Conceived in Liberty (56 page)

The honeymoon with the Nine Men did not last long. For one thing, Stuyvesant had refused to permit New England ships in New Netherland ports, even though New England permitted entry of the ships from New Netherland. In 1648, New England retaliated against all Dutch trade with the Indians, causing considerable economic distress in the Dutch colony. Another important factor in this distress was the high customs in New Amsterdam and the heavy penalties for evasion imposed there. Spurred by the withering of commerce subsequent to the New England regulation, the Nine Men, led by their president, Adrien Van der Donck, patroon of Yonkers, appealed the Stuyvesant ruling to Holland. Stuyvesant seized the papers of the Nine Men, arrested Van der Donck, and expelled him from their membership.

At this point, none other than Cornelis Melyn arrived from Holland, brandishing a safe-conduct from the States-General as well as a condemnation of Stuyvesant’s harsh treatment of Melyn and Kuyter. Chastened temporarily, Stuyvesant released Van der Donck, and allowed the Nine Men to send their petition to the States-General. The petition, sent in the fall of 1649, asked the States-General to take over the government
of New Netherland from the West India Company, in order to allow local self-government in New Amsterdam and to encourage rather than restrict trade. The petition also included a severe indictment of the government of Peter Stuyvesant and of the Dutch West India Company. As the petition charged: “Nobody is unmolested or secured in his property longer than the Director pleases, who is generally inclined to confiscating.” The petition wisely noted, “A covetous chief makes poor subjects.”

Oddly enough, Stuyvesant’s main support at this time came from a group of English settlers on Long Island, headed by George Baxter of Gravesend, who was Stuyvesant’s appointed English secretary of state. The magistrates of the English settlements of Gravesend and Hempstead fawningly expressed the fervent hope for no change of government, praised the existing strong government, and warned that any democratic procedure in New Netherland would surely lead to anarchy and ruin. Three years after the petition, the company’s sole concession was to order Stuyvesant to grant a municipal government to New Amsterdam. However, this was only a
pro forma
victory for the idea of limiting government; Stuyvesant insisted on retaining the power to appoint all of the municipal officials, and to decree the municipal ordinances.

In foreign affairs Stuyvesant was cautious and conciliatory regarding the power of the English colonies, realizing as he did that Connecticut’s and New Haven’s activities on the Connecticut River, Westchester, and Long Island constituted a potential threat to Dutch rule. In 1650, Stuyvesant negotiated a boundary settlement with the New England Confederation, partitioning Long Island at Oyster Bay. This partition continued to be upheld even after the outbreak of the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54). Indeed, the only loss suffered by New Netherland in that war was Connecticut’s seizure of Fort Good Hope, which had been a hopeless enclave in hostile territory for a long while. The Dutch West Indies Company, however, suffered very seriously from the Anglo-Dutch War. For England was allied with newly independent (1640) Portugal, which proceeded to reconquer Angola and northern Brazil, the company’s most lucrative possessions (England was rewarded with rights in the slave trade by the Portuguese). The company’s financial problems were compounded by lack of support from the government and the merchants, who preferred private trade to the expenses of monopolies and colonial government.

Stuyvesant’s own problems during the war were chiefly internal rather than external. On the outbreak of the war, the English settlers were alienated by the company’s prohibition of any but Dutchmen in public office. Captain John Underhill organized a one-man rebellion at Hempstead and Flushing, claiming allegiance to England and denouncing Stuyvesant’s tyranny: his seizure of private land, imposition of heavy taxes, religious persecution, banning of any election procedures, and imprisonment of men without trial. Underhill was forced to flee to Rhode Island.

More significant was the disaffection of such former lieutenants of Stuyvesant as George Baxter. Baxter’s opposition forced the reluctant director to agree to a “landtag,” or popular convention, to meet to discuss public affairs. The landtag met in December 1653 with four Dutch and four English towns represented by nineteen delegates. (The Dutch towns: New Amsterdam, Breukelen, Flatlands, and Flatbush; the English: Flushing, Gravesend, Hempstead, and Middleburg.) Despite the partition treaty of 1650, most of the new settlers of western Long Island were English, and many of these settlements had acquired some rights to local self-government from the charter of 1640. Now they were in the forefront of the complaints of arbitrary government. Ostensibly called to concentrate on the English war, the landtag’s meeting was turned by Baxter—attracted out of office to the liberal cause—to the most pressing problem, Stuyvesant’s own tyranny. Baxter drew up, and the landtag unanimously approved, a Remonstrance and Petition attacking all the despotic evils of the existing regime: especially arbitrary government by the director and his council, appointment of officials and magistrates without consent of the people, and granting of large tracts of land to favorites of the director. They also demanded a permanent landtag with power to raise taxes and help select officials, and they asserted that “the law of nature” authorized all men to associate in defense of their liberty and property. Here were the very “rights of man” which Peter Stuyvesant had always despised.

Stuyvesant, like Kiefft, had thought his subjects would come together to meet an “external threat”; he found them instead seizing the opportunity to challenge the threat to their life, liberty, and property that they were suffering chronically at home. Stuyvesant, of course, brusquely rejected the Remonstrance and promptly declared the assembly illegal and ordered it dissolved. Stuyvesant poured his scorn on the “law of nature”; only appointed
magistrates,
not private individuals, had the right to hold political meetings: “We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects, and we alone can call the inhabitants together.” Moreover, charged the director, the whole proceedings “smelt of rebellion.”

Stuyvesant was able to continue the arbitrary rule that was crippling and greatly slowing down the development of the colony. Indeed, the company not only approved the director’s treatment of the landtag, but gently chided him for engaging in any sort of dialogue with “the rabble.” Encouraged, Stuyvesant expelled Baxter and James Hubbard of Gravesend from their civil offices. When the latter raised the English flag at Gravesend and both proclaimed their allegiance to Cromwell, Stuyvesant sent a troop to imprison Hubbard and Baxter. The director’s victory over his opposition was complete.

As we have noted, Stuyvesant’s foreign policy, in welcome contrast to Kiefft’s, was cautious and conciliatory. When Stuyvesant assumed
office, he found Governor Printz of New Sweden constructing many forts on the Delaware River. To counter this expansionist policy, Stuyvesant built Fort Beversrede (now Philadelphia) in the spring of 1648, across the Schuylkill River from the new Swedish Fort New Krisholm. But the rambunctious Swedes twice burned Fort Beversrede during that year, and each time the Dutch simply rebuilt, without retaliation. Then, in 1651 the Dutch built Fort Casimir (New Castle) below Fort Christina; strategically located, it commanded the river approaches to most of New Sweden.

During the early 1650s, friction was building up in Europe between Sweden and the United Provinces. The Thirty Years’ War had ended in 1648, and now the two countries would soon erupt into open conflict over Sweden’s interventions in Denmark. In this delicate situation, the new governor of New Sweden committed the enormous blunder of launching a surprise attack on Fort Casimir, and thus helped end New Sweden forevermore. Surely this governor, Johan Rising, an associate of the powerful Oxenstierna family, must have realized that his tiny colony of less than a few hundred souls could hardly have held its own in a war with New Netherland. And yet, inexplicably, Rising suddenly attacked and seized Fort Casimir in 1654, renaming it Fort Trefaldighet. This provocation was the last straw for the hitherto patient Dutch, who decided to wipe out New Sweden for good.

The following year the Dutch sent seven ships, headed by Stuyvesant, and quickly forced the surrender of the two Swedish forts. The Swedish governor was returned to Sweden. Most of the Swedish settlers elected to remain, but were forced to take a loyalty oath to Holland. New Sweden had ended. It was now a part of the enlarged New Netherland.

The Delaware Bay area was now governed by the Dutch, who provided the officialdom and the fur traders, but the bulk of the settlers—amounting to about six hundred by 1659—were Swedes and Finns, who provided the farmers and village governments. (Finland was, in those years, under Swedish rule, and hence many of the “Swedish” immigrants were Finns.) In 1656 there occurred the fateful separation of the west bank of the Delaware River—from Fort Christina (Wilmington) southward— from the rest of the Delaware River settlements. In short, a separate life began for the future colony of “Delaware.” As a direct result of the highly expensive expedition to conquer New Sweden, the heavily indebted Dutch West India Company in 1656 transferred its sovereignty over part of this area to its creditor, the city of Amsterdam. Three years later, the company transferred the entire west bank, from Fort Christina southward, to Amsterdam.

The city of Amsterdam sent out more settlers to its new land; renamed Fort Christina, Altena; and named its new colony New Amstel, which
was headed by one Alrichs. In 1659 Alrichs was succeeded by Alexander d’Hinoyossa, who became the sole governor of what was later to be Delaware.

The Swedish and Finnish settlers soon found that their lot under Amsterdam rule was much worse than under New Netherland, and the Dutch West India Company. Their freedom of trade was far more restricted, and the city of Amsterdam’s officials arrogated to themselves a tight monopoly of all trade. Stuyvesant was also bitter at this governmental rival in his former domain.

As Swedish and Finnish Lutherans were incorporated into the domain of New Netherland, the problem of theocracy and religious persecution became acute. We have indicated that New Netherland was largely governed by that wing of Dutch opinion that advocated Calvinist theocracy, as over against the libertarian approach of their Republican rivals. The Dutch West India Company in general and Peter Stuyvesant in particular hated the idea of religious toleration and desired theocracy under the Dutch Reformed Church, as directed by the synod, or classis, of Amsterdam. In 1654 Stuyvesant forbade any Lutheran minister from holding services, and the company decreed that only Dutch Reformed services were permissible in the colony. In 1656 all other religious meetings were prohibited under heavy fine and no baptism was permitted except that of the Dutch Reformed Church. Indeed, Stuyvesant went so far as to imprison several persons for attending private Lutheran meetings. But for this he was censured by the States-General. And in 1657 even a commission from Amsterdam to serve as a Lutheran pastor did not save the newly arrived Rev. Ernestus Goetwater from being shipped back to Holland by the authorities. Leading the campaign of persecution was the influential Dutch Calvinist minister, the Reverend Mr. Megapolensis.

It was at this time that the great wave of Quaker persecutions began in New England and Peter Stuyvesant was not to be caught lagging. New Netherland, indeed, was distinguished, even among the colonies, for its extensive use of torture—particularly the rack—to extract confessions and to whip and mutilate runaway servants and slaves. Now, in 1656, Stuyvesant decreed that Quakers could be tied to a cart’s tail and assigned hard labor for two years.

The first Quakers in New Netherland arrived from England in 1657. Two women, Mary Weatherhead and Dorothy Waugh, were thrown into a dungeon as soon as they began to preach and after a week were sent, tied up, to Rhode Island—that “sewer of heretics.” Robert Hodgson, another English Quaker, found many receptive hearts in Long Island and prepared to preach at Hempstead. There he was seized by a local magistrate, Richard Gildersleeve, and imprisoned in the latter’s house. But Hodgson was able to preach even under house arrest. Governor Stuyvesant now sent an armed guard to Hempstead, bound Hodgson closely, and arrested two women for the crime of giving space to the Quaker. The three were taken by cart, Hodgson dragged at the tail, to New Amsterdam. Prevented from speaking in his own defense, Robert Hodgson, for the crime of being a Quaker, was fined 600 guilders and sentenced to two years at hard labor. But Hodgson courageously refused to cooperate in this unjust sentence; he refused to work or pay. Whereupon he was chained to a wheelbarrow and beaten with a tarred rope. This treatment continued for three days, and Hodgson still refused to work or pay. For speaking out of turn, the Quaker was hung up and whipped at Stuyvesant’s order. The director then told him that he would be beaten every day until he worked and paid the fine. Finally Hodgson yielded and agreed to work in prison. However, pressures on the director led him to waive the fine and eventually Hodgson was permitted to leave the colony for Rhode Island.

A fine of fifty pounds was now proclaimed for anyone found sheltering a Quaker for so much as one night, and the law against meetings was revived. The first enforcement was against Harry Townsend of Flushing Town on Long Island. He was thrown into prison when he refused to pay a heavy fine for attending a Quaker meeting. This spurred a complaint by the English settlers of Flushing. They protested that they were obliged to do good to
all
Christians, including Quakers, and that they would therefore continue to shelter them as “God shall persuade our conscience.”

The receptivity of Flushing and other western Long Island towns to religious freedom, and even to the Quaker creed itself, deserves explanation. These towns were settled by New Englanders, but the settlers were not the Puritans who peopled the Connecticut and New Haven towns of eastern Long Island. The fountainhead of this different migration was Lady Deborah Moody. Born in England and persecuted by the Church of England, this widow had been invited by her friends the Winthrops to move to Massachusetts to gain her religious freedom. Settling at Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1640, but belonging to the Salem church, Lady Moody and a few followers were harassed by Massachusetts for opposing infant baptism and adopting the Baptist creed. Hence Lady Moody, like other heretics, left Massachusetts in 1643. She bought an estate at Gravesend, Long Island, where she was followed by many other families from Lynn. We have seen that Gravesend, alone, survived the Indian war against Willem Kiefft. In the next decade other Lynn Baptists as well as Seekers
organized more settlements on west Long Island: Flushing, Jamaica, Hempstead, and Oyster Bay. By 1653 Peter Stuyvesant was complaining that the Long Island towns were selecting local magistrates without regard to their Calvinism, and that Gravesend in particular was electing Baptists and freethinkers.