USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 17
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trader as well as a farmer. And at home Van Rensselaer and his partners did not always agree. Nevertheless he continued to urge the establishment of more patroonships as the only way to insure that the province would not be 'contracted and encroached upon as is done even now by foreigners, English as well as Swedes,' and would be peopled by a better sort of persons than the 'tatterdemalions' who were now emigrating. His partner the historian De Laet, he wrote to a correspondent in Holland, took no interest in the colony 'except to enquire about rarities or to ask for some copy of a document.' Of himself he said:
I acknowledge that I talk too much, but when I think of the trouble that I had for others and how I received nothing but opposition in return I do not know how to balance my labor against the ingratitude shown me.
In 1640 the Company, directed again by the States General to settle its disputes and to consult with delegates from their own body, published a new Charter of Freedoms and Exemp- tions. It was not at all what Van Rensselaer desired. It was less favorable to patroons, much more favorable to other settlers, than the charter of 1629. Any Netherlander, whether a member of the Company or not, was now permitted to establish a patroonship but might claim for it only four miles along coast or river. Any person who would transport to the province five adults besides himself might claim as 'master or colonist' two hundred acres with hunting and fishing privileges. If such colonists should form themselves into 'hamlets, villages, or even cities' they were to be permitted to choose their own magistrates after the manner customary in the fatherland - the director-general to select incumbents from triple nominations presented by the vote of the free inhabitants - and to erect courts of justice. From such courts as well as from the patroons' a right of appeal in all but small cases lay to the court of the director-general. This was the second promise of local self-government for the Dutch province.
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To such emigrants as were willing to travel between decks the Company offered free transport. Should Company ships not be available patroons and free colonists might get special permission to send out their own, taking on board a supercargo of the Company. The Company pledged itself to supply its province with 'capable' councillors and other officials, clergymen, comforters of the sick, schoolmasters, and 'as many blacks as possible.' And it promised that so long as the new charter should remain in force it would not burden the colonists with 'customs, tolls, excise, imposts, or any other contributions.' This evidently meant that it would demand nothing beyond the export duties prescribed by the charter itself which were ten per cent upon all merchan- dise sent from Holland and, to be paid at New Amsterdam 'all in kind,' ten per cent upon skins, five per cent upon other wares. Paying these duties and respecting the staple-right regulations regarding Manhattan, all settlers might now engage in the internal and coastwise traffic previously reserved to patroons; and all were now permitted to manufacture.
Another clause in the charter promised protection to the colonists 'against all domestic and foreign wars and violence' provided they would put themselves in a proper state of defence, each man supplying himself with a gun or a cutlass and side-arms. This mandate Kieft echoed by ordinance, adding that all inhabitants 'at and around Fort Amsterdam' should hold themselves ready instantly to repair under their respective corporals to the appointed places when summoned by signals duly described. Such were the first militia regula- tions of the province. The soldiers who garrisoned the fort, detached from the regular army in Holland and sent out for short periods, numbered at this time only fifty although in 1633 Van Twiller had brought out thrice as many. To take command of them, to be 'commander of the military,' Van Rensselaer wrote to Kieft in May, 1640, Hendrick Van Dyck who appeared to have qualities of 'intelligence and courage' was just then setting sail. Ensign Van Dyck he is called in the records.
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It was at this time that Cornelis Melyn, a man of means who had been a tanner at Amsterdam, had visited New Netherland in 1638 as supercargo of a ship, and had since obtained in Holland permission to settle as a patroon on Staten Island, returned with his family and dependents to start his colony. De Vries objected, thinking that the island should have been reserved for him, but was induced to con- sent that Melyn should establish himself at a place near the Narrows. A little later Kieft gave him a patent conferring the rights of a patroon for the whole island excepting the portion actually covered by De Vries's bouwerie. Melyn seems to have had to begin his enterprise twice over for he testified in later years that in 1640 the pirates called Dun- kirkers had taken him, his ship, people, cattle, and all his belongings. Early in 1641 a patroonship which seems never to have amounted to much was established north of Newark Bay, then called Achter Col.
In spite of his energy and its good results Governor Kieft did not please his people. Some of the accusations showered upon him and his employers were exaggerated or untrue. For example, the Breeden Raedt, a bitter controversial pamphlet published at Antwerp in 1649, goes beyond the verge of the probable when it says that the West India Com- pany so envied the growing prosperity of its colonists that it instructed Kieft to bring suits against them 'in order to take more of their profits from them.' Kieft, however, appears to have done much this sort of thing on his own ac- count, haling men into his court on the slightest pretexts and imposing unjust fines and fees. Soon the settlers declared that he had made himself an autocrat and used his power to oppress and to plunder them. They objected to a court which consisted only of himself and a single councillor, and complained that when he wanted to enlarge it he asked assist- ance not of reputable freemen but of the Company's sub- ordinate servants. Especially they resented an ordinance which prescribed that no 'contracts, obligations, leases,
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bills of sale,' or formal papers of any sort should be valid unless drawn up by Secretary Van Tienhoven. Kieft's design, they said, was to prevent them from sending plaints or pleas to Holland. He merely wished, he explained, to avoid misunderstandings in a place where many people were illiterate and ignorant of law.
In spite of his orders that no man should leave Manhattan without a permit all men continued to do so and to traffic with the savages wherever they chose. This was one cause of the Indian troubles which began in 1640. The chief and actively exciting cause was the governor's injustice to the red men.
Permitted freely to frequent New Amsterdam with maize, tobacco, and furs for sale, entertained as guests, and employed as outdoor and even as indoor servants, the Indians soon lost their awe of the white man, developed their passion for his drinks, and offered irresistible prices for his firearms and powder - as much as twenty beaver skins for a single musket. The Company wisely forbade under penalty of death any such traffic, and Kieft prevented it almost entirely in the neighborhood of Fort Amsterdam. Farther away, and especially at Rensselaerswyck, he had less control. There- fore the Mohawks rejoiced in an abundance of the coveted weapons while the Indians around Manhattan, getting but a meagre supply, grew morose and indignant with the Dutch. The newly granted liberty in internal trade increased the number of wandering traders and tempted them deep into the wilderness. It also scattered the settlers, who thought they could traffic best with the savages by living far from one another; and this meant that their straying cattle often injured the Indians' crops while their isolation invited re- vengeful attacks.
Such a state of things provoked individual crimes and paved the way for local outbreaks which even a wise governor might not have been able to prevent. Yet for a long time peace and amity prevailed. As late as 1640 Captain De Vries wrote of the Indians:
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Though they are so revengeful towards their enemies they are very friendly to us. We have no fears of them; we go with them into the woods; we meet each other sometimes at an hour or two's distance from any house, and we think nothing more of it than if a Christian met us. They also sleep in the chambers before our beds, but lying down on the bare ground with a stone or a piece of wood under the head.
Kieft had clear orders from the Company to preserve these good relations with the savages by clement as well as just and prudent treatment. Instead, he treated them as the New Englanders had treated the Pequots: if one of them killed a settler the governor refused the customary Indian reparation, blood-money paid in wampum, and demanded the surrender of the culprit. Also, falsely professing to act under instruc- tions from the Company, he tried to collect tribute in corn or service from the friendly River Indians whom the Dutch, he said, had protected against the Mohawks, but who hotly re- sented the injustice of the demand. His people asserted at a later day that this was the main cause of the war. Captain De Vries names another: Kieft visited on the savages, 'who although they are bad enough will do you no harm if you do them none,' certain wrongs which his own agents had com- mitted. That is, in 1640 he accused the Raritans of Staten Island of depredations actually committed by white men, and sent soldiers to ask satisfaction; the soldiers killed several Indians without the governor's orders but in the belief that he would be pleased; and one or two other persons, De Vries asserts, cruelly maltreated one or more of the savages. So in 1641 the tribe retaliated, desolating De Vries's plantation and killing four of his people. It was the general alarm awakened by this raid that prevented Kieft from sending Councillor La Montagne with reinforcements to check the English who were persecuting the little garrison at Fort Good Hope. The Almighty had directed the raid in the in- terests of his chosen people, thought Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts. It 'pleased the Lord,' he explained, thus 'to disappoint the purpose of the Dutchmen.'
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Declaring now that he would exterminate the Raritans Kieft tried to excite the River Indians against them and offered bounties for their heads, as the New Englanders did in the case of their savage enemies when at a much later day King Philip's War was beginning. And then the spectre of a long-past crime arose, dramatically, to excite him to other rash and cruel courses.
This crime had been committed in 1626, the year of the first governor's arrival. Three of Minuit's servants, whom some accounts describe as negroes, then robbed and killed a Wech- quaeskeck Indian on Manhattan near the borders of the Kalck Hoek Pond. Minuit did not punish them or pay the blood-money that the tribe demanded. An Indian boy who had witnessed the murder, a nephew of the victim, nursed his revenge for years. In 1641 he came to Manhattan from the home of the tribe beyond the Harlem River in what is now Westchester County and treacherously slew an old man, called Claes Cornelissen Swits (the Swiss) or Rademaker (the Wheelright), who had leased part of Jacobus Van Corlaer's farm on the Muscoota Flats. Kieft demanded the surrender of the young brave. His sachem replied that he had merely done his duty and that he himself regretted that twenty Chris- tians had not been killed.
Kieft now began to grow alarmed. The people said that he was seeking a war so that he might make 'a bad account- ing for the Company,' presumably for his private profit. Also, writes De Vries, they accused him of cowardice because he imperilled their safety but guarded his own: he had not slept outside the fort 'a single night during all the years he had been there.' Fearing therefore, De Vries continues, that the trouble which now seemed imminent would be laid to his charge, Kieft
. . . called the people together to choose twelve men to aid him in the direction of the affairs of the country, of which number I, as a patroon, was one.
Such was the first faint dawning of popular government on
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Manhattan. In answer to Kieft's summons 'all heads of families' met in the fort on August 29, 1641; and with the twelve men whom they then chose to act on behalf of the 'Commonalty of New Amsterdam' begins the roll of the representatives who, under widely differing conditions, have since been elected to do the will of the people of New Amster- dam and New Netherland, of the city and province and State of New York. Their names were:
David Pietersen De Vries,
Frederik Lubbertsen,
Jacques Bentyn,
Jochem Pietersen Kuyter,
Jan Jansen Damen,
Gerrit Dircksen,
Hendrick Jansen,
Joris Rapelje,
Maryn Adriaensen,
Abram Planck,
Abram Pietersen Molenaar,
Jacob Stoffelsen.
Here were residents of Manhattan, Pavonia, Long Island, and Staten Island, for what was called the Gemeende or Com- monalty of New Amsterdam embraced not only the people in the little town around the fort but also the other settlers on Manhattan and in its neighborhood. All twelve appear to have been true Netherlanders except Kuyter the Dane and Rapelje the Walloon. Both of these were farmers. So was Dircksen, Planck (if, as is probable but not certain, he was the Planck or Ver Planck who had settled at Paulus Hoek), and Stoffelsen who had been one of the Company's commissaries and overseer of its negroes. Bentyn had served on Van Twiller's council. Jansen was a tailor, Lubbertsen a seaman, Molenaar a miller. Damen (also called Dam) has already been mentioned as the stepfather of the first-born son of Manhattan. Adriaensen had recently come from Rensse- laerswyck whither the patroon had sent him as a master tobacco planter in 1631.
As their president the Twelve Men chose Captain De Vries. His account of their proceedings says :
Commander Kieft then submitted a proposition whether we should avenge the murder of Claes the Wheelwright by declaring war upon the Indians or not. We answered that time and opportunity must
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be taken as our cattle were running at pasture in the woods and we were living far and wide, east, west, south, and north of each other; that we were not prepared to carry on a war with the Indians until we had more people like the English who make towns and villages. I told Commander Kieft that no profit was to be derived from a war with the Indians; that he was the means of my people being murdered at the colony which I had commenced on Staten Island in the year forty. . . .
De Vries also told the governor that the West India Company had ordered its colonists to keep peace with the savages. But Kieft 'would not listen to it,' and again the captain lamented the careless manner in which the Company made choice of its officials.
The Twelve Men insisted that Kieft should send 'one, two, and three times' peaceably to demand the murderer of Swits before declaring war. Arguing with them individually Kieft urged immediate action. Not until January, 1642, when repeated solicitations had failed to effect the surrender of the culprit, did they consent, unwillingly, to attack the Wech- quaeskecks provided the governor would accompany the expedition 'to prevent all disorder.' He was also to supply guns and ammunition, provisions and a steward to distribute them, but, they added, 'if anyone require more than bread and butter, he must provide it himself.'
These facts are told in papers which Kieft afterwards took with him when he sailed for Holland. From the people's own petitions and narratives of a later day it appears that as soon as they had settled the main matter under discussion they seized their chance to speak about other things. They demanded for the people a share in the government, saying that in Holland even the smallest village had its elected judiciary of five or seven schepens. To save 'the land from oppression' they asked that the governor's council should consist of at least five persons, that four of them should be members of their own board, and that, according to the Dutch custom of rotation in office, two of these should annu- ally be retired in favor of others. They also asked for a
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proper organization of the burgher guard or militia, which was not being maintained as the Company had prescribed, and for sundry commercial regulations. To some of these requests Kieft gave a qualified assent. But he made small effort to redeem his promises; he told the Twelve Men that the Commonalty had not empowered them to do anything except advise about the murder of Swits; and in February he practically dissolved their board, forbidding them to meet or to call 'any manner of assemblage' without his express command. Thus, as the Remonstrance of New Netherland declared, he proved that he had sanctioned their election merely that they might serve him 'as a cloak and as a cat's paw' when he was 'wholly bent' upon fighting the Indians.
Possibly he had sanctioned it because of certain things that Van Rensselaer had pointed out to him in one of his long let- ters, dwelling upon the difference between commanding 'a loose mass of people' and ruling 'a republic' where, after the custom of Holland, there should be local governments attend- ing to matters within their own spheres so that only 'great and important' ones would come before the 'general chief,' which general chief, moreover, 'should be assisted by dele- gates from the respective members.' So, thought Van Rens- selaer, New Netherland ought to be governed, but as the Company was 'not inclined that way' it would not be feasible to bring about such a state of things 'gradually and carefully' but only
. to introduce it when the charges become too heavy, in order . to get relief, though it will not be possible to do it then as conven- iently as if matters had been guided in this direction from the beginning.
Whether or no these sensible words influenced for a moment Governor Kieft, they contained a prediction which, like Was- senaer's, came true.
In March Kieft sent Ensign Van Dyck with eighty men to attack the Wechquaeskecks, quietly staying in the fort him- self. The expedition went astray yet it alarmed the sav- ages; in the house of Jonas Bronck they made a pact with the
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white men, promising to deliver up the assassin of Swits; and, although they did not keep their word, peace prevailed during the remainder of the year 1642. The wiser settlers must have realized that, Kieft being at the helm, the little provincial ship of state was probably drifting through a deceptive calm into another and a wilder storm. Apart from this danger the condition of New Amsterdam was more pros- perous and promising than ever before.
There were now, it is recorded, thirty bouweries near Fort Amsterdam 'as well cultivated and stocked as in Europe' and a hundred lesser plantations in a fair way to become regular bouweries. Some of the most promising had been started by Englishmen. Although the first of these to settle in the province, says the Journal of New Netherland, were bond-servants whose time had expired, soon came families,
. . . and finally entire colonies . .. in order to enjoy freedom of conscience and to escape from the insupportable government of New England.
The most conspicuous result of the theological disputes that had grown bitter and hot in Massachusetts was the found- ing of the settlements which grew into the colony of Rhode Island. In 1636 Roger Williams sought among the red men at the spot he called Providence the shelter denied him by the Puritans of Massachusetts and the Pilgrims of Plymouth; and in 1638 William Coddington, John Clarke, William Dyer, Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the famous Antinomian who had been banished from Massachusetts, her husband, and a few more of the unorthodox found refuge on the island of Aquidneck (Rhode Island).
Others of their kind betook themselves to New Netherland. Many persons were leaving Massachusetts, Winthrop tells, because of hard material conditions - a great depression of trade resulting largely from the disturbed condition of the mother-country; but many accepted the 'very fair terms'
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upon which Governor Kieft offered them lands on Long Island because they were 'infected with Anabaptism.' The authori- ties at Boston reproached them
. . . not for going from them but for strengthening the Dutch our doubtful neighbors, and taking that from them which our king challenges and had granted a patent of . . . to the Earl of Stirling, and especially for binding themselves by an oath of fealty.
Some thereupon promised to desist; others were not so easily bridled. Nor was Long Island the only place in which Kieft made them welcome. The Reverend Mr. Throgmorton, or Throckmorton, of Salem settled with thirty-five Anabaptist adherents in the region afterwards called Westchester, north- east of Bronck's Land, calling his place Vreedenland, the Land of Peace. The name of Throg's Neck preserves his memory. Just above him at the place then named Annie's Hoek, now Pelham Neck in Pelham Bay Park, settled Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and her household, driven from Rhode Island by the fear that Massachusetts or Plymouth would absorb it. A little stream which now forms the western boundary of Pelham Bay Park is still called Hutchinson's River. From Rhode Island came also Thomas Cornell who settled between Bronck's and Throgmorton's plantations. Among his descendants have been the founder of Cornell University and a governor of the State of New York.
To the Reverend Francis Doughty and a group of his friends Kieft gave a great tract of land on Long Island where they founded a village at Mespath, afterwards called Middel- burg and Newtown. Doughty was not an Anabaptist or an Antinomian, yet the Remonstrance of New Netherland, which was written a few years later by his son-in-law Adriaen Van der Donck, says that after emigrating from England to escape persecution and finding that he had got
. . . from the frying-pan into the fire . .. he betook himself in consequence under the protection of the Netherlanders in order that he might, according to the Dutch Reformation, enjoy freedom of conscience which he had unexpectedly missed in New England.
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Another Anabaptist immigrant was Lady Deborah Moody. Winthrop writes:
The Lady Moody, a wise and anciently religious woman, being taken with the error of denying baptism to infants, was dealt with by many of the elders and others and admonished by the church of Salem ... but persisting still and to avoid further trouble she re- moved to the Dutch against the advice of all her friends. . . . She was afterwards excommunicated.
Not all her friends can have opposed her departure, for besides her minor son, Sir Henry Moody, forty persons came with her when she decided, as a clergyman of Lynn wrote to Winthrop, to 'sit down' at Gravesend on Long Island 'from under civil and church watch among the Dutch.'
On the security of their oaths of allegiance and in accord- ance with a set of Articles regarding English settlers published by Kieft in June, 1641, all these aliens received their lands without price, promising after the end of ten years to pay tenths of their harvests to the West India Company. They were to enjoy 'free exercise of religion' as well as the hunting, fishing, and trading privileges enjoyed by their Dutch neigh- bors. And should they 'desire a magistracy' they might set up, in the manner prescribed by the Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1640, inferior courts of justice from which an appeal should lie to the governor and council in all civil cases involving more than forty guilders and in all criminal cases involving corporal punishment - 'blood-letting' is the Dutch term.
Time was to show how the English settlers of whom these were the first would regard their oaths of allegiance and repay the generous welcome they received. It may be said in ad- vance that again Van Rensselaer proved himself a prophet when he wrote to a correspondent at New Amsterdam in 1643:
I fear that the arrival of so many Englishmen will later give trouble. The Lord grant that it may turn out better.
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So many foreign vessels were now entering the harbor of New Amsterdam that in 1642 Kieft issued a stringent ordinance saying that all goods which had not paid the legal 'recogni- tions' to the West India Company in the fatherland or in one of the other Dutch colonies should be charged with equivalent import duties at New Amsterdam. And so many were the English residents and the English skippers stopping on the way between Virginia and New England that Kieft had to supply himself with a secretary of their nation. The person he chose - the first English-speaking official of the province - was one of Lady Deborah Moody's companions, Ensign George Baxter, who in spite of his military title had had 'some experience in law cases.'
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