The Island at the Center of the World (40 page)

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.
He
is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great
Alma Mater.
Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

What we find beneath the “Middle Colonies” label, the force that gave rise to Crèvecoeur's observation, is the Dutch colony. There were other forces at work, too: the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island colonies both became known for religious toleration. But the influence of the Dutch colony would be wide ranging. Such influence can't be proved deductively, but evidence to support it comes in many forms. There is, first, the simple fact that the very part of America in which multiethnic society first formed was also the region where the Dutch colony had been.

We can support the connection by looking at other legacies from the colony that also took root first in this region. An example: after Richard Nicolls took charge of New York and had become familiar with the Dutch customs he had allowed the inhabitants to maintain, he found one political office particularly useful. The colony had a law officer whose job was to prosecute cases on behalf of the government. The English system had no such officer; at the time, the victim of a crime, or his or her relative, was responsible for seeking justice. The Dutch official—called a
schout—
allowed the justice system to move more efficiently. Nicolls adopted it—the English records at first took to calling this law man the “scout”—and it spread through the other colonies. The job eventually became known as district attorney, and remains a fixture of local government in America. (It happens that one of the first “district attorneys” in America was Adriaen van der Donck, whose original posting was as
schout
of the colony of Rensselaerswyck.) In 1975, Yale law professor A. J. Reiss noted, in an article on the history of the office, “The first appearance of public prosecutors in the United States occurred when the Dutch founded the colony of New Netherland,” that “[h]istorical evidence makes it abundantly clear that when this area was taken by the Duke of York in surrender in 1664 . . . the Dutch system of public prosecution was maintained where it had been firmly established by then,” and that “[h]istorical records demonstrate that the ‘Schout' was established within five of the 13 original colonies that became the states of the United States of America.”

There are many other telltale legacies—customs and traditions and usages that spread, along with the phenomenon of American pluralism, from what was once Dutch territory. It was in the Dutch colony that an American worker first complained about “the boss.” It was here that American children first longed for the arrival of “St. a Claus” (as
Rivington's New York Gazetteer
spelled it in the early 1770s, noting that the saint's feast day would be celebrated “by the descendants of the ancient Dutch families, with their usual festivities”). It was here that Americans first ate “cookies” and “cole slaw.” Of course, nothing is more meaningless than cookies; the reason for mentioning such items is their ubiquity. The blob of slaw on every blue plate special served from the Depression to the Eisenhower era, riding alongside the baked beans at numberless barbecues, packed into a little plastic tub to offset the grease in a fast-food burgers-and-fries meal, ignored or absently consumed, is a modest clue to the pervasive presence of the Manhattan colony. It is a tip-off that in considering its contribution we should be looking not in obscure corners but at what is right in front of us. We won't find it in the form of Dutch pipestems buried in backyards, but in any town's telephone book, where Singh, Singer, Singleton, and Sinkiewicz fall on the same page.

Many inheritances are hard to spot because in the mix and rumble of the centuries they have become layered, altered, embedded in other, larger systems. This stands to reason: we couldn't expect much to last three centuries in pristine form. Rather, we would expect that, if a thing was useful or desirable, it would become part of the blend. Santa Claus may be the perfect example of this. It was a slim fellow in a bishop's hat whose arrival the children of Dutch Manhattan looked forward to on Saint Nicholas Eve; typically, he left treats in their shoes, but occasionally (as in a late-century drawing, “The St. Nicholas Celebration,” by Cornelis Dusart), in stockings hung from the mantel. As the non-Dutch families adopted him and he gained momentum, bits of other cultural traditions stuck to the ritual; the media (Thomas Nast's cartoons in
Harper's Weekly
plumped the saint and whitened his beard) and corporate advertising (the white-trimmed red suit came compliments of Coca-Cola's iconic ad campaign in the 1930s) refined the image, and the result is a complicated collage, thoroughly American, and rooted in the Manhattan of Stuyvesant and Van der Donck.

The influence of the colony can also be spotted rippling through the layers of political history. After Van der Donck's political crusade helped cement the unique features of the Dutch colony's society, Nicolls's Articles of Capitulation guaranteed that the English would preserve the rights and privileges the residents had come to expect. When in 1686 the New York City Charter, considered by some to be the launch point of the modern city, was signed, it not only made plain those rights and privileges but was clear about their origins, acknowledging that the citizens of the “ancient City . . . Enjoyed . . . sundry Rights Libertyes priviledges [and] ffranchises” that derived not only from its English rulers but from the “Governours Directors Generalls, and Commanders in Chiefe of the Nether Dutch Nation.”

You can move forward from this charter, and from the rowdy, argumentative, still mostly Dutch-speaking society that stood behind it, straight into the revolutionary period and beyond. In Philadelphia in 1787, New York's delegation to the Constitutional Convention was among those least enamored of a document that would give so much power to the federal government. Meeting later in Albany, the state's leaders decided that they could only ratify the Constitution if, among other things, a bill of specific individual rights were attached to it. The names of the twenty-six men who insisted on this were about half English and half Dutch; the new state was already famously contentious, and its pluralistic delegation had a long history of struggling for individual rights to account for its stubbornness.

Of course, when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, no one looked to the Dutch-led colony that had held sway a century before as having a hand in it. There had been no written history of the Dutch period—it would be decades before the documents detailing Van der Donck's mission on behalf of the rights of Manhattanites would be unearthed.

The pathways along which the colony's influence spread are also part of the evidence for its lasting importance. Starting from their settlements on the Delaware River, the “forest Finns” literally cleared a path down the Appalachian valleys, along which Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, and other pioneers traveled, and by the way added the log cabin to America's cultural legacy. But the main route of expansion was to the north. The island of Manhattan became the gateway to America for generations of immigrants, and it was because of this that the legacy of the Dutch colony got amplified. Stepping off the boat, the individuals in those huddled masses, arriving from Naples or Hamburg or Le Havre or Liverpool, breathed in an atmosphere utterly different from what they had left. The smell in the air was one they had hoped to find, a complicated, heady perfume. It had in it the big, muscular, fresh odors that came sweeping off the continent, full of green promise. It was sharpened by the oily tang of industry and good sweat, accented with kielbasa and pasta sauce, horse dung and sawdust and slaughterhouse. The newcomers soaked it in, this odor of promise and of a reblending of peoples into something new, and they called it American. Then they fanned out, and brought it with them. Up the Hudson they went, which was to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what the Mississippi would be to later eras: the lifeline, the broad highway of commerce and travel.

At Albany, once the site of the fur-trading post of Fort Orange, they cut westward, into the Mohawk River valley. There, in the early nineteenth century, industrial-age politicians discovered what Dutch pioneers had known two centuries earlier: that promise and expansion lay westward along this valley. In 1825, after eight years of stupendous manual labor, a three-hundred-and-sixty-mile trench was carved through the wilderness that Harmen Myndersz van den Bogaert had explored on his perilous foray into Iroquois country during the harsh winter of 1634. How the Erie Canal changed the nation is a basic piece of American history. It opened the interior of the continent, swelled the population, shifted the balance from rural to urban, helped make America an industrial power. America was transformed, and the promise that the first Manhattanites saw in their island came roaring into reality. The stream of people and goods into Manhattan became a flood. From across Europe and around the world they funneled into the island, then up the river, and so westward along the canal. And with the pipeline of commerce extending into the very heart of the continent, crossroads settlements transformed into cities, lights winking on in the dusk of the endless landscape, each with its cluster of founding ethnic groups: Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Chicago, Green Bay.

That's why the story of the original Manhattan colony matters. Its impact is so diffuse that it would be perilous to declare and define it too concretely, so here is a modest attempt: it helped set the whole thing in motion. Certainly this isn't evident on the surface: the little village that Stuyvesant lorded over bore no resemblance to the metropolis, let alone the vast nation that exploded into existence to its left, any more than an acorn does to an oak. But the original settlement contributed, and is still there, mixed into the being of the island and the nation.

The legacy of the people who settled Manhattan Island rides below the level of myth and politics. They reshuffled the categories by which people had long lived, created a society with more open spaces, in which the rungs of the ladder were reachable by nearly everyone. They didn't exactly mean to do these things. There was a state policy of tolerance, which helped shape the colony, but there was also ignorance of it and refusal to adhere to it. It was a society that was both haphazard and planned. It didn't have a neat outline of the sort that spawned the Puritan myth. Then again, myths have a downside: the shining “city on a hill” became Manifest Destiny, and morphs easily into a cheap battle cry. The first Manhattanites didn't arrive with lofty ideals. They came—whether as farmer, tanner, prostitute, wheelwright, barmaid, brewer, or trader—because there was a hope for a better life. There was a distinct messiness to the place they created. But it was very real, and in a way, very modern.

It wasn't until 1908 that a Jewish immigrant, intoxicated by the possibilities, the strength, the progressiveness, the hope for breaking down old hatreds that he found in America's mixed society, wrote a play, which ran for 136 weeks (on Broadway, naturally) that he called
The Melting Pot.
The phrase entered the lexicon as recently as that, but Israel Zangwill was describing something that had been stewing for a long time. Of course, terms like “melting pot” and “pluralism” have long since become weighted and contentious. Should immigrants leave their old ethnicities behind or preserve them and remain in some way apart from the main culture? Instantly, the question becomes “What is an American?” Or, for that matter, “Who is English?” “Who is a German?” Or an Italian, an Israeli, or a Turk. In a world of pluralistic societies, the debate is universal.

But the strength in the mixing-of-cultures idea was undeniable for a long time. And the essence of it, the idea of tolerance, may matter more now than ever. The terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and shook the world in September of 2001 struck not only the center of American financial might but also the few square acres of lower Manhattan that was once called New Amsterdam. The fact that the one grew out of the other ought to be proof that the idea of tolerance remains a thing of power. With any luck, it will also remain the mortar of progressive society. Developing it, showing that it could work, was the messy genius of the first Manhattanites.

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*1 For the record, Hudson was right. Roald Amundsen finally achieved the northwest passage in 1906, but by then it was a matter of personal adventure, the commercial possibilities of a northern route to Asia having been largely extinguished by the brutal realities of the voyage.
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*2 In 1924, A. J. F. van Laer, Charles Gehring's predecessor as translator of the Dutch archives, produced a limited edition publication of these records,
Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624–1626, in the Henry E. Huntington Library.
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*3 Broadway does not follow the precise course of the Indian trail, as some histories would have it. To follow the Wickquasgeck trail today, one would take Broadway north from the Customs House, jog eastward along Park Row, then follow the Bowery to Twenty-third Street. From there, the trail snaked up the east side of the island. It crossed westward through the top of Central Park; the paths of Broadway and the Wickquasgeck trail converge again at the top of the island. The trail continued into the Bronx; Route 9 follows it northward.
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*4 Presumably, he was born something like John Lamp; like many foreign residents of the Dutch colony, he had his name “Batavianized.”
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*5 Properly speaking, Holland referred not to the Dutch Republic but to its chief province, with Amsterdam as its hub; the other six provinces in the seventeenth-century state were Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Zeeland, Friesland, and Groningen.
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*6 Tulip mania reached its height just at the time Van der Donck began his studies. The year before, in exchange for a single tulip bulb, a man paid four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, 160 bushels of wheat, 320 bushels of rye, four casks of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, two oxheads of wine, a silver pitcher, and a bed. The government of the province of Holland was forced to pass laws to end the speculation before it ruined the economy.
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*7 The “turtle” in Turtle Bay—the neighborhood that occupies that area—is a corruption of the Dutch word
deutel,
or
dowel;
the bay—long since filled in—was so named because of its shape.
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*8 I am deeply indebted to Diederik Willem Goedhuys for the new translation he made of the
Description
in 1991, a vast improvement on the Johnson translation that unfortunately remains unpublished; to Ada Louise Van Gastel, whose 1985 doctoral dissertation, “Adriaen van der Donck, New Netherland, and America,” outlined for me many of the problems with the earlier translation; and to Hanny Veenendaal of the Netherlands Center in New York City, who helped me to translate afresh some passages of the
Description.
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*9 My method of determining Van der Donck's involvement in these documents that have not heretofore been associated with him is fairly straightforward. The population of the colony was small. As both Dr. Gehring and Dr. Frijhoff argue, Van der Donck was the only jurist, and thus the only person capable of framing his arguments with Latin legalisms and of constructing elaborate “interrogatories.” I simply broke out of the archives all documents from this period that had such features. I then took a step that I hoped would serve as a check on my surmises. I had noted in some of the documents known to have been written by Van der Donck the repeated use of an unusual word:
American.
In the 1600s, the noun, applied to a person, was very rare. European colonists didn't use it in reference to themselves: the Dutch colonists considered themselves “New Netherlanders,” the English to the north were “New Englanders,” and those to the south thought of themselves as “Virginians.” Only very occasionally does one see “American” used in the period, when it refers to Indians. The first recorded usage in English is in 1578, in a report about Martin Frobisher's voyage to Canada: “the Americans . . . which dwell under the equinoctiall line.” The usage is even rarer in Dutch writing of the period. The word typically employed by the Dutch to refer to the Indians was
wilden,
meaning natives or, as Van der Donck himself wrote, people who “seemed to be wild and strangers to the Christian religion.” Van der Donck used that word, or else
naturellen,
people of nature, but he also, in a few places, referred to the Indians as Americans. Having noticed the word also used in a few instances in the legal documents I suspected were written by Van der Donck, I then did a search of the entire corpus of political documents related to the Manhattan-based colony that were retrieved from the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. I found nine occurrences of the term “American,” all referring to Indians, and all nine in documents that either have Van der Donck's name attached as the author or that Dr. Frijhoff and/or I had separately concluded were the work of Van der Donck. With uncanny appropriateness, then,
American,
turns out to be a clue to the identity of Adriaen van der Donck.
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*10 The couple traveled south to Breda to be married. The record in the Walloon (French-speaking) church for August 13, 1645, reads: “Mons. Pierre Stuyvesant, J. H. directeur de la part de la Compagni de Oestinde en Nieu Nederland et Judith Bayard jeune fille de Mons. Bayard, en sa vie pasteur de l'Eglise Franc, a Breda.”
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*11 Note the use of
Americans
in reference to the Indians—.
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†12 I.e., the Mahicans.
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*13 I.e., David de Vries.
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*14 Technically, Schuylkill River is a redundancy since
kill
means river or waterway.
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*15 The colors of the Dutch flag of the seventeenth century were adopted in 1915 by the city of New York in recognition of its origins. There is thus a bizarrely direct connection between the colors flown by Dutch privateers cruising for booty on the Spanish Main three hundred and fifty years ago and the jerseys worn today by the New York Mets and the New York Knicks.
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*16 The Plowden affair would not end here, but would go on and on, as a kind of Pythonesque subplot to American colonial history. In 1784, amid the confusion at the end of the Revolutionary War, an Englishman named Charles Varlo appeared in the new country brandishing Plowden's charter, which he had somehow purchased. Varlo distributed handbills to various Americans detailing his rights to a significant portion of their newly won land, and apparently delivered an address in several places “to the people of New Albion.” We can only imagine his surprise when he reached St. Mary's, Maryland, which was held to be the seat of New Albion, and found there a man named Edmund Plowden—a descendant of the original, who had kept his ancestor's dream alive and traveled to the New World to claim his palatinate. This Plowden settled at an estate in Maryland called Bushwood, and Plowdens continued to live there for many generations. Charles Varlo returned to England and published his memoirs, which he called
Floating Ideas of Nature.
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*17 In the small world of the Dutch colony, Vos would later require legal services, and would hire Adriaen van der Donck to represent him.
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*18 Officially, the Board represented the residents of the villages of New Amsterdam, Breuckelen (later Brooklyn), New Amersfoort (the future Flatlands section of Brooklyn), and Pavonia (Jersey City, New Jersey).
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*19 The Netherlands is still renowned for its tobacco connoisseurship, and, not entirely coincidentally, one of the major Dutch cigarette brands is called Peter Stuyvesant.
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*20 The site of the supposed Van der Donck house is just behind the gardens of the Van Cortlandt House. The Indian village, which was called
Mosholu
or
Keskeskick,
was located at what is now the Parade Ground.
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†21 There are several references in the records to settlers using Indian-made canoes, and someone who had spent much time among them would have recognized their convenience.
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*22 There was also a linguistic irony in Pauw's drab appearance, since his last name meant “peacock.”
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*23 The finished building remains a tourist site, but its town hall function ended when it was converted into a palace in the nineteenth century by Louis Napoleon, so that it is now known as the Royal Palace.
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*24 The Gevangenpoort still stands and is today a museum of torture and punishment.
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*25 Where in England, and the English colonies, property was passed down to the eldest son, in the Dutch system it passed to all children, regardless of gender.
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*26Here he is referring to all the provinces traditionally considered by the Dutch as part of their domain, including those that did not become part of the republic but would one day form the nation of Belgium.
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*27 As a nice metaphor for the way history has muddled Manhattan's Dutch period, Stuyvesant's tombstone, embedded in the foundation of the Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, manages to get both his age and title wrong.
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*28 “And now latelie in a ship belonging to Newhauen, as bought by Mr. Goodyeare, yow haue sent armed men, & (without lycence, not soe-much as first acquainting any of the magistrates of this Jurisdiction with the cause or grownds thereof) ceised a shipp within our harbour . . .”
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*29 The fort lives on—sort of—in the name of Huyshope Avenue in downtown Hartford.
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*30 The ship's manifest listing Van der Donck's supplies still exists, and gives a nice snapshot of a settler's needs: whetstones, millstones, baskets of nails, “farmer's stockings,” shoes, linen, “coarse woolen cloth,” hats and caps, kettles, ribbons, thread, books and paper, “2 boxes and 2 barrels of steel,” “8 casks of bird lime,” “10 anckers of brandy,” “32 cakes of soap,” and a whopping “300 lbs. of pepper and 20 lb. cinnamon,” suggesting Van der Donck hoped to do some trading in spices on Manhattan.
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*31 The festivities were held in the Museum of the American Indian, on the site of the fort. A sort of flattened tribute to the original city hall exists in the form of a brick outline of its location on the sidewalk at the corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Slip.
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*32 Yes, Springsteen is a New Jersey icon, but New Jersey was after all part of the Dutch colony, and from that time to now at the center of Manhattan's sphere of influence. And, while we're at it, Springsteens were among the original Dutch settlers of New Netherland.
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*33 A bit of anecdotal support: when I told my Swedish-Norwegian father-in-law—who owns a log cabin in the traditionally Scandinavian country of northern Minnesota—about the Finns as the originators of the American log cabin, his response was: “Around here everyone knows that if you want a log cabin built, you call a Finn.”
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