The Island at the Center of the World (38 page)

The Dutch leaders were completely duped; the directors insisted Stuyvesant needn't be alarmed. Nicolls's mission would not affect him, and as to the English residents of the Dutch colony, they would “not give us henceforth so much trouble” because they “prefer to live free under us at peace with their consciences” than risk being persecuted by “a government from which they had formerly fled.” So Stuyvesant relaxed his guard, went up the Hudson as planned, and as soon as he arrived at his northern outpost news of impending disaster reached him. He sailed back to Manhattan to find the island in turmoil. The English gunboats were perched at the entrance to the lower harbor, cutting off the river and Manhattan Island. People stepping off the ferry from Breuckelen talked of inhabitants of the English towns forming themselves into companies of foot soldiers. Sailors from a Dutch boat anchored in Gravesend Bay reported the English ships had fired on them.

Stumping into the fort, Stuyvesant dictated a letter to the colony's secretary, which was delivered to Nicolls's ship, asking his business and declaring hopefully that Stuyvesant was not “apt to entertaine any thing of prejudice intended against us.” Nicolls's reply came the next morning, a messenger delivering a letter informing Stuyvesant that “in his Majesties Name, I do demand the Towne, Scituate upon the Island commonly knowne by the Name of Manhatoes with all the Forts there unto belonging, to be rendered unto his Majesties obedience, and Protection into my hands.” The king did not relish “the effusion of Christian blood,” but if the Dutch did not surrender they would invite “the miseryes of a War.”

Stuyvesant's reaction to this thunderbolt was stylishly in period: he returned the letter because it was unsigned. Whereupon Nicolls fired off another:

These to the Honorable the Governor of the Manhatoes.

Honoured Sir.

The neglect of Signing this inclosed Letter, when it was first brought to your hands, by Colonell Geo: Cartwright, was an omission which is now amended, and I must attribute the neglect of it at first, to the over hasty zeale I had dispatching my Answer to the Letter I received from you dated 19/26
^th
instant, I have nothing more to add, either in matter of Forme, then is therein expressed, only that your speedy Answer is necessary to prevent future inconveniences, and will very much obliege.

Your affectionat humble Servant
RI: NICOLLS.

Townspeople were rushing through the streets with news and gossip. Stuyvesant tended to be calm in such situations. By now he had the pertinent details. There were maybe five hundred men in New Amsterdam able to bear arms. Nicolls had nearly twice that, plus forces totaling a thousand or more amassing on Long Island, plus the firepower of his ships. The fort had its cannons, but it was so low on gunpowder they were inconsequential. It was probably hopeless, but Stuyvesant doesn't seem to have had second thoughts: they would fight to the death. Anything else, he informed the leaders of the city government, “would be disapproved of” at home.

At this juncture, a rowboat, with a white flag aloft, approached the shore. In it, of all people, was Winthrop, along with several other New Englanders. They asked for a meeting, and Stuyvesant led them to a tavern. Winthrop urged his “friend” to surrender, and handed him a letter containing Nicolls's terms. They were generous terms—extravagant almost—and yet Stuyvesant was unmoved. Later, at the City Hall, the city officials demanded to see the letter and show it to the citizens. Stuyvesant knew his people: resistance would cave once they heard of the favorable terms. So he tore the letter to pieces.

At this, the room went wild. Long-stoppered feelings came flooding out. The company, Stuyvesant himself, the colony's government—it was all a sham; it had never been anything else. For years they had lodged requests and petitions, asking for a voice in government, and he had sneeringly rejected them, declared them childish fools who didn't understand the complexities of government, and all along he had been nothing but a good soldier blindly carrying out the orders of a bankrupt bureaucracy. Now he expected them to fight and die on his orders. Why should they? Why spill their blood, and try to hold the attackers off, when they all knew the West India Company had sent no reinforcements, despite his appeals. It would have been one thing had the company denied their petitions for reform on the grounds that its way was better, but it never had a way.

Finally, the town leaders demanded once again to see the letter. In an odd bit of comedy, Stuyvesant offered them the pieces, which Nicasius de Sille took and carefully pasted back together.

Meanwhile, with no answer from Stuyvesant, Nicolls had moved his ships forward, within shot of the city. The English Long Islanders, with muskets and pikes, were gathered along the Breuckelen shore. Some French privateers who were in the area had gotten news of the events, and rushed to the scene as well.

There is then an almost Shakespearean scene, in which Stuyvesant climbs heavily onto the battlements of his fort and stands there, gazing at the guns trained on his town, his long wisps of hair flailed by the wind. He seems, in this moment in which he will be forever frozen in history, almost to have achieved the status of a tragic hero, his leadership, his particular stew of character strengths and flaws, having built this impressive place but also having caused his own people to turn against him. (To add a family dimension to the betrayal, his seventeen-year-old son, Balthasar, had come out on the side of the city leaders.) There was a lone gunner at his side, awaiting his command to touch light to powder. It must have been tempting. A single cannon blast at the ships riding at anchor just beyond the walls would be enough. It would unleash a rain of violence, a storm that would swallow the place, ending the torment, ending things the way they ought to end, in good, quenching blood and fire.

Then, in his direst moment, the church came to give comfort. Two ministers of the town, father and son, both with the ponderous, sonorous name of Megapolensis, appeared at his side. It's hard not to think of Stuyvesant's father here, to imagine the lifelong battle inside him between stalwart devotion to the church, personified in his father's ministry, and that streak of stiff rebelliousness. Maybe it was the church that swayed him. Then, too, the warships, the guns, the French privateers, and the glinting line of weaponry on the opposite shore had to have added up to something in his military calculations. He knew what the pikes and the expectant leers of the foreigners meant. It was a long-standing rule of war that if a besieged fort so much as fired a shot, the forces against it were at liberty to sack and loot; the place would be laid waste. Was he really willing to subject the people he had lived among these seventeen years to such a thing?

The ministers talked lowly to him for a while, and then the three men went down.

But he still wouldn't yield. He crafted another letter to Nicolls, referencing the history of the Dutch claim to the territory, asserting that “we are oblieged to defend Our place,” informing him that he had had news from Holland about a treaty between the two countries, and suggesting that Nicolls check with the home office before taking this fateful step. It may have been a bluff, but Stuyvesant was right in thinking this move by England was rash. Contrary to Ambassador Downing's assurances to King Charles, the Dutch would fight to defend their interests. At this moment, the great Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter was preparing to launch an expedition for West Africa. When his sweep was over, all but one of the Dutch outposts taken in James's raids would be back in Dutch hands. Outright war would then begin, and, all told, the Dutch would win the Second Anglo-Dutch War, creating a pothole in England's road to empire.

But, pulling back to the broad view, the English were riding to the top of the historical wave. With these events of late summer 1664, the island of Manhattan would be a pivot around which the age would turn, and when it was done the floppy hats, Vermeer interiors, “merry company” portraits, and blue-and-white Delft tiles would be thrust into the past, and ahead would be the Raj and the redcoats, Britannia ruling the waves.

In the end, Stuyvesant truly did stand alone. All of his people deserted him. The leading citizens of New Amsterdam—ninety-three of them, including his son—signed a petition asking him to avert “misery, sorrow, conflagration, the dishonor of women, murder of children in their cradles, and, in a word, the absolute ruin and destruction of about fifteen hundred innocent souls.” Perhaps it struck him, on reading it, that it showed he had been right all along: this rapid willingness to give up, this spinelessness, this absence of patriotism, was what came of a mongrel society. Mixing religions and races weakened a populace, and here was proof. It would be wrong to think that the citizens of the town had no sense of loyalty, but they were practical people, and at any rate they had little choice. They made clear in their final petition to Stuyvesant that they were willing to support their neighbors and their colony, but they had no qualms about abandoning the company that had left them defenseless.

And so they did. The fifteen hundred residents of New Amsterdam, the ten thousand inhabitants of the colony of New Netherland, turned their backs on the company that had long ignored them. Griet Reyniers, onetime Amsterdam barmaid who became Manhattan's first prostitute, abandoned it. So did her husband, Anthony “the Turk” van Salee, the half-Morroccan former pirate. They were now wealthy landowners on Long Island, and their four daughters were married to some of New Amsterdam's up-and-coming businessmen. Joris Rapalje, who with his bride Catalina Trico comprised the Adam and Eve of the colony, had recently died, but Catalina was still very much alive, as were her grown children and their families, and they, too, preferred to acquiesce rather than die. The same went for Asser Levy, the Polish Jew who had battled Stuyvesant over the rights of Jews, and now owned Manhattan's first kosher butcher shop, and for Manuel “the Giant” Gerrit, the African who had escaped hanging in 1641 and who for the past five years had been living as a free landowner on a small farm near Stuyvesant's bouwerie. For all of these people, living peaceably under an English prince who promised to continue the way of life they had fashioned was patently better than fighting and dying.

And so he relented. “I would much rather be carried out dead,” he said, and surely everyone believed him, but instead he named six men to meet with their English counterparts and negotiate terms. They met at Stuyvesant's farm. And the next Monday, at eight in the morning, Stuyvesant, fifty-four-years-old, thick of build, with his cuirass and his limp and his small, bold eyes, led a military procession out of the fort, with drummers drumming and flags waving.

Then, as all attention shifted to the waterfront, where Nicolls and his main body of troops was coming ashore, a small party of English soldiers entered the deserted fort. Outside, the harbor winds were swirling around the interested throng of mixed nationalities who watched as an English flag went up the flagpole and listened as Nicolls declared the place renamed for his patron, the Duke of York and Albany. Inside the fort, meanwhile, a few soldiers climbed to the office of the colonial secretary, above the gate. In any change of government, gaining possession of the records is among the first steps, for to control a society's vital documents is to control its past and future. The soldiers found what they were looking for: rows of bulky leather-bound volumes, forty-eight in all, numbered consecutively on their spines, A to Z and then AA through PP. Wills, deeds, minutes, correspondence, complaints, petitions, confrontations, agreements—it was all here, meticulously maintained, year by year, day by day, the story of America's first mixed society.

Chapter 15

INHERITED FEATURES

A
s Stuyvesant surrendered the Manhattan colony, America's myth of origin was already coming into being. Starting in the 1660s, a handful of New England clergymen began singing the praises of their parents' and grandparents' generations, which had braved an ocean and a wilderness to start a new life. The story they wove was biblical from first to last. In their modest telling, their forebears were none other than the chosen people of God, and America (i.e., New England) was the promised land. By the time of the revolutionary generation a century later, the story had become myth. John Adams, himself a descendant of the first Puritans, revered the Pilgrims as the launchers of the American saga.

Certainly the Puritans passed down many features to the nation. They were practical, plain-spoken, businesslike, pious—all traits that Americans from Adams on have admired and tried to emulate. But, as many people have noted in recent decades, in which the Puritans have fallen out of favor, they were also self-important zealots. Their form of government was a theocracy. It was rooted in intolerance: freedom of worship, in the words of one prominent New England minister (who became president of Harvard College), was the “first born of all abominations.” “'Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration,” declared another. The Puritans' systematic crackdown on alternative views was cruel, unusual, and lethal. People whose crime was being members of the Baptist denomination, or Quakers, or belonging to some other Protestant sect, were beaten with a knotted whip (“to cut their flesh and to put them to suffering”), put in a “horse lock” of irons, had ears lopped off. They were whipped and then tied to a cart and driven through deep snow, “the white snow and crimson blood” making a vivid tapestry. They were hanged in public spectacles. Some were hanged and then had their naked bodies dragged through the streets. These were not mass “lynchings” but sentences pronounced by judicial authorities, in regimes based on an official policy of intolerance. Later, in the 1680s, came the witchcraft mania, which has gone down in history as a particularly vivid example of the dangers of fusing government and religion.

Out of the Puritans' exceptionalism—their belief that the Old World had succumbed to wickedness and they had been charged by God to save humanity by founding a new society in a new world—grew the American belief that American society was similarly divinely anointed. In 1845, journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase that would carry this doctrine forward across the continent when he declared “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government.” In the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson extended the manifest destiny concept to cover the globe. In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson determined that the United States, because of “the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power” and because it had “seen visions that other nations have not seen,” had become not only “a determining factor in the history of mankind” but “the light of the world.”

This conviction lives on today, and is directly traceable to the first Puritans. When the sons of those first leaders—Cotton Mather, Thomas Hutchinson, Jeremy Belknap, Thomas Prince—put their beliefs into print, their story found ready listeners. Of course, in this version of American beginnings, the tellers were English and the hearers were English. Subsequent generations were raised on the belief that America's origins were English, and that other traditions wove themselves into the fabric later. And history shows this, does it not? The thirteen original colonies were English colonies. The supporting evidence is overwhelming: the language we speak, our political traditions, many of our customs. This is all so obvious that we don't question it.

But it ought to be questioned. The original colonies were
not
all English, and the multiethnic makeup of the Manhattan colony is precisely the point. The fact that the Dutch once established a foothold in North America has been known all along, of course, but after noting it, the national myth of origin promptly dismisses it as irrelevant. It was small, it was short-lived, it was inconsequential. That wasn't
us,
the subtext runs, but someone else, an alien mix of peoples—with strange customs and a different language—who appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving only traces.

This is false. In the first place, while in population the colony was quickly outpaced by New England, it was hardly small. It covered the whole middle stretch of the East Coast and encompassed parts of five of what would be the original thirteen states. In terms of historical evidence—of written records—we have a steadily growing mountain of it, thanks to the translation and publication work now going on. But surely the most obvious reason to see the Dutch colony as significant is that we are not talking about a settlement planted in some obscure corner, in a hidden valley or on an inaccessible slope. We are talking about Manhattan. The strange thing would be if the settlers of the most geographically vital island on the continent, which would serve as the gateway between it and Europe, had
not
made an imprint on the nation that was to come.

Moving the story beyond the English takeover requires, first, realizing that “the Dutch” didn't go anywhere. The people from all over Europe who had built homes and raised families on Manhattan, on Long Island, away to the south along the Delaware River, and across the river from Manhattan in what the English first named “Albania” (
sic!
) but on second thought called New Jersey, had no reason to leave after Stuyvesant surrendered his colony. In fact, ships from the Dutch Republic, with their mixed loads of European settlers, kept arriving in New York Harbor. (Notaries in Amsterdam, blithely ignoring the political changeover, continued writing “New Netherland”—and sometimes “New York in New Netherland”—on immigration papers well into the 1680s.) And Richard Nicolls—who became the first governor of New York after accepting Stuyvesant's surrender—and his successors actually encouraged the traffic with their longtime foe. They even made a point of naming prominent Dutch merchants to their economic councils to keep the ties strong. That was because these first English governors quickly discovered they were in the awkward but titillating position of being even more keyed into world trade than London itself. With the English takeover, New York instantly became a unique spot on the globe: the only port city plugged directly into both of the world's two major trading empires. To sever connections to the great trading firms of Amsterdam would have been to strangle their long-sought possession just as it was burgeoning. The traders, bakers, brewers, barkeeps, smugglers, and scam-artists of the town soon realized the same thing the governors did, and felt the power of it: their island was no longer a Dutch settlement, and it wasn't really English either. It had its own trajectory.

The notion of an English takeover brings with it an image of starting afresh, of a house emptied of the possessions of the previous tenant and then filled with the completely different belongings of a new occupant. What happened instead was more in the nature of a cohabitation. Continuity between the Dutch and English eras was established at eight o'clock on Saturday morning, the sixth of September 1664. We can imagine a percussion of hooves on dry earth as twelve riders, having traveled north up the Highway and then east along the Bouwerie Road, came to a halt and dismounted before the façade of Peter Stuyvesant's farmhouse. Maybe they paused for a moment to breathe the country air: here were fields under cultivation and, just beyond, stands of forest alternating with salt marshes. (Today the same view takes in an Arab newsstand, a Yemenite Israeli restaurant, a pizza shop, a Japanese restaurant, and a Jewish deli.) Following precedent for such occasions, neither Stuyvesant nor Nicolls was present for the meeting that then took place, but each had chosen a slate of commissioners to negotiate the transfer of the colony. Stuyvesant's included four Dutchmen, one Englishman, and one Frenchman; Nicolls's representatives were two of his aides and four New Englanders, including John Winthrop.

We don't know details of the negotiations, which is a pity because there is the suggestion of a move on the part of Peter Stuyvesant that, if true, would amount to a kind of reversal in his long struggle with the colonists, and in particular with Adriaen van der Donck. Nicolls's private instructions from the king authorized him to inform the Dutch colonists only that “they shall continue to enjoy all their possessions (Forts only excepted) and the same freedome in trade with our other good subjects in those parts.” But Stuyvesant seems to have instructed his men to push for specific guarantees, and that is what they got. The end result of the negotiations, the so-called Articles of Capitulation, is a remarkable document. Packaged into it—and extended later by the New York City Charter—was a guarantee of rights unparalleled in any English colony. “The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their Consciences,” it read. People would be free to come and go as they liked. Trade would be unrestricted: by all means, “Dutch vessels may freely come hither.” Most remarkable, the political leaders of the colony would “continue as now they are,” provided they swore an oath of allegiance to the king, and in future “the Towne of Manhatans, shall choose Deputyes, and those Deputyes, shall have free Voyces in all Publique affaires.” Prefiguring the Bill of Rights, it even stipulated that “the Townesmen of the Manhatons shall not have any Souldier quartered upon them.”

It's possible that this unusual slate of freedoms was authorized by the Duke of York himself, who had declared he wanted the Manhattanites to have “immunities and privileges beyond what other parts of my territory doe enjoy.” If James was indeed the force behind these articles then he deserves to have his title attached to the name of the place. The thinking was that the inhabitants of the island should be allowed to maintain their way of life for the very good reason that the place worked. One has to keep in mind what an oddity the new city of New York was to people of the seventeenth century, with its variety of skin tones and languages and prayer styles coexisting side by side. The English leaders in Whitehall Palace were surely aware of this unusual characteristic of the island across the water, and they may have been confused by it, but at the same time they understood that it was part of what made the place function.

Then again, there is no record that the English offered the particular catalogue of guarantees that made their way into the Articles of Capitulation. It's logical to assume that the Dutch representatives, on Stuyvesant's orders, pushed for some of these. If so, there is an ironic twist here. Such a slate of individual rights and liberties, preserving the unique society that had come into being in the colony, was just what Van der Donck had fought for, and precisely what Stuyvesant had opposed during his seventeen years in office. Now, faced with the end of the West India Company's rule, which he had stoutly, mulishly, upheld, he seems to have made a turnaround. If his own brand of leadership couldn't save the place, then Van der Donck's vision—government commitments to support free trade, religious liberty, and a form of local political representation—afforded the best protection for its inhabitants in the uncertain future. If this is what Stuyvesant came to think in those final hours, the question is: why? Part of the answer may be that, despite the unending turmoil of his years as director of the colony, he cared about it and its people. Some of his colonists may have argued the proposition, but he apparently had a heart. The second part of the answer is that Stuyvesant understood power. If he had to give up the colony, better to divide it into channels and see that some of it flowed to the people of the colony than to have the English decide what courses it would follow. The result surely wasn't a reversal of character, not a complete break, but a bending that makes for an ironic end to Stuyvesant's long tussle with his colonists.

Maybe then Stuyvesant came away from the negotiations with some degree of satisfaction. But if so it was slim. He had lost his colony, and the directors of the West India Company rubbed salt in the wound by demanding that he return to Amsterdam to face charges of “criminal neglect” in surrendering. After a grim voyage on a ship the ironic appropriateness of whose name
—The Crossed Heart—
must have raised in him a low chuckle, Stuyvesant found himself in more or less the same position that Van der Donck had been in more than a decade earlier: making his case before the States General while the West India Company threw argument and invective at him (“neglect or treachery . . . scandalous surrender”), blocked his effort to return to America, and kept him exiled in Holland and separated from his family. As further indication that Stuyvesant had undergone something of a transformation with the loss of the colony, he included in his defense testimonials from some of the very Manhattanites who had once denounced his autocratic rule, who now declared that he had done everything in his power to keep the colony together.

The fact that Stuyvesant petitioned to be allowed to return can't be overlooked. Like Van der Donck, and yet by a very different route, he, too, had become an American. He may have packed his son off to seek his fortune in the Caribbean in the weeks after the English takeover (upon arrival in Curaçao, Balthasar Stuyvesant wrote home, inquiring about events and asking his cousin to “take care of the girls on the Manhatans” and “greet them all for me with a kiss”). But America was Stuyvesant's home, and eventually the States General granted him permission to return. He finished out his days as a resident of the rapidly growing settlement, a gentleman farmer, a grandfather, a man of renown always greeted by locals as “the General,” a historical curiosity to the incoming population. The capping irony of his life was that in surrendering the colony he had finally won himself the welcome of his fellow colonists. He had joined them at long last, but not as an inhabitant of New Netherland. He died—in 1672, at the age of sixty-two—a New Yorker.