nederlander,” 37–68; Charles T. Gehring, “Petrus Stuyvesant, directeur-generaal van Nieuw-Nederland,” 69–88; A.L. van Gastel, “Adriaen van der Donck als woordvoerder van de Nieuw-Nederlandse bevolking,” 89–107; J.A. Jacobs, “Johannes de Laet in de Nieuwe Wereld,” 108–130; Nico Plomp, “Nieuw-Nederlanders en hun Europese achtergrond,” 131–160; M.S.F. Kemp, “De herkomst van Wolfert Gerritsz, stamvader van de Amerikaanse familie Van Kouwenhoven,” 161–178; and E.Th.R. Unger, “ ‘Voorts weet ick niet meer te schrijven,’ Brieven van Nieuw-Nederlandse Van Arsdale’s (1698, 1731, 1733),” 179–286.

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cles in New Netherland Connections that would have been equally appropriate for publication in the Record. In its first five years of publication New Netherland Connections has included over forty genealogical articles, many of them by new authors. It has helped publicize all of the other organizations and publications relating to New Netherland genealogy, and has attracted a steady stream of queries and often published answers to them as well. It is a welcome addition to the field.17 In the past ten years all the U.S. genealogical journals taken together have published 125 articles on New Netherland families. These articles were produced by 54 authors, most of whom have three or fewer titles to their credit. Fifty of the 125 articles were produced by six authors, namely Henry Hoff, Harry Macy, Dorothy Koenig, John Dobson, Barbara Barth, and Pim Nieuwenhuis.18 However, volume isn’t everything and there have been some outstanding articles that may represent the author’s sole contribution to New Netherland genealogy. For example, a number of the country’s top genealogists whose specialties lie elsewhere have made small but significant additions to the New Netherland genealogical literature. Peter Stebbins Craig in his studies of the Swedes on the Delaware has uncovered a number of interesting connections to New Netherland that had escaped the notice of New York-oriented researchers.19 James Hansen, while tracking early French settlers from Canada into the Midwest, discovered some unexpected links to Dutch communities in New York.20 Gordon Remington, best known for his writings on upstate New York and New England, produced an outstanding article on the Duncanson sisters who went from Scotland to Amsterdam where they found husbands who would bring them to New Netherland.21

17

New Netherland Connections is indexed by subject in PERSI (note 5, above). We regret to report that since this paper was written we have lost two of these prolific genealogists, Pim Nieuwenhuis who died on 25 September 2001 and Barbara Barth who died on 23 April 2003. 19 Peter Stebbins Craig, 1671 Census of the Delaware (1999), previously published in the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine. 20 James L. Hansen, “The Family of Hendrick Van der Werken,” The NYG&B Record 118 (1987): 1–13, 213; “The Origins of the Montross and David Families of Tarrytown,” ibid. 122 (1991): 193–201; 123 (1992): 30–34; “The Lootman/Barrois Families of Canada, New York, and Points West,” The American Genealogist 66 (1991): 88–92, 169–175. 21 Gordon L. Remington, “The Duncanson Wives of Four New Netherland 18

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In spite of all these contributions, the picture could be more encouraging. We are basically down to the two journals, The NYG&B Record and New Netherland Connections. The Record has a circulation of a little over 3,000, and New Netherland Connections’s circulation remains in the hundreds. This means that a large percentage of those who are trying to do New Netherland genealogy are not subscribing to these publications, and probably are not reading them in libraries either, even though these journals may contain the best New Netherland genealogy now being published. Nevertheless, circulation has been growing,22 partly because knowledgeable genealogists have been publicizing journal articles through their own websites or by participating in Internet mailing lists. In this regard a primary forum for New Netherland families has been the Dutch Colonies List.23 Among the more experienced genealogists participating in that list are Dorothy Koenig of New Netherland Connections, and Richard Alan McCool, whose work on New Netherland families meets all the requirements of genealogical scholarship although it remains unpublished. Another promising participant is Lorine McGinnis Schulze, who has had articles published in both The NYG&B Record and New Netherland Connections. Mrs. Schulze, who lives in Ontario, Canada, maintains the website Olive Tree Genealogy,24 which includes some very useful source data for New Netherland genealogical research. There are other sites that have been established for individual families or geographic areas where New Netherland families lived, but the full potential of the Internet is certainly a long way from being realized with regard to New Netherland genealogy. Over the past 35 years the rise in interest in genealogy has led to the reprinting of many works containing New Netherland genealogical data or compiled genealogies. Almost all of the source material that was published in the 19th or early 20th centuries has been reproduced in either paper or electronic forms. Other resources useful to genealogists have been newly-translated or re-translated and

Settlers: Glen, Teller, Powell and Loockermans,” The NYG&B Record 128 (1997): 1–10, 128. 22 Evidence of this can be seen in The NYG&B Record’s circulation, which by 2004 had risen to 4,500. 23 For information on the Dutch Colonies List visit http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/ usa/misc/misc.html. 24 Olive Tree Genealogy homepage is at http://olivetreegenealogy.com/index.shtml.

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published, and of course these include the marvelous volumes from the New Netherland Project. Most recently the Holland Society has begun publication of the Flatbush Reformed Church records, ably edited by David Voorhees. Over the past 20 years the records of most of the Reformed or Lutheran churches in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys have been published by either Arthur and Nancy Kelly, owners of Kinship in Rhinebeck, New York, or by Mrs. Jean Worden. Many of these church records were transcribed earlier by Royden Vosburgh under the aegis of The NYG&B Society, and his work is now widely available on microfilm. Robert Griffin of Bergen Historic Books has reprinted some earlier-published New Jersey Reformed records as well as those of New Amsterdam/New York City. While most of the surviving church records begin after the New Netherland period, many of the congregations were attended largely by descendants of the New Netherland settlers. There still remain some 18th century Reformed records, mostly from Kings and Queens counties, that are available in manuscript, microfilm, or on the Web, but have not been published on paper. In the near future we expect to see more reprinting in electronic form. The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society will soon announce the electronic republication of the entire run of The NYG&B Record from 1870 to 1998, fully indexed and searchable.25 This should be followed by electronic reprints of other NYG&B publications and of previously unpublished material in the NYG&B Library. Genealogists of New Netherland families who understand the importance of using primary sources have in recent years been making increased use of the microfilm resources of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, maintained by the LDS Church. This Library has films of nearly all of the surviving governmental records of New Netherland, the colonies of New York and New Jersey, the early counties of New York and New Jersey, the City of New York, and those more distant jurisdictions where New Netherland families migrated. It also has films of many church records, including many of the holdings of the Reformed Church archives at New Brunswick, and the church record collection and other holdings of the Holland

25 Publication of the CD-ROM edition of The NYG&B Record commenced in 2003 with Disc 1 (1870–1899) and is expected to be completed by the end of 2005.

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Society Library. Since the films at Salt Lake City may be borrowed at LDS Family History Centers worldwide, they have greatly expanded the research capabilities of people who do not have easy access to another major genealogical repository. Half of the New Netherland articles published in The NYG&B Record in recent years have dealt with the European origins of settlers, rather than their American descendants. In this regard films from Salt Lake City have played a major role. The library at Salt Lake City holds an enormous number of films from the Netherlands and other European countries where New Netherland settlers had their roots. Filming has been done at archives throughout the Netherlands, so that most of the surviving church registers of the 16th and 17th centuries are available from Salt Lake, as well as copies of some notarial archives and other records. The library at Salt Lake City also has accumulated one of the larger collections in this country of printed genealogical material from the Netherlands, including runs of most of the Dutch national and local genealogical journals. In addition to films of original records in the Netherlands, the Family History Library has films of available indexes or abstracts of Netherlands records. These make the original records easier to use, especially for the researcher with a weak knowledge of 17th century Dutch language and handwriting. About 20 years ago the LDS Church published a series of research papers describing the basic elements of Netherlands genealogy, including an inventory of surviving church records by locality for every province. Although no author is indicated, these papers were written by the late Hendrik Slok, whose early death was a great loss to New Netherland genealogy. One of Slok’s most valuable papers is the one that describes Amsterdam religious and civil vital records, including the extensive indexes to those records.26 Another Amsterdam resource now accessible in this country is the Noord Amerika Chronologie, a microfilm of card abstracts of Amsterdam notarial archives pertaining to North America from 1598 to 1750, compiled by the late Amsterdam archivists de Roever and Hart. This 26 Church and Civil Records of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Before 1811, [Research Paper] Series C, No. 25 (Salt Lake City, 1975, also microfiche 6000355–6000356). A full list of the papers is in Gwenn F. Epperson, New Netherland Roots (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1994), pp. 68–69.

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is one film that is not available in Salt Lake, but there is a copy at the NYG&B Library and another at the State Library in Albany. A different set of these abstracts, translated by Pim Nieuwenhuis, has recently been published in New Netherland Connections.27 There is considerable overlap between the two sets but each has items not in the other. From the beginning of American genealogy, there has been a fascination with discovering the place of origin of each immigrant and something about the family on the other side of the Atlantic. Since New Netherland records contain so many clues to these origins, many descendants of New Netherland families have found it relatively simple to locate European records, usually with the help of a researcher in the old country. Much of the early work in this area was satisfactory, though limited in scope. There was also some notoriously bad work done, some of it intentionally fraudulent. It is now known that Louis P. de Boer, a native of the Netherlands living in the United States, fabricated many of the ancestries he produced for American clients in the early twentieth century. DeBoer knew how to do proper genealogical research, but when the answer wasn’t to be found he did not hesitate to leap to false conclusions, no doubt needing to collect the client’s fee. Another researcher who took this route was Gustave Anjou, again quite capable of doing good genealogy but also ready to invent ancestry when he couldn’t find it on record.28 Once a false story is in print it can be extremely difficult to kill it. Books containing such false accounts have been reprinted or filmed with no warning that some of the contents are unreliable. The Internet has added another medium for such reprintings. The stories that Anneke Jans was descended from William of Orange, or that Frederick Philipse descended from the Bohemian nobility, are still out there, in spite of excellent published research that disproves them.29 Beginning

27 Pim Nieuwenhuis, “Abstracts from Notarial Documents in the Amsterdam Archive,” New Netherland Connections 4 (1999): 65–70, 90–93; 5 (2000): 23–28, 50–56, 78–81. 28 For an exposé of Anjou and his work see Robert C. Anderson, “ ‘We Wuz Robbed!’ The modus operandi of Gustave Anjou,” Genealogical Journal 19 (1991): 47–58, and Gordon L. Remington, “Gustave, We Hardly Knew Ye: A Portrait of Herr Anjou as a Jungberg [his real name],” ibid., 59–70. However, only a small part of Anjou’s work was on New Netherland families. A study of de Boer and his writings is yet to be made. 29 On Anneke Jans’ ancestry see George Olin Zabriskie, “Anneke Jans in Fact

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genealogists unfortunately are likely to see or hear these stories long before they find the journal articles that tell them the truth. And even when they learn the truth, they may not want to accept it. Beginning in the 1930s, William J. Hoffman wrote many articles on the origins of New Netherland families. Most of his work was published in The NYG&B Record. Hoffman was an American citizen but he was also a native of the Netherlands. Dutch was his native tongue and he learned to read both the language and handwriting of the 17th century. He also was an engineer by profession, with an innate concern for detail. He was, in short, a superb genealogist, and no one else has matched his contribution to our knowledge of the New Netherland settlers.30 The first native-born Americans to try their hand at finding the settlers’ European origins included two highly regarded genealogists, Rosalie Fellows Bailey and George Olin Zabriskie, whose articles were published in The NYG&B Record, de Halve Maen, and other journals. Gwenn Epperson of Utah had easy access to the Salt Lake City library, and also knew Hendrik Slok. Under his guidance she began her search for settlers’ origins, and went on to write several articles for The NYG&B Record as well as her book New Netherland Roots,31 which challenged other North American genealogists to undertake similar research. Some have taken up this challenge, and a few have published the results of their research, including Dorothy Koenig, Lorine Schulze, and Henry Hoff who were mentioned earlier, Chris Brooks of Kansas City, John Dobson of Winnipeg, Canada, and Kathy Lyon, Susan Amicucci, William Parry, and the present writer,

and Fiction,” The NYG&B Record 104 (1973): 65–72, 157–64, 249. On Philipse see C.R. Schrick, “The Philipse Jewel: A Legend Is Born,” de Halve Maen 67 (1994): 30–36; and Field Horne, “The Friesland Ancestry of Frederick Philipse,” The NYG&B Record 109 (1978): 201–204. 30 Hoffman’s articles in the The NYG&B Record run from vol. 63 (1932) through vol. 85 (1954). Of particular interest is his series “An Armory of American Families of Dutch Descent,” which ran in vols. 64–72 and concluded in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 106. He also had articles published in The American Genealogist, of which “Random Notes Concerning Settlers of Dutch Descent” (vols. 29–30) is of particular interest. Some of Hoffman’s papers are in the library of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, as is his unfinished typescript “Settlers From The Netherlands in America Before 1700: A Compendium of Genealogical Information,” listing settlers by place of origin for seven provinces of the Netherlands. 31 See note 26, above.

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the last four all New Yorkers. All of us have found that even with a limited knowledge of the language we could effectively use Netherlands church registers and some of the other records that had been maintained in a tabular format. Faced with notarial records and other masses of 17th century text, however, most of us have had to call on our Dutch colleagues for assistance, but working together we have managed to make some important discoveries. In recent years we have had help from a number of these colleagues in the Netherlands who share an interest in the New Netherland settlers. Readers of New Netherland Connections and The NYG&B Record have become particularly familiar with names of Otto Schutte, Pim Nieuwenhuis, and Peter Nouwt. The contributions of Nico Plomp, Jaap Jacobs, and others have also been welcomed, including Marcel Kemp who was mentioned earlier. This research into the origins of the settlers still has a long way to go. Much more remains to be discovered. But what has turned up in the past two decades is interesting, in that it makes the population of the colony of New Netherland even more diverse than previously thought. For those settlers whose place of origin was known from the colony’s records, it has been a simple matter of seeking out the records of that place, if they survive. But there were others whose place of origin was not known, or who were on record as coming to New Netherland from a large city like Amsterdam, and if they had Dutch-sounding names it was assumed that they and their families originated in the Netherlands. Recent research has disclosed that many of these individuals actually came from elsewhere, especially from the North Sea coast of Germany, and lived only briefly in the Netherlands before crossing the Atlantic. For example, Jan Snedeker was found to have come from Oldenburg and his first wife from Hamburg,32 while Annetje Barents Rottmer, the wife of the Norwegian Albert Andriesen Bradt, was from Land Hadeln east of Cuxhaven.33 Several settlers have been added to the list of those coming from Ostfriesland, including Jan Evertsen,34 Barent Juriansz

32

Jeff Snedeker, Pim Nieuwenhuis, and Ted Snedeker, “The European Origin of the Snedeker Family,” New Netherland Connections 1 (1996): 4–12, 2 (1997): 39–45. 33 Harry Macy, Jr., “Origins of Some New Netherland Families,” The NYG&B Record 123 (1992): 17–19. 34 Gwenn F. Epperson, “Jan Evertsen, Master Shoemaker of Albany,” The NYG&B Record 125 (1994): 18–24ff., as corrected 131 (2000): 295.

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Ryder,35 and Gerrit Stoffelsz van Sant;36 and the founder of the Ostrander family has been traced to the island of Nordstrand off Schleswig-Holstein.37 All of these persons were previously thought to have been “Dutch.” On the other hand, Gordon Remington, in his study of the Duncanson sisters mentioned earlier,38 showed that Willem Teller, previously thought by many to be German, was actually from the Shetland Islands. All of these discoveries were published in The NYG&B Record or New Netherland Connections. Besides discovering European connections, genealogists in the past ten years have been correcting errors in the previously proposed structures of many New Netherland families. There have been several cases where the individual long identified as the family’s American founder actually was found to have come over as a child with previously unidentified parents. An example of this is Susan Amicucci’s recent article on the Sutphen family, in New Netherland Connections.39 While Dirck Jansz van Sutphen had been identified as the immigrant ancestor, Ms. Amicucci observed that he must have come to the colony as a child, making it likely that his parents came with him, and she was able to identify them as Jan Hendrickszen Wesseling and his wife Elsje Jans. The present writer found a similar situation in the Van Wicklen family,40 where the alleged progenitor Evert Jansz was on record as immigrating in 1664 but did not marry until 26 years later. He too came over as a very small child, with his previously unidentified parents Jan Jacobszen de Vries and Sytje Gerrits, and siblings who also had not previously been identified. There are undoubtedly more such cases to be discovered. That they are being discovered now reflects our recognition that every genealogy must be taken back to the drawing board for a re-examination of the primary sources, especially those sources not available to earlier

35

Note in The NYG&B Record 131 (2000): 290. Barbara A. Barth, “The Van Sant Family of New Utrecht and Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” The NYG&B Record 127 (1996): 129–36ff. 37 Chris Brooks, “Parentage of Pieter Pietersen Ostrander and His Sister Tryntje Pieters,” The NYG&B Record 130 (1999): 163–173, and Lorine McGinnis Schulze and Chris Brooks, “Ostrander Update,” ibid. 131 (2000): 178–181. 38 See note 21, above. 39 Susan Amicucci, “Reconstructing the Ancestry of Dirck Janse Van Sutphen,” New Netherland Connections 6 (2001): 57–65. 40 Harry Macy, Jr., “The Van Wicklen/Van Wickle Family, Including Its Frisian Origin and Connections to Minnerly and Kranckheyt,” The NYG&B Record 128 (1997): 81–90, 177–184, 241–252. 36

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researchers. These discoveries are also due to our better understanding of the Dutch naming system and related customs. Many other articles have dealt with families where the immigrant was already properly identified, but there were errors in attaching children to parents or in properly identifying spouses. Of the current writers, Barbara Barth has shown an unusual talent for detecting and correcting such errors. In addition to New Netherland’s European families, there were Africans in New Netherland, both slave and free, and the civil and church records of the colony contain a surprising amount of information about these individuals. Henry Hoff has made the most extensive genealogical study of this part of New Netherland’s population. His writings reveal that the Africans adopted some genealogicallyuseful Dutch customs, such as those regarding choice of names and baptismal witnesses for children. The earliest generations also show many cases of marriage across racial lines. Mr. Hoff’s work has been published in The NYG&B Record, the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and The American Genealogist.41 One of his most impressive contributions is the genealogy of the family of Frans Abramse Van Salee, born by 1659 to a Moroccan-Dutch father and African slave mother; in an article in The NYG&B Record 42 Hoff traced this family into the 19th century, and he has since identified presentday descendants, creating a remarkably long African-American lineage. An important recent development is the publication of David Riker’s monumental directory of the settlers of New Netherland, the result of years of work on his part.43 In the past such compilations have been published for the early settlers of New England, French Canada, and some other regions, but for New Netherland there have

41 Henry Hoff ’s paper “Researching African-American Families in New Netherland and Colonial New York and New Jersey,” originally presented at New Netherland at the Millenium (2001), will be published in The NYG&B Record, vol. 136 (2005). Appended to the paper are genealogical sketches of fourteen African families that can be traced for three or more generations, citing, among other sources, all of Mr. Hoff ’s articles on this subject. 42 Henry B. Hoff, “Frans Abramse Van Salee and His Descendants: A Colonial Black Family in New York and New Jersey,” The NYG&B Record 121 (1990): 65–71, 157–161, 205–211; 132 (2001): 301. 43 David M. Riker, Genealogical and Biographical Directory to Persons in New Netherland from 1613 to 1674 (Salem, Mass.: Higginson Book Co., 2000), also published by Genealogy.com as New Netherland Vital Records 1600s (Family Tree Maker—Family Archives CD 11).

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only been local directories like Bergen’s for Kings County and Pearson’s for Albany and Schenectady counties. Riker’s work is already proving helpful as a starting point for identifying settlers and prior work that may have been done on them. A work of this size cannot be without flaws, but no one else has done it and it is an enormous accomplishment. Laurens van der Laan has been working on a similar directory, and he has indicated that when the time is right he will make it available. He is now living in Rotterdam but makes frequent trips to New York as he continues his research. In addition to overall directories, we need a good guide or howto book on New Netherland genealogy. Articles or chapters have been written on the subject, particularly the classic works on the naming system by Bailey and Stryker-Rodda.44 Mrs. Epperson’s book covers some other aspects. But an overall guide is still needed. We need to encourage more amateur genealogists who are interested in New Netherland families to aspire to higher standards of research and publication. Our long term goal must be to have a definitive published account of every New Netherland family and the early generations of its descendants. We are far, far away from accomplishing that goal today, and will remain so especially if we can rely only on the small pool of scholarly genealogists to accomplish it. We need to increase contact between the top genealogists in North America and those in the Netherlands and other countries, to continue the search for settlers’ origins. We also need to continue to cultivate our contacts with historians, to develop a mutually beneficial relationship between our disciplines. Even the best genealogists need to be prodded to become more familiar with what the New Netherland historians are doing. These goals are a tall order. They will keep genealogists busy for generations to come. Our greatest challenge is to see that at least some of these future genealogists maintain and build on the scholarly base that has been established thus far in New Netherland genealogy. 44 Rosalie Fellows Bailey, Dutch Systems in Family Naming, New York—New Jersey, National Genealogical Society Publication No. 12 (1954); Kenn Stryker-Rodda, “New Netherland Naming Systems and Customs,” The NYG&B Record 126 (1995): 35–45. See also [Hendrik Slok], The Origin of Names and Their Effect on Genealogical Research in The Netherlands, [Research Paper] Series C., No. 28 (Salt Lake City, 1978).

SEX AND THE CITY: RELATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN IN NEW NETHERLAND Firth Haring Fabend A historian in search of a field and coming freshly to New Netherland Studies, the reader to whom this essay is particularly addressed, will be struck at once by the quantity of research—both dissertations and published works—that has appeared in the last quarter-century. This is for the most part research inspired by the New Netherland Institute’s translations and/or retranslations of the documents of the seventeenth-century colony, its stimulative annual Rensselaerswijck Seminar, its annual Hendricks Prize for the book-length work that best describes the Dutch experience in colonial America, and the opportunities for publication offered by the quarterly magazine of The Holland Society of New York, the indispensable de Halve Maen. Still, a second look will reveal that there is more to uncover and interpret, and to reinterpret. Take, for example, the subject of the relations between men and women. One of the most direct ways to get at the relations between men and women in any age and place is to study them in family, but the problems of writing about family in New Netherland have frustrated many historians. As yet there is no comprehensive, full-fledged study of the family in New Netherland—if we take that entity to have ended with the second and final English takeover of the colony in 1674. This is not only because there are few families to study for New Netherland’s first two decades, single men being typical settlers until the 1640s and 1650s, but also because of the scarcity of those primary sources such as personal correspondence, journals, and diaries that facilitate the writing of family history in later periods. Even if we expand the definition of New Netherland to include, for the purposes of study, the Dutch experience in North America up to the time of the American Revolution, the pickings are slim.1

1 Charles T. Gehring, the Director and chief translator of the New Netherland Institute, suggested this periodization. See “Introduction,” A Beautiful and Fruitful

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In 1988, Joyce Goodfriend noted in an essay on the historiography of the Dutch in colonial America that investigation of the family in New Netherland up to that time had been mostly from a legal perspective, exemplified by the work of David Narrett on inheritance patterns, Linda Biemer on women and property in the transition from Dutch to English law, and Gwen Gampel and Joan Gundersen on married women’s legal status in eighteenth-century New York.2 As this is a function of the primary material available to historians, it continues to be true. Between 1988 and 1999, family historiography on the Dutch in colonial America continued to be based on legal, administrative, and court records, supplemented in some cases by church records and in those rare cases where they exist and where they thus allow a glimpse into the private lives of families, by correspondence and other personal documents.3 Older works on individual families such as Alice Kenney on the Gansevoorts of Albany and Philip White on the Beekmans of New York are valuable sources of information about this topic, but they do not delve into the internal life of these families and so shed little light on domestic dynamics and the affective dimensions of the family. Likewise, works on house architecture and material culture— David Steven Cohen’s A Dutch American Farm, Harrison Meeske’s The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses, Roderic H. Blackburn’s Dutch Colonial Homes in America, and Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka’s Remembrance of Patria come to mind—supply insights into the family’s physical setting but not into those nuances of la vie intime that one would like to know. Further, these works concentrate on circumstances in the English years, rather than in the Dutch, where again surviving artifacts are in short supply. A wealth of publications on New Netherland has appeared since 1988—but there has been no attempt to describe the family in all its textured manifestations. Yet as Peter Christoph wrote in 1991, in New Netherland and colonial New York, the “real basis of society was not the community but the family.”4 Place: Selected Rensselaerswijck Seminar Papers, ed. Nancy Anne McClure Zeller (Albany, NY, 1991), p. ix. Hereafter BFP. 2 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Historiography of the Dutch in Colonial America,” in Eric Nooter and Patricia U. Bonomi, eds., Colonial Dutch Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (New York, 1988), pp. 10–11 and notes. 3 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History, 80 ( January 1999), 5–28. 4 Peter R. Christoph, “The Colonial Family: Kinship and Power,” BFP, p. 111.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 265 Wayne Bodle in an update of scholarship on the Middle Colonies between 1979 and 1994 cites of family studies published in that span of years only my own book, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, on the Haring family and Cynthia Kierner’s book on the Livingston family, Traders and Gentlefolk.5 Both of these works fall under the expanded definition of New Netherland, concerning themselves mostly or totally with these two families after the English takeover of the colony rather than before it. A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, for example, deals with the period from 1660 to 1800. Traders and Gentlefolk takes up the story of the Livingstons when Robert Livingston arrived on these shores in 1674. Both are single-family studies over five generations and, though valuable, are not the full-fledged study of the relations between men and women in (and out of ) family in New Netherland that one hopes to read some day. (For one thing, “men and women” should include men and women of races other than the Caucasian.) Since 1993, six dissertations have appeared that have at least some bearing on the relations between men and women in New Netherland. All six confine themselves strictly to New Netherland before 1674 or earlier. “Wives, Mothers, and Businesswomen,” the often-cited Chapter 3 of Martha Shattuck’s 1993 dissertation, demonstrates how a woman’s legal rights in New Netherland under Roman-Dutch law defined her status in the community, her participation in the economy, and her position within the family.6 In her marriage, she was a partner to her husband in a curiously modern-sounding companionate and reciprocal relationship based on “shared responsibility.”

Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley (Syracuse, NY, 1969); and Philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce, 1647–1877 (New York, 1956). David Steven Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York, 1992); Harrison Meeske, The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses (Purple Mountain Press, 1998; Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany, NY, 1988); and Roderic H. Blackburn, Dutch Colonial Homes in America (New York, 2002). 5 Wayne Bodle, “Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980–1994,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 51 ( July 1994), 355–388. Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies: 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991); and Cynthia Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790 (Ithaca, NY, 1992). 6 Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664,” Ph.D. dissertation Boston University 1993, p. 167. This dissertation was not mentioned in Bodle’s 1994 review essay, cited above.

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She could own property, she jointly owned with her husband their communal property, and she was equally responsible with him for their debts. Even so, her opportunities for “equality” were legally constrained. Her husband was the legal administrator of their joint estate and could dispose of her portion without her consent. Appeal was available if he mismanaged her affairs, but Shattuck found no trace in the court records of the community she studied that any wife took this course. The companionate character of marriage in Dutch culture was apparently conducive to cooperation, mutual trust, and general cordiality in the relationship, rather than suspicion and confrontation. Like Shattuck, Michael Gherke rejects the notion that Dutch wives were similar to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “deputy husbands” in New England, taking care of business only when the real husband was away from home.7 Rather, women in New Netherland, thanks to Dutch law and custom, were equal partners in their husbands’ businesses, he says, and the courts treated them so. Gherke attempts to describe the economic life of the family, the “many expressions of conjugal partnership” between husband and wife in administering their family finances, a necessary effort in any attempt to describe family life in New Netherland. His chapter “Dysfunctional Marriages and the Transition from Dutch to English Law” seems to be the only lengthy statement on this topic, although it is not based on primary materials. Its main sources are Hugo Grotius’s Jurisprudence of Holland, various legal commentaries, Dutch secondary sources, and secondary sources relating to other colonies—records from New Netherland and seventeenth-century New York being “circumspect about marital litigation, rarely revealing witness testimony.”7 Gherke, like many other historians of New Netherland, is quick to notice how historians of Early America, even up to the present, continue to ignore the Dutch colony, in this case to “ignore the experience and lasting influence of Dutch women,” and thus to fail to present a rounded portrait of the Early American family. He cites, for example, three collections of essays on women published after Bodle’s retrospective essay, Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De

7 Michael E. Gherke, “Dutch Women in New Netherland and New York in the Seventeenth Century,” Ph.D. dissertation West Virginia University 2001, p. 72.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 267 Hart, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (New York, 1995); Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York, 1996); Larry D. Eldridge, ed., Women and Freedom in Early America (New York, 1997), none of which mentions women in New Netherland. One could go on—and on and on—with examples of colonial historians’ curiously uninquisitive attitude toward things Dutch in Early America. What do we still need to know about New Netherland in the new millennium? One question we should ask and answer is, Why is this so? Karen Ordahl Kupperman perceived a “welcome change under way” in 1993, as scholars began to use analytical categories that transfer across colonial boundaries, such as land, family life, and the interplay of ethnic and religious matters. But she also supplies an answer to this knotty question: “The crucial role of the Dutch in the process of exploration and colonization has always been vastly underplayed, largely because so few scholars had the linguistic skill to open the archives to study.”8 This is changing, and today many historians of New Netherland read Dutch, and an increasing number of them are Dutch by birth. Susannah Shaw’s ability to read Dutch allowed her to avail herself of little-used primary sources in the Dutch language in her dissertation, which investigates gender and family ties in New Netherland as she seeks “a means to uncover gender roles in the Atlantic world.”9 Although she does not define what she means by gender, she looks at the relations between men and women in New Netherland in family from a different perspective than has heretofore been taken. (At times she seems to mean by gender simply the roles played by men and women according to their biological differentiation; at others she seems to take the meaning feminists have given to the term as the way cultural and historical processes have created role differences between men and women.) The chapter titles in her table of contents do not gibe with the titles of the chapters themselves in the case of the first three, thus obscuring both her emphasis on family,

8 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Early American History with the Dutch Put In,” Reviews in American History ( June 1993), 195–201. 9 Susannah Elizabeth Shaw, “Building New Netherland: Gender and Family Ties in a Frontier Society,” diss. Cornell University 2000. Passages quoted are on pp. 3, 304, 391, and 404. See also Susannah Shaw, “New Light from Old Sources: Finding Women in New Netherland’s Courtrooms,” de Halve Maen, 74 (Spring 2001), 9–14.

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which is at the heart of the study, and her attention to the importance in the formation of the colony of cross-cultural mingling among Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans—all in family, in one manner of speaking or another—and not only in the economy but in all areas of daily life. Shaw rejects the idea that Dutch women’s active participation in the economy was a reflection of their particular advantages in Roman Dutch law. Rather, she says, their extensive participation in the economy arose from the centrality of family cooperation to transatlantic trade: “New Netherland women needed financial know-how and the confidence to negotiate the worlds of law, debt, and contracts in order to fulfill their duties as wives within fluid and mobile colonial ‘households.’ Far from being the quiet housewives who left the interaction between family and wider world in the hands of their husbands, New Netherland wives had a financial savvy of their own in order to survive in the Atlantic trading economy.” Shaw urges historians to reconceptualize the transatlantic and transfrontier household, to see it less as a literal home with four walls, and more as a metaphor for the “mutuality” of the family as it struggled to find the flexible economic strategies to enable it to survive and endure in the Atlantic world. And she also points out that the multiplicity of European ethnicities within colonial North America warns against interpreting the fluidity of gender and family solely as a cultural legacy of the Dutch. Instead, historians should attempt to see how New Netherland shared with other regions and colonies the important economic factors underlying family and gender. “Seeing New Netherland as an outpost of a new transatlantic and transfrontier economy offers the potential to interpret family and gender in a new context.” This is an angle well worth pursuing and is in line with what Kupperman perceived happening in 1993: “analytical categories that transfer across colonial boundaries.” Jaap Jacobs’ dissertation, just published in English, will be required reading for anyone entering upon New Netherland as a subject of study.10 His chapter bearing on the family takes a traditional approach in examining the differences and likenesses between colony and motherland in four areas: material culture, the stages of life from birth

10 Jaap A. Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden, 2005).

relations between men and women in new netherlands 269 to burial, conflicts and violence, and a “tour” of the rhythms and festivals of a typical day and a typical year. The result is a picture both intimate and scholarly that relies on the best type of primary information available and on selected secondary sources, sprinkled with the author’s measured commentary. Adriana van Zwieten’s careful study of real property, custom, and law in New Amsterdam has an inherent bearing on the texture of family life, including the right of men and women to possess and convey land, use and enjoy it, and devise it to the next generation. A chapter on behavior vis à vis neighbors and the community in an urban setting and her final chapter, on the Orphan Chamber of New Amsterdam, from which portions of her 1996 article on this subject in The William and Mary Quarterly were drawn, will be helpful to anyone interested in studying family and the relations between men and women in New Netherland.11 Finally, Janny Venema’s dissertation, now published, like Shattuck’s a community study of Beverwijck in the years 1652–1664, should be read for its many references to, and insights into, the texture of family life on the frontier woven throughout, but particularly in Chapter III on the Van Rensselaer family.12 Five essays bearing on the relations between men and women, and thus a history of the family in New Netherland, have appeared since 1996. Benjamin Roberts’ Research Note, “Fatherhood in Eighteenth-Century Holland: The Van der Meulen Brothers,” discusses the little-known topic of fathers as caregivers and nurturers.13 The two brothers of the elite urban class in Holland, whose correspondence is in the Provincial Archives of Utrecht, reveal their concern for their children’s births and sicknesses, maternal breastfeeding vs. breastfeeding by wet nurse, the problem of finding suitable godparents, and the trials of both brothers when they become widowers left with the care and upbringing of their combined eleven

11 Adriana E. van Zwieten, “ ‘A Little Land . . . To Sow Some Seeds’: Real Property, Custom, and Law in the Community of New Amsterdam,” Ph.D. dissertation Temple University 2001. Adriana van Zwieten, “The Orphan Chamber of New Amsterdam,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53 (April 1996), 319–340. 12 Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Hilversum, NL, 2003). 13 Benjamin Roberts, “Fatherhood in Eighteenth-Century Holland: The Van der Meulen Brothers,” in Journal of Family History, 21 (April 1996), 218–228.

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children. Neither remarried. Both hired nannies for the hands-on care. Roberts suggests and documents that Dutch, English, and colonial American fathers in the seventeenth century as well as the eighteenth took pleasure in the joys of parenthood and an active part in its responsibilities. Peter R. Christoph’s essay “Worthy, Virtuous Juffrouw Maria van Rensselaer” makes use of the Van Rensselaer family’s correspondence and deft medical detective work to uncover new information about Maria’s chronic leg ailment, which the author decides was the result of septic arthritis, accompanied by osteomyelitis of the femur.14 Just as fascinating as this sleuthing in the annals of medicine are the descriptions of Maria’s relationship with her husband Jeremias, who left her a widow at age 29, with five children and a sixth on the way and only the produce of her farm, mill, and brewery for her support. Her endless machinations to secure Rensselaerswijck for her children, in which she eventually succeeded, despite the opposition of family members in the Netherlands, and the first patroon’s former partners, Robert Livingston, the Schuyler family, and a succession of English governors, complete a portrait of a determined and feisty woman making her way in a man’s world. Joyce D. Goodfriend’s essay on Maria both before and after her marriage adds another dimension to her saga.15 David William Voorhees’ “ ‘how ther poor wives do, and are delt with’: Women in Leisler’s Rebellion” investigates the “angry and sometimes violent nature of women’s actions” against men during Leisler’s Rebellion and attributes it to tensions aroused by the eroding (by men) of women’s traditional economic and legal rights after the introduction of English law.16 In the decade preceding the Rebellion especially, women’s legal rights were “virtually erased,” and some women, he writes, may have turned their frustrations toward their husbands as they found their former privileges and liberties taken from them.

14 Peter R. Christoph, “ ‘Worthy, Virtuous Juffrouw Maria van Rensselaer,’ ” de Halve Maen, 70 (Summer 1997), 25–40. 15 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer,” in Carla Mulford, ed., American Women Prose Writers to 1820, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 200 (Detroit, MI, Gale Research, 1998), 299–303. 16 David William Voorhees, “ ‘how ther poor wives do, and are delt with’: Women in Leisler’s Rebellion,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Summer 1997), 41–48.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 271 The restoration of women’s rights was one of the issues the Leislerians attempted to address. How then to explain why, if Leislerian courts favored women, as they did, women attacked Leislerian men, as they did? Voorhees suggests that all reported attacks involve women whose family status had been enhanced in the Stuart years, when Catholic James II was on the English throne, and were now threatened by the rise of Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary, James’s Protestant daughter—another case where seeking the economic motive for a seemingly inexplicable situation sheds light. In a 1999 essay, Adriana van Zweiten touched briefly on almost every aspect of women’s lives, including their relationships with men from courtship to divorce and from childbirth and confinement to citizenship privileges and will writing.17 She finds that society in New Netherland was flexible, with custom and law tempered by practice and tolerance, as it was in the Netherlands, where, she notes, medieval laws governing women’s ability to appear in court and to sell their own property fell into disuse in the seventeenth century. In New Netherland, she concludes, both men and women were steeped in their Dutch heritage, but not obsessed by it. Rather, “they applied practical solutions from a distant homeland [and] adjusted them to New World necessities.” Finally, James Homer Williams’s 2001 essay “Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland” claims that cases of violence between men and women “litter” the colony’s records from the late 1630s to 1664.18 But the slender evidence he marshals does not bear this out. He cites three cases in these decades of cross-cultural sexual relations between white men and Indian and African women, at least one case of which was probably consensual, eight cases of slander using sex-related language, one case of rape involving adults, three cases of men molesting girls, ten cases of physical assault by men of women, and three cases of men molesting boys, which cannot be counted as a gendered crime. These rare events, while vile, should be seen in relation to the vast majority of cases

17 Adriana E. van Zwieten, “ ‘[O]n her woman’s troth’: Tolerance Custom and the Women of New Netherland, de Halve Maen, 72 (Spring 1999), 3–14. 18 James Homer Williams, “Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland,” Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, 2001), 61–80. The quotation is on p. 69.

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that came before council and court that do not involve sexual violence, and in fact the author acknowledges that the “troublesome women glimpsed in the records are probably overrepresented.” The even more vast and uncountable, unknowable, numbers of New Netherland’s men and women who never appeared in court because they lived peaceably together should also be kept in mind. These five essays, the recent dissertations, and of course earlier published works and dissertations, are all grist to the mill. All deal to more or less degree with the relations between men and women in New Netherland and thus they bear on the history of the family in New Netherland. They will be among the building blocks for a future comprehensive study of the New Netherland family—if and when one is undertaken. Given the difficulties, however, of both demographic and traditional family study for this period, whether one stays strictly in New Netherland or uses the extended definition of New Netherland to include colonial New York and New Jersey, the scarcity of the sort of material that allows an intimate picture to be drawn, and the particular limitations of New Netherland’s primary records, it may be that a description of the New Netherland/colonial New York and New Jersey family in all its permutations and meanings—and thus of what we still want to know of the relations between men and women—is destined to unfold only via short, focused, and incremental works such as the above essays. What are the questions a study (or smaller studies) of the New Netherland family should ask, and how best should such studies be approached? As historians do not agree on the size of the population of New Netherland at the time of the English takeover—estimates range from 6,000 to 10,000—a study of the relations between men and women in (and in the case of deviance and/or divorce, out of ) family might want to concentrate on one community where the population is more or less known, Beverwijck/Albany, for instance, for a trading community, or Harlaem, in the Out Ward, for a farming community. Looking at the same events in the same families over time, its goal would be to answer large interpretive questions about the family, its structure and its functions, beliefs, and values, as historians have done for New England and for the Chesapeake. It would explore the related topics of men and women in the economy, in church, in court, and in social settings such as the tavern. The approach to family study in New Netherland and the colo-

relations between men and women in new netherlands 273 nial extension of it used by most historians has been a traditional one. Kierner, for example, based Traders and Gentlefolk on such written sources as church records, wills, administrative documents, court records, account books, diaries, and correspondence. Because diaries and personal correspondence were totally lacking, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies adopted the techniques of historical demography to examine the Haring family, by collecting data for births, marriages, and deaths (among other elements) to make observations about marital selection, age at first marriage, fertility patterns, household size and composition, infant mortality, life expectancy, church joining patterns, and testamentary customs in order to discover patterns over time. The demographic family study has the advantage of getting at the little people, for it can gather data on all strata in a community. To manage and interpret the data, its narrative might be structured along the seven-stages-of life idea, treating infancy, childhood, and adolescence by focusing on baptisms and baptismal customs, education, and apprenticehood; sexual relations and family formation by examining premarital, marital, extra- and postmarital trends and behavior; for the middle years examining such topics as occupations and roles in the economy, the church, and the community, and treatment in the courts; and finally looking at the circumstances and customs centering around old age and death. It would be concerned with trends over time and, even more important, with the Netherlands, for scholars have repeatedly shown that in every area of New Netherland’s cultural, political, social, and institutional life, the model and pattern originated in patria—with local variations arising from the distinctive conditions on the frontier. Given the difficult demographics of New Netherland and the relative dearth of such primary sources as letters and journals, a family study concentrating on one family has been the usual choice of the two approaches. Peter Christoph has suggested the Van Rensselaer family as ideal for a major family study. Plentiful evidence is available for this family in the form of correspondence, account books, and other records, and a study of the Van Rensselaer family would necessarily involve the dozen or so families intermarrying with it who together controlled economic and political life in the region throughout the colonial period. David Voorhees has suggested a family study from the perspectives of the interrelated families prominent on both sides of the

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Leislerian questions.19 Investigations of this type should ask how ethnicity, race, class, and occupation affected these families, what role relatives, friends, and neighbors played in their social and economic life, the role of church and school, how discipline was shared among families, church, and courts, and the relationship between families and politics. The Livingston Family is another that offers rich possibilities. The correspondence over forty-six years between Alida Livingston and her husband Robert has been probed for the details of their intricate business relationship and the politics of the era, but not for the portrait it paints of their affective life together—and apart, which they seem to have been more often than not. Yet it is a trove of intimate information about their feelings for each other, the pain of separation, the joy of anticipated reunion.20 Choosing this approach, however, would be to concentrate on the elite families of New Netherland, to the exclusion of the much more numerous, more typical, and harder-to-reach middling families. For the middling sort, where do we go for that information we are lacking on la vie intime: courtship, love, sexual relations, the style of parent-child relationships, sex-role patterns, sources of concord and conflict, deviance, and such other hard-to-get-at subjects as sanitary arrangements, hygiene, and privacy? Geographic mobility, mobility on the social scale, and social life in general, including friendship, the place of alcohol and the tavern in male/female relations, and shared work are other areas where the men and women of New Netherland found themselves dependent on each other for everything from survival to economic betterment, from entertainment to economic disaster. How do we get at these people and these dimensions of life in New Netherland? It may be that we don’t. But before giving up, to find material on a subject on which it is difficult to amass evidence, we might go

19 Christoph, “The Colonial Family,” p. 111. David William Voorhees, “First Families,” Seaport: New York’s History Magazine, 36 (Fall 2001), 14–18. This was a Special Issue of Seaport published in conjunction with the conference “New Netherland at the Millennium” cosponsored by the New Netherland Project and The Holland Society of New York. 20 The Livingston correspondence, 760 pages in all, has been translated by Jos van der Linde. The translation is in the Gilder-Lehrman Collection at the NewYork Historical Society. A copy is at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 275 to subfields of history, to related fields—genealogy, for instance— even to other disciplines—archaelogy, anthropology, architecture, art history—and especially to that other place, the Netherlands, to discover how recent Dutch historians are approaching their seventeenth-century conundrums.21 To take other subfields of history: Just a few months before the New Netherland at the Millennium Conference was held in New York, a conference on Sexuality in Early America took place in Philadelphia, cosponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Articles from this conference were published in The William and Mary Quarterly in January 2003. In the 206 pages devoted to the subject there is no mention of New Netherland, and a scanning of the tables of contents of the published collections on the subject of sexuality in Early America cited in the copious footnotes throughout the issue reveals only one article in all of these many works that bears on the Dutch colony, James Homer Williams’s “Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland.” (See above.) For instance, Part I of Merril Smith’s collection Sex and Sexuality in Early America is called “European/Native American Contact, 1492–1710,” surely a place where one might hope to find information on New Netherland. But no. Stephanie Wood’s article “Sexual Violation in the Conquest of the Americas” deals with the Caribbean and Mexico, using accounts of the explorers. We turn next to Gordon Sayre’s essay, “Native American Sexuality in the Eyes of the Beholders, 1535–1710,” hoping for some insights into the relations of men and women in New Netherland: Native American men and women, Native American women and European men. What were the relations among these people whose lives intersected on so many planes? But again, we strike out. Sayre discusses Spanish America, French America, English America, but not Dutch America. Using explorers’ accounts, and accounts of missionaries, traders, and promoters,

21 Re genealogy, The Record, the quarterly of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, is a fruitful source of information on New Netherland families. A consolidated index of more than one million individuals named in The Record between 1870 and 2001, and an index of all articles published between 1870 and 2001, is now available on a CD-ROM. See http://www.nygbs.org/info/publications.html to purchase.

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he describes the relations between Native Americans and Europeans among the Hurons, the Gaspesia Indians, the Illinois Indians in the upper Mississippi valley, and Indians in Carolina, Virginia, and Brazil. A disappointment, as far as New Netherland is concerned, but not a complete loss. One might profitably apply Sayre’s method to get at the relations between Native Americans and Europeans in New Netherland through the creative use of explorers’ accounts, missionary and trader accounts, and promotional literature. If the rising generation of New Netherland historians and future generations finds it helpful to investigate the methods used by historians to get at the relations between men and women in this subfield of historical inquiry, this issue of The William and Mary Quarterly is a good place to start. Another potentially fruitful subfield of history relevant to our question is gender studies. Although at least three of the dissertations since 1993 mentioned above and two of the published essays describe their concern with uncovering gender roles, they lack the crispness of gender studies that focus on how social and racial inequalities— i.e., power relations—affect the construction of gendered identities— and the way the relations between men and women in (and out of ) family in New Netherland are identified. How would looking at the relations between men and women from the perspective of this type of gender study open up a window on the topic, permit an angle of vision we have not had? The social scientist and historian Joan Wallach Scott in her 1986 article in the American Historical Review, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” stated that the most useful gender studies seek to explain the persistent inequalities between men and women by examining gender in relation to how it interacts with class and race to produce social, economic, and political consequences.22 Such a perspective, she wrote, understands inequality to be the result of “processes so interconnected that they cannot be disentangled.” But they are processes, she went on, that always involve social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and differences that always signify relationships of power. (Feminist historians argue, of course, that power has always characterized the relationship between men and women.) 22 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053–1075. It also appears as a chapter in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).

relations between men and women in new netherlands 277 To illustrate Scott’s notion that gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power—and at the risk of sounding anachronistic to ears tuned to the seventeenth century—I will repeat here her twentieth-century examples. An effect of the Taliban in keeping women down, she wrote in 1986, is to reaffirm male power. An effect of the U.S. welfare system in protecting women and children is to demonstrate the paternalism and power of the central government. An effect of the proponents of “family values” is to keep women at home and docile, without power in the larger world of the labor market and political decision making. And so on. To go back to the seventeenth century, what was the combined effect of Reformed Dutch doctrine, Roman-Dutch law, Dutch social customs, and Dutch folk wisdom on the relations between men and women? It is another thing we want to know and should try to know. Scott’s analysis is clarified by her analogy between the well-ordered patriarchal family and the well-ordered patriarchal state made familiar for English society by the writings of Filmer and Locke. For the Netherlands—not called patria for nothing—we can substitute another model provided by the constellation of Biblical and Pauline ideas on the family, the idea of eendracht or concordia, Roman-Dutch law, and the homilies of Jacob Cats to see how religion, custom (a desire for societal concord), legal structure, and popular wisdom had the effect of keeping Dutch women in their place and men in power over them. This can lead to new insights, insights we can catch a whiff of in the public records of New Netherland before the English takeover. Gender studies have been undertaken in the Middle Colonies. But in the forementioned review essay by Wayne Bodle, he commented that as of 1994 the historical discussion of gender in the Middle Colonies “had advanced without developing a dominant model” such as Scott had proposed in 1986. That the discussion did not develop a dominant model implied that it was a “conceptually sophisticated history of women” but not one governed by what Scott had called for, a search for the ‘‘social organization of the relationship between the sexes.”23 But the following year, 1995, saw published a brilliant study of gendered litigation patterns in Connecticut. Cornelia Hughes Dayton,

23

Bodle, “Themes and Directions,” p. 385.

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by systematically profiling everything that occurred in one jurisdiction over the 150-year period 1638–1789, drew a portrait of that social organization Bodle found missing in Middle Colony gender studies in revealing how the courts treated women vis-à-vis men.24 As a gender study, it was a portrait that necessarily involved men; the five topical categories Dayton studied included divorce, illicit consensual sex, and rape. In addition, she considered debt actions and found that a comparison of women’s and men’s litigated debt revealed the gendered dimensions of commercialization and rural economic growth. Her fifth category was slander, which brought women before the bar both as defamer and defamed, and of and by those of both sexes. Her findings led her to conclude that women’s presence in the courts “declined dramatically” over time as the “utopian reform platform” of Puritanism faded, as legal practice began to follow English patriarchal models, as the economy became commercialized, and as families became more genteel and encouraged women to settle their problems privately.25 Deborah Rosen has recently written on gender, law, and the market economy in colonial New York (after 1690) using debt litigation rates to show that men and women had different opportunities in the colonial market economy. Women’s participation in commercial activities in colonial New York was limited, she found, by their inability to make contracts and control their own property, and as Dayton had found for Connecticut, also by the gender assumptions of eighteenth-century culture and society, particularly new notions of gentility that preferred women to be silent in public.26 How might a gender study along the lines spelled out by Scott, and exemplified in the work of Dayton and Rosen, one that views the differences between the sexes as always signifying relationships

24 Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995). 25 Dayton, Women before the Bar, p. 8. 26 Deborah A. Rosen, Courts and Commerce: Gender, Law, and the Market Economy in Colonial New York (Columbus, O, 1996), especially Chapter 6. See also Deborah A. Rosen, “Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 60 (April 2003), 355–381, which describes the difference in women’s fates depending on whether they lived in a place governed by common law (as in England and New York), or in a place governed by civil law (as in Spain and New Mexico, and, as well, the Netherlands, and thus New Netherland). Under a civil-law system, women fared better.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 279 of power, be conducted for New Netherland? The married women of New Netherland, though nowhere near equal to men in RomanDutch law, did, unlike women under English law, have legal joint ownership with their husbands over the marital property, and they did have the legal right to make contracts, to sue and be sued, and consequently to participate in the economy. Thus Scott’s elements of social relationship, inequality, power, and the economy are satisfied. With this in mind, would a reading of the court records of New Netherland from the perspective of a gender study looking at power dynamics add anything to our knowledge of the relations between New Netherland’s men and women? The court records back up the idea that marriage in the Netherlands and in New Netherland was regarded as a partnership of two friendly, companionable, and loving people, with the custom of the community of property giving it the economic structure of a joint venture. In the Council minutes for the eleven years 1638–1649, for instance, men and women appear in court in an adversarial position about 100 times, or an average of 1.3 times per month, yet almost none of the cases involve husbands and wives. Thirteen cases involve men and women physically fighting or behaving lewdly; there are several cases of criminal sex; and the court also heard some 25 cases having to do with problem betrothals, dysfunctional marriages, adulteries, elopements, abductions, fornication, and one case of illegitimacy. These cases may suggest tension between the sexes, or they may be statistically insignificant, simply a matter of life taking its normal course. But there are also the slander and debt cases to be explained, specifically 37 cases of slander in these years, broken down into 25 of men slandering women, 3 of men suing men for slandering a female relative, and 9 of women slandering men. In cases of debt or the settlement of a dispute over contract terms, women were plaintiffs against men 8 times. Men sued other men on behalf of a female relative 10 times. And men sued women 5 times—a total of 23 debt cases.27 Whether these hundred or so cases are significant statistically or not, they are significant, I think, in revealing a side to male-female

27 A.J.F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Council Minutes, 1638–1649, vol. 4, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch (Baltimore, MD, 1974), passim.

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relations not to be found elsewhere. Particularly interesting are the slander and debt cases, with men slandering women three times more than women slandered men, and women having to sue men for payment or satisfaction of a contract almost four times more than men sued women. What explains these disparities? The New Netherland economy was fragile, and competition for the profits to be made in the colony caused both sexes to insist on contract terms being honored, on payment for services rendered, and on good workmanship and on-time delivery, but a count of the cases reveals that men slandered women more often than vice versa. Was this possibly in order to cast doubt on their character and thus on their reliability in fulfilling contracts? And men almost four times more than women tried to avoid paying for goods and services rendered. Was this an expression of their resentment at women’s power in the market place? Or even at women’s special benefits in the law, which Martha Shattuck has called the law’s “gender-related economic protection for women”? These special benefits included the law that allowed men to be sued for the whole of their debts, while women could be sued for only half, and the law that allowed a wife to renounce all of her interest in the marital estate and thus not be held responsible for any debts against it.28 For New Amsterdam in the period 1653–1674, Linda Biemer counted 1049 cases in which women were plaintiffs or defendants in court, 16.5% of the total cases.29 She was interested in the 43 criminal cases more than in the other 1006 civil cases, or in the 957 cases involving suits of women against men and men against women. However, those 957 civil cases, three or four a month on average, are also interesting. The vast majority of them have to do with settling business or property disputes and disposing of slander charges. Reading them from a gender-study perspective—again, one that seeks to explain inequality between the sexes in terms of interconnected processes that involve the power of one sex over the other—may provide an explanation for the adversarial positions in which men and women found themselves in court. In an economic climate in which every stuiver counted, a woman’s ability to participate in the economy was a boon to her husband 28

R.W. Lee, An Introduction to Roman-Dutch Law, 5th ed. (Oxford, 1953). Linda Biemer, “Criminal Law and Women in New Amsterdam and Early New York,” BFP, p. 76. 29

relations between men and women in new netherlands 281 and an important factor in the family’s economic progress. But her ability to sign binding contracts and to sue and be sued may have represented for other men and families in the community nothing but more competition for a share of a finite market. Did a woman’s access to economic opportunity, the ability to buy and trade, to manage her own assets, to insist on contracts being fulfilled, to defend her honor and good name, all of which translated into economic leverage, did these considerations stoke the tensions between the sexes and bring them before the court and council? Of course, seventeenth-century women may have welcomed their special protections in the law, but is it possible that at the same time they also resented their status as perpetual minors? In Roman-Dutch law, a woman, no matter her age, was a minor, under first her father’s, then her husband’s guardianship. (Only adult unmarried women had the same rights as adult males.) Although married women readily appeared in court to ensure what rights they did have, they could do so legally only with their husbands’ verbal approval, or if they had his power of attorney. The inheritance law that treated them equally with their brothers was in fact, upon marriage, effectively vitiated by another law that gave their husbands complete control of this inheritance—unless they had a premarital contract, which, David Narrett has established, few women in New Netherland did have.30 In other words, the law effectively benefited the testator’s sonin-law—not his daughter, but his daughter’s husband. Under Roman-Dutch law, married women could bequeath their half of the couple’s property without their husbands’ permission, including real estate. But, without a prior agreement to the contrary, a husband had the legal power to sell his wife’s property without her consent, if he chose so to do. When English common law was introduced to New York after 1664, this situation was exacerbated, for wives were now prohibited by common law from conveying real estate by last will and testament “under any circumstances,” according to Narrett.31

30 David E. Narrett, “Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and the Law in Colonial New York City,” in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wrights, eds., Authority and Resistance in Early New York (New York, 1988), pp. 34–35. 31 Narrett, ibid., pp. 34–35.

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There is not much direct evidence that women resented their legal status as sub tutelas, or the restrictions on their activities. In fact, some will say that it is anachronistic to infer that they did, a modern concern for equality that would not have occurred to a seventeenthcentury woman. I tend to doubt that. Unfortunately, there is no body of folk literature or pictorial art in New Netherland as there is in the Netherlands at the time, or in France, as Natalie Zemon Davis and others have amply shown, to portray the strident wife who wears the breeches in the family, the shrew, the virago, and the angry harridan clobbering her cowering husband over the head with a wooden shoe, or making him wear an apron and toil in the kitchen. But in the court records, where we have the unusual opportunity of hearing the words of the people themselves, we can catch echoes of such men and women that allow us to infer something of the emotional context of their grievances. As the gender studies of Dayton and Rosen point to an economic model for the “social organization of the relationship between the sexes,” so also might a gender study of New Netherland along those lines point in that direction. As Biemer found, after English law was established, crime rates among women in colonial New York soared, because, she suggested, they were no longer able to “avail themselves of economic opportunity” as before; some women, she concluded, evidently gave up their toeholds in the legitimate market and turned to thievery and prostitution to get along.32 Access to economic opportunity was vital to survival and betterment in the precarious economy of New Netherland, and anything that distanced people from opportunities might explain the emotions in the court records. Just as economic factors underlay the estate feuds among some of the leading families of New Netherland and early New York, so too they may have underlain the litigation of the lesser folks and accounted for the male/female tensions that surface in the court records. On the other hand, such a study may prove the opposite, that all in all harmony characterized the relations between men and women in New Netherland, for the same court records that disclose the friction between the sexes also reveal in far more and diverse ways another side of their relations: their mutual cooperation in building

32

Biemer, “Criminal Law and Women,” p. 80.

relations between men and women in new netherlands 283 lives together as man and wife, and their interest as neighbors and denizens in soldering the seams of a viable community. By drawing on both sorts of court evidence in conjunction with the types of literary sources already mentioned, a portrait of these relations may emerge that would neither exaggerate male/female tensions nor claim too much for harmony, but aim for a balanced view that could be quite close to the reality and that would tell us a little more of what we still want and need to know about New Netherland.

WRITING THE HISTORY OF NEW NETHERLAND IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A SURVEY OF MANUSCRIPTS RELATING TO THE HISTORY OF NEW NETHERLAND Charles T. Gehring

Throughout the course of New Netherland’s history, the West India Company’s central administration on Manhattan and local jurisdictions from the upper Hudson to Delaware Bay generated and maintained thousands of pages of records. In addition to these official records, the original settlers of New Netherland and their descendants in colonial New York left behind, in Dutch, private documentation of their religious, social, and commercial activities long after New Netherland had become New York. Following is a survey of the surviving manuscript sources relating to New Netherland in general and to the colony’s various regions, as well as remarks on what has been lost and may still be found. This survey will not go beyond 1674. When New Netherland fell under the control of James, Duke of York and Albany at the end of the third AngloDutch war, public records continued to be kept in Dutch for varying periods, while private records (mostly business and church records) and correspondence can be found written in de taal (the language) well into the 19th century. These post-New Netherland manuscripts await a similar survey.

New Netherland In 1664 the administrative records of New Netherland were turned over to the English. It was important that legal continuity be maintained, especially in the title to land; therefore, the records were retained at the fort on Manhattan. They reverted to the Dutch in 1673 during the Colve administration, but once again were returned to the English in the fall of 1674. They remained at Fort James (later renamed Fort George) until the American Revolution, during which period the early records of the colony were stored aboard warships in New York harbor for safekeeping. After the Revolution, the “Colonial Manuscripts” became part of the records of the office

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of the Secretary of the State of New York in Albany, where they remained until 1881, when they were transferred to the “Manuscripts and History Section” of the New York State Library. In 1978 the “Colonial Manuscripts” finally were transferred to the newly formed New York State Archives as the earliest administrative records of a precursor of state government. These twelve thousand pages of records form the core of all surviving source material relating to New Netherland. As the remains of the governmental archives, they contain the records of the colony’s day-to-day operations from approximately 1638 through 1674. Unfortunately the original Dutch record books were reorganized in the 1850s by E.B. O’Callaghan to reflect his sense of chronology and record type. The Dutch records, which were identified by alphabetical code, were torn apart and reassembled according to O’Callaghan’s organizational conception. The forty-eight Dutch record books were transformed into twenty numbered volumes (with two volumes retaining the original Dutch alphabetical designation).1 Each volume was given an introduction and index before it was rebound. Although O’Callaghan’s reorganization brought order out of chaos, he nevertheless tampered with the records’ archival integrity, an error that can never be corrected. The first three volumes of “Colonial Manuscripts” are “Secretarial Records” from 1638 to 1664, containing copies of contracts, wills, inventories of estates, and other such records requiring the authentication of a notary. Volumes 4 through 10 are “Council Minutes” from 1638 to 1664, containing the executive, legislative, and judicial activities of the High Council of New Netherland. The next five volumes contain correspondence from 1646 to 1664 between the directors of New Netherland and neighboring colonies and the directors of the West India Company. Volume 16 contains “Laws and Ordinances,” “Fort Orange Records,” and “Writs of Appeal.” This miscellaneous volume apparently represents what was left over when the three major categories were completed. The next volume contains the “Curacao Papers” from 1640 to 1665. They represent some

1 An inventory of the Dutch records was made by John Van Ness Yates before O’Callaghan’s reorganization and published in New York Legislative Documents, 43rd session, 1820, no. 2 as “A Catalogue of the Records in the Office of the Secretary of the State of New York, on the first day of January 1820.”

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of the earliest records of Dutch administration in the Caribbean. Volumes 18 and 19 are “Delaware Papers” from 1646 to 1664, representing the collection of official correspondence and papers relating to the administration of New Netherland’s interests on the South, or Delaware, River. Volumes GG, HH, and II contain “Land Papers” from 1630 to 1664. For reasons unknown, O’Callaghan retained the Dutch designation for these papers. The final volume, numbered 23, contains the records of the administration of Governor Colve from 1673 to 1674. Volumes 20 and 21 contain papers relating to the English administration of the Delaware from 1664 to 1682, and volume 22 represents the papers of the intervening English administrations of Richard Nicolls and Francis Lovelace from 1664 to 1673.2 These Dutch “Colonial Manuscripts” have attracted many translators over the years. Although extracts of the Dutch records were translated for specific reasons in the eighteenth century,3 it was not until the first decades of the nineteenth century that a systematic translation of the records was undertaken. In 1818 a Dutch expatriate by the name of Adriaen van der Kemp began the monumental task of translating the “Colonial Manuscripts” under the aegis of New York’s governor Dewitt Clinton. In the span of four years Van der Kemp had completed forty volumes of translations, which were to be known as the “Albany Records.”4 However, this set of translations proved to be imperfect in several ways. Not only was Van der Kemp hampered by failing eyesight, which led to numerous mistranscriptions of proper names and incorrect translations, but also his haste to complete the task before his patron’s administration ended caused him to summarize or omit passages that he considered irrelevant without comment.

2 Although the majority (85 percent) of the Nicolls-Lovelace papers are in English they should nevertheless be reviewed because governors Nicolls and Lovelace were administering a majority Dutch population. Volume 22 has been edited by Peter R. Christoph and published as Nicolls Lovelace Papers in the series New York Historical Manuscripts (Baltimore, 1980). 3 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has a collection of translations known as the “Coates List.” It represents a compilation of extracts that were taken from the “Colonial Manuscripts” in order to resolve a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1740s. 4 The name is derived from the translations’ association with their location in Albany and not with their content. Nineteenth-century historians made extensive use of these unpublished translations by Van der Kemp, citing the source as “Albany Records” with volume and page references.

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Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan became so annoyed by the errors in Van der Kemp’s “Albany Records” while writing his History of New Netherland 5 that he resolved to begin his own series of translations. Before his death in 1880, O’Callaghan had completed translations of volumes 1 through 4 and 23 of the “Colonial Manuscripts.”6 Prior to undertaking this work, however, he compiled a guide, or calendar, that still remains the only access to this material for researchers unable to read seventeenth-century Dutch.7 As a translator O’Callaghan was a considerable improvement over Van der Kemp; however, he was hindered by a limited knowledge of seventeenth-century material culture, which is reflected especially in the mistranslation of terms relating to various architectural features.8 In 1871 Berthold Fernow succeeded O’Callaghan. Unfortunately, he decided to translate only those records of “political” importance, excluding all so-called “personal records,” which today are of interest to social historians. Rather than follow O’Callaghan’s arrangement of the manuscripts, Fernow eventually published his selected translations according to three geographical designations: the Delaware, the Hudson Valley, and Manhattan and Long Island, creating a translation devoid of contextual continuity. Fernow also was hampered by a lack of knowledge of the seventeenth century, which produced numerous mistranslations in complex situations. An additional failing, which most nineteenth-century translators exhibit, is the mistranscription of proper names caused by the paucity of reliable related sources necessary for comparison and confirmation. In 1910 A.J.F. van Laer assumed the position of archivist. Upon reviewing the previous translations of Van der Kemp, O’Callaghan, and Fernow, he found them all unsatisfactory. Shortly thereafter he

5 Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 2 volumes (New York, 1845). 6 Volume 1 of O’Callaghan’s translations was used by A.J.F. van Laer to recover the loss of the first volume of Dutch records in the 1911 Capitol fire. It was eventually published as Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642 in the series New York Historical Manuscripts as volume 1. O’Callaghan’s translation of volume 23, “Colve Papers, 1673–1674,” appeared in volume 2 of Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York (Albany, 1858), pp. 571–730. 7 Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, Calendar of Dutch Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, New York, 1630–1664 (Albany, 1865; reprint, Ridgewood, N.J., 1968). 8 For example, O’Callaghan consistently mistranslated uytlaeten, a typical feature in Dutch H-frame house/barn constructions, as “doors” instead of “side aisles.”

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began a new translation of the “Colonial Manuscripts.” Unfortunately, a fire broke out at the state library on March 29, 1911, the same day Van Laer was comparing his translation of the first volume with the original manuscripts. During the three-day conflagration Van Laer’s translation was destroyed together with the volume of Dutch originals, which was on his desk at the time. The remaining twentytwo volumes of “Colonial Manuscripts” suffered varying degrees of damage depending on their location on the shelves. Other casualties of the fire were the Van der Kemp translations and the twentysix volumes of transcriptions of Dutch records relating to New Netherland that John Romeyn Brodhead had collected during his visit to the Netherlands in the 1840s.9 Fortunately, O’Callaghan’s translations of volumes 1 through 4 of the “Colonial Manuscripts” survived, furnishing Van Laer at least with an English text for the first volume. Van Laer’s translation was so fresh in his mind that he was able to annotate O’Callaghan’s translation from memory, correcting numerous errors in the process. In the decade following the fire Van Laer translated volumes 2 through 4 before interest and financial support waned. His four bundles of typescripts lay dormant in the New York State Library until 1973, when they were finally published under the direction of Ralph L. DeGroff of the Holland Society of New York. Publication of A.J.F. van Laer’s translations once again stimulated interest in the Dutch “Colonial Manuscripts” and led to the formation of the New Netherland Project with the present writer as director and translator. Since 1974 the project has produced translations of the “Delaware Papers,” volumes 18 through 21 of the “Colonial Manuscripts”; “Land Papers,” volumes GG, HH, and II; “Council Minutes, 1652–1656,” volumes 5 & 6; Laws and Writs of Appeal, 1647–1663, volume 16, part 1; Fort Orange Court Minutes, 1652– 1660,” volume 16, part 2; Fort Orange Records, 1656–1678; Correspondence, 1647–1658, volumes 11 & 12; and “Curacao Papers,” volume 17. In addition to these editions of translations, the project has also produced a guide to Dutch manuscripts relating to New Netherland in United States repositories.10 9 John Romeyn Brodhead was commissioned by New York State to visit archives in Europe with the purpose of collecting copies of records relating to the state’s colonial history. 10 Charles T. Gehring, A Guide to Dutch Manuscripts Relating to New Netherland in

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In summary the published translations of the “Colonial Manuscripts” appear in two series. Those done by Fernow can be found in volumes 12 through 14 of Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York.11 The series begun by A.J.F. Van Laer and continued by the New Netherland Project is entitled New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, and contains Van Laer’s translations of volumes 1 through 4 and my translations of volumes 5, 18 through 21, GG, HH, and II.”12 Beginning with the translation of volume 17, “Curacao Papers,” the series title was changed to New Netherland Documents. Volumes 6, 11, 12, and 16 now appear under this title.13 Although the “Colonial Manuscripts” begin with the administration of Willem Kieft in 1638, earlier records relating to New Netherland have survived elsewhere. When the “Van Rappard Documents” were sold at an Amsterdam auction in 1910, they brought to light significant details about the early years of the colony.14 This manuscript collection contains the instructions issued to Director Willem Verhulst in 1625, which include advice and orders on all aspects of colonial administration from the operation of sawmills to relations with the Indians; in addition to these instructions are the orders for the construction of Fort Amsterdam and a letter from Isaack de Rasière to the directors of the West India Company upon his arrival in New Netherland as secretary in 1626. His letter reveals the state of the colony shortly after Peter Minuit replaced Verhulst as director. The entire collection of “Van Rappard Documents” was translated by A.J.F. van Laer and published under the title Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624–1626 (San Marino, 1924). This limited edition contains extensive notes by Van Laer together with facsimiles of the originals. Another body of manuscripts that supplements the “Colonial Manuscripts” and fills in some gaps in the administration of New

United States Repositories (Albany, 1978). This guide also contains a key to previous translations of the “Colonial Manuscripts.” 11 Berthold Fernow, trans. and ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York. vols. 11–14, Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1861–1883. 12 These volumes were published by Genealogical Publishing Company of Baltimore, Maryland. 13 The publisher for this new series’ title was Heart of the Lakes Publishing Company of Interlaken, New York. 14 These manuscripts are held by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

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Netherland is the “Bontemantel Collection.”15 These papers were generated by Hans Bontemantel, a West India Company official in charge of New Netherland operations for the chamber of Amsterdam. One of his responsibilities was to screen incoming correspondence from the colony, which he then summarized for presentation to the XIX (directors of the West India Company). He also kept records of everything relating to New Netherland, including extracts of letters from Petrus Stuyvesant, memoranda on reports from the colony, and copies of documents sent to Amsterdam for the directors’ approval, such as the chartering of New Amsterdam as a municipality and the articles of surrender granted New Sweden on the Delaware. Among this collection is also a group of manuscripts relating to the Dutch capture of New York in 1673, including the secret cipher and instructions of the Zeeland squadron commanded by Cornelis Evertsz de Jonge. The manuscripts in the “Bontemantel Collection” are accompanied by translations, which were never published; however, many of them appear in extracted or summarized form in I.N. Phelps Stokes’ The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (New York, 1915–1928). The Netherlands still preserves documentary source material. However, it is not as extensive as one would expect. The Old West India Company records held by the State Archives contain for the most part only those matters that were brought to the attention of the States General in its capacity as a chartering agency, such as minutes and correspondence of the XIX; minutes of the chambers of Amsterdam and Zeeland; and a large collection of papers relating to Brazil from 1631 to 1654. However, it must be noted that, although from a different hemisphere, these Brazil papers have yielded documents relating to New Netherland. Although Brazil papers seems to be an unlikely source, it was common practice to send multiple copies of the same letter by different routes assuming that the law of averages would assure that at least one found its destination. Early in the twentieth century A.J.F. van Laer was made aware of two letters of Director Wouter van Twiller for the year 1636; Van Laer translated and published them in the first volume of New York History in 1919 under the title “Letters of Wouter van Twiller and the

15

This collection is owned by the New York Public Library.

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Director General and Council of New Netherland to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India company, August 14, 1636.” In 2003 New Netherland historian Jaap Jacobs discovered another Van Twiller letter dated August 20, 1635 among these same Brazil papers in The Hague.16 This discovery emphasizes the need to search these nineteen bundles of Brazil papers collected by the Zeeland chamber of the Company in a systematic manner, whether for positive or negative results. The first systematic search for such records was undertaken in the nineteenth century by John R. Brodhead. He was commissioned by New York State in 1841 to collect documentary source material relating to colonial history in European repositories. Brodhead’s transcriptions of records relating to New Netherland in the State Archives were eventually translated by E.B. O’Callaghan and published as volumes 1 and 2 (“Holland Documents”) in the series Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1856–1858). Selected manuscripts from Brodhead’s transcriptions will also be found in O’Callaghan’s Documentary History of New York (Albany, 1849–1851). The archives of the city of Amsterdam have a significant collection of approximately eight hundred notarial record books that has been relatively untapped by researchers. Unfortunately these records, which contain numerous references to activities in New Netherland, have not been translated and await complete processing by the archives. The only access to these records in the United States is through summaries of references to New Netherland made by the late archivist Simon Hart. A microfilm of these summaries is available at the New Netherland Project and extracts from the originals have been acquired by Historic Hudson Valley, formerly Sleepy Hollow Restorations, in Tarrytown, New York. Other source materials of general interest to New Netherland can be found in the collection of journals, letters, and reports that have been translated in J. Franklin Jameson’s Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664 (New York, 1909). Manuscripts relating to non-governmental activities in New Netherland are rare, though there is an extensive collection of correspondence from the dominies in the colony to the classis of

16 Publication of the translated letter is scheduled for the 2004 fall issue of New York History.

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Amsterdam from 1648 to 1674.17 These letters, which contain numerous observations on social activities in New Netherland, are published in Corwin’s Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York.18 In 1628 Jonas Michaelius was sent to New Netherland as the first minister to serve the colony. During his three-year stay on Manhattan he maintained correspondence with acquaintances in the Netherlands. Only three letters survive, yet these contain significant details about life in the early years of the colony and valuable observations on the Indians. Michaelius’ letter to Adrianus Smoutius dated August 11, 1628, appears in Jameson’s Narratives of New Netherland. The remaining two letters were not found until the 1920s. They proved to be a second letter to Smoutius, dated August 8, 1628, and a letter in Latin to Joannes van Foreest written on September 13, 1630. All three letters can be found translated in A. Eekhof ’s Jonas Michaelius, Founder of the Church in New Netherland (Leyden, 1926).19 Recently a collection of manuscripts has come to light containing correspondence between Govert Loockermans and the merchant family Verbrugge in the Netherlands.20 As the Verbrugge family’s representative in New Netherland, Loockermans traveled from Fort Orange to the South River, eventually becoming one of the most prominent merchant traders in the colony. Through his correspondence much information can be derived concerning the trading operations of private merchants in the seventeenth century. This material still awaits translation; however, a description of the contents of the Loockermans papers does appear in the present writer’s Guide to Dutch Manuscripts Relating to New Netherland in U.S. Repositories (Albany, 1978), and a complete transcription of the letters is on file at the New Netherland Project in Albany. Private journals and diaries of visitors to New Netherland remain to be discovered; however, one journal of two Dutch travelers to 17 This correspondence is kept in the archives of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. 18 Edward T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York, 7 vols., (Albany, 1901–1916). 19 The August 11, 1628, letter is in the possession of the New York Public Library and the August 8, 1628, letter is owned by the Huntington Library of San Marino, California. The Latin letter dated September 13, 1630, was in the private archives of Jonkheer van Foreest at Heiloo in North Holland when A. Eekhof ’s book, Jonas Michaelius, appeared in 1926. 20 This collection of correspondence can be found at the New-York Historical Society catalogued as “Stuyvesant-Rutherford Papers.”

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New York in 1679 and 1680 contains detailed observations of the former Dutch colony from the Schenectady/Albany area to the Delaware River settlements. Although the journal is beyond the 1674 limit of this survey, it is included because it contains significant information about the former settlers and settlements of New Netherland. This journal of Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter was translated by Henry C. Murphy in the 1860s. After some revisions were made in Murphy’s translation by S.G. Nissenson, the work was published in J. Franklin Jameson’s series: Original Narratives of Early American History as the Journal of Jasper Danckaerts 1679–1680 (New York, 1913). Murphy’s translation, however, deserves another revision. Not only did many translation errors survive Nissenson’s revision, but also the omission of 15 pages of commentary on Indians remained untranslated. The latter was remedied in the publication of “Observations of the Indians from Jasper Danckaerts’s Journal, 1679–1680,” by Charles T. Gehring and Robert S. Grumet in The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. XLIV, number 1, January 1987. Another journal kept by Danckaerts during a second voyage to New York contains much detail on the transatlantic crossing but little on New York. It was translated and edited by Kenneth Scott under the title Diary of Our Second Trip from Holland to New Netherland, 1683 by Jasper Danckaerts (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1969).21 The only surviving literary ventures inspired by New Netherland are represented by a handful of poems translated by Murphy and published in his Anthology of New Netherland (New York, 1865).

New Amsterdam When New Amsterdam officially received its charter as a municipality in 1653, the city began keeping its own records independent of the director general’s council in the fort. As with the records of the central administration, or “Colonial Manuscripts,” the city’s records were also turned over to the English in 1664. However, the majority of the records were still kept in Dutch during the intervening English administration until the end of the Dutch restoration in 1674. These records contain the minutes of the municipal coun-

21

Both of these journals are owned by the Brooklyn Historical Society.

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cil; records of the burgomasters and schepens, containing powers of attorney, indentures, inventories, conveyances, acknowledgements of debt and mortgages, and executive minutes; the notarial records of Salomon La Chaire and Walewijn van der Veen; and the records of the orphanmasters.22 All of these records were translated by E.B. O’Callaghan except for a volume entitled “Original Dutch Records: Mortgages 1660–1665,” which contains acknowledgments of debts and mortgages. O’Callaghan’s translations appear in the following publications: The Records of New Amsterdam, 1653–1674, Berthold Fernow, ed. (New York, 1897; reprint, Baltimore, 1976); Minutes of the Orphanmasters of New Amsterdam, 1655–1663, Berthold Fernow, trans. and ed. (New York, 1902–1907), which also contains minutes of the executive boards of the burgomasters and the records of Walewijn van der Veen, notary public from 1662 to 1664; Minutes of the Orphanmasters of New Amsterdam, 1663–1668, E.B. O’Callaghan, trans., Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds. (Baltimore, 1976); and Register of Salomon La Chaire, E.B. O’Callaghan, trans., Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds. (Baltimore, 1978). The most comprehensive source of primary material relating to New Amsterdam remains Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island, which contains an exhaustive chronology of events and activities on Manhattan from the earliest days of the West India Company to beyond the American Revolution. In this chronology Stokes drew extensively on previously mentioned manuscript collections, in some cases printing previously unpublished translations for the first time. Although the chronology relating to New Netherland appears in volume four, the Addenda to the chronology in volumes 4: 941–986; and 6: 3–64 should not be overlooked.

Long Island Although the majority of source material for the Dutch and English settlements on Long Island is in the “Colonial Manuscripts,” there are a few collections of manuscripts that relate exclusively to this area. One collection, known as the “Kings County Records,” contains

22 These records of the city of New Amsterdam are kept by the New York City Municipal Archives.

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the court minutes of Flatbush (Midwout) from 1659 to 1682, and conveyances and petitions from 1652 to 1708; deeds of New Utrecht from 1659 to 1831; deeds and miscellaneous items of Bushwick (Boswijck) from 1660 to 1825; and deeds, town orders, and road records of Flatlands from 1661 to 1831. Translations of these records were made in the early 1900s by Frank L. Van Cleef, which were bound into volumes accompanying the originals.23 These important manuscripts await publication after a thorough check of the transcription of proper names. It may be worth considering this corpus of records as a candidate for publication on the website of the NNP. Other manuscripts directly relating to Long Island are the records of the Dutch reformed church of Brooklyn, which contain a protocol of noteworthy events from 1660 to 1752; baptismal register from 1660 to 1719; financial records from 1657 to 1676; orphan records from 1662 to 1664; cow records from 1662 to 1669; marriage register from 1660 to 1696; and a register of members from 1663 to 1702. These records have been translated by A.P.G. Jos van der Linde in the series New York Historical Manuscripts; Old First Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, New York, 1660–1752 (Baltimore, 1983). In 1999 the Holland Society of New York published the Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Flatbush, Kings County, New York, translated by David William Voorhees.

Fort Orange/Rensselaerswijck The “Colonial Manuscripts” contain most references to the West India Company’s interests in the upper Hudson region until 1652. In this year the jurisdiction of Fort Orange/Beverwijck was carved out of Rensselaerswijck territory after a long dispute between Petrus Stuyvesant and officials of the patroonship. After the establishment of a court at Beverwijck all local matters were resolved by the magistrates there and official records maintained by the secretary. These records contain court minutes from 1652 to 1660; deeds from 1654 to 1679; conveyances from 1658 to 1660; and notarial papers from 1660 to 1676. In addition to the court minutes of Beverwijck there

23 The original records and translations are at the New York City Municipal Archives.

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are also records of the court kept in Dutch during the English administration of Albany, Rensselaerswijck, and Schenectady, from 1668 to 1685.24 The court records have been translated by A.J.F. van Laer and published in two series: Minutes of the Court of Fort Orange and Beverwijck, 2 volumes (Albany, 1920–1923) and Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswijck and Schenectady, 3 volumes (Albany, 1926–1931). A new translation of the court records for the Dutch period appeared in 1990 as Fort Orange Court Minutes, 1652–1660, translated and edited by Charles T. Gehring, in the series New Netherland Documents published by Syracuse University Press. The other related papers, deeds, conveyances, and so on have been translated by Jonathan Pearson in Early Records of the City and County of Albany, 1654–1679, four volumes, (Albany, 1869); volumes two through four of Pearson’s translations were revised and edited by A.J.F. van Laer. They were eventually published under the above series title in Albany, from 1916 through 1919. The first volume of Pearson’s translation is being again translated by the NNP in three parts. The first part appeared in 2000 as the Fort Orange Records, 1656–1678, translated and edited by Charles T. Gehring in the series New Netherland Documents published by Syracuse University Press. Over the years certain records relating to Albany have been separated from the main body. They contain wills, notarial papers, and other documents from 1666 to 1693.25 Translations of these records by A.J.F. van Laer can be found in the following volumes of the Dutch Settlers Society Yearbook, vol. 6 (1930–1931), pp. 13–28; vol. 10 (1934–1935), pp. 1–14; vol. 13 (1937–1938), pp. 1–18; and vol. 14 (1938–1939), pp. 1–18. Another source of information for the upper Hudson region of New Netherland is the account of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert’s trip into Iroquois country during the winter of 1634 to 1635.26 This journal, which contains the earliest description of the Mohawk Valley and detailed observations of Indian settlements and ceremonies, was translated by General James Grant Wilson and published after a revision by S.G. Nissenson in Jameson’s Narratives of New Netherland (New York, 1909). The present author has completed

24

These records are held by the Albany Municipal Records Center. These records are in the Livingston Family Papers of The Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society. 26 This journal is held by The Huntington Library at San Marino, California. 25

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a new translation of the journal from the original manuscript, in conjunction with Dr. William A. Starna as co-editor, who has provided extensive ethno-historical annotations for the references to the Iroquois; the work was published in 1988 by Syracuse University Press as A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635. Another excellent source of information for approaching the social history of the settlement on the upper Hudson is the Deacons’ Accounts 1652–1674, First Dutch Reformed Church, Beverwijck/Albany, translated and edited by Janny Venema, published by Picton Press in 1998. The patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, which comprised approximately the present-day counties of Albany and Rensselaer, generated many records over its almost 250 years of existence. The correspondence of the first patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1630–1643), and other related manuscripts until 1696 are contained in a collection translated by A.J.F. van Laer and published as Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908).27 Shortly after this volume appeared in 1908, Van Laer was informed by Howard Townsend of New York City that he had in his possession additional Rensselaerswijck manuscripts that had been separated from the original collection. Van Laer received the manuscripts from Townsend with the stipulation that they be returned directly to their owner in Amsterdam, W.M. van Rensselaer Bowier. Before returning them to the Netherlands, Van Laer made typescripts of those manuscripts that related to Rensselaerswijck (49 of the 83 manuscripts). A calendar of the whole collection was published in the New York State Library Report for 1909.28 Another extensive collection relating to the patroonship contains 122 boxes of manuscripts, 29 rent ledgers, 45 boxes of leases, and 9 boxes of survey returns. It represents records of the colony from its earliest days in the 1630s until its closing phases as a manor in the mid-nineteenth century.29 Much of the source material in Dutch remains to be translated; however, A.J.F. van Laer did translate several cohesive groups among the records, which were published as Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswijck, 1648–1652

27 This collection of manuscripts is held by the Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum [Maritime Museum] in Amsterdam. 28 The typescripts of these Rensselaerswijck manuscripts are kept by the New York State Library; the originals are in the possession of the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam. 29 The “Van Rensselaer Manor Papers” are held by the New York State Library.

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(Albany, 1922); Correspondence of Jeremias van Rensselaer, 1651–1674 (Albany, 1932); Correspondence of Maria van Rensselaer, 1669–1689 (Albany, 1935); and “Protocol of Dirck van Schelluyne, Secretary of the Colony of Rensselaerswijck, 1660–1665,” Dutch Settlers Society Yearbook, vol. 16 (1940–1941), pp. 2–18. Another source for information about the patroonship and especially relations with the Indians is a corpus of records called the Slichtenhorst court proceedings. These records are marked N 15.3. Renselaer Ca. V. Slichtenhorst and are kept in the Rijksarchief in the province of Gelderland at Arnhem. When Brant van Slichtenhorst returned to the Netherlands he sued the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck for uncompensated expenses. The more than 400 pieces of legal records offer a candid view of relations between the director of Rensselaerswijck and the Native Americans who inhabited the region. A short extract of these papers is published in the Appendix to A.J.F. van Laer’s Court Minutes of the Colony of Rensselaerswijck. A transcription of the entire court proceedings made by Janny Venema from a microfilm of the court proceedings is on file at the New Netherland Project.

Esopus/Wiltwijck As with the records for the jurisdiction of Beverwijck, the local records of the Esopus region of New Netherland begin with the establishment of a court. The records for this central Hudson administration contain court records from 1661 to 1675 and secretary’s papers including copies of conveyances, contracts, agreements, bonds, wills, and powers of attorney from 1664 to 1675.30 This collection of records was translated by Dingman Versteeg and published as Kingston Papers in the series New York Historical Manuscripts (Baltimore, 1976). Prior to the establishment of a court at the Esopus in 1661 cases from this region were heard in the court at Beverwijck.

30 These records are maintained by the Ulster county clerk’s office in Kingston, New York. A microfilm of the Kingston records is kept by the New Netherland Project.

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Unlike other regions within New Netherland, communications from the South River were kept in separate files by both the Dutch and later English secretaries on Manhattan. As a result there are several volumes of the “Colonial Manuscripts” devoted solely to this region. Volumes 18 and 19 contain papers pertaining to the regulation of affairs on the South River from 1648 to 1664; and volumes 20 and 21 represent a collection of papers concerning administration of the region by the province of New York from 1664 to 1682. These volumes, entitled Delaware Papers, 1648–1664 and Delaware Papers, 1664 –1682, have been translated by the present writer and published in the series New York Historical Manuscripts (Baltimore, 1977 and 1981). Two informative letters from Johannes Bogaert to Hans Bontemantel concerning the expedition against New Sweden in 1655 were translated by Henry C. Murphy and published in The Historical Magazine, 2 (1858), 257–258.31 Although the records for the city of Amsterdam’s colony on the South River were lost during the English siege of Fort Nieuwer Amstel in 1664, many records concerning this colony within a colony from 1656 to 1664 have survived in the Netherlands.32 They were compiled by John R. Brodhead during his research trip to the Netherlands in the 1840s and eventually translated by E.B. O’Callaghan for publication in the series Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, of which volumes 1 and 2 are known as “Holland Documents.” Volume 2 also contains a translation of the minutes of the council of war of the Colve administration, 1673–1674, These minutes represent a section of volume 24 in O’Callaghan’s calendar.

Manuscript Loss When one considers that it has been over three hundred years since the Netherlands relinquished its colony in North America to the English, and that the Dutch records of New Netherland probably had become indecipherable within a generation in New York, it is

31 32

These letters are in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. These papers are at the Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archives) in Amsterdam.

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amazing that such a large amount of primary source material for the study of this West India Company territory has survived. The greatest loss of documentary source material relating to New Netherland occurred when the West India Company was reorganized in 1674.33 Although some of these papers do survive in the form of copies sent on to the States General for its consideration and recommendation, the early records of the administrations of Verhulst, Minuit, Crol, and Van Twiller have been lost.34 In addition to the loss of administrative records from 1624 to 1638, all of the reports, accounts, journals, inventories, muster rolls, and correspondence from New Netherland to the West India Company directors were lost. “The Bontemantel Collection,” mentioned above, gives us some insight into what type of information the West India Company Chamber of Amsterdam was receiving from New Netherland. We can only hope that some of these West India Company papers were sold to private collectors rather than destroyed, and that one day they will be acquired by an institution that will make them accessible to researchers. The “Colonial Manuscripts” held by the New York State Archives have also suffered extensive loss and damage over the years. Although it is possible that some records were lost during the Dutch administration, the first major losses probably occurred during the governorship of Sir Edmund Andros. When the former territories of New Netherland were reorganized in 1688 and centralized under the Dominion of New England, Andros had all the records moved to his new administrative headquarters in Boston. When the short-lived dominion failed and the records were returned to New York City after the Leisler period, some of these records probably either remained in Boston or were lost en route to New York.35 The first known natural disaster to strike the “Colonial Manuscripts” occurred in 1741 during the so-called slave conspiracy in New York

33

See M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, “A Survey of Archives in the Netherlands Pertaining to the History of the Netherlands Antilles,” published in West-Indische Gids, 35 (1954), 1. 34 It is possible that the early directors returned to the Netherlands with their administrative records. In most cases they intended to use them to justify their actions while serving as director. It is known that Kieft had many of his records with him when he was lost at sea off the coast of Wales in 1647. 35 See “Tragedies in New York’s Public Records,” by Victor Hugo Paltsits in The Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1909), 371.

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City. Among the many fires set in the city during the turmoil, one destroyed the roof of the governor’s residence at Fort George. The fire also consumed the chapel and other adjacent buildings, and it eventually reached the storage area of the records over the main gate. In order to save them from the flames, the records were thrown out the window onto the street. Many loose papers were seen blowing up the street in a heavy wind. Unfortunately there is no contemporary account of what was lost, though it must have been considerable.36 During the American Revolution the “Colonial Manuscripts” were stored by the English aboard the warships Duchess of Gordon and Warwick. Several years of storage in damp holds caused extensive water damage to a number of the volumes. It was also probably at this time that the records suffered much damage from rodents. Nonetheless, the first recorded loss of Dutch records did not occur until the 1911 State Library fire. On the day of the fire, as noted above, A.J.F. van Laer, the keeper of the manuscripts, had some of the original documents on his desk, all of which were consumed during the three-day fire. Miraculously the remaining Dutch records survived with varying degrees of damage. Because these bound volumes were stored on wooden shelves close to the floor, the collapsing shelves of English records from above formed a protective layer over the archives of New Netherland. Of course, damage was greatest to books closest to the top of the pile; namely, the “Council Minutes,” or volumes 5 through 10. Volume 10, for example, which contains over a thousand pages of manuscripts for the years 1662 to 1664, had about three inches burned away at the top of every page. Still, the “Colonial Manuscripts” suffered the greatest losses during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Owing to fire, theft, neglect, and such, the following records have been lost: council minutes from August 1649 to January 1652, June to September 1652, May to November 1653, June 1657 to January 1658, and 1659; the record book into which petitions were copied verbatim; letter books; letters and journals relating to activities with the neighboring English colonies; the report of Stuyvesant’s voyage to the West Indies in 1655; and the “Book of Resolutions.” Although the gaps in the

36

Paltsits, “Tragedies,” 371.

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“Council Minutes” are significant, the loss of the letter books is the most troublesome, especially for the translation of the records into English. For example, an extensive file of correspondence with the South River region of New Netherland exists; however, only the responses of the director on the South River survive, creating a oneway correspondence, containing replies with no questions and questions with no responses. Records for local jurisdictions are less complete than the “Colonial Manuscripts.” The area with the best-kept records is that of Fort Orange/Beverwijck; however, there are few local records for this area before the establishment of the West India Company’s jurisdiction within Rensselaerswijck in 1652. Although the records for Fort Orange/Beverwijck are mostly complete, the book of court minutes for 1661 to 1664 has been lost. The only references to Fort Orange before 1652 are in the council minutes of the central government and in the minutes of the court of Rensselaerswijck.

Manuscript Recovery The recent discoveries of the “Govert Loockermans Papers” at the New-York Historical Society (mentioned above) and the discovery of Van Twiller correspondence in the “Brazil Papers,” provide one with hope that there is still “new” source material to be uncovered. With the exception of the first volume of the “Colonial Manuscripts,” which was destroyed in the 1911 State Library fire, it is possible that those papers now presumed lost may some day reappear. In the meantime there are several possibilities for pursuing the discovery of the papers relating to New Netherland. First, families of Dutch descent from the New Netherland period may still retain possession of papers whose value has been obscured by time. In many cases private individuals are unaware of the contents of such papers except that they are old and indecipherable. An offer by the present writer to translate the material for the family’s own information in exchange for copies of the originals is usually successful, if the private party can be convinced that they will not suffer loss of value by making them public. Second, there has never been a systematic search in the Netherlands for letters sent from New Netherland by private parties to their friends and relatives back in the fatherland. We know that the transatlantic

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correspondence had increased to such a point in 1659 that Stuyvesant passed an ordinance to regulate the conveyance of letters from New Netherland.37 In order to begin such a search in the Netherlands, one must organize a list of family names with all known variations and places of origin. In this way local repositories in the Netherlands can be approached in a systematic fashion. Because such papers have probably not been identified as originating in New Netherland, they may be filed among private papers only under specific family names. Third, although John Romeyn Brodhead searched the Old West India Company papers at the State Archives in The Hague for material relating to New Netherland, there are indications that he failed to consider the large group of records labeled “Brazil Papers.” It is quite possible that a careful search of these papers will reveal new information on the early period of New Netherland. A case in point is the correspondence of Wouter van Twiller, director of New Netherland, to the Amsterdam chamber of the West India Company mentioned above.38 These letters represent the only communications from Van Twiller and his council that have come to light so far. They survive in the “Brazil Papers” because it was a custom of the time to send several copies of communications to the fatherland by alternate routes, thereby increasing the possibility of successful delivery. Before the fall of Brazil in 1654, it was common for ships to return to the Netherlands by way of the Caribbean Islands and Recife. We can only hope that a search of these papers will reveal further material such as the Van Twiller letters, and help to fill the void in the documentary sources for New Netherland from the administrations of Verhulst to Kieft. The New Netherland Project at the New York State Library continues to stimulate interest in the Netherlands for a search of papers relating to New Netherland in local repositories. Such potential source material when added to already available information will provide future scholars with the documentary evidence required for a thorough analysis of a neglected period of colonial American history. Although New Netherland occupied a strategic position between New

37 See Charles T. Gehring, Correspondence, 1654–1658, (Syracuse, 2003), pp. 46 and 78. 38 A.J.F. van Laer, “Letters of Wouter van Twiller,” New York History (October, 1969), 44.

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England in the north and the tobacco colonies of Maryland and Virginia in the south for more than half of the seventeenth century, the significance of the Dutch colony has been in many cases either distorted by ignorance of available sources or simply ignored altogether. It is hoped that this essay will provide historians with increased accessibility to the primary source material necessary for a balanced and complete examination of the Dutch colonial experience in North America.

TYING THE LOOSE ENDS TOGETHER: PUTTING NEW NETHERLAND STUDIES ON A PAR WITH THE STUDY OF OTHER REGIONS David William Voorhees

“I embarked upon historical research as an explorer conscious that every great discovery was one that revealed a continent of ignorance.”1 Thus, Oscar Handlin introduces us in Truth in History to his point of departure in the quest for understanding the past. Handlin subsequently determined that the importance of historical enquiry was not its relevance to the present but its “capacity for advancing the approach to truth,” and that truth “resides in the small pieces which together form the record.”2 The diversity of papers presented by scholars at the two-day “New Netherland at the Millennium Conference” held in New York City in October 2001, at a two-day symposium on Amsterdam-New York City relations held in Amsterdam in January 2003, and at the annual Rensselaerswijck Seminars hosted by the New Netherland Institute, reveal that at the opening of the twenty-first century the quest to fill the “continent of ignorance” regarding New Netherland is rapidly being undertaken. In a statement applicable to New Netherland studies, three and a half centuries ago New Netherland promoter David Pietersz de Vries asserted, “Nothing is wanting but to carry men there, for the land upon this coast is very fertile.”3 In January 1999, New York History published Joyce D. Goodfriend’s excellent overview of the state of New Netherland studies at the end of the twentieth century. In that essay, Goodfriend noted that the proliferation of works relating to New Netherland since 1985 demonstrate that “colonial Dutch studies has become a vital field of research in the United States.” The recent work of such European scholars

1

Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979), 4. Ibid., 405. 3 David Petersz. De Vries, Voyages from Holland to America, Henry C. Murphy, trans., Collections of the New York Historical Society, 2nd series (New York, 1867), 125. 2

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as Willem Frijhoff, Simon Groenveld, and Jaap Jacobs in the Netherlands, Claudia Schnurmann in Germany, Simon Middleton in England, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke in France reveals that the vitality of the field has also rapidly spread to other nations. Indeed, Goodfriend’s opening statement in her essay that “Historians of the colonial Dutch have long been forced to contend with the prevailing assumption of scholars that the Dutch impact on the mid-Atlantic region was negligible” has, as she suggested it would, become largely outdated.4 Through her efforts, and those of Karen Kupperman, Wayne Bodle, Jessica Kross, the Nieuw Nederland Werkgroep in Holland, and numerous others, the Dutch are increasingly receiving their deserved recognition as players in the early European settlement of North America and the development of an Atlantic World.5 This essay does not attempt to replicate or update Goodfriend’s essay, but rather to raise some questions in order for us to more fully integrate the New Netherland experience into the mainstream of American, Atlantic World, and global historiography. To place New Netherland in a proper historical context we need to clarify its relation to English colonial America and the wider Atlantic community. Foremost are definitions. What do we mean by the terms Dutch and Dutch colonial period when looking at the New World? There is no doubt that the actual Dutch political presence in North America was brief, lasting little more than forty years, from 1621 to 1664 (not counting the prologue of Dutch exploration and trade from the late 1590s to the formation of the Dutch West India Company in 1621, or the short-lived Dutch interlude when the Dutch recaptured New York in 1673–1674). On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence that both a Dutch cultural presence and the Republic’s political and legal legacy lasted in the mid-Atlantic region well into the nineteenth century. As late as the eighteenth century, 4 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History, 80 ( January 1999), 5–28, quote from p. 5. 5 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Early American History with the Dutch Put In,” Reviews in American History, 21 (1993), 195–201; Wayne Bodle, “Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980–1994,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 51 ( July 1994), 355–386; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “New Netherland in the Atlantic World: Comments and Reflections,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Winter 1997), 86–88; Jessica Kross, “The Dutch and English in New York,” Journal of Urban History, 21 (November 1994), 118–129, and “‘If you will not drink with me, you must fight with me’: The Sociology of Drinking in the Middle Colonies,” Pennsylvania History, 64 (Winter 1997), 28–55.

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such maps as Matthias Seutter’s 1720 “Novi Belgii in America Septentrionali” designated the region “New Netherland.” The tenacity of Dutch nomenclature, Benjamin Schmidt pointed out in a 1997 essay, was partially due to the Dutch ability to “consistently outmaneuver” the English in matters of cartography.6 Donald Meinig, among other scholars of North American post-contact cultural areas, amply demonstrates that the Dutch in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, on western Long Island, and in New Jersey formed a key cultural area in pre-industrial America.7 How, then, do we define New Netherland’s parameters? Is it a political entity demarcated by precise dates, geography, and particular sovereignty? Or should it be defined in broader cultural and linguistic contexts? In early modern Europe, sovereignty frequently changed hands without altering underlying social and cultural structures. French King Louis XIV’s holdings in Italy, for example, did not automatically make those regions French.8 “Real time,” the French historian Marc Bloch noted, “is, in essence, a continuum. It is also perpetual change.”9 The final outcome of English sovereignty over New Netherland, so clear to us in hindsight, long remained uncertain for contemporaries. Yet, the Dutch settlement and political administration of the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers left a permanent imprint that continues to inform that area. In order to put New Netherland studies on a par with other regions such as New England and the Chesapeake, the region must be viewed in its broader cultural context. In this essay, the term New Netherland will be used in this broader context. It is a quarter of a century since David Steven Cohen published his influential essay “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?”10 Since then it has become universally recognized that

6 Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54 ( July 1997), 549–578. 7 Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of American History, vol. 1,—Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1986). 8 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Sian Reynolds, trans., 2 vols. (New York, 1972, 1976), 2:763–770. 9 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Peter Putnam, trans. (New York, 1953), 28. 10 David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?”, New York History, 62 ( Jan. 1981), 43–60.

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not only was the population of New Netherland heterogeneous but also that the Dutch Republic—barely fifty years old at the time of New Netherland’s permanent settlement by the Dutch West India Company in 1624—was itself a conglomeration of several cultural and ethnic groups as well as the product of massive immigration from other parts of Europe and the British Isles.11 Population statistics remain nonetheless incomplete for New Netherland and postconquest New York and New Jersey. The reasons for this are manifold: the Dutch traditionally distrusted censuses; the English undercounted non-English to bolster claims of right by occupation; and reports often focused on freeholders, with the result that the unpropertied free poor, servants, slaves, and apprentices, as well as newly formed or isolated settlements, often went uncounted.12 As an example, the two populous villages in Manhattan’s Out Ward, the Bowerie Village and New Haarlem Village, were not included in the New York City tax list of 1695. Moreover, it is important to know that immigration statistics for New Netherland are based solely on records of those who owed a debt to the West India Company for their passage, leaving the number of those who paid for their own passage to America unknown.13 Modern population estimates for New Netherland and colonial New York and New Jersey fluctuate wildly. In 1909, Albert Faust calculated New Netherland’s Dutch population at 10,000 in 1664, with their descendants in New York approaching 200,000 by 1790, to which figure he added 40,000 living in New Jersey and other states. Seventy-five years later, Thomas Purvis estimated a 17.5 percent “Dutch” component for Revolutionary New York and New Jersey based on “thirty-seven family names.” In the 1990s David M. Riker compiled a register of New Netherland settlers, not counting spouses, resulting in 1,800 distinct family surnames from those who

11 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, Eng., 1995). 12 See, for example, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 13; Thomas E. Burke, Jr., Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661–1710 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 156. 13 Ernst van den Boogaart,”The servant migration to New Netherland, 1624–1664,” in P. C. Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labor Before and After Slavery (Dordrecht, 1985), 55–71.

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had arrived in the Dutch colony prior to 1674.14 In order to truly understand the size and ethnic composition of New Netherland’s population, then, more comprehensive demographic studies are needed that integrate census and tax data with genealogical, legal, and church records. Without the minutiae such statistics provide, can we clearly define the New World Dutch character? In the first comprehensive scholarly study of New Netherland by a European author, published in 1999 as Een zegenrijk gewest, Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw, Dutch historian Jaap Jacobs argued that, despite the ethnic diversity noted by David Steven Cohen, New Netherland remained an integrated extension of the Old World Dutch Republic. Jacobs maintains that, unlike those in the English colonies to its north and south, Dutch cultural institutions never underwent a process of “creolization”— that is, a mixing of European, Native American, and African characteristics—but continued unchanged from those in the fatherland.15 Janny Venema drew a different conclusion in a massive study of Beverwijck published in 2003. “Cultural boundaries were easily changed and remained fluid,” she writes. “Meetings and negotiations with natives took place. . . . Life at the frontier was similar to, but at the same time different from, life in patria.”16 Clearly, scholars are deriving very different conclusions about the composition of the New Netherland character from the materials they are using. More detailed studies are needed for New Netherland’s communities, particularly on Manhattan, along the Delaware River, and on western Long Island, to determine if all New Netherland communities followed the same pattern.

14 Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States, 2 vols. (Boston, 1909), 2:16–17; Van den Bogaart, “The Servant Migration to New Netherland,” 61; Thomas L. Purvis, “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 41 ( January 1984), 89–90; David M. Riker, comp. Genealogical and Biographical Directory to Persons in New Netherland from 1613 to 1674, 4 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1999). 15 Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk geweest Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1999). See also, Willem Frijhoff, “Reinventing an Old Fatherland: The Management of Dutch Identity in Early Modern America,” in R. Bendix and H. Roodenburg, eds., Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History and Anthropology (Amsterdam, 2000), 121–141. 16 Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Hilversum, Neth., and Albany, N.Y., 2003), 367.

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In the same year that Jacobs’ work appeared, Dutch historians Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster published a highly controversial paper that suggested that the “consequences of the Dutch expansion into the Atlantic were of no great importance” and that the “cultural impact of Dutch Atlantic expansion was virtually invisible.”17 For Emmer and Klooster, the more aggressive colonial settlement policies of the English rapidly erased the Dutch cultural presence. As Klooster stated in an earlier 1997 essay, “immigration to New Netherland was by no means insignificant. . . . Yet, compared to English migration to New England and the Chesapeake, Dutch migration was hardly impressive.”18 Emmer’s and Klooster’s thesis seems extraordinary in light of the survival of Dutch cultural forms in the Hudson Valley until the nineteenth century, but it demands careful scrutiny. In a 1998 essay that is widely influencing understandings of identity, “Brothers, Scoundrels, Metal Makers: Dutch Constructions of Native American Constructions of the Dutch,” Daniel K. Richter wrote, “Dutch authors tried to make sense of what they heard Indians say about New Netherlanders. . . . In calling the resulting images ‘constructions,’ we remind ourselves that these authors were not just reporting what was done and said, but they were actively shaping knowledge, building meaning for themselves and their readers as they considered the question of who they—and the Native neighbors— were.”19 Paul Otto and Evan Haefeli portray Dutch and Amerindian relations as the result of “contrasting societies and cultural outlooks.” Haefeli, for example, sees Kieft’s War (1643), a pivotal event in New Netherland history, as a “real clash . . . between the European and

17

Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800 Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario, 23 (1999), 2:48–49. This paper expanded upon an earlier essay by Emmer, “The West India Company, 1621–1791: Dutch or Atlantic?” in Pieter C. Emmer, ed., The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy 1580–1800: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot, Neth., 1998), 65–90. 18 Wim Klooster, “Winds of Change: Colonization, Commerce, and Consolidation in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Fall 1997), 55. 19 Daniel K. Richter, “Brothers, Scoundrels, Metal Makers: Dutch Constructions of Native American Constructions of the Dutch,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Fall 1998), 59. See also Anthony F. Buccini, “Swannekans Ende Wilden: Linguistic Attitudes and Communication Strategies among the Dutch and Indians in New Netherland,” in Joanna C. Prins, Bettina Brandt, Timothy Stevens, and Thomas F. Shannon, eds., The Low Countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations (Lanham, 2000), 11–28.

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Native American cultures of violence.”20 Dennis J. Maika, in a 2000 essay on relations between Africans and Europeans in early New York wrote, “The experiences of the Philipse family and their slaves offer special insights into the evolving cultural perception of race in colonial New York.”21 Cynthia Van Zandt’s 1998 doctoral dissertation, “Negotiating Settlement: Colonialism, Cultural Exchange, and Conflict in Early Colonial North America, 1580–1660,” argued that Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans relied upon intercultural alliances during the early settlement period.22 The exploration of identity constructions, however, should not be confined solely to the “racial” configuration of Amerindians, Africans, and Dutch. Constructions of how the Dutch viewed and were viewed by the English, French, Spanish, and other players in the Atlantic World are just as pertinent for a clearer understanding of Dutch identity in the seventeenth century. Benjamin Schmidt, in Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, focused on how the Dutch “imagined, appropriated, and manipulated” the New World during the formative period of Dutch national identity. Using historical narratives, pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, poems, plays, paintings and prints, and even a seventeenthcentury Amsterdam amusement park, he illustrated the widespread influence of “America” on shaping and articulating a Dutch identity at home and as justification for Dutch involvement in the New World as a way to liberate America from Spanish tyranny.23 If, as Schmidt proposed, America had such a profound influence upon the Old World, would not this influence have carried over into its North American settlements? Jaap Jacobs largely focuses on the Europeanborn generation in New Netherland before 1664, but would not the

20 Paul Otto, “Common Practices and Mutual Misunderstandings: Henry Hudson, Native Americans, and the Birth of New Netherland,” de Halve Maen, 72 (Winter 1999), 75–83; Evan Haefeli, “Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America,” in Michael A. Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York 1999), 17–40. 21 Dennis J. Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture in Early New York,” de Halve Maen, 73 (Summer 2000), 27. 22 Cynthia J. Van Zandt, “Negotiating Settlement: Colonialism, Cultural Exchange, and Conflict in Early Colonial Atlantic North America, 1580–1660” (Ph.D. dissertaion, University of Connecticut, 1998). 23 Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York, 2001), xviii, 98.

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environment and proximity of Amerindians slowly have creolized subsequent generations of Dutch Americans? Both Jacobs’ thesis as well as that of Emmer and Klooster need testing. In the 1990s, Firth Fabend, Willem Frijhoff, and Joyce Goodfriend, building on the work of James Tanis and earlier generations of Dutch Reformed church historians, convincingly pinpointed the Dutch Reformed church as the central institution in shaping and maintaining Dutch identity in the New World.24 Indeed, whereas at the time of the English takeover of New Netherland in 1664 three Dutch Reformed dominies oversaw eleven congregations, by 1780, and despite the Anglican church’s favored position after 1693 and the establishment of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the number of Dutch Reformed congregations in the middle colonies had soared to 127.25 Using deacons’ account books from the Flatbush, Long Island, Reformed church, currently being translated and published by The Holland Society of New York, the late Eric Nooter gave us considerable insight into not only the Flatbush Reformed congregation but also the workings of the Flatbush community at large. Janny Venema has also provided much new information relating to Beverwijck through her translation of the deacons’ records of that community.26 Because the Reformed church was the central and, indeed, the only public institution for

24 Firth Haring Fabend, “The Synod of Dort and the Persistence of Dutchness in Nineteenth-Century New York and New Jersey,” New York History, 77 ( July 1996), 273–300, Fabend, “New Light on New Netherland’s Legacy to the Religious Culture of New York and New Jersey,” de Halve Maen, 73 (Fall 2000), 51–55, Fabend, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 214, and Fabend, “Church and State, Hand in Hand: Compassionate Calvinism in New Netherland,” de Halve Maen, 75 (Spring 2002), 3–8; Willem Frijhoff, “The West India Company and the Reformed Church: Neglect or Concern?,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Fall 1997), 59–68; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Social Dimensions of Congregational Life in Colonial New York City,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 46 (April 1989), 252–278. 25 Edwin Scott Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America, rev. ed. (New York, 1976), 3–4. 26 Willem Fredrick (Eric) Nooter, “Between Heaven and Earth: Community and Society in Colonial Flatbush” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1994); Janny Venema, Kinderen van weelde en armoede: armoede en liefdadigheid in Beverwijck/Albany (c. 1650 –1700) (Hilversum, Neth., 1993), and Venema, Deacons’ Accounts 1652–1674 First Dutch Reformed Church of Beverwijck/Albany, New York (Rockport, Maine, and Grand Rapids, Mich., 1998); David William Voorhees, trans. and ed., Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Flatbush, Kings County, New York, Volume 1, 1677–1720, (New York, 1998).

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both of these communities, its influence spread much wider than its communicants. For this reason, similar studies are needed for all of the Dutch communities. Broader conclusions about New Netherland can be made only when the comparative tools for drawing such conclusions are available. We should also continue to ask hard questions about the religious cohesion of New Netherland’s population. How, for example, does the prominent mid-Hudson Valley Dutch Lutheran community centered at Loonenberg (present-day Athens, New York) fit into the hypothesis that the Synod of Dort cemented the New World Dutch character? What about Dutch Jews and Roman Catholics? “New Netherland was a Dutch colony with a Dutch government,” Peter Christoph wrote, “but it had a complex society, multinational and multi-religious with a strong strain of secularism”27 Was the Reformed church the only cementing factor in creating an identity for New Netherlanders? As suggested above, might the proximity of large Amerindian and African populations have played a role in creating a homogeneous identity for diverse Europeans? Language is another indicator of identity. Although English became the official governmental language after 1664, Dutch was retained for many civil and ecclesiastical functions and private affairs for nearly a century after the English takeover. Indeed, Dutch as the primary language was so pervasive in rural eighteenth-century New York and New Jersey that in 1730 the printer William Bradford was compelled to publish a Dutch-English dictionary, “whereby the LowDutch inhabitants of North America may (in a short time) learn to spell, read, understand and speak proper English. And . . . the English may also learn to spell, read, understand and write Low-Dutch.”28 As late as 1866, the wife of the Dutch consul-general to New York City noted, “it is a fact that one out of ten people [in the city] will be able to understand you although it is not our civilized Dutch that they speak.”29

27 Peter Christoph, “Albany’s Colonial Lutherans: Ecumenism and Conflict Among the Churches,” de Halve Maen, 73 (Spring 2000), 16. 28 Hendrik Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography 1693–1794: A descriptive Catalog of Dutch-language Books, Pamphlets and Almanacs printed in America (Nieuwkoop, Neth., 1974), 39. 29 Citation from Gerald de Jong, The Dutch in America 1609–1974 (Boston, 1974), 106.

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David Narrett estimated a late seventeenth-century literacy rate in the Dutch language of at least 80 percent among New York men and 50 percent among New York women.30 Archival research by such family associations as the Van Voorhees reveal that New York and New Jersey farmers also conducted correspondence in Dutch with their relations in the Republic for generations after the 1664 English takeover. Correspondence between Harmen Jansen Blauw in Groningen and his distant cousins Albert and Kornelis Coertensz. on Long Island, for example, occurred sixty-five years after the New World branch of the family had migrated.31 In addition, Dutch courants, literally modern newspapers, and mercuriuses, somewhat akin to news magazines, circulated in the region.32 At least thirty of 150 inventories in the New York State Archives that I have surveyed, or twenty percent, provide detailed information regarding Dutch book titles. Willem Frijhoff suggests that such writings “testify not so much to the intensity or the frequency of communications across the ocean as to a sense of community founded on a common language, a common religion, and a common culture.”33 Hendrick Edelman and Elizabeth Funk have initiated introductions to the New Netherland world of letters.34 Nonetheless, a comprehensive study of the reading matter of the New World Dutch and its influence on their culture and actions has yet to be undertaken. Examination of another aspect of written communication, West India Company and private trade documents, is providing a fuller understanding of the economic role that New Netherland played in the Atlantic World. Building on the work of Van Cleaf Bachman and Oliver A. Rink, a new generation of scholars including Jaap Jacobs and Wim Klooster is reinterpreting the West India Company’s role in the development of New Netherland. The West India Company “was not bent on monopoly,” Klooster noted in a revisionist study.

30 David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 222–227. 31 Robert S. Vorhis, ed., Through A Dutch Door: 17th Century Origins of the Van Voorhees Family (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 143–177, quote from pages 166–167. 32 See, for example, Jacob Melyn to Abraham Gouverneur, October 1691, Melyn Letter Book, n.p., American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 33 Willem Frijhoff, “New Views on the Dutch Period in New York,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Summer 1998), 23. 34 Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography; Elisabeth Paling Funk, “De literatuur van Nieuw-Nederland,” De nieuwe taalgids, 85–5 (1992), 383–395.

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“If anything,” he added, “it was remarkably flexible” in its policies.35 The volumes of English translations of Dutch documents in the New York State Archives produced by the New Netherland Institute under the direction of Charles Gehring now provide American scholars a wealth of documentary materials unavailable to previous generations of non-Dutch speakers.36 Claudia Schnurmann, Dennis Maika, and Cathy Matson confirm that a flourishing commerce, both legal and illegal, existed between Holland and New York during the English colonial period, despite efforts by England’s Navigation Acts to restrict it.37 Cathy Matson noted that when, in 1756, the British Parliament passed an act to stem the flow of smuggled goods on Dutch vessels, it created a crisis among New York merchants.38 Although imports of Dutch manufactured goods declined in relation to English manufactured goods during the eighteenth century, Walter H. Salzmann suggested that Dutch exporters adjusted to the transition throughout the eighteenth century.39 As Wim Klooster reminds us, New Amsterdam’s trade was minuscule when placed in the broader Dutch national and Atlantic imperial contexts. Nonetheless, we need to know a great deal more about New Amsterdam’s and New York’s Dutch trading contacts in the pre- and post-conquest periods and their implications for New York’s future economic growth. Of particular importance is the role of New Netherland in the slave trade. Seventeenth-century Manhattan merchants such as Jacob Leisler, Gabriel Minville, and Frederick Philipse were important players in the North American coastal slave trade, and the New York and New Jersey Dutch tenaciously held onto the practice of

35 Wim Klooster, “Failing to Square the Circle: The West India Company’s Volte-Face in 1638–1639,” de Halve Maen, 73 (Spring 2000), 3–9. 36 Charles T. Gehring, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch (Baltimore, Md., 1977–1983), New Netherland Documents Series (Syracuse, N.Y., 1983–). 37 Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1995); Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten. Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum 1648–1713 (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1998); Cathy Matson, Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore and London, 1999). For records relating to post-1674 trade with the Netherlands see Jacob Judd extracts from Port Books, Historic Hudson, Tarrytown, N.Y.; Peter R. Christoph, The Dongan Papers, 2 vols. (Syracuse, N.Y., 1993–1996), 2:200–201, 236–238, 257–270. 38 Matson, Merchants & Empire, 271–273. 39 Walter H. Salzmann, A Market to Explore: A history of public-private partnership in the promotion of trade and investment between the Netherlands and the United States (Amsterdam, 1994), 35.

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slaveholding long after it had been abandoned by their neighbors.40 In a provocative essay dealing with the lack of a Dutch abolitionist movement in the later Dutch colonial world, “The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Perspective,” Seymour Drescher tackled the delicate issue of why the “Dutch were the last [Europeans] to legislate colonial slave emancipation.” Drescher’s call for “comparative anti-slavery as well as comparative slavery studies” is as relevant for New Netherland and its New World Dutch descendants as it is for the nineteenth-century Dutch empire.41 While the exploration and understanding of the African presence in New Netherland continues to attract widespread attention, the connection of New York merchants to the Surinam slave trade has yet to be investigated.42 If slaves in New Netherland have received attention as a distinctive social subgroup, such has not been the case with other social elements that composed New Netherland. In Pursuits of Happiness, Jack P. Greene describes New Netherland as “characterized by little civic consciousness, slight concern for achieving social cohesion, [and] high levels of individual competitiveness and public contention.”43 Graham Hodges’ study of New Amsterdam cartmen and Simon Middleton’s study of New Amsterdam bakers, however, suggest that urban artisans and laborers were able to form cohesive groups in order to promote their collective interests.44 Moreover, research into

40 Johannes Postma, “A Monopoly Relinquished: the West India Company and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Winter 1997), 81–85; Willie F. Page, The Dutch Triangle: the Netherlands and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1621–1664 (New York, 1997), and Page, “‘By Reason of Their Colour’: Africans in New Netherland, 1626–1674,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Winter 1998), 75–84; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1999). 41 Seymour Drescher, “The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review (February 1994), 44–69. 42 See Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture in Early New York.” 43 Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1988), 50. 44 Graham Russell Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 (New York, 1986); Simon Middleton, “How it came that the bakers bake no bread: a struggle for trade privileges in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 58 (April 2001), 345–370. See also Middleton, “The World Beyond the Workship: Trading in New York’s Artisan Economy, 1680–1740,” New York History, 81 (October 2000), 378–408.

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the familial networks of Jacob Leisler is revealing that as early as the 1640s a merchant oligarchy emerged in New Netherland that also promoted the interests of its members. After 1675, this closeknit kinship network began to feud, fracture, and re-coalesce into opposing camps. The leaders of New York’s political factions thus emerged, as European factional leaders often did, out of an elite intra-familial feud between cousins, brothers, and in-laws vying for public opinion.45 These studies raise new questions about class identity in New Netherland. How, for example, did such special interest groups operate within the wider Dutch Atlantic World networks? Were New Netherland’s labor actions inspired by similar contemporary group actions in the fatherland? Was New Netherland’s society as fluid as it has been supposed, or did the colony import the Republic’s class system intact? To better understand New Netherland’s society, we need to take a fresh look at the basic building block of any society, the family. In A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660 –1800, Firth Haring Fabend provided an excellent introduction to what information can be found regarding a middling agricultural family.46 Yet, much remains undisclosed. What do we mean by family in New Netherland? Was it the nuclear family as understood in the twentieth century, or the more extended classical family structure consisting of near and distant blood relations, servants, and slaves? Moreover, we need to know much more about relations between men and women. Susannah Shaw suggests, “we do not so much need new sources for the study of women in New Netherland (although new sources are always very nice indeed), but rather we need to set those sources we already have alongside one another to trace the complex interplay of economic realities and cultural constructions in the shaping of women’s lives.”47 In a 2001 essay, James Williams looked at sexual relations in New Netherland in terms of violence.48 In dealing with gender,

45 David William Voorhees, “First Families,” Seaport Magazine, 36 (Fall 2001), 14–18. 46 Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1991). 47 Susannah Shaw, “New Light on Old Sources: Finding Women in New Netherland’s Courtrooms,” de Halve Maen, 74 (Spring 2001), 14. 48 James Homer Williams, “Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland,” in Merrill D. Smith, ed., Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America (New York and London, 2001).

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however, we must be careful not to project our own post-feminist perceptions upon the actual experiences of women and men living in a still medieval and sparsely inhabited frontier world. Moreover, we are left with many unanswered questions. Why, for example, did New Netherland women have such a high birth rate in comparison to women in the Netherlands? How did social class, the New World environment, the harsh climate, and the proportion of women to men affect male-female relationships, parent-child relationships, and a concept of family in general? Questions regarding fundamental human relations in the New Netherland family unit remain endless. Donna Merwick’s portrait of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam in Death of a Notary, Willem Frijhoff ’s monumental study of New Amsterdam dominie Everhardus Bogardus, Jaap Jacobs’ forthcoming biography of Petrus Stuyvesant, and Willem Frijhoff ’s forthcoming study of Willem Kieft, as well as such essays as Frans Westra’s on Crijn Fredericx, Brenda Safer’s on Jaques Corteljou, and Jon S. Hallam on Cornelis Steenwijck have begun to fill the wide gaps in our understanding of the role of the individual in New Netherland’s development.49 Many more biographies of New Netherland’s leading, and lesser, figures are needed. Resident West India Company director Wouter van Twiller, for example, is one such fascinating character whose story has yet to be told. Moreover, we need to have a firmer grasp of the role of individuals in group migrations to New Netherland. D. J. Wijmer’s study of Kings County settlers, for example, found that a large number came from rigidly Calvinist congregations in the eastern provinces of Drenthe and Gelderland, and that most had been communicants of Long Island domine Theodorus Polhemius when he preached in Gieten and Meppel.50 James Tanis, Willem Frijhoff, Firth Fabend, and Joyce Goodfriend have dispelled the notion that religion played a minimal role in New

49 Frans Westra, “Lost and Found: Crijn Fredericx—A New York Founder,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Spring 1998), 7–16; Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999); Brenda Safer, “Jaques Corteljou, the Cartesian: The Connections between René Descartes and Jaques Corteljou,” de Halve Maen, 73 (Winter 2000), 71–76; Jon S. Hallam, “The Portrait of Cornelis Steenwyck and Dutch Colonial Experience in America,” in Joanna C. Prins, Bettina Brandt, Timothy Stevens, and Thomas F. Shannon, eds., The Low Countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations (Lanham, 2000), 77–85. 50 D.J. Wijmer, “Steven Coerts—His Family and His Dutch Background,” in Vorhis, Through A Dutch Door, 49–50.

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Netherland. We now know that conflicts between traditionalists and expansionists in the Netherlands, whether Gomarian and Arminian, Voetian and Cocceian, or Pietist and Orthodox, laid a foundation for political conflict in New Netherland and New York. Dirck Mouw’s current research into the eighteenth-century coetus-conferentie conflict in the New World Dutch churches over whether ministers could be trained in the colonies among other ecclesiastical issues suggests that it too reflects contemporary eighteenth-century arguments in the Republic over ecclesiastical authority.51 Further research on how Old World doctrinal conflicts translated in the New World environment is needed. The seventeenth century was an age when church and state were not separated. As Willem Frijhoff noted, “there is no reason to suspect the West India Company of neglect in matters of religion and commerce in every single director’s behavior and in his mind.”52 Recent research by James Homer Williams and Eva De Vos into New Amsterdam’s Jews, Peter Christoph’s studies of New Netherland’s Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and Evan Haefeli’s overview of the broad sweep of religion in New Netherland and early New York have seriously eroded the conventional belief that widespread tolerance existed in New Netherland.53 “The West India Company was under pressure in the Netherlands not to grant toleration in the colonies,” Christoph tells us, and Director General Petrus Stuyvesant “was particularly conscientious in repressing ‘conventicles’.”54 Williams adds, “Stuyvesant, backed by the Reformed clergy, clung to the ideal

51 Dirk Mouw, “Moderkerk and Vaderland: Religion and Ethnic Identity in the Middle Colonies, 1690–1772” (Ph.D. prospectus, University of Iowa, 2001), 15–16. 52 Frijhoff, “West India Company and the Reformed Church,” 68. 53 Evan Haefeli, “The Creation of American Religious Pluralism: Churches, Colonialism, and Conquest in the Mid-Atlantic, 1628–1688” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2000); James Homer Williams, “ ‘Abominable Religion’ And Dutch (In)tolerance: The Jews and Petrus Stuyvesant,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Winter 1998), 85–91, and “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle For Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland, and New York” in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (New York, 2001), 369–393; Eva De Vos, “‘Somewhat unreasonable and unfair’: the Jewish population of New Netherland and the attitude of the Dutch toward them 1654–1664,” New Netherland at the Millennium Conference paper, October 2001; Peter Christoph, “The Time and Place of Jan van Loon: A Roman Catholic in Colonial Albany,” de Halve Maen, 60 (October 1987), 8–11 (December 1987), 9–12. 54 Christoph, “Albany’s Colonial Lutherans,” 11.

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of New Netherland as a Christian colony, even if that meant welcoming foreigners of questionable loyalty.”55 We need to continue to investigate the motivations and meanings behind Company director Willem Kieft’s seeming tolerance toward minority sects, and, as Jaap Jacobs suggests, behind Petrus Stuyvesant’s alleged bigotry. “Religious tolerance in the Dutch Republic was not pursued as an ideal in itself,” Jacobs wrote in 1998. “Rather, it was the result of ideas about the role of religion as a cohesive force in a community and of the struggles between ministers and magistrates.”56 Moreover, we need to look more carefully at the role played by the Dutch constitution in shaping Company policies. Article 13 of the Union of Utrecht guaranteed freedom of conscience to all in the Republic, and political decisions by the States of Holland, the most powerful provincial government, in the decades after the Arminian controversy, Jonathan Israel suggests, doomed efforts by the Reformed synods to enforce absolute religious conformity in the Republic and its overseas possessions.57 The effects of decisions by the Hof van Holland and the national Hooge Raad upon the policies of the West India Company and its directors have yet to be explored. In 1992, in a work intended to be the standard undergraduate text on law in colonial America, Peter Charles Hoffer described New Netherland’s legal system as being run by “a series of weak and dissolute governors abetted by a crew of inept and often inebriated legal advisors.”58 On the other hand, Martha Shattuck in her dissertation, “A Civil Society,” Jacob Schiltkamp in a number of works, and Deborah Rosen, Susannah Shaw, Dennis Sullivan, and Adriana van Zwieten have amply demonstrated that New Netherland was a society governed by law.59 Even after the 1691 Act of Judicature

55

Williams, “‘Abominable Religion,’” 91. Jaap Jacobs, “Between Repression and Approval: Connivance and Tolerance in the Dutch Republic and New Netherland,” de Halve Maen, 71 (Fall 1998), 58. 57 Israel, The Dutch Republic, 601, 952. In 1654 the States of Holland rejected the appeals of the Reformed Synod to impose doctrinal censorship as having “very dangerous consequences.” Ibid., 912. 58 Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 29–30. 59 Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1993); Deborah A. Rosen, Courts and Commerce: Gender, Law, and the Market Economy in Colonial New York (Columbus, 1996) and Rosen “Women and Property across 56

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fully established the English Common Law system in New York, New York’s legal system continued to reflect vestiges of Dutch Roman Law as late as the early national period. How, then, did the complex relation between the Republic’s constitution and Company directives to New Netherland fully play out? What influence did the Republic’s constitution have on the development of New Netherland’s provincial and civic law? The 1689 event known as Leisler’s Rebellion may best illustrate the persistence of Dutch cultural forms in New York. In pattern, the 1689 New York and East Jersey uprisings against King James II’s government bear similarities to the 1672 Orangist uprisings in the Netherlands, when mobs there forced numerous towns to replace their magistrates with Voetian-Orangists.60 The central role taken by the New York militias in 1689 followed the precedent of the Low Countries, where citizens’ militias, the schutterijen, traditionally played a pivotal role in civic life. In the Dutch Republic, these civilian military units, created to maintain order within the towns, could be employed in military tasks outside the city walls during times of crisis. In the Netherlands this frequently happened during the War for Independence from Spain and again in 1672 and 1673, during the war with France and England.61 In a similar fashion, it was the militia companies in New York that called for a reorganized interim provincial government while awaiting instructions from England’s new king, the Dutch stadholder, William III, after the overthrow of English King James II’s administration. Moreover, when in June 1689 a committee of representatives was called to oversee the government, it followed in structure and parliamentary procedures

Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60 (April 2003), 355–381; Jacob A. Schiltkamp, “On Common Ground Legislation, Government, Jurisprudence, and Law in the Dutch West Indian Colonies: the Order of Government of 1629,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Winter 1997), 73–80; Shaw, “New Light on Old Sources: Finding Women in New Netherland’s Courtrooms,” 9–14; Dennis Sullivan, The Punishment of Crime in Colonial New York: The Dutch Experience in Albany during the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1997); Adriana E. van Zwieten, “‘A Little Land . . . To Some Seeds’: Real Property, Custom, and Law in the Community of New Amsterdam,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 2001), and “ ‘[O]n her woman’s troth’: Tolerance, Custom, and the Women of New Netherland,” de Halve Maen, 72 (Spring 1999), 3–14. 60 Rowen, Princes of Orange, 131–136, 138. 61 Paul Knevel, Burgers in het geweer: De schutterijen in Holland, 1550–1700 (Hilversum, Neth., 1994).

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Dutch constitutional traditions as formalized in the provincial states, or assemblies, of the Low Countries.62 These actions suggest the continuing legacy of Dutch constitutional expectations in the Dutch culture areas well into the English period. In the 1980s, historian James Tanis convincingly argued that during the English imperial crisis of the 1740s and 1750s, New Yorkers and Jerseyites again looked to their Dutch traditions. Citing numerous New York and New Jersey Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian sermons, “the Dutch example,” he wrote, “became an important symbol for the colonists at the time of the Albany Congress in 1754” and served as the “paradigm” of “union and independence.”63 During the 1750s, American Dutch-language almanacs republished the 1581 Act of Abjuration [Plakkaat van Verlatinghe], by which the Republic had declared its independence from Spain, and the 1579 Union of Utrecht [Vehandelinge van de Unie], the Republic’s basic constitutional document.64 In a provocative essay, Stephen E. Lucas deftly demonstrated that Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence so closely follows the Act of Abjuration in construction that the act must have served as a model for Jefferson. The influence of the Union of Utrecht on the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution has long been commented upon.65 To integrate the Dutch more fully into American historiography, we need to consider more carefully 62 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 20–24; Simon van Leeuwen, Commentaries on Roman-Dutch Law, Book 5 Law of Proceedure. 63 James Tanis, “The American Dutch, Their Church, and the Revolution,” in J.W. Schulte Nordhold and Robert P. Swierenga, A Bilateral Bicentennial: A History of Dutch-American Relations, 1782–1982 (Amsterdam, 1982), 116. 64 De AMERICAANSE Almanak, Voo’t Jaar na Christi geboorte 1754 (New York, 1754), cited in Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 56. 65 van Gelderen, Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 286. English texts of the Union of Utrecht [Verhandelinge van de Unie, Eeuwig Verbondt ende Eendracht tusschen die Landen, Provintien, Steden en Leden van Hollant, Zeelant, Utrecht, &c. binnen de Stadt Utrecht gesloten, den 23. January 1579] and Act of Abjuration [Plakkaat van Verlatinghe den 26 Julii 1581] are in E.H. Kossman and A.F. Mellink, eds., Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherland (Cambridge, Eng., 1974), 166–173, 216–228. For the influence of these works on American constitutional development see James R. Tanis, “The DutchAmerican Connection”: The Impact of the Dutch Example on American Constitutional Beginnings,” in Stephen L. Schechter and Richard B. Bernstein, eds., New York and the Union: Contributions to the American Constitutional Experience (Albany, NY, 1990), 22–28, and Stephen E. Lucas, “The Plakkaat van Verlatinge: A Neglected Model for the American Declaration of Independence” in Rosemarijn Hoefte and Johanna C. Kardux, eds., Connecting Cultures The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange (Amsterdam, 1994), 187–207.

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the impact of the Dutch constitutional ideal upon early modern and revolutionary Americans. This essay barely touches upon the numerous New Netherland topics that should be addressed. Historians need to more fully integrate the work of such material culturalists as Harrison Meeske, Ruth Piwonka, Roderic H. Blackburn, and Charlotte Wilcoxen, and of such archeologists as Karen Hartgen, Paul Huey, and Dianne Dallal into their conclusions about New Netherland’s society and its development.66 As William Starna suggests, relations between Native Americans and the Dutch need much fuller exploration. “Larger questions central to the Indian-Dutch experience,” he writes, include “those concerned with the dynamics and details of the fur trade; the dependence of he Dutch on surrounding native groups, particularly the Mohawks; the interactions between Indian polities and various European nation-states; the consequences of Dutch and English settlement on Indian populations in New Netherland; and the full range of Indian responses to the Dutch presence, especially as they concern evolving political policies and adaptive strategies.”67 Nan A. Rothschild’s Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape offers one interpretive ethnographic setting for such studies.68 A comprehensive study of Kieft’s War, the central event in New Netherland’s history, has yet to be undertaken. And, despite the work of David Steven Cohen, Jan Folkerts, and Gregory D. Huber, we still need to learn a lot more about husbandry, agriculture, and gardening.69

66 Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America 1609–1776 (Albany, N.Y., 1988); Ruth Piwonka, Luykas Van Alen House Furnishing Plan, (Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, New York, 2001); Charlotte Wilcoxen, Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century (Albany, N.Y. 1987); Roderic H. Blackburn and Geoffrey Gross, Dutch Colonial Homes in America (New York, 2002); Karen S. Hartgen, “Preserving Albany’s Past: The Battle Over the Broadway-Maiden Lane Archeological Site,” de Halve Maen, 70 (Spring 1997), 1–6; Harrison Frederick Meeske, The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Homes (Fleischmanns, N.Y., 1998); Paul Huey, “Fort Orange Archeological Site National Historic Landmark.” Volume No. 114 (The New York State Archeological Association, 1998); Alexandra van Dongen, ed., One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure: The Metamorphosis of the European Utensil in the New World (Rotterdam, 1995). 67 William Starna, “Assessing American Indian-Dutch Studies: Missed and Missing Opportunities,” New York History, 84 (Winter 2003), 4–31. 68 Nan A. Rothschild, Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: the Spanish and Dutch in North America (Washington, D.C., 2003). 69 David Stephen Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York, 1992); Jan Folkerts,

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In his forthcoming dissertation on the American Dutch Reformed church, Dirk Mouw argues that the “18th-century descendants of the inhabitants of New Netherland were acting, or attempting to act, in certain respects more like early-modern Dutch laity than their seventeenth-century New-World ancestors [had].”70 I suggest that in order to understand more fully the cultures of post-conquest New York and New Jersey, they must be seen as a component of contemporary European Dutch culture rather than in the light of an increasingly distant “Golden Age.” Finally, I would like to suggest that the state of New Netherland studies at the millennium should be seen not as the culmination of New Netherland scholarship in the twentieth century, but rather as the seed from which the discipline will grow and bloom in the twenty first.

“The Failure of West India Company Farming on the Island of Manhattan,” de Halve Maen, 69 (Fall 1996), 47–52; Gregory D. Huber, Dutch Barn Research Journal (1992ff.). 70 Mouw, “Moederkerk and Vaderland,” 3.

INDEX

Abbey, Edwin Austin, 34–35 Ackerson-Eckerson family, 249 Act of Abjuration (1581), 326 Act of Judicature (1691), 324 Adam Westerman, 213 Adriaen Gerritsz, 220 Africa, Africans, 148 African-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Journal of the, 261 Africans in New Netherland, genealogical studies, 261 Africans, enslaved, 119; free, 120 Aix-la-Chapelle, 165 Albany, 22, 30 Albany Congress, (1754), 326 Albany Records, 289, 290 Alexander the Great, 227, 241 Algeria, Algiers, 173–177 Allston, Washington, 16–19, Fig. 1 almanacs, 326 Alrichs, Jacob, 105 Amama, 224, 227 Amandi Polani a Polansdorf, (Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf ), 239 Amelant, Willem Willemsz, 193 American Genealogist, The, 252, 261 American Revolution 287, 304 Amersfoort, 215 n. 25, 225 Amesius, 225–226, 234 Amicucci, Susan, 258, 260 Amsterdam, 58, 59, 64, 124–125, 149–204, passim; ’t Water [Damrak], 182; Admiralty, 190; Amstel river, 179; Amsterdam-New York City relations held in Amsterdam ( January 2003), 309; brewery Het Witte Hart, 203; Brugstraat, 194; city government in, 102; civic guard, 179, 181, 183, 190, 201–202; Civic Orphanage [Burgerweeshuis] 161, 180, 202; classis, 206; Dam, 159, 182–183; directos, 206, factory De Kievit, 150; Gravenstraat, 180; Great and Small Burgher Right, 115; Herengracht, 150, 195; Illustrious School, 169; “insiders and outsiders,” 109; Insurance Chamber,

181; investors from, 107, 115, 125; invoked as model for colonial practice, 140; Kalverstraat, 179; Keizersgracht, 180; Kreupelsteeg, 163; Latin School, 169, 184; Lauriersgracht, 190; Middeldam, 159; Nes, 179; New Church, 201; Nieuwe Zijde (New Side), 179; Nieuwendijk, 180; Nieuwezijdskapel, 179; notarial abstracts, 256; Old Church, 157, 159, 163, 179, 181, 201; Oostersekaai, 162, 192, 195; Oude Turfmarkt, 193; Oude Zijde (Old Side), 159; Oude Zijds Voorburgwal, 159; Oudeschans (Montelbaensburgwal), 162, 184, 186, 194–195; Oudezijds Achterburgwal, 163; Remonstrant community, 187–188; Saint Lambert’s fair, 157; Singel, 190; Sint-Anthonis Breestraat, 179, 190; stock market, 166; Town Hall, 199, new Town Hall, 164, 190; Uylenburch island, 162; Vijgendam, 182, 202; Vlooyenburg island, 194; Voetboogdoelen, 203; Warmoesstraat, 159, 181–182, 202–203; Westerkerk, 201; WIC warehouses, 162; Y river, 192 Andrews, William Loring, 29–30 Andros, Edmund, 126, 303 Anglican church, 316 Anglo-Dutch War (1672), 68, 325; third, 287 Angola, 62 Anjou, Gustave, 257 Anna or Anneken (daughter of Balthasar Stuyvesant and Margaretha Hardenstein), 219, 230 Anthony, Allard, New York City Sheriff, 129 Antonides, 211–213 Antony van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, 17, 36–37, Fig. 2 Antwerp, 42 Appelman, Trijntgen Jansdr 163

330

index

apprentices, 312 Archangel[sk], 165 Architecture, 15, see also buildings Aristotelian, 227 Aristotle, 227, 237, 240 Arminians, 323–324 Arminius, 212 Arnoldus Buchelius, 206 Arnoldus Verhel, 225 artes, 228, 234; faculty, 227 Articles of Capitulation, 125 Articles of Confederation, (1781), 326 Artois, 43, 44, 48, 49 Art-Union, 18 Asher, Georg Michael, 24 Athens, New York, see Loonenberg Atlantic, 225; commerce, 95, 123; Ocean, 95–96; World, 95, 97, 128 Bachman, Van Cleaf, 318 Bahia, 60–61, 64 Bailey, Rosalie Fellows, 258, 262 Bakers in New Amsterdam, 142 bakers, 108, 320 Bal van Rijswijck, Jacob Andriesz, 178 Bal van Wieringen, see Huydecoper Balde, IJsbrand Kieft, 150 Balde, Jacob, 150 Balde, Jan Jr., 150 Balde, Jan Sr., 150 Balthasar, 206–212, 214–215, 218–222, 224, 226, 228–231, 234–235 Baltic, 159, 162, 171 Bancroft, George, 23–24, 30 Banninck, Erm Bartholomeusdr, 161 Banning Cocq, Frans, 201 Barbary Coast, 173 Barelts, 211, 215 Barlaeus, Caspar, 169 Barth, Barbara, 253, 261 Bartholomaeus Keckermann, 227, 238, 241 Bartholotti, Guillelmo, 191, 195 Batavia, 70 Batavorum Americae Coloniae, 20, Fig. 6 Beekman, James William, 2 Beekman, Willem, 2 Belgium, 42, 44, 51, 54 Benedictus Aretius, 228, 239 Benedictus Arias Montanus, 228, 237–238 Berlikum, 22, 219–220 Berlin, 190 Bermudas, 186

Bernardus Fullenius, 224 Bestevaers Kreupelbosch (Manhattan), 166 Beuningen, Machteld Geurtsdr van, 178 Beverwijck, 30, 103; burgher right in, 97, 97 n. 12, 298, 300–301; population of, 313, 316 Biasca, Cynthia, 249 Bicker, Andries, 153 Bicker, Laurens, 202 Bicker-De Graeff, faction, 154 Biemer, Linda, 264, 280, 282 birth rates, 322 Bisschop, Elisabeth de, 190 Blackburn, Roderic H., 264, 327, 327 n. 66 Blaeuw, Michiel Cornelisz, 184 Blaeuw, Sara, 184 Blauw, Harmen Jansen, 318 Bloch, Marc, 311, 311 n. 9 Blommaert, Samuel, 73 Bodle, Wayne, 265, 277–278, 310, 310 n. 5 Boelen, Andries, 153, 160 Boelen, Claes Cornelisz, 154, 159, 201 Boelendr, Mary [Marritgen] Claes, 154, 159 Boelen-Heynen, kinship, 153–154, 159–160 Boëtius Ludolphi, 211 Bogardus, Everhardus, 148, 158, 166, 175, 199–200, 322 Bogardus, William Brower, 249 Bolsward, 218 bonds of chattel slavery, 119; of indenture, 119 Bontemantel Collection, 293 Bontemantel, Hans, 293 books, 226 Boom, Saertje Pietersdr, 183 Boot, Nicholas, 117–118 Booth, Mary L., 30–31 Bordeaux, 170 Bosch, Jan, 192 Boskoop (Holland), 188 Boston, 168 Boughton, George Henry, 34–35, Fig. 13, Fig. 14 Bowerie Village, 312 Brabant, 149 Bradford, William, 317 Bradt family, 249 Bradt, Albert Andriesen, 259 Brahe, Per, count of Jönköping, 80

index Brandenburg, 190 Braudel, Fernand, 311 n. 8 Brazil, 62, 65, 69, 97, 185–186, 192, 194, 231; burgher right in, 97, n. 12, 118; loss to Portugal (1654), 104; Sephardic refugees from, 111 Brazil Papers, 293–294, 306 Breda, Peace Treaty of (1667), 123 Brede middenstand, equivalent to English “middling sort,” 144 Breeden-Raedt, 231, 233 Breuckelen, 97 Breuker, Ph.H., 237 British Parliament, 319 Brodhead, John Romeyn, 23–24, 30–31, 38, 291, 294, 302, 306 Brooks, Chris, 258 Brouwer, Jacob Dircksz, 181 Bryant, William Cullen, 30 Buccini, Anthony F., 314 n. 19 Buildings, 13, 18, 21–23, 25–26, 28–29, 37–38, see also architecture Burchgraeff, Jacob, 166 burgemeester, 218 burghers, 97, 100, 102, 123; as citizens, 95; references to, before Burgher Right officially established, 96–97, 102, see also burgher right; Great Burgher Right; Small Burgher Right burgher guard (schutterijen), in Curacao, 99; in New Amsterdam, 100 burgher oath, 94–95, 112–114, 118, 125 burgher right (burgerrecht), control by municipal court, 112–113; enslaved Africans excluded, 119; fees collected, 113; “foreigners” excluded, avoided by “sojourners,” 121; free blacks excluded, 120; indentured servants excluded, 118; “inhabitants” excluded, 120; negotiations, 95, 108–113; original claimants, 94; privileges granted by, 114–115; retained under English rule, 124–126, and significance for different residential groups, 140–42; soldiers excluded, 118; Stuyvesant’s compromise, 112; see also municipal citizenship Burgomaster, 16 Burke, Peter, 155 Burke, Thomas E., 312 n. 12

331

Bushwick (Boswijck), 298 Butchers in New Amsterdam, 143 C. Ivlivs Caesar, 227, 241 Calais, 48–49 Calvin, John, 43 Calvinist/s, 216, 206, 322; church, 212 Campbell, Douglas, 32, 37, 39 Campbell, Tony, 20 Campherbeeck, Hendrick Jr., 165 Cantwell, Anne-Marie, 27 Cape Lopez, 60 Caribbean, 63 Caricature, 17, 38 Carl X Gustav, king of Sweden, 1654–60, 77; and war with Denmark, 88 Carl XI, king of Sweden, 1660–97, 77; and Scanian War, 88 Carl XII, king of Sweden, 1697–1718, 75 cartmen, 320 cartography, 311 Casparus Bartholinus, 227, 239–240 Catharina, 220 Catholic, 212, 228–229, 317, 323 Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, Jaarboek, 252 Ceulen, Coenraet van, 164–167, 176–177, 193–194 Ceulen, Coenraet Willemsz van, 166 Ceulen, Pieter van, 165 Ceulen, Willem [Coenraetsz] van, 192 Chamberlain, Marjorie, 249 Charles II, king of England, 190 Charles IX, king of Sweden, 162 Charleston, SC, 45 Chesapeake, tobacco from, 93, 103, 104, see also Virginia Christian IV, king of Denmark, 176 Christoph, Florence, 249 Christoph, Peter R., 249, 264, 270, 273, 289 n. 2, 317, 317 n. 27, 323, 323 n. 53 Chrysostomos, 223–224 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), 248, 255–256 Church of Rome, 216 Cicero, 227, 237, 240 City Hall, 127, see also Stad Huys Claesz, Reyer, 163, 192 Clasen, Douwe, 117 classis of Leeuwarden, 220 classis of Zevenwouden, 221 Clemens Timplerus, 227–239

332

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Clinton, DeWitt, Governor, 289 Coates List, 289 n. 3 Cocceians, 323 Coertensz., Albert, 318 Coertensz., Kornelis, 318 Coevorden, 218 coetus-conferentie conflict, 323 Cohen, David Steven, 264, 311, 311 n. 10, 313, 327, 327 n. 69 Coimbra 227, 237 Coligny, Gaspard, 52–54 Collen, Geertruyt van, 165 Collen, Susanna van, 165 Collen, Van, family, 165; see also Ceulen, Van Colombo (Ceylon), 70 Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape (2003), 327 Colonial Manuscripts, 287–289, 291–292, 296, 298, 302–305 Colonial Revival, 15, 32–33 Colton, Julia, 29 Colve, Anthony, Governor, 287–289, 302 Common Law, 325 commonalty (gemeenschap), 99, 109 Connecticut River, 311 Conradus Vorsitius, 212 Consensus historians, and colonial artisans, 130 Constantinople, 223 Constitution, Dutch, 324–327 Constitution, United States, 326 conventicula, 225 Cornelis Martini, 241 Cornelis, Renier, 118 Cornelissen, Laurens, see Wel, Laurens Cornelissen van der Correspondence, 291 Corteljou, Jaques, 322 Corwin, Edward T., 295 n. 18 Costumes, 15, 17, 19, 34–35, see also dress Council Minutes, 288, 291, 304–305 Counter-Remonstrant, 229 Counter-Remonstrantism, 208 courants, 318 Court of Burgomasters and Schepens, 137, 140, 143 Court of Schout, Burgomasters (Burgemeesters) and Schepens (Schepenen), 93–94, 102–103, 113–114, 120; petition against sojourners, 108–109; on threat from Jews and

foreigners, 112; supervision of burgher right, 120–122; construction of Weigh house, 103; appoints City Weighmaster, 103; appoints Orphanmaster, 103 Couwenhoven, Jacob van, 167 Coymans, Balthasar, 190–191, 195 Coymans, family, 177 Coymans, Maria, 190 Cracouw, Carel van, 171 craft guilds, absence of, 116 Craig, Peter Stebbins, 253 Crol, Bastiaen Jansz, 303 Cruikshank, George, 19 Cruydenier, Pieter Gerritsz, see Ruytenburch cultural areas, 311 Curaçao 65, 185–186 Curaçao Papers, 288, 291–292 Curler, Jacob van, 166 Dale, Jan de la, 165 Dallal, Dianne, 327 Danckaert, Jasper, 25, 27, 29, 296 Dantzig (Gdansk), 162 Darley, Felix O.C., 17–19, Fig. 3 Daughter of a Knickerbocker, 35, Fig. 14 David, Natalie Zemon, 282 Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, 277–278, 282 De Boer, Louis P., 257 De Brès, Guy, 42 De Certeau, Michel, and everyday life, 134, 144 De Forest, Jesse, 48, 53 De Geer, Louis, and Stora Kopparberg, 79 De Halve Maen, 263 De Jong, Gerald, 317 n. 29 De Rasière, Isaack, 292 De Sille, Nicasius (First Councilor), on staple right and sojourners, 111; quote from, 116 De Vries, David Petersz., 309, 309 n. 3 De Vries, Jan Jacobszen, 260 deacons’ accounts, 316 Death of a Notary (1999), 322 Debt and debt litigation, 266, 278–281 Declaration of Independence (1776), 326 DeGroff, Ralph L., 291 Delaware Papers, 289, 291, 302 Delaware River, 311 Delft, 196 Delfzijl, 219, 221, 234

index denizens/denization, 125–126 Denmark, 150, 171, 176, 185, 196 Dennis C. Landis, 237 Denver, 20 Deventer, 179, 184 DeVries, Tiemen, 32 Dikeman family, 249 Dircksen, Peter, 96 Director-General and Council, 98, 112, see also Petrus Stuyvesant; DirectorGeneral Director-General, 95, 102, see also Petrus Stuyvesant; Director-General and Council; Willem Kieft disputatio, 209 Dobson, John, 253, 258 Doherty, Frank, 249 Dokkum, 206, 209, 209 n. 12, 209–211, 215 Donck, Adriaen van der, 148–149, 198, 200 Dongeradeel, 211 Dordrecht (Dort), 98 Doughty, Francis, 198 Drenthe, 218, 322 Drescher, Seymour, 320 Dress, 22, 35, see also costume Dudok van Heel, S.A.C., 153 “Dun and Scot”, 124, see also “Scot and Lot” Duncanson family, 253 Dunkirk, 174 Dunsmore, John Ward, 38 Dutch, 228; language, 317–318; municipal tradition/culture, 95, 98, 100, 102, 112; and commerce, 96, see also staple right; Amsterdam; Dordrecht; burgher guard; burgher right Dutch Calvinism, 229, 235 Dutch Colonies List on Internet, 254 Dutch Cottage in Beaver Street, 25–26, 39, Fig. 9 Dutch Family Heritage Society Quarterly, 252 Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (1991), 321 Dutch Reformed, 229 Dutch Republic, 215, 222, 227, 234 Dutch Settlers Society of Albany Year Book, 251 Dutch Trading with the Indians, The, 37–38, Fig. 16

333

Dutch West India Company (WIC), 72; orders destruction of New Sweden, 87 Earle, Alice Morse, 28, 29 East India Company (VOC), 57, 59, 60, 64–65, 235 East Indies, 180, 183, 185, 196 Eaton, Theophilus, 168 Edelman, Hendrik, 317 n. 28, 318 n. 34 Edict of Nantes, 43, 46, 50 Edict of William the Testy, The, 36–37 Ee, 210 Een zegenrijk gewest, Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (1999), 313 Egbertsz, Jacob, see, Rijn, Jacob Egbertsz van Egbertsz, Roelof, see Vrij, Roelof Egbertsz de Ehninger, John Whetten, 18 Eight Men, 99 Eighty Years War, impact on Netherlands investors, 100 Elbertsz, Jannetgen 163, 171, 191–192 Elmina, 58, 61, 65 Elsenør (Denmark), 171 Elslant, Claes van, 167 Emden, 42, 46, 179, 196 Emmer, Pieter C., 312 n. 13, 314 n. 17 Engelraeve, Pieter Nicolai, 188 England, 169, 190, 196, 198; cartography, 311, scholarship in, 310 English “intrusion” (1664), 96; church 225; investors, 123 English Civil War, 104 English municipal tradition/culture, 127, see also freemanship English takeover, 263, 265, 272, 277 Epperson, Gwenn, 258, 262 Erasmus, 227, 237 Esopus, 301 Evertsen, Jan origin, 259 Evertsz, Cornelis, de Jonge, 293 Fabend, Firth Haring, 249, 316, 316 n. 24, 321, 321 n. 46, 322 Fabio Jacobi, 207 Fair Daughter of Holland, A, 35, Fig. 13 familial networks, 321 Families, particular: Beekman, 264 Gansevoort, 264 Haring, 265, 273 Livingston, 265, 274

334

index

Schuyler, 270 Van Rensselaer, 269, 270, 273 Family History Library and Centers, 255–256 family structure, 321 Family studies, 262–283, passim Family, historiography of, 264–272 Faust, Albert, 312, 313 n. 14 Fenn, Harry, 27 Fernow, Berthold, 290, 292 n. 11, 297 Festus Hommius, 207 “fire and light,”, 112, 122, 127, see also residency requirement First Anglo-Dutch War, impact on New Amsterdam, 103; impact on Virginia and Maryland, 104 First Settlement at Albany, The, 30, Fig. 11 Flatbush (Midwout), 298 Flatbush, Long Island, 316 Flatlands, 298 Flinck, Govert, 203 Florida, 47, 50, 52–53 Focco Franciscus Unia, 210 Folkerts, Jan, 249, 327, 327 n. 69 Food stuffs, trade in, 104, 105 Foreest, Dirck Jacobsz van, 184 Foreest, Jacob [ Jacobsz] van, Jr., 195 Foreest, Jacob Dircksz van, 183–184, 195 Foreest, Weyntgen van, 183–184 Forest Finns, 80–81 Fort Amsterdam, 292 Fort George, 287, 304 Fort Nieuwer Amstel, 302 Fort Orange, 122, 298 Fort Orange Court Minutes, 291 Fort Orange Records, 288, 291 France, 42, 44–45, 159, 169, 176, 189–190, 196, 198; as modernization model, 78; scholarship in, 310, Dutch war with (1672), 325 Franciscus Avercampius, 207, 210, 221 Franco Burgersdijck, 227, 239–240 Franeker, 206–213, 217, 222, 224–227, 229–235; city secretary 230 Frans Fokkes van Unia, 211 Frederick Henry, stadholder, 190, 195 Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg, 190 Fredericx, Crijn, 322

Freedoms and Exemptions (1640), 97 freemanship, 123, and Dun and Scot, Scot and Lot, 124 Friedrichstadt on the Eider (Holstein), 188 Friendland, 211 Friesland, 206–207, 215–218, 220, 222, 231, 233, 235 Frijhoff, Willem, 310, 313 n. 15, 316, 316 n. 24, 318, 318 n. 33, 322, 323, 323 n. 52 Frisia, 163 Frisian, 234 Frisian Remonstrants, 216 Fulton, Robert, 15 Funk, Elizabeth, 318, 318 n. 34 fur trade/beaver trade, 93, 103, 122, 327 Further Reformation (Nadere Reformatic), 225 Gampel, Gwen, 264 Gaustad, Edwin Scott, 316 n. 25 Gay, Sidney Howard, 30 Gehring, Charles T., 87, 291 n. 10, 296, 299, 306 n. 37, 319 Gelderland, 322 Gellius Amama, 234 Gemen, Lijsbeth Gerritsdr van, 179 Gender, 17; as a category of historical analysis, 277–278; studies, 277–279, 280, 282; roles, 267–268 Gendered litigation patterns, 277–279; violence, 271–272 Genealogy of New Netherland families, 245–262; correcting past errors, 257–258, 260–261; databases, 248, 261–262; defining scholarly work, 246–248; discovery of European origins, 256–260; future goals, 262; growth in interest, 246; recent books, 248–249; reprinted titles, 254–255; survey of journal articles, 249–254; value of LDS resources, 255; value to historians, 245; work on African families, 261 Georg Witzel, 242 George Pasor, 225, 239 Gerard Mercator, 228, 237 Gerardus Johannes Vossius, 240 Gerdts, William H., 19, 32 Germany, 49; scholarship in, 310 Gerrits, Sytje, 260 Gherke, Michael, 266

index Gibson, Walter, 26 Gieten, Drenthe, 322 Gijbelant, Claes Joppen, 182 Gijbelant, Job Claesz, 164, 181–182, 187, 192 Goclenius, 240 Godijn, Samuel, 148 Gomarians, 323 Goodfriend, Joyce Diane, 264, 270, 309, 310, 310 n. 4, 312 n. 12, 316, 316 n. 24, 322; Anglocentric reading of early New York history, 130 Gorisz, Seger, 172 Gouda 164, 196 Goudesteyn, manor, see Maarssen Gourdain, Louis, 45 Gouverneur, Abraham, 318 n. 32 Governors, 17, 24, 27 Graeff, Andries de, 160 Gravesend, 98 Great Britain, 49 Great Burgher Right (Groot Burgerrecht), 125, 128; established, 115; disappeared, 127 Grebber, Frans de, 182 Greek, 223–225, 228–229 Greene, Jack P., 320, 320 n. 43 Gregorius Nyssenus, 240 Grietje, Toelinck, 219 grietman, 219, 221 Griffin, Robert, 255 Griffis, William Elliot, 32, 37, 39 Groenendijk, Jan, 249 Groenveld, Simon, 310 Groningen 221, 234, 318 Gronovius, Johannes Fridericus, 168 Gross, Geoffrey, 327 n. 66 Grotius, Hugo, 168 Grumet, Robert, 296 Guiana, 66 Guilelmus, 225 Gundersen, Joan, 264 Gustav I Vasa, king of Sweden 162 Gustavus Adolphus (Gustav II Adolf ), king of Sweden, 1611–32, 76, 77; and Swedish modernization, 77–78 Haarlem (Holland), 164, 181–182, 220 Haefeli, Evan, 314, 314 n. 20, 323, 323 n. 53 Hague, The, 149, 168, 178 Hainaut, 43–44, 49, 54 Hallam, Jon S., 322, 322 n. 49 Hals, Frans, 33, 39, 182

335

Halve Maen, de, 250–251, 258 Handlin, Oscar, 309, 309 n. 1 Hansen, James, 253 Hardenberg, Arnold van, 198 Haring family, 249 Harlem (Manhattan) Otterspoor farm, 166–167; Van Keulen’s Hook 166 Harlem, New York, 312 Harmensdr, Anneken, 182 Hart, Simon, 294, 256 Hartgen, Karen S., 327, 327 n. 66 Hartgers, Joost, 21, 31 Harvard College, 225 Hatfield, April Lee, 5 Hawthorne, Julian, 37 Hayward, George, 25–28, Fig. 9, Fig. 10 Heath, William, 19, Fig. 4 Hebrew, 223–224 Heemstede (Holland), 195 Heermans, Augustine, 96 Helius Eobanus Hessius, 228, 241–242 Helmer, Elbert Lucasz, 183 Helmer, Grietgen, 183 Helst, Bartholomeus van der, 203 Hempstead, 98, 100 Hendricks Prize, 263 Henricus, 207 Henricus Antonides Nerdenus, 210, 211 Henricus Avercampius, 210 Henrik Hardenstein, 218 Herborn, 225 Hermannus Episcopius, 214 n. 24 Hero Otthonis, 214 n. 24 Heyn, Piet, 62–63 Heynen, family, 153–154 Hills, Patricia, 17 Hinlopen, Jacob, 191 Hodges, Graham Russell, 320, 320 n. 44 Hof van Holland, 324 Hoff, Henry, 251, 253, 258, 261 Hoffer, Peter Charles, 324, 324 n. 58 Hoffman, William J., 258 Holland, 217, 222; immigrants from, 98, tobacco market in, 104, 122 see also Netherlands; (province), 149, 152, 155, 160, 176–177, 193, 196 Holland Mania, 2 Holland Society of New York, 2, 50, 250, 255, 263, 298, 316 Holstein, 188 Holwerd, 211 Hoochkamer, Jacob Pietersz, 183 Hooft, Cornelis Pietersz, 155

336

index

Hooge Raad, 324 Hoorn (Holland), 170 Horace, 227 Horst, Ter, manor, 202 Houtman, Cornelis de, 180 Howard, Ronald, 24 Huber, Gregory, 327, 328 n. 69 Hudson Valley, 5, 93, 311 Hudson, Henry, 15, 23, 38; voyage, 72 Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 15, 38 Huey, Paul, 327, 327 n. 66 Huguenot Society of America, 50 Humor, 17 Huydecoper, Aeltgen Jansdr, 180 Huydecoper, Anthonette [Teuntgen], 164, 181 Huydecoper, family, 156–157, 178–179 Huydecoper, Geertruyt, 187 Huydecoper, Isabel, 191 Huydecoper, Jacob, 180 Huydecoper, Jan Jacobsz [Bal], 154, 159, 162, 178–182, 186–187, 189 Huydecoper, Joan Jr., 156, 173, 202 Huydecoper, Joan Sr., 164, 166, 177, 180, 188–192, 195, 202–203 Huydecoper, Lijsbeth, 182–183 Huydecoper, Luytgen Willemse, 178 Huydecoper, Machteld Jansdr, 157, 160, 163–164, 171–172, 176–178, 182, 186–189, 191–195 Huydecoper, Maria, 191 Huygens, Christiaen, 176 Huygens, Constance, 176 Hyde de Neuville, Baroness, 22 Iceland, 168 Ilias, 241 Illustrations, 24–25, 29–30, 34 immigration, 312, 322 Indian/s, 20, 23, 37; attacks by, 98–99, on Eastern Long Island, 107 “inhabitants,” excluded from burgher right, 120 Inheritance customs, 281 Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World (2001), 315 Irving, Washington, 1–2, 14–19, 23, 25, 30–33, 36–38, 147, 167 Israel, Jonathan, 312 n. 11, 324, 324 n. 57 Italy, 176 Jacob Marcus, 241 Jacob Martini, 239

Jacobs, Jaap, 259, 268–269, 294, 310, 313, 315–316, 318–319, 322, 324, 324 n. 56 Jacobus Rodolphi, 207 James I, king of England, 196 James II, 325 James, Duke of York and Albany, 287 Jameson, J. Franklin, 294–296, 299 Jans, Anneke, 249; erroneous ancestry, 257 Jans, Elsje, 260 Jansdr, Machteld, see Huydecoper, Machteld Jansdr Jansson, Johan, 20 Janvier, Thomas A., 37 Jarrige, Pierre, 173 Jefferson, Thomas, 326 Jelsum, 210 Jensma, 229, 236 Jesuits, 227 Jews, 317, 323 Joachim Beringer, 228, 238 Joannes Backemude, 210–211 Joannes Chrysostomos, 223–224 Joannes Tollius, 215 n. 25 Jogues, Isaac, S.J., 168 Johann Buxtorf, 227, 240 Johann Sebastian, Bach, 227 Johannes Bogerman, 219 Johannes Hachting, 225, 230, 234 Johannes Henricus, Alstedius, 238 Johannes Hus, 227 Johannes Maccovius, 226 Johannes Petri Hartsburgh, 232 Johannes Saeckma, 220 nn., 36–37 Journal of New Netherland, 96 Kampen, 184 Kelly, Arthur, 255 Kelly, Nancy, 255 Kemble, Edward W., 36–37 Kemp, Marcel, 252, 259 Kennedy & Lucas Lithographers, 27, Fig. 7 Kenney, Alice, 264 Kieft Balde, see Balde Kieft, Anna Maria, 150 Kieft, Cornelis IJsbrantsz, 201–202 Kieft, family, 156–204 passim Kieft, Floris IJsbrantsz, 202 Kieft, Gerrit Willemsz, 157, 159–162, 170, 177, 186–189, 192, 203 Kieft, Huybert, 202

index Kieft, IJsbrant Jansz, 158, 160 Kieft, IJsbrant Willemsz, 154, 159, 162 Kieft, Isbrant, 150 Kieft, Jacob Gerritsz (the elder), 157, 159 Kieft, Jacob Gerritsz (the younger), 157 Kieft, Jan Gerritsz, 158–160, 163, 167, 171, 175, 188, 191–192, 195, 203 Kieft, Jan IJsbrantsz, 161–162, 195 Kieft, Jan IJsbrantsz de Jonghe, 158 Kieft, Lijsbeth [Gerritsdr], 164, 185–186, 192–194 Kieft, Machteltgen [ Jansdr], 188, 192, 194 Kieft, Maria [ Jansdr], 188 Kieft, Maritgen IJsbrantsdr, 203 Kieft, Pieter IJsbrantsz, 158 Kieft, Regina Catharina, 150 Kieft, Stijn IJsbrants, 158 Kieft, Stijntgen [Gerritsdr], 164, 192–194 Kieft, Trijn Willemsdr, 162–163 Kieft, Willem, 97, 99, 322, 324; protests Swedish landing in South River, 73; unable to attack New Sweden, 86; Kieft’s War (1643), 101, 314, 327 Kieft, Willem [Gerritsz] (the younger), 147–204 passim, 292, 303 n. 34, 306 Kieft, Willem Gerritsz (the elder), 157–158, 160 Kieft, Willem IJsbrantsz, 158, 160–162, 187, 202 Kieft, William, 193 Kierner, Cynthia, 265, 273 King of Great Britain, 126 Kings County Records, 297, 322 Kingston Papers, 301 Klaas Hobbes Vallinc, 211 Klenck, Georg Everhard, 165 Klock, Jan, 191 Klooster, Wim, 314, 314 nn. 17–18, 318, 319, 319 n. 35 Knickerbocker, 14–19, 21, 25, 30–33, 35–38 Koenig, Dorothy, 252–254, 258 Koke, Richard J., 26 Kolenut, Ethel Konight, 249 Koning, Joep M.J. de, 20 Kooijmans, Luuc, 156 Kross, Jessica, 310, 310 n. 5

337

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 267, 268, 310, 310 n. 5 Kuyter, Jochem Pietersz, 167 La Chaire, Salomon, 297 La Dale, see Dale La Montagne, Johannes, 100 La Montagne, see Montagne La Rochelle, 42, 45, 48 Laan, Laurens van der, 262 Laet, Johannes de, 63, 68, 168 Lamb, Martha J., 31, Fig. 5, Fig. 10 Land Hadeln, settler from, 259 Land Papers, 289, 291 Landscapes, 15, 18 Lange, Michiel Cornelisz de, 158 Latin, 209–210, 222–223, 226–229, 241–242; school 211, 220 Latin-Greek dictionary, 227 law, 324–325 law of Rhemnius (lex Remnia), 232 Laws and Ordinances, 288 Le Leu de Wilhem, see Wilhem lectio, 209 Leeuwarden, 207, 211, 219–220, 222; nation, 222–224, 232 Leiden, 48, 51, 53, 153, 181, 207–208, 212, 227, 234; university 167–169, 184, 200 Leisler family, 249 Leisler, Jacob, 25, Fig. 8, 118, 319, 321; Leisler’s Rebellion (1689), 128, 270–271, 325 Leslie, Charles, 17 Levant, 176 liber nationalis, 231 Liège, 43 Lievensz, Jan, 181 Ligne, prince de, 202 Lille, 48 literacy, 318 Livy, 227 Loenen (Utrecht), 150 Loncq, Hendrick, 185 London, 46, 190 Long Island, 311, 318 Loockermans, Govert, 107, 295, 305 Loonenberg, 317 Lord’s Supper, 217 Lossing, Benson, 22 Louis XIII, king of France, 196 Louis XIV, 45–46, 49, 311 Louvain, 234 Lovelace, Francis, 126, 289

338

index

Lubbertus, 212, 225, 238 Lübeck, 162 Lucas, Stephen E., 326, 326 n. 65 Ludovicus Lavaterus, 237 Lüdtke, Alf and the study of everyday life, 134 Lupoldt, Ulrich, 167 Lutheranism, 216 Lutherans, 317, 323 Lyon, Jacob, 183 Lyon, Kathy, 258 Maarssen (Utrecht) De Gouden Hoeff homestead, 180; Elsenburch manor 166; Goudesteyn manor, 161, 180, 189–190 Maarsseveen and Neerdijk (Utrecht), lordship, 189 Maccovius, 226, 234 MacEwen, Walter, 33–34, 36–37, Fig. 12 Macy, Harry, 253, 258, 260 magistrates (of New Amsterdam), 93, 97, 105, 108, 111, 115, 121; in English towns of New Netherland, 98, see also, municipal leadership; Court of Schout, Burgomasters and Schepens Maika, Dennis J., 315, 315 n. 21, 319, 319 n. 37 Manhattan, 13, 21, 25, 38, 166, 93–95, 109, 114, 122, 128, 177, 287, 297; craftsmen, 95, 166; currency, 107–108; see also wampum; wealthy citizens contribute to Wall, 105, see also New Amsterdam; New York City Maps, 15, 19–21, 24, 30, 32–33, 311 Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 239 Marcus Terentius Vallo, 240 Mareschal, Claus, 117 Mareschal, Evert, 117, Aaltje, wife of, 117 Margaretha Hardenstein, 218–220 Markus Lycklama, 219 n. 36 Marriage: companionate, 265–266, 268, 279; economic factors in, 277–283 Martin Bucer, 242 Maryland, 104, 307, see also Chesapeake Matson, Cathy, 319, 319 n. 38 Matthias Flacius Illyricus, 227 Maurice of Orange, stadholder, 196

Mauritsstadt (Brazil), 186 Mazyck family, 45 McCool, Richard Alan, 254 Mediterranean, 175–176 Meeske, Harrison, 327, 327 n. 66, 264 Megen, Margaretha, 193 Meinardus, 226 Meinig, Donald, 311, 311 n. 7 Melyn, Jacob, 318 n. 32 Memory, 14, 16, 26 Men, 16, 18, 35–36 Menaldumadeel, 221 Mennonite, 212, 216, 228–229 Meppel, Drenthe, 322 merchants (of New Amsterdam), 103–104, 106–107, 110–111, 115, 121, 125; elite, 95, 115; lesser merchants, 95; sensitive to competition, 106 mercuriuses, 318 Merwick, Donna 1, 322, 322 n. 49; and burgerlijk as central cultural metaphor, 133 Michaelius, Jonas 295 Middelburg, 58 Middleton, Simon, 310, 320, 320 n. 44 Midwout, 97 Migration, 67, 69–70 militia, 325 civilian militia, 99 minister 217, 229, 231 Minuit, Peter, 52, 54, 292, 303 Minville, Gabriel, 319 Minwe (Minuit), Pieter, director-general of New Netherland, 72–73; and foundation of New Sweden, 72–73 Mitchell, Samuel, 15 Mohawk Valley, 311 Mohawks, 327 Moller, Jacob Rutgertsz, 172 Monchovius, 218 Montagne, Jean Mousnier de La 166–167, 198, 200 Moore, George Henry, 24, 29 More, Anthony, 120 Morris, Richard B. and colonial artisans, 130 Moscow, 165 Motley, John Lothrop, 2 Mouw, Dirck, 323, 323 n. 51, 328, 328 n. 70

index Muldrew, Craig, credit and the market in early modern England, 131 municipal citizenship, 95, 112, 127; “insiders vs. outsiders”, 109; certificates of, 112; register of, 112, see also burgher right municipal leadership (New Amsterdam), 101, 102, see also magistrates; Court of Schout, Burgomasters, and Schepens Murphy, Henry C. 296, 302 Museum of the City of New York, 5 Naarden (Holland), 183 Nadere Reformatie, see Further Reformation Nantes, 163, 171 Narrett, David, 264, 281, 318, 318 n. 30 Nathaniel Eaton, 225 Native Americans, 314–315, 327 Navigation Act, English (1651), 102, 319 Neck, Cornelis Barendsz van 183, 200–201 Neck, Jacob Cornelisz van, 183 Nederlandsche Leeuw, De, 252 Netherlands, 95–96, 98, 112, 117, 123, 125; investors in, 100; as Patria/Fatherland, 97, 109, see also Holland; Amsterdam Netherlands, cartography, 311, constitution of, 324–326, scholarship in, 310, war for independence, 325 Netherlands, Southern, 165, 191 Netherlands, The, 150, 152, 197, 199 neutralist, 216 New Amstel, 72, 105 New Amsterdam, 13, 21–26, 29, 37–39, 69, 108, 114, 117–118, 121–122, 128, 132–33, 168, 171–172, 186, 199, 296–297, 320; desire for city charter, 100; defense contributions in, 105–106; ministers, 206; see also Manhattan New England, 98, 225, 306 New Haven, 168 New Jersey governmental records microfilms, 255 New Jersey, 311, population of, 312 New Jersey, Genealogical Magazine of, 250 New Netherland, 95–98, 100–101, 104–105, 109, 111–114, 123, 147–149, 156, 161, 166–167, 172,

339

175–177, 189, 192–193, 197–198, 200, 231; claims to South River, 71–72; directory of settlers, 261; geographical extent of, 71, 85–86; population of, 312–313; protests Swedish colony, 73; relations with English, 87; relations with Indians, 75, 83; surrender to English, 71–72 New Netherland at the Millennium Conference (October 2001), 309 New Netherland Connections, 252–254, 257, 259, 260 New Netherland Institute, 263, 309, 319 New Paltz, 48–49 New Sweden Company, 74, 293 New Sweden, and English traders, 84–85; Finnish settlement of, 80–81; foundation of, 72–74; and recruiting settlers, 81; relations with Dutch, 85–86, 87; relations with Indians, 81–84; weaknesses of, 75, 84, 88–89 New Testament, 228 New Utrecht, 298 New York, 13–14, 22–24, 26, 30–31, 33, 39 New York (colony), population of, 312 New York City, 123, 312, see also Manhattan; New Amsterdam New York Dutch Reformed Church, 206 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 248, 250–256, 258–261 New York governmental records microfilms, 255 New York History, 309 New-York Historical Society, 2, 18, 22–24, 26, 28 New York State Archives, 318–319 Nicolaus Amama, 233 Nicolls, Richard 126, 289; surrender of New Netherland, 71 Niesen, Gerrit Dircksz, 162–163 Nieuw Nederland Werkgroep, 310 Nieuwenhuis, Pim, 253, 257, 259 Nieuwersluis (Utrecht), 150 Nijeholt, 220 n. 36 Nine Men, 99, 102; the 1649 Remonstrance, 139 Nissenson, S.G. 296, 299 Noord Amerika Chronologie, 256 Noort, Olivier van, 180 Nooter, Willem Fredric (“Eric”), 316, 316 n. 26

340

index

Nordstrand, Schleswig-Holstein, settler from, 260 Norway 150, 184 notaries, 100 Nouwt, Peter, 259 “Novi Belgii in America Septentrionali” (1720), 311 NYG&B Newsletter, 251 O’Callaghan, Edmund Bailey, 24, 30–31, 38, 288–291, 294, 297, 302 Oath of Allegiance, to English government, 125–126 Oath of Fidelity, to States General, 126 Old Testament, 228 Oldebercoop, 207, 210, 221 Oldenburg, settler from, 259 Olive Tree Genealogy website, 254 Oloffe Van Kortland Measuring the Land with Ten Broeck’s Breeches, Fig. 3 Oostzaan (Holland), 171 Orangist Uprisings (1672), 325 Orphanmasters, 103 Ostfriesland, settlers from, 259–260 Ostrander family origin, 260 Otterspoor farm (Harlem), 166–167 Otto, Paul, 314, 315 n. 20 Oudraad, 102 Oxenstierna, Axel, and Swedish modernization, 77 Page, Max, 4–5 Page, Willie F., 320 n. 40 Painting, 14, 18, 26, 30, 32, 38 Palatinate, 46, 49 Palgrum Hardenstein, 218 Paltsits, Victor Hugo, 303 n. 35 papism, 212 arminianism, 212 Paris, 42, 196 Parry, William, 258 Patterson, F.B., 28 Pauw, Adriaen [Reyniersz], 195–196 Pauw, Adriaen, Sr., 196, 203 Pauw, Jacob Adriaensz, 196 Pauw, Michiel, 167, 197 Pauw, Reynier Adriaensz, 153, 159, 195–197 Pavonia, patroonship, 197 Peach War, 105 peddlers, 101, 122, see also sojourners; petty traders Pelegromius, 218 Pellicorne, Jean, 165

Peperga, 206, 216, 218–219 Perard, Victor S., 37 Pernambuco (Brazil), 185 petty traders (schotzen), 101; as threat to trade, 106, see also sojourners; peddlers Petrus Monches, 218 Petrus Ramus, 227, 241 Philipse family, 315 Philipse Frederick, 319, erroneous ancestry, 257 Picardy, 49 Pickere, De, family, 177 Pickere, Isabeau de, 190 Pierce, Christopher, 24, 26 Pietersen, Jochem, 100 pietism, 225 Pietist, 229, 323 Piwonka, Ruth, 264, 327, 327 n. 66 Plakkaat van Verlatinghe, see Act of Abjuration Plautus, 227, 238 Plomp, Nico, 259 Polanus von Polansdorf, 239 Polhemius, Theodorus, 322 Pomerania, 171 Pope Pius X, 224 Poppen, family, 195 Portugal, 61, 62, 227, 237 Postma, Johannes, 320 n. 40 Poughkeepsie, 22 Presbyterians, 326 Prince of Orange, 126 Prints, 18, 21, 25, 29, 32 Printz, Johan Björnsson, as colonial governor, 88, 90; early life, 80; and Indians, 81–82; as representative of Swedish crown, 85; and upward mobility, 80, 86 privatissimum, -a, 209, 234 Prototype View, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 37, Fig. 5 Provincial Secretary (WIC), 112 Prown, Jules David, 17 Psalms of David, 228 Pt. Bethius, 241 Puritans in New England, 225 Pursuits of Happiness (1988), 320 Purvis, Thomas, 312, 312 n. 14 Pyle, Howard, 37–38, Fig. 15 Quakers, and settlement of Delaware Valley, 89; as threat to Swedish culture, 89–90

index Quellinus, Artus, 190 Quidor, John, 17–19, 36–37, Fig. 2 Quintus Curtius Rufus, 227, 241 Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 239 Raedt, Catharina de, 177 Raedt, Elias de, Jr., 167, 177 Raedt, Elias de, Sr., 177 Raep, family, 200, 203 Rand, Edward, 13–14, 22 Ranney, William, 38 Ravesteyn, Nicolaes Hermansz van, 172 Ravesteyn, Willem van, 154 Reael, Laurens, 185 Recife, 104, 186 Reformation, 207 Reformed Church, 101, 117, 119, 216–217, 220, 235 Reformed Dutch Church, 316–317, 322–323, 326, 328 Reformed pulpits, 217 Regnerus Barelts, 210, 214 religion, 316–317, 322–324 religious tolerance, 324 Rembrandt van Rijn, 33, 39, 181, 201 Remington, Gordon, 253, 260 Remonstrance of New Netherland (1656), 101, 103 Rendorp, Josua, 165 René Descartes, 222 Rensselaer, Kiliaen van, 177, 196–197 Rensselaerswijck Seminar, 263, 299–300, 305, 309 residency requirement for burgher right, European tradition of, 109; in Amsterdam, 109; in New Amsterdam, 112–113; “fire and light”, 112, 127, see also “Scot and Lot”; “Dun and Scot” Revised Freedoms and Exemptions, 1640, 136 Rhineland, 98 Richardson, Judith, 5 Richelieu, Jean-Armand Duplessis, cardinal de, 170 Richter, Daniel K., 314, 314 n. 19 Riga, 162 Rijn, Jacob Egbertsz van, 182–183, 189 Rijn, Pieter Jacobsz van, 170, 182–183, 189 Rijswijck, Bal van, see Huydecoper

341

Riker, David M., 251, 261, 312, 312 n. 14 Rink, Oliver A., 318 Rio Formoso, 185 Risingh, Johan Claesson, captures Fort Casimir, 86; refuses return of New Sweden, 75; replaces Johan Printz, 83; and upward mobility, 86 River (Lenape) Indians, 81–82 Roberts, Benjamin, 178, 269–270 Rochelle, La, 170–176 Rodolphus Goclenius, 240 Roelofsz, Egbert, 181–182 Roman Catholic 224; properties, 230 Roman law, 325 Roman-Dutch law, 265, 266, 268, 277, 279, 281 Rombertus Doyema, 210 Rooleeu, Gerard, 171 Rosen, Deborah, A., 278, 282, 324, 324 n. 59 Rotgans, Jacob Lucasz, 187 Rotgans, Lucas Jacobsz, 201, 203 Rothschild, Nan A., 327, 327 n. 68 Rotterdam, 172, 225 Rottmer, Annetje Barents origin, 259 Rouen, 42 Rudolphus Meijerus, 230 Russia, 165, 193 Ruytenburch, Pieter Gerritsz [Cruydenier] van, 159, 202–203 Ruytenburch, Willem Pietersz van, 195, 201 Ryder, Barent Juriansz, origin, 259–260 Safer, Brenda, 322, 322 n. 49 Saint Nicholas Society, 2 Saintes (France), 200 salary, 219 Salzmann, Walter H., 319 Sant, Gerrit Stoffelsz van, origin, 260 Santpoort (Holland), 203 Sarony & Major, 19 Sayre, Gordon, 275–276 Schaep, Dirck, 164, 192–194 Schaep, Johan [ Jan], 163–164, 171, 175–176, 188, 192, 195 Schendel, Gijsbert van, 163 Schenectady, 299 schepen, 219 Schepen Laughing at a Burgomaster’s Joke, A., 16–19, Fig. 1 Scherpenzeel, 216, 218–221 Schiltkamp, Jacob, 324, 325 n. 59

342

index

Schmidt, Benjamin, 311, 311 n. 6, 315, 315 n. 23 Schnurmann, Claudia, 310, 319, 319 n. 37 Schotanus, 226 Schout, 16 Schulze, Lorine McGinnis, 254, 258 Schutte, Otto, 259 schutterijen, see militia Scobey, David, 38 “Scot and Lot”, 124, 127 Scott, Joan Wallach, 276–279 Scott, Kenneth, 296–297 Scudder, Mrs. A.M., 26 Second Anglo-Dutch War, 123; peace treaty signed in Breda, 123 Secretarial Records, 288 Senate, 234 senatus judicialis, 232–233 Servaes, Hendrick, 180–181, 193, 195, 203 Servaes, Jacob [Hendricksz], 181, 193, 202 Servaes, Jacob [ Jacobsz], 193 Servaes, Johan [ Jacobsz], 193 Servaes, Lijsbeth, 181 Servaes, Marritgen, 181 servants, 119, 312; of WIC, 118; excluded from the burgher right, 118 Seutter, Matthias, 311 Sexuality in early America, 271, 275–276, 278–279 Shattuck, Martha, 265–266, 280, 324, 324 n. 59 Shaw, Susannah, 267–268, 321 n. 47, 324 Shetland Islands, settler from, 260 ships, De Waagh, 105; The Jager, 110; The Jan Baptiste, 117; The Otter, 118 Shorto, Russell, 3 Sibrandus, 225 Sisser, Fred, 250 Sixtinus Amama, 224, 227, 230–231, 234, 240 Sixtus Hommius, 207 Sixtus van Scheltema, 211 Slade [Sladus], Matthew, 169 Slander litigation, 278–279, 280 Slave and slave trade, 37, 61–62, 69, Fig. 15, 312, 315, 319–320; see Africans, enslaved; Manhattan as entrepot, 104 Slok, Hendrik, 256, 258

Sluyter, Peter, 25, 296 Small Burgher Right (Klein Burgerrecht), 117, 125, 128; established, 115; privileges, 116; distinction disappeared, 127 Smith, Merril, 275 Smoutius, Adrianus, 295 smuggling, 319 Snedeker, Jan origin, 259 Snyder, Hendrick Jansen, 161 socianism, 212 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 316 Sodom and Gomorra, 182 Soet, Jan Pietersz, 162 sojourners, 101, 106, 121–122, 123; undermining local currency, 107; petition against, 108–109; as “hit and run capitalists”, 106, 123, see also petty traders; peddlers soldiers (WIC), 119; excluded from burgher right, 118 Solms, Johan Albrecht, count of 189, Somerset County [N.J.] Genealogical Quarterly, 250 Sound (Denmark), 171 South Carolina, 45, 52 South River, 302, 305; conditions on, 73; European claims to, 72 sovereignty, 311 Spain, 59–60 Stad Huys, 94, 127; description of 93, 94, see also City Hall Stadt Herberg, Niew Amsterdam (New York) in 1650, 33–34, 37, Fig. 12 Stadt Huys, 25–29, 33–34, 36, Fig. 7, Fig. 10 staple right (staplerecht ), 100, 121; in Dordrecht, 98, 111; in New Amsterdam, 100; linked to burgher right, 111; reaffirmed by Stuyvesant, 113 Starna, William A., 300, 327, 327 n. 67 Starter, Jan Jansz 163–164 State Archives (Rijksarchief ), 293–294, 306 States General of the Netherlands, 125–126; recommended New Amsterdam city charter, 102 States General, 135–136, 293 States of Friesland, 207, 219–220, 230–231 States of Overijssel, 219 Stebbins, Theodore, 19

index Steenshorne, Jennifer, 16 Steenwijck, Cornelis, 322 Stephanus Ubels, 211 Stockholm, 162 Stokes, I.N. Phelps, 25, 30, 293 Stott, Annette, 32–33 Stryker-Rodda, Kenn, 262, 297 Stuyvesant, Petrus (Peter/Pieter), 17–19, 36, 38, 95, 108, 110–111, 113–114, 147, 149–150, 168, 205–207, 219–224, 225–229, 232–235, 238, 230–232, 234–236, 293, 322–324; burgher right compromise, 113; as an elder in the New York Dutch Reformed Church, 206; junior, 228, 230–231; Peter Stuyvesant’s Army Entering New Amsterdam, 19, Fig. 4; dealings with municipal government, 137–138; called upon to establish guilds, 140, 141, 143; conquest of New Sweden, 75; received instructions from WIC, 100–102; attack on New Sweden, 105; restricted Sephardic refugees, 111; surrender of New Netherland, 71–72; WIC orders to destroy New Sweden, 87; see also DirectorGeneral; Director-General and Council Styntje Pieters, 220 Sullivan, Dennis, 324, 325 n. 59 Surinam, 320 Susquehannock Indians, 82, 84 Sutphen, Dirck Jansz van, parentage, 260 Swanendael, 72, 86 Swansea (Wales), 193 Sweden, 162, 164, 190, 198; colonial ambitions, 78–79, 81; as European frontier, 79, 80–81; as European Great Power, 75–77; foreign policy goals, 76–77; and France, 88; and Maritime Powers, 88; and modernization, 77–78, 81; precarious Great Power position, 87–88; relations with Denmark and Russia, 76–77; and Thirty Years’ War, 77, 81 Sweden, Church of, and mission to Delaware Valley, 89–90 Swedes on the Delaware, 253 Swedes, on South River, 101 Swits, Claes, murder of, 97 symposia, 233

343

Synod of Dort, 317 Synod of Friesland, 220 Tanis, James, 316, 322, 326, 326 nn. 63, 65 Tapestry, 20, Fig. 6 tax lists, 312 taxes, on beer and wine, 101; on trade, 101; assessment on “disaffected and evil minded” people, 106; excise farmers, 116 Teller, Willem, origin, 260 Terentius, 223, 227 Ternate (East Indies), 183 Texel, island (Holland), 183 Thamen and Blokland (Utrecht), manor, 189 Theodoricus Joannis, 210 Thibault, Gérard, 161 Thomas Joannis, 211 Thomas Sagittarius, 239 Tienhoven, Cornelis van, 166–167, 198 Tierck van Heerma, 221 Titus Livius, 242 tobacco trade, 105, 117–118, 122; in Holland, 104, see also Chesapeake; Nicholas Boot; Evert Mareschal Tomlins, Christopher, and early American legal culture, 130–131 Tournai, 176 town councils, 98 Townsend, Howard, 300 Truth in History, 309 Turkey (Ottoman Empire), 173 Twelve Men, 96–97, 99 Twelve Years’ Truce, 216 Ubbo Emmius, 227, 239 Union of Arras, 43 Union of Utrecht (1579), 324, 326 Usselincx, Willem, 78 Utrecht, 189, 193 Valenciennes, 44, 48 Valentine, David T., 24–25, 27–29, 31, 38, Fig. 8, Fig. 9 Van Cleef, Frank L., 298 Van Corlear, Antony, 17 Van Cortlandt, Oloff Stevensen, 107 Van den Bogaert, Harmen Meyndertsz, 299 Van den Boogaart, Ernst, 312 n. 13 Van der Donck, Adriaen, 101

344

index

Van der Donck, Adrian, 20 Van der Helst, 24 Van der Kemp, Adriaen, 289–290 Van der Veen, Walewijn, 297 Van Dongen, Alexandra, 327 n. 66 Van Gelderen, Martin, 326 n. 62 Van Ilpendam, Adriaen Janse, 322 Van Kleek, Myndert, 22 Van Laer, A.J.F., 290–293, 299–301, 304 Van Laer, Arnold, 3 Van Leeuwen, Simon, 326 n. 62 Van Ostade, 18, 33 Van Rappard Documents, 292 Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen, 300 Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold, 31–32, 39 Van Ruymbeke, Bertrand, 310 Van Rys, Gerrit Hendricksen, 121 Van Salee family, 261 Van Slichtenhorst, Brant 301 Van Tuyl family, 249 Van Tuyl, Rory, 249 Van Twiller, Wouter, 293, 303, 305–306, 322 Van Voorhees Family Association, 249, 318 Van Wicklen family, 260 Van Winkle, Rip, 16, 18 Van Zandt, Cynthia, 315 Van Zwieten, Adriana, 269, 271, 324, 325 n. 59 Varkens Kill, English settlement on, 85 Vecht, river, 166, 189 Velsen (Holland), 203 Venema, Janny, 269, 300, 313, 316, 316 n. 26 Venice, 155 Verbrugge, Johannes Pietersen, 107 Verhandelinge van de Unie, see Union of Utrecht Verhulst, Willem, 292, 303, 306 Versteeg, Dingman, 301 Vinck, Egbert Pietersz, 201 Vinck, Jacob Jansz, 158, 162, 200 Vingboons, Philip, 166, 189–190 Virgil, 227, 241 Virginia, 48, 49, 98, 104, 117, 307, see also Chesapeake Visscher, N.J., 20 Vlaardingen (Holland), 201–202 Vlieger, Nicolaes de, 194 Voetians, 323, 325

Vogelaer, Jan de, 166 Vogelaer, Marcus de, 165–166 Vogelesangh, Jan, 181 Volendam, 33–36 Voorhees, David William, 249, 251, 255, 270–271, 273–274, 298, 316 n. 26, 321 n. 45 Vorhis, Robert S., 318 n. 31 Vorsitius, 238 Vos, Eva, 323, 323 n. 53 Vos, Jan, 164 Vosburgh, Royden, 255 Vries, David Pietersz de 148, 170, 174–177, 199 Vrij, Roelof Egbertsz de, 181 vroedschap, 211 Walbeeck, Jacob Jacobsz van, 184 Walbeeck, Jacob Johansz van, 184 Walbeeck, Johan Jacobsz van, Jr. 170, 175, 184–186, 193–194 Walbeeck, Johan van, Sr., 184 Walbeeck, Maritgen van, 183–184 Walbeeck, Pouwels van, 186 Walbeeck, Weyntgen van, 184 Wall, Diana diZerega, 27 wampum (sewant), 107; inflation of, 108 Watson, J.F., 13, 22, 27 Weighmaster, 103 weights and measures, stamping of, 103 Wel, Laurens Cornelissen van der, 172 Wesseling, Jan Hendrickszen, 260 West India Company (WIC), 48, 57–70, 97, 123, 132, 231, 235–236, 312, 318, 323–324; charter 135; and attitudes towards colonial monopolies and skilled trades, 138–139; directors in Amsterdam, 95; fur trading monopoly, 96–97; servants of, 98; accusations against 101; response to English Navigation Act (1651), 102; loss of Brazil, 104; attack on New Sweden, 105; new commercial strategy, 110, see also Petrus Stuyvesant; Willem Kieft; Director-General; Director-General and Council Westellingwerf, 210, 218 Westland (Holland), 178 Westleigh (Devon), 193 Westphalia, peace of, 196, 203 Westra, Frans, 322, 322 n. 49 White, Philip, 264

index Wicqufort, family, 191 Wijmer, D. J., 249, 322, 322 n. 50 Wilcoxen, Charlotte, 327, 327 n. 66 Wilhem, David Le Leu de, 176 Wilhem, Paolo Le Leu de, 176 Willem Laurens, 207 Willemsz, Gerrit, see Kieft, Gerrit Willemsz William Ames, 225 William Aspinwall, 225 William I of Orange, stadholder, 176 William II, death of, 102 William III, 325 Williams, James Homer, 271–272, 275, 321, 321 n. 48, 323, 323 n. 53 Williams, Roger, 168 Wilson, James Grant, 299 Wilson, Woodrow, 26, 27 Winthrop, John, 168 Wissinck, Joost Michielsz, 194

345

Woerden (Holland), 158 Women, 16, 27, 17, 19, 26, 34–36, 39; economic strategies of, 265, 268, 278; legal rights of, 265–266, 270; legal status of, 264–271; in Leisler’s Rebellion, 270–271; as sub tutelas, 282 Wood, Stephanie, 275 Worden, Jean D., 255 Worst, Evert Jacobsz, 184 Wou, Hendrick Willemsz, 179 Wou, Lijsbeth Hendricksdr, 179 Writs of Appeal, 288, 291 Wybrantsz, Pieter, 162 Zabriskie, George Olin, 258 Zacharius Ursinus, 228, 238 Zeewan, 138; setting value of, 140 Zuckerman, Michael, and early American economic culture, 131 Zwolle, 218–219

THE ATLANTIC WORLD ISSN 1570–0542

1. Postma, J. & V. Enthoven (eds.). Riches from Atlantic Commerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12562 0 2. Curto, J.C. Enslaving Spirits. The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1550-1830. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13175 2 3. Jacobs, J. New Netherland. A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. 2004. ISBN 90 04 12906 5 4. Goodfriend, J.D. (ed.). Revisiting New Netherland. Perspectives on Early Dutch America. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14507 9 5. Macinnes, A.I. & A.H. Williamson (eds.). Shaping the Stuart World, 16031714. The Atlantic Connection. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14711 X