Conceived in Liberty (55 page)

Finally, the long-suffering colonists could bear Kiefft no longer. Speaking for the colonists, the Eight Men in October 1644 directly petitioned the States-General in the Netherlands to remove Kiefft forthwith. The Eight Men wrote eloquently of their plight under Kiefft:

Our fields lie fallow and waste; our dwellings and other buildings are burned; not a handful can be either planted or sown... we have no means to provide necessaries for wives or children.... The whole of these now lie in ashes through a foolish hankering after war. For all right-thinking men here know that these Indians have lived as lambs among us until a few years ago.... These hath the Director, by various uncalled-for proceedings, so embittered against the Netherlands nation, that we do not believe that anything will bring them and peace back....

This is what we have, in the sorrow of our hearts, to complain of; that one man... should dispose here of our lives and property according to his will and pleasure, in a manner so arbitrary that a king would not be suffered legally to do... We pray... that one of these two things may happen—either that a governor may be speedily sent with a beloved peace to us, or that [the company] will... permit us to return with wives and children to our dear Fatherland. For it is impossible ever to settle this country until a different system be introduced here, and a new governor be sent out....

The petitioners also asked for greater freedom and more representative institutions to check the executive power.

This
cride coeur
of the oppressed people of New Netherland was heeded by the West India Company and Kiefft was removed in May 1645. It was perhaps not coincidental that the Algonquins and the Dutch were able to conclude a peace treaty soon afterward, in August, under pressure, to be sure, of the pro-Dutch Mohawk tribe. The parties sensibly agreed that whenever a white man or an Indian should injure the other, the victim would apply for redress to the juridical agencies of the accused. An ironical part of this peace treaty was the Algonquin agreement to return the kidnapped granddaughter of Anne Hutchinson, who now liked Algonquin life and who was returned against her will. Even a peace treaty could not be carried out, it seems, without someone being coerced.

Unfortunately, the company was delayed two years in sending the new governor, and Kiefft continued to oppress the citizenry in the meanwhile. Even the coming of peace did not completely lift the burdens of the people. The people had happily rejoiced when they heard the glad tidings of Kiefft’s ouster. Kiefft immediately threatened all of his critics with fines and imprisonment for their “sedition.” He continued to prohibit any appeals of his arbitrary decisions to Holland. The director was thereupon denounced by the influential Rev. Mr. Bogardus, in his sermons: “What are the great men of this country but vessels of wrath and fountains of woe and trouble? They think of nothing but to plunder the property of others, to dismiss, to banish, to transport to Holland!” To counter this courageous attack, Kiefft decided to use the minions of the state to drown out Bogardus’ sermons—by soldiers’ drum rolls, and even by roar of the fort’s cannon. But Bogardus would not be silenced. Kiefft then turned to the method of violence to stop his critic—to the legal proceedings of his own state. Kiefft’s charges against Bogardus in Kiefft’s court included “scattering abuse,” drinking alcohol, and defending criminals (such as Adriaensen in his attempt to assassinate the director). When these charges were served on Bogardus, he defiantly refused to appear, challenging Kiefft’s legal right to issue the summons; with the people solidly on the minister’s side, Kiefft was forced to yield.

Finally, at long last, Kiefft’s replacement, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived in May 1647. So great was the jubilation of the people in getting rid of this incubus, that almost all of the fort’s powder was used up in the military salute celebrating the arrival of the new director. When Kiefft handed over the office, the conventional vote of thanks to the old director was proposed, but two of the leading Eight Men, Cornelis Melyn, the patroon of Staten Island, and the German Joachim Kuyter, refused to agree, saying that they certainly had no reason to thank Kiefft. Moreover, they presented a petition for a judicial inquiry into Kiefft’s behavior in office. But apart from being no liberal himself, Stuyvesant saw immediately the grave threat that a precedent for inquiry into a director’s conduct would hold for any of his own despotic actions. The late nineteenth-century historian John Fiske aptly compared Stuyvesant’s position to that of Emperor Joseph II of Austria-Hungary during the American Revolution over a century later: “Stuyvesant felt as in later days the
Emperor Joseph II felt when he warned his sister Marie Antoinette that the French government was burning its fingers in helping the American rebels. I, too, like your Americans well enough, said he, but I do not forget that my trade is that of king—
c’est mon metier d’etre roi!
So it was Stuyvesant’s trade to be a colonial governor....”
*

Stuyvesant loftily declared that government officials should never have to disclose government secrets on the demand of two mere private citizens. And furthermore, to petition against one’s rulers is
ipso facto
treason, no matter how great the provocation. Under this pressure, the petition of Melyn and Kuyter was rejected in the council, even though the company, in a mild gesture of liberality, had agreed to vest the government of New Netherland in a three-man supreme council (instead of Kiefft’s one-man rule): a director general, a vice director, and the
Schout-Fiscal.
All, however, were company appointees.

The Dutch soon found that their jubilation at the change of directors should have been tempered. From his speech upon arrival, “I shall govern you as a father his children” Stuyvesant indicated no disposition to brook any limits to his rule. Even on the ship coming over, he had angrily pushed the new
Schout-Fiscal
out of the room because the latter had not been summoned. When Stuyvesant assumed command, he sat with his hat on while others waited bareheaded before he deigned to notice them, a breach of etiquette; he was, as one Dutch observer exclaimed, “quite like the Czar of Muscovy.” Furthermore, Stuyvesant was not willing to let the Melyn-Kuyter matter rest with the rejection of their petition. He now summoned
them
to trial; and Kiefft eagerly accused these two “malignants” of being the real authors of the “libelous” Eight Men petition. Kiefft suggested that the two defendants be forced to produce all their correspondence with the company, and to show cause why they should not be summarily banished as “pestilent and seditious persons.” Stuyvesant agreed, but Melyn and Kuyter showed so much damning evidence against Kiefft that
these
charges were quickly dropped. But if one charge fell through, another must immediately be found. Melyn and Kuyter were now indicted on the trumped-up charge of treachery with the Indians, and of attempting to stir up rebellion. Without bothering about evidence this time, Stuyvesant rushed through the prearranged verdict of guilty.

Stuyvesant was eager to sentence Melyn, as the leader of the two, to death, and he seriously pondered the death sentence for Kuyter also. For Kuyter had also committed two grave crimes: he had dared to criticize Kiefft, and he had shaken his finger at the ex-director. And Stuyvesant remembered the philosophizing of the Dutch jurist Josse de Damhouder: he who so much as
frowns
at a magistrate is guilty of insulting him. He also recalled the admonition of Bernardinus de Muscatellus: “He
who slanders God, the magistrate, or his parents, must be stoned to death.” Stuyvesant was persuaded by his more cautious advisers, however, not to execute Melyn and Kuyter; instead, both were heavily fined and banished. Banishment, however, raised the danger that they would spill their tales of woe to the authorities in Holland. So Stuyvesant warned Melyn: “If I thought there were any danger of your trying an appeal, I would hang you this minute from the tallest tree on the island.” This was in line with Stuyvesant’s general view of the right to appeal: “If any man tries to appeal from me to the States-General, I will make him a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland and let him appeal in that fashion.”

The ironic climax of the Kiefft saga occurred when Kiefft finally left for Holland in August 1647 with a large fortune of 400,000 guilders, largely amassed from his term in office, and with Melyn and Kuyter in tow as his prisoners. The ship was wrecked and Kiefft drowned, in seeming confirmation of De Vries’ prophecy. Before his death, he purportedly confessed his wrongdoing to Melyn and Kuyter, who were rescued and who were able to gain their freedom in Holland.

*
John Fiske,
The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1899), 1:202.

The Kiefft administration had witnessed another development annoying to the Dutch West India Company and to the Dutch government: the settlement by Sweden of arbitarily proclaimed Dutch territory on the Delaware. The Delaware, and indeed America as a whole, presented a vast virgin territory for virtually any settlers of any nationality who wished to emigrate. But government sovereignty is always jealous of its self-trumpeted monopoly. In 1633 the New Sweden Company was formed, of equal parts of Dutch and Swedish capital, as a successor company to one of William Usselincx’s projects. The idea was the creation of Peter Minuit, the disappointed, ousted governor of New Amsterdam, and of Samuel Blommaert, a director of the Dutch West India Company at odds with the controlling interests of that company. Blommaert, who became an agent of the Swedish Crown, was by far the largest Dutch investor. Of the Swedish investors, three were of the family of Oxenstierna, the prime minister of Sweden.

In the spring of 1638, the first small party of Swedish settlers, led by Minuit, landed on the west bank of the Delaware and built Fort Christina (now Wilmington). Land was purchased from the local Indians. The Swedes lived in uneasy coexistence with their neighbors. The Dutch quickly protested the infringement of their monopoly, and Virginia carped at the competition of Swedish fur trade with the Indians. But the Dutch were constrained from war against New Sweden by the fact that the two countries were allies in the Thirty Years’ War, then raging in Europe. Dutch colonists planted a settlement twenty miles north of Fort Christina, but, characteristically, the Dutch area was thinly populated; those
who did settle there were soon outnumbered by the Swedes. By 1640 the Swedish colony had a Lutheran minister, Rev. Reorus Torkillus.

The Dutch were less tender, however, with the English settlers. In 1640 the leaders of New Haven Colony, including Governor Theophilus Eaton, formed the Delaware Company in an attempt to secure prosperity for the colony by promoting settlements on the Delaware. The effort was supported financially by the General Court of New Haven Colony. The first New Haven settlement on the Delaware took place in the summer of 1641, in southwestern New Jersey. The small group of settlers began to grow tobacco and to trade with the Indians. Promptly, the Dutch troops at Fort Nassau, aided by a Swedish force, invaded the New Haven land, burned the houses of the settlers, and shipped the prisoners to Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Sweden asserted its rampant nationalism by moving to put the New Sweden Company under Swedish governmental control. In 1641 the Swedes bought out the Dutch investors in the company and the following year the Swedish Crown moved in to exert full control over the company’s affairs. By 1642 New Sweden was under the direct rule of the Swedish Council of State, which appointed as the new governor the veteran soldier of fortune, Johan Printz.

Printz immediately began a campaign of harassment of the small New Haven settlement and its leader, George Lamberton, whom he forbade to trade without a license. Under this treatment, the New Haven settlement soon collapsed. Flushed with the victory, Printz established a series of forts, including Fort Elfsborg, near Salem Creek, and Fort New Krisholm at the mouth of the Schuykill River on the west bank of the Delaware.

By 1644 New Sweden reached its peak of population, less than three hundred. This contrasted to a population in all of New Netherland of 2,000. But from that point on, this already small colony entered into a decline. For one thing, Sweden was interested in tobacco, and not in the fur available in the Delaware Valley.

To return to New Netherland proper, we have seen that Peter Stuyvesant was every bit as rigorous a tyrant as his predecessor, albeit more sophisticated and systematic in his depredations. As soon as he took office he persecuted the critics of Kiefft, and threatened to hang anyone appealing his decisions to Holland. He also decreed that no liquor be sold to any Indians, and that none at all be sold on Sunday mornings or after nine o’clock curfew. Taxes were raised sharply, a new excise was laid on wines and spirits, and export taxes on furs increased to thirty percent. When these laws were not observed, Stuyvesant added corporal punishment to the usual fines. All forms of smuggling and illegal trading were, of course, forbidden on pain of heavy penalties.

Stuyvesant, therefore, was rapidly acquiring the reputation in the colony of being little different from the hated Kiefft. But Stuyvesant
elaborated a sophisticated refinement. After enmeshing the economy in a network of restrictions and prohibitions, Stuyvesant in return for heavy fees sold
exemptions
from these regulations. In short, Stuyvesant saw that the key to wealth for a government ruler is to create the opportunity for monopoly privilege (for example, by outlawing and regulating productive activities) and then to sell these privileges for what the traffic can bear. Stuyvesant’s sales yielded him a fortune during his term in office, in currency and in land.

To levy increased taxes, Stuyvesant, too, was forced to call together representatives of wealthy families of the colony—in this case a group of Nine Men. The Nine Men were chosen as advisers and judges by eighteen men, who in turn had been elected by Dutch householders of Manhattan, Flatlands, and Breukelen (now northwestern Brooklyn), in September 1647. Stuyvesant realized that, rather than rule totally alone, it would be far shrewder to
share
his monopoly gains with the Nine Men, thus cementing them to his rule and warding off the rise of the sort of serious opposition that had ousted Kiefft. And so Stuyvesant pleased the Nine Men by restricting the crucial fur trade of the Hudson Valley to the old residents, the new ones needing considerable property to be admitted. This was later expanded, however, to a fee requirement for all residents, with the fee being a purchase of the approval of Governor Stuyvesant. After this expansion, there was no incentive for the Nine Men to continue to back the director. All these various taxes and regulations, however, were generally evaded by shippers and traders—the reaction of traders to harassment and depredation from time immemorial. These successful evasions benefited the traders and the mass of consumers alike.