The Island at the Center of the World (33 page)

Some historians have explained this breach between Stuyvesant and the Long Island towns as a Dutch-English encounter. There were many English residents in these towns and there was a war on between the Dutch and the English, therefore, according to the reasoning, the agitation amounted to an internal revolt, a way of assisting England in the war. The episode has also been used to support the standard notion that any yearning for political rights that existed in the Dutch colony could only have come from its English residents. This is a misreading of events. The confusion seems to stem from the fact that the petition presented to Stuyvesant in December was written in English and then translated into Dutch. But the “Remonstrance and Petition of the Colonies and Villages in this New Netherland Province,” in which colonists complained of the “arbitrary government” Stuyvesant exercised, follows Dutch legal forms. John Brodhead, the nineteenth-century historian who gathered the records of Van der Donck's doings in The Hague and who was intimately familiar with Van der Donck's writing, noticed a similarity in tone between Van der Donck's
Remonstrance of New Netherland
and this current remonstrance, with its spirited rejection of Stuyvesant's continued rule by fiat. Another early historian of the period noted the similarity in style of this complaint to the earlier complaints written during Kieft's time—for which, as detailed in Chapters 7 and 9, there is ample evidence of Van der Donck's involvement.

In demanding a voice in their affairs, the residents of the Long Island towns—Dutch and English both—were reacting not to the war but to the founding of the municipality of New Amsterdam. In fact, the magistrates of the New Amsterdam government not only supported their petition to the West India Company; they called on these leaders to travel out of their wooded plains and valleys, cross over on the Breuckelen Ferry, and join with them in the capital to craft a formal complaint. In other words, this minirevolt that Stuyvesant found himself faced with at the end of 1653 was a direct result of Van der Donck's achievement in The Hague, and it was also a direct continuation of that work, an attempt to push Stuyvesant and the company further toward political reform. It took place within weeks of Van der Donck's return. Van der Donck was uniquely suited to act as intermediary between the Dutch and English leaders: his wife was English, and his father-in-law, the firebrand English preacher Francis Doughty, was now minister of Flushing, one of the towns that was party to the complaint. Van der Donck also knew well the Englishman who penned the remonstrance. George Baxter had been around since Kieft's time, like Van der Donck had assisted Stuyvesant as an English translator, and had even served on Stuyvesant's council during Van der Donck's trial—and therefore, like Van der Donck, had split with Stuyvesant after once being close to him.

As a final piece of evidence, Stuyvesant seems to have complained to his superiors about the possibility of Van der Donck being behind this latest insurgency. In response to a letter of his that is now lost, the directors write: “We do not know, whether you have sufficient reason to be so suspicious of Adriaen van der Donck, as all the charges against him are based upon nothing but suspicion and presumptions, however, we shall not take his part, and only say that as we have heretofore recommended him to you on condition of his good behavior, we intend also that he be reprimanded and punished, if contrary to his promise he should misdemean himself.”

The picture that emerges, then, is not one in which English interlopers come into the colony, lay in wait for several years, and then, Trojan horse–like, emerge at time of war to add to the Dutch troubles. Indeed, there is no indication in this encounter of the English residents expressing a longing for English government. As they point out in their complaint, they had fled to these parts to escape it, and hoped to put down roots in the area surrounding Manhattan to take advantage of the more liberal justice of the Dutch Republic, the government of which, they noted, was “made up of various nations from divers quarters of the globe.” What they wanted was exactly what Van der Donck had strived for all these years: an end to the West India Company's rule, and a spread of rights through the rapidly growing towns of the colony. Such rights, the remonstrance declared, in a phrase out of Grotius that Van der Donck liked, were based on “natural law.”

So the movement Van der Donck had launched was still animating the people of the colony, and in fact had spread. It was the continuation of a long, sustained, well-reasoned appeal for political reform that came not from England but from the early-modern heart of the European continent.

It did little good, however. Stuyvesant reacted to the remonstrance in trademark fashion. The directors of the West India Company, he declared, were “absolute and general lords and masters of this province.” The petition was denied. Stuyvesant was nothing if not consistent.

Then again, Stuyvesant himself was in danger of being trumped: violent change was bearing down on the colony while this debate still echoed. Unknown to everyone, Cromwell's squadron left England in February of 1654. New Amsterdam would have been quickly subdued—the West India Company's soldiers were spread thinly around the colony, and hundreds of New Englanders, alarmed by the threats of a Dutch invasion, had declared themselves ready to follow an English military leader in a preemptive strike.

But fate—i.e., the weather—intervened. The storm-tossed squadron didn't arrive in Boston Harbor until June. As Major Robert Sedgwicke, commander of the fleet, wrote to Cromwell, the very day he was about to embark from Boston with “nyne hundred foote” and “one troope of horse” for the assault on Manhattan, “there arrived a shipp from London, bringing with her diverse printed proclemations of peace between the English and the Dutch.” Jan de Witt had hammered out a treaty with Cromwell, yielding England control of the Channel while retaining trading supremacy in the Mediterranean and in Asia. The First Anglo-Dutch War ended with the North American sphere unchanged. The invasion squadron was called back home.

O
NE MIGHT SAY
that this is the point in history when Manhattan became Manhattan. With a rudimentary representative government in place, the island rapidly came into its own. Stuyvesant and the West India Company still officially ran the place, but, whether they were Dutch, English, or any of the other nationalities represented in the colony, the businessmen—the fur traders, the tobacco farmers, the shippers of French wines, Delft tiles, salt, horses, dyewood, and a hundred other products—increasingly got their way. As the business leaders won positions in the city government and became political leaders, others—bakers, tavernkeepers, school teachers, ministers—came to them for support. These alliances strengthened New Amsterdam's municipal government, which, in its turn, set a flurry of development in motion. Roads were paved with cobbles. Brick houses replaced wooden ones; tile roofs came in (mostly red and black, giving the town a crisp finish), and the old thatch ones were banned as a fire hazard. A proper wharf was built off Pearl Street. A street survey of New Amsterdam was commissioned. As the town picked itself up, it took on that defining Dutch characteristic: tidiness. Its streets and stoops were swept clean. Trees were aesthetically pruned; gardens took neat diamond, oval, and square shapes. An order went out forcing farmers to tear down pigsties and chicken coops that occupied prominent roadside positions. Owners of vacant lots on the main streets were slapped with an extra tax to encourage them to develop their property. The ditch that had been chopped through the center of the town was widened into a proper canal, its banks reinforced with pilings and crossed by pretty stone bridges, which, together with the gabled buildings, gave the town a strong echo of its namesake. Taverns were even more numerous than before, but staggering, puking drunkenness had abated somewhat. The taverns now functioned as clubs for traders and businessmen to meet, places where news was exchanged, and maybe dens for sampling that wanton new elixir, coffee.

It was still a port town, with tentacles that stretched across the globe, so piracy and whoring, syphilic scabs and cutlass scars, remained fixtures. But you get glimpses, too, of the well of ordinary life that any society draws from and that, in its quiet, pious normalcy, falls outside the margins of official records. A family gathers in the evening around the hearth, the father reading the Bible and carefully recording special events inside its front cover. A minister, writing home to Europe, recounts his weekly circuit on the Breuckelen Ferry between the churches of Long Island, New Amsterdam, and “Stuyvesant's Bouwerie.” An “orphanmaster” describes the progress of his charges.

The place was maturing, thanks largely to the municipal leadership on Manhattan. It gave people a sense that this island on the edge of the wilderness, which had always veered sharply between lawlessness and tyranny, had become a place where families could let their dreams take root.

In what might have been seen as a good omen, one of the colony's dodgiest residents, Kieft's and Stuyvesant's longtime henchman, Cornelis van Tienhoven, disappeared at this time, with appropriate flamboyance. Fleeing from The Hague, where he was opposing Van der Donck, and later turning up on Manhattan with a young mistress, had made him a laughingstock; we can only guess how his wife greeted him. Stuyvesant had kept him on for a time, but he soon became too much of a liability. He had bullied colonists for years, and there was a growing sense that he was involved in cooking the company's books. As troubles reached a climax, he vanished one day in 1656, with his hat and cane found floating near the shore. Stuyvesant wanted badly to cover the matter up, have his association with the man forgotten, and quickly declare a death by drowning. But people felt they knew better—for one thing, Van Tienhoven's brother, who had also become entangled in financial irregularities, vanished at about the same time, and later turned up on Barbados. Whatever happened to Cornelis van Tienhoven is one of the unsolved mysteries of New Netherland.

But Manhattan wasn't the only eventful part of the colony; it wasn't just the island capital that took off after 1653. Only a year before the municipal government came into being, in an effort to resolve his dispute with the upriver duchy of Rensselaerswyck, Stuyvesant had created by decree the town of Beverwyck on territory staked out around Fort Orange. The beaver trade for which it was named was still flourishing, and the community came into being seemingly overnight. Mills, brickyards, and tile yards were laid out and produced the materials for creating a town whose citizens were self-consciously urban enough to construct a poorhouse as one of their first community projects. By 1660 it was the colony's second city, with a thousand residents. Compared with New Amsterdam, it kept its remote, Wild West feel. Through the records we get fleeting views of Indians as ordinary participants in town life. They are boarders in residents' homes, sitting by the fireside of an evening with pewter mugs of beer. One shows up, purse in hand, at the baker's house to buy cakes. Once, in 1659, two Mohawk chiefs ask for—and receive—an extraordinary session of court in which to present grievances against Dutchmen who have been abusing their people. For the twelve years in which it existed, before morphing into the town of Albany, Beverwyck was a hardscrabble place, poised between the looming mountains and the vast river, the thunk of beaver skins on countertops the sound of commerce. But it was also a well-ordered community, with a court of justice that functioned identically to the one in New Amsterdam and those in Holland. In makeup it was more Dutch than New Amsterdam, but still a quarter of its residents came from outside the United Provinces, and with Germans, Swedes, French, English, Irish, Norwegians, and Africans, it had a far more mixed population than New England towns.

In Amsterdam, meanwhile, men like Seth Verbrugge and Dirck de Wolff—the coiffed and groomed merchant princes who ran Europe's trade from their red leather chairs and ornately carved desks, their walls hung with framed maps showing their global sway, their wives collared in lace and studded with diamonds—took advantage of the newfound stability on Manhattan. They gave their agents there greater sway and purchasing power, and the agents used their contacts with English and Dutch merchants from Canada to Virginia to Jamaica and Brazil to make their island port the hub of Atlantic trade. The new products appearing in New Amsterdam's shops speak of a more refined life for its inhabitants—medicine, measuring equipment, damask, fine writing paper, oranges and lemons, parakeets and parrots, saffron, sassafras, and sarsaparilla.

With municipal government on Manhattan came an innovation whose affect would long outlive the colony itself, and help to impress the island's legacy into the American character. Going back into the Middle Ages, cities throughout Europe had offered a form of local citizenship to inhabitants: English cities had their freemen, Dutch towns their burghers. Amsterdam had recently installed a new, two-tiered system, and the local government on Manhattan promptly copied it. The so-called great burgher was a powerful trader who contributed sizable sums for civic improvements and, in exchange, got the right to trade and had a voice in setting policy. What was different was the offering of small burgher status. Nearly every resident of New Amsterdam applied for it, and it gave even the humblest—shoemakers, chimney sweeps, tailors, blacksmiths, hatters, coopers, millers, masons—a stake in the community, a kind of minority shareholder status. The system encouraged inhabitants to support one another and largely did away with the itinerant traders who used to sweep in, make a quick profit, and then leave. It also made for a more egalitarian place than New England, where the number of freemen, or town citizens, never exceeded twenty percent of the population. In New Amsterdam, nearly everyone—rich and poor, the coiffed and the scabby—was part of the same club. When shipping increased in the port, all benefited.

Added to this, workers in the colony never organized themselves into the guilds that had held sway in Europe since the Middle Ages. This was probably because the West India Company did its best to bar the guilds, fearing their power. But this form of union-busting turned out to have an advantage. Artisans branched out: a baker might own land, invest in a shipment of tobacco, and earn extra income as a soldier. Young men who entered the colony's rolls as humble artisans rose to heights, and a muscular strain of American upward mobility was born. Frederick Flipsen (a.k.a. Philipse) traveled to Manhattan from Friesland and signed himself a lowly carpenter when he became a small burgher in 1657; at the time of his death in 1702, after a long career of multifaceted wheeling and dealing, he was one of the wealthiest men in America, his upriver estate, the famous Philipsburg Manor, encompassing ninety-two thousand acres of what would become Westchester County (including, incidentally, all of Adriaen van der Donck's former holdings).