Conceived in Liberty (53 page)

Engaged in forming the huge Dutch West India Company, the States-General had no interest in granting the request made in 1620 by the English Pilgrims residing in Leyden, Holland, for founding a colony on Manhattan Island. Their proposal rejected, the Pilgrims soon ended their wanderings by landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The Dutch West India Company mostly concentrated on the Atlantic colonies of Portugal in Brazil and Angola, for Brazil was the major source of European sugar and Africa supplied the slaves who produced that sugar. The company, in fact, temporarily captured Bahia in Brazil in 1624. When a company fleet captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, the money was used to finance the Dutch conquest of northeastern Brazil, beginning with Recife in 1630, and of the Portuguese ports of Luanda (near the lower Congo) and Benguela in Angola, Goree and Elmina in West Africa. The company established colonies on the Guiana coast and in the unoccupied islands in the Caribbean, St. Eustatius, and Tobago in 1632 and Curaçao in 1634. The governor at Curaçao for the next decade was Peter Stuyvesant, who had been in the military service of the company for many years. Thus, the Dutch West India Company had many valuable and important interests, of which the colony of New Netherland was one of the least valued.

The Dutch West India Company began operations in 1623, and in the same year the first party of permanent Dutch settlers landed in the New World— apart from a settlement near Cape May on the Delaware Bay in 1614. The new colonists landed in Manhattan. Others in the party settled in Fort Orange. The settlers, significantly, were a party of Walloon emigrés. Appointed governor, or director general, of New Netherland was Capt. Cornelis May. Under May’s aegis the Dutch quickly began to expand over the vast virgin territory. Fort Nassau was built on the east bank of the Delaware River (now Gloucester, New Jersey, opposite Philadelphia). Another Dutch party built Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut River, and we have seen the fate meted out to it by the English “planters” of Connecticut. Still other Dutchmen settled on what is now the coast of Brooklyn and on Staten Island.

Why didn’t the English, who had laid claim to the whole coast, seriously molest the Dutch settlements? For the first decade the English were busy fighting with Spain and France. After that came the troubles and distractions of the Puritan Revolution. It was only the advent of the Restoration period that enabled England to turn serious attention to exerting its power over New Netherland—as well as over Massachusetts.

In the spring of 1626 Peter Minuit took over as director general, and it was he who, in a series of fateful decisions, laid the pattern of social structure for New Netherland. In the English colonies the chartered companies and proprietors tried to gain immediate profits by inducing rapid settlement. The need for these inducements led to the inevitable dissolution of original attempts to maintain feudal land tenure, as lands were divided up and sold, and halfhearted attempts to collect feudal quitrents from the settlers were
abandoned in the face of their stubborn evasion and resistance. Moreover, the need for inducing settlement also led the companies or proprietors to grant, from the beginning, substantial rights of democracy and self-government to the colonists. Happily, none of the English settlements
began
as royal colonies; either they were settled by individuals, for individual temporal or spiritual gain, or they were governed by profit-seeking companies or proprietors who were induced by hopes of profit to grant substantial or even controlling rights of property and self-government to the settlers. North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut began as individual self-governing settlements; Virginia and Massachusetts as chartered companies; Maryland and South Carolina as proprietorships.

But the Dutch West India Company and Minuit decided quite differently. As profit seekers they first concentrated on their monopoly of the lucrative fur trade, and for this trade extensive settlements were not needed. Whether by design or not, the effect of Dutch policy was to discourage settlement greatly, and to hamper the development of the vast area over which the Dutch West India Company had been assigned its monopoly. For example, one of Minuit’s first actions was to order the colonists back, to concentrate them around the fort in New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan, which had been purchased from the Indians. This arbitrary policy left only a few traders at Fort Orange and only one vessel on the Delaware, Fort Nassau being completely abandoned. This action stemmed from the company’s high-handed decision to retain its exclusive monopoly of trade; to leave too many individuals in the interior would foster illegal, competitive trading. Second, the Dutch perpetuated a feudal type of land tenure by insisting on
leasing,
rather than
selling,
land to the settlers. It is no wonder that with no settler permitted to own his land and thus help to dissolve feudalism and land monopoly—and with no one permitted to trade on his own account—the pace of settlement was very slow.

Furthermore, the form of government was by far the most despotic in the colonies. There was no self-government or democrary, no limitation whatever on the arbitrary rule of the company and its director general. The director, along with a Council of Five appointed by the Amsterdam Chamber, ran the entire government; its legislative, executive, and judicial functions. They were joined by two other officials appointed by the company: the
Schout-Fiscal,
who made arrests and collected revenue, and the
Koopman,
the secretary of the colony. There were no legislatures or town meetings of any sort.

By 1629 it was evident that the colony was growing very slowly, only 300 persons, for example, lived in New Amsterdam. The company therefore decided to spur settlement, but instead of dissolving its land monopoly into a system of true private property for landed settlers, it decided to make the monopoly into a more elaborate feudal structure, sub-land monopolists placed over large particular areas in New Netherland. In the Charter of Privileges and Exemptions of 1629, the company decided to grant extensive tracts of
land to any of its members who should bring over and settle fifty or more families on the tract. The tracts were required to lie along the banks of the Hudson (or other navigable rivers) and were granted in huge lots of sixteen miles along one shore of the Hudson, or eight miles on both shores. The depth on either side of the Hudson was indefinite. The grantee was termed a “patroon,” or lord of the manor. In imitation of the feudal lord, the patroon was to possess civil and criminal jurisdiction over his tenants, or “peasants.” The tenants had the formal right of appeal from the patroon’s manorial courts to the feudal overlord—the company’s government—but in practice the tenants were forced to forgo this right. The property of any tenant dying intestate reverted to the patroon, and the tenant was forced to grind his grain at his patroon’s mill. The tenants were exempted from colonial taxation for ten years, but in return they were compelled to stay on the original estate for the entire period. To leave was illegal—an approximation of medieval serfdom.

Aside from being a temporary serf and having no hope of owning the land he tilled, the tenant was also prohibited from weaving any kind of woolen, linen, or cotton cloth. Even the patroons were prohibited from weaving, in order to keep the monopoly of the trade in the hands of the company government and to maintain a monopoly of the colonial market for Dutch textiles. This provision, however, was continually evaded and led to numerous conflicts. Neither tenant nor patroon could engage in the fur trade, which was still reserved to the company and its agents. Apart from these commodities, the patroons were at liberty to trade, but were required to pay a five percent duty to the government at New Amsterdam for exporting their goods. The use of slaves in domestic service or in tilling the soil was also sanctioned. The patroons were required, however, to purchase the granted land from the local Indians. It should be noted that Manhattan Island was exempted from the granting of patroonships: the land of that valuable island was to be reserved for the direct monopoly of the company government of the province.

While the incentive to become a tenant remained minimal, the incentive to become a patroon was now considerable. It should not be surprising that the receivers of these handsome grants of special privilege were leaders or favorites of the company itself. Thus, the first patroonship was granted by the company to two members of its own board of directors, Samuel Godyn, president of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company, and Samuel Blommaert, who granted themselves a large chunk of what is now the state of Delaware, as well as sixteen square miles on Cape May across the Delaware Bay. Godyn and Blommaert took five other company directors into partnership to expand the capital of the patroonship, and one of the partners, Capt. David De Vries, was sent with a group of settlers to found the patroonship of Swanendael (now Lewes), near Cape Henlopen in Delaware.

The Swanendael manor was settled in 1631, but the settlement soon ran into difficulties. For one thing, it was chiefly designed as a whaling station,
but De Vries soon found that whales were scarce along the Delaware coast. Furthermore, the Swanendael settlers managed to provoke the Indians into attacking and massacring them. The settlers had emptied a pillow, leaving the remains as waste, which happened to contain a piece of tin embossed with the emblem of the States-General of New Netherland. An Indian chief found the abandoned tin and used it for his tobacco pipe, whereupon the settlers, in an act unexcelled for stupidity even in the sordid history of white treatment of Indians, executed the hapless chief for “treason” to the Netherlands. It is hardly puzzling that the Indians proceeded to attack and wipe out the settlement. In addition to these calamities, the patroons then quarreled and dissolved their partnership. They sold the land back to the company government in 1634 for a handsome 15,000 guilders. The first patroonship in New Netherland had proved to be a failure.

The second patroonship was also a failure. Michael Pauw, another of the grasping company directors, managed to obtain a grant for himself of the area that now includes Hoboken, Jersey City, and the whole of Staten Island. Pauw called his colony Pavonia, which he organized on the site of Jersey City for a few years. The Indians, however, proved troublesome and the patroonship was losing money, and so in 1637 Pauw sold the land back to the obliging company for 26,000 guilders (land, of course, that the company had originally granted Pauw as a gift).

The first successful patroonship—and the only one that continued past the demise of New Netherland and through the eighteenth century—was the grant to yet another Amsterdam Chamber director, the wealthy jeweler Kiliaen van Rensselaer. Van Rensselaer’s domain, Rensselaerswyck, prospered because of superior management and because its area was strategically located for fur trade with the Iroquois. It included virtually the entire area around Albany (now Albany and Rensselaer counties) except Fort Orange itself, which remained the property of the company government.

Immediately there began conflicts between the Hudson River patroons and the government. For the patroons began to ignore the Dutch West India company’s legal monopoly of the highly lucrative fur trade, and the company began to tighten its regulations to enforce its monopoly. The patroons’ illegal fur trade not only endangered the company monopoly; it also led them to concentrate on furs rather than encourage a large agricultural population, which the company government was now trying to foster. As a consequence, Peter Minuit was fired as director general by the company in 1632, on charges of being too soft on the patroons.

Succeeding Minuit was Wouter Van Twiller, a clerk in the company’s Amsterdam warehouse, chosen because he had married into the powerful Van Rensselaer family. Conflicts with the patroons over fur trading continued in the Van Twiller regime. Externally, New England began the process of overrunning Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut River. However, the English occupation of the abandoned Fort Nassau, on the east bank of the
Delaware, was ended as Van Twiller reoccupied the fort and drove out the settlers. Further Dutch expansion took place during the Van Twiller administration: Arendt Corssen erected Beaver Road Fort on what is now the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware.

A good part of the expansion of land was accomplished for the benefit of Governor Van Twiller himself. He and his friends were given land grants and purchased large speculative tracts of land from the Indians. The tracts were concentrated on western Long Island, notably in the present Flatlands of Brooklyn. Van Twiller himself purchased Governors Island. None of these purchases was approved, as was legally required, by the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company. What is more, the director saw to it that his own farms received the best services from the government.

In addition to the conflicts over land irregularities and fur trading, the
Schout-Fiscal
opposed the director’s methods. When Van Twiller fired the
Schout-Fiscal,
Lubbertus Van Dincklagen, the latter complained to the States-General. Furthermore, although some tobacco was now growing on Manhattan Island, the emphasis on the fur trade was helping to discourage agriculture and permanent settlement. The States-General, perturbed that emphasis on fur was discouraging permanent settlement in New Netherland, ordered the dismissal of Wouter Van Twiller in 1637.

But if the Dutch colonists had been chastised with whips, they were now to be chastised with scorpions. Arriving in 1638, the new director, Amsterdam merchant Willem Kiefft, proceeded to impose an absolute despotism upon the colony. First, he reduced his council of advisers from five to one, and on this rump council of his adviser and himself, he had two votes. To appeal his decisions to the Netherlands was now made a high crime. Assured of absolute power to issue his decrees, Kiefft outlawed virtually everything in sight.
All
trade, of any commodity whatsoever, was outlawed, except by special license issued by Kiefft. Any trader doing business without a license had his goods confiscated, and was subject to further punishment. To guard against possible trade, all sailors were prohibited from being on shore at night, under penalty of forfeit of wages and of instant dismissal on second offense. All sales of guns or ammunition to the Indians were prohibited on pain of death. All sorts of “immoralities” were prohibited. Heavy restrictions were placed on the sale of liquor; any tavern keeper selling liquor to tipsy customers was subject to a heavy fine and to confiscation of his stock. A tax was placed on tobacco. It is no wonder that De Vries, who had strongly opposed the tyranny of Van Twiller, had far more to resent now.