4 Stuyvesant 41- 56

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Stuy-vesant
B
ut the West India Company didn't abandon New
Netherland . Instead, reasoning that it could be
used to provision Brazil-and if Brazil were lost,
that it might be the onl y Dutch possession of consequence in the New 'World-the
company's directors resolved to make another attempt to get the colony on its feet.
Their first step was to find a man tough enough to ride herd on its turbulent inhabitants,
and the obvious choice was a company veteran named Petrus Stuyvesant.
Stuyvesant came from Friesland, in the northern Netherlands, where his father, a
Reformed clergyman, preached the stern , bellicose Calvinism of the Counter-Remon­
strant party and the Synod of Dort. He enrolled in the University of Franeker at the
age of twenty but was expelled two or three years later for seducing his landlord's
daughter. His father then sent him to Amsterdam, where he wangled a job with the West
India Company and began to make something of himself (as "Petrus" rather than
"Pieter" because the Latin form of his name showed that he had university training). In
1630 the company appointed young Stuyvesant its commercial agent on Fernando de
Noronha, a tiny island off the coast of Brazil used for operations against the mainland.
He was transferred to Pernambuco in 1635, and in 1638 the company moved him to
Curacao, now its American headquarters and principal naval base in the Caribbean. In
1642, barely thirty years old, he became acting governor of Curacao, Aruba, and
Bonaire.
Stuyvesant's principal assignment on Curacao was to organize an expedition
against the island of St . Martin. The Spanish had pried St. Martin away from the com­
pany some years earlier, and the Dutch sorely missed its valuable salt pans as well as its
proximity to Puerto Rico, which had almost fallen to company forces in 1625 and
remained an inviting target. In the early spring of 1644 Stuyvesant fell upon St. Martin
with twelve ships and over a thousand men. When the Spaniards refused to surrender,
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LENAPE COU NT RY AND NEW AMSTERDAM TO
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he laid siege. He failed to prevent supplies getting through from Puerto Rico, however,
and an enemy cannonball crushed his right leg. Surgeons amputated it just below the
knee. Four weeks later, in excruciating pain, he called off the assault. Later that year he
went home to the Netherlands' to recuperate and get fitted for a wooden leg. It was, he
always said, a sign that God had spared him for great things . The West India Company,
for its part, hailed Stuyvesant's peg-leg as a symbol of "Roman" sacrifice and named
him director-general of New Netherland at the salary of three thousand guilders per
year-fifty times the purchase price of Manhattan and twenty times the annual wages
of a company sailor or seaman,
While waiting for the States-General to confirm his appointment, Stuyvesant mar­
ried Judith Bay ard, the daughter of a Huguenot clergyman from Breda. He and his
bride left Amsterdam in December 1646. After a quick stop on Curacao, they reached
New Amsterdam in August [647 .
The place was a wreck. Kieft's "land-destroying and people-expelling wars with
the cruel barbarians," Stu yvesant later reported, had stripped the country of inhabi­
tants, obliterated all but a handful of villages, and driven many settlers to head for
hom e. Barely "250, or at farthest 300 men capable of bearing arms" remained in the
entire colony. Around seven hundred people, still fearful of reoccupying their farms,
cowered in makeshift huts around Fort Amsterdam, which "I found resembling more a
mole-hill than a fortress, without gates, the walls and bastions trodden underfoot by
men and cattle." Kieft himself was holed up in his quarters counting all the mone y he
'. " 1
I
i
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II
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1
I
Petru s Stuyvesan t. pain ted ill New Amsterdam by Hend rick
Co u tu rie r, ('.rGOo. (f) Collr -ct io r: oCT I", New- Yor k Hi st o ri cal
S oc iPly)
Stu yvesant
had made-reportedly mor e than four hundred thou sand guilders-and drinking him­
self into oblivion. The rest of New Amsterdam's besotted inhabitants, Stuyvesant said,
were "grown very wild and loose in their morals."
Certain that this was the work for which the Lord had spared his life on St . Martin,
the new director waded in with the same combination of ruthlessness and piety with
which the English Puritans were just then consolidating their power under Oliver
Cromwell. "I shall govern you as a father his children," he informed the townsfolk .
TOWN B UILDI NG
Uppermost in Stuyvesant's mind was the need to turn New Amsterdam into the kind of
community that would appeal to the Dutch taste for well-regulated urban life. For the
Netherlands (unlike, say, England) was a nation of town dwellers, known for their civic
consciousness and for the love of public tidiness that had led them to adopt the broom
as a symbol of national identity and purpose . No sooner had he arrived, therefore, than
Stuyvesant began to sweep New Amsterdam into shape with a succession of edicts,
decrees, and orders, They would continue to stream from his pen for the next seventeen
years-i-joine.i, after 1653, by a torrent of ordinances from the burgomasters he appoint­
ed to New Amsterdam's first municip al government.
On e of his earliest targets was the town's confounding jumble of lanes and foot­
paths. Stuyvesant named three surveyors to establish reliable property lines and layout
regular stre ets, some of which even received names. He ordered the removal of building
materials and other obstructions from the streets and imposed a speed limit on wagons
and carts. In 1658 the residents of Brouwer (Brewer) Street received permission to pave
their lane with cobblestones, creating New Amsterdam's first properly surfaced road­ way, now Stone Street.
In 1648 Stuyvesant declared war on New Amsterdam's pigs, cows, goats, and hors­ es. Residents had been accustomed to letting their animals forage freely through the
town ; while this helped remove accumulations of garbage it also damaged gardens and
orchards, and rooting swine had pretty well ruined the fort's sodded ramparts. Hence­ forth, Stuyve sant announced, the schout would seize wayward animals and dr ag th em to
a publ ic pound, and soldie rs were authorized to shoot on sight any hog grunting its way
toward the fort. What was mor e, residents were forbidden to throw "rubbish, filth,
ashes, oyster-shells, dead animal or anything like it" into the streets. Householders were
required to clean the road in front of their dwellings. Any priv y that released excrement
at ground level was banned , for it "not only creates a great stench and therefore great
inconvenience to the passers-by, but also makes the streets foul and unfit for use."
Butchers were warned not to discard offal in the streets. In r657 an ordinance estab­ lished five official sites for the dumping of garbage.
To guard again st the danger of fire-"most of the houses here in New Amsterdam
are built of wood and roofed with reeds," Stuyvesant explained, and "in some houses
the chimneys are of wood, which is very dangerous"-he prohibited further con struc­ tion of wooden chimneys; later, thatched roofs and haystacks were banned as well. Four
fire wardens were appointed to see that all chimneys in town were regularl y swept. The
wardens banned the use of fireplaces on dangerously windy days. After 1647 a fire cur­ few required that each evening all fires must be put out or covered up. A decade later the
burgomasters began to assemble a municipal firefighting apparatus. Two cordwainers
(shoemakers) were hired to produce 150 leather fire buckets, copied from a Dutch sam­
jjj]
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LENAP E CO UNTRY AND NEW AMSTERDAM TO
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S tuy vesant
N I E C W A MSTE RDAM UJn ; .\lU I', NJ GU\v IOIIX o P',: '.!·E YL,-I;" T r\i I~\ N
'L'
New Ams terd am , c. 1650- 53, copie d so often th at it has becom e kn own
the "Prototyp e View." U I1 th e far
left.ju st east of wha t is n ow Bowling Gre e n. s tands th e r.om pall)' grist mill, whil e to its right th e twin gahles or
the I\ ..formed chu rc h ris e above Ute walls oft he fort. At Sc hreyers Hook in the foregro und - ju st hcl ovv "h al
is now th e int ers ection of'Wh itr-hall an d Pearl stre ets -c- are th e com pany's wooden wh arf cra n... "".1 a ln-ruu
for weigh in g merch an dise (wh ich llIay also have served th e bu rgeo ning commun ity as a gallo ws). AI UI('
extre me rig ili. th e Ci ty Tavern faces th e East River shore on pre se n t-day Pearl S treet. neal' tile 11I'ad of
Coe nt ics S lip. (© Mu seum of th e City ofNew York)
ple, and after being painted with the city seal by glazier Evert Duyckinck- -the town's
first artist-they were placed at various street corners. The following year the town got
ladders and fire hooks. As conditions improved and a sense of permanence began to
take hold, Dutch brick "alla moderna"-some imported as ship's ballast , som e turned
out in local kilns-began to replace wood as a building material.
From the outset, th e company had supplied New Amsterdam with a succession of
midwives and z ieckent roosters (comforters of th e sick)- lay pastors who assisted
ord ained clergymen by reading Scripture and prayers to th e ill. A year before the arrival
of Governor Ki eft, it sent over the first form alIy tr ained physician, Dr. Johannes La
M ontagne, a Hug~enot refugee and graduate of the University of L eyden. The compa­
ny balked at the expense of a proper hospital, however, until Stuyvesant decided th at
unsanitary conditions impeded the recovery of sick slaves and soldiers billet ed in pri­
vate homes. In 1658, as a result, New Amsterdam got its first hospital under the direc­
tion of matron Hilletje Wilbruch (in the Netherlands such chari table institutions were
oft en run by women).
In 1649 and again in 1653, on th e other hand, Stu yvesant refused requests to build
an or phan asylum and appoint orphanmastcrs, claiming that the idea was inconsistent
with "the weak state of this just beginning city." L et the deacons of the ch urch "keep
their eyes open," he said, and look after any destitute children they saw. Matters
changed only after 1654, when com pany officials arranged with the burgomasters of
Amsterdam to send children from that city's orphan asylum to New Amsterdam, there
to be bound out as apprentices and servants. Now Stuyvesant not only rented a house to
lodge the first group- the town 's first public hom e for orphans-but, in 1656, estab­
lished an Orphan Masters' Court.
The company likewise resisted appe als to provide for the relief of the poor-a
responsibility, it said with some justice, that properly lay with religious institutions. In
1653, accordingly, N ew Amsterdam's Reformed Church opened an almshouse or "dea­
cons ' house" for the aged poor on what is now Beaver Street. For funding, the deacon s
relied on contributions collect ed in church and at weddings, where guests dropped
offerings in a poor box. In time, the system acquired a public character as the deacons
began to assist the needy in general and were assigned revenues raised from municipal
fines. In 1655 the first lottery took place in New Amst erdam as a fund-raising device for
the almshouse .
Company involvement expanded in 166I, after the deacons com plained th at needy
people fro n outlying villages had begun drifting into town for help, diminishing their
ability t .) care for New Amsterdam's own poor. Stuyvesant and his council enacted the
colony's first poor law, "to the end that the Lazy and Vagabond may as much as possible
be rebuked, and the really Poor the more assisted and cared for." The lawrequired every
village to take up weekly collections for its own poor. It also spe.cifically relieved th e
New Amsterdam Church from caring for nonresid ents who could not present a certifi­
cate of character and poverty from the deacon at their place of residence.
So, too, the company responded grudgingly when New Amsterdam's residents
asked for schools comparable to those in the N etherlands, where publicly funded educa­
tion was widely available, even to th e poor. The company had launched a common
sch ool in 1638, but it refused to build a schoolhouse, forcing teacher and pupils to find
temporary quarters. Residents complained repeatedly-in 1649 they appealed again for
con struction of a "public sch ool, with at least two good teachers"--but the company
still declined to spend th e money.
Townspeople peti tioned as well for a Latin school that would provide more
advanced instruction to the many children who could now read and write. The nearest
grammar school, they pointed out, was in Boston, 250 miles away, and without an estab­
lishment of its own, N ew Amsterdam was not likely to become a " place of great splen­
dor." In 1659 th e company belatedly agreed to help defray the expense of a teacher's
salary (but not erection of a school buildin g), and a certain Dominie Curtius, " late pro­
fessor in L ithuania," soon commenced classes with seventeen pupils. By 1664, with the
additional assistance of private teachers-the only schooling available to non-Dutch­
speaking children-probably a major ity of New Amsterdam's white population could
read and write. As in Holland, a larger number of wom en had received an education
than was common in other European countries or their colonies.
The company also resisted establishing a police force until 1658, when, partly
inspired by fears of Indian trouble, the magistrates organized a rattle watch. A capta in
and eight men re ceived twenty-four stivers a night (plus an allowance for firewood) to
walk around town and "ca ll out how late it is, at all corners of th e str eets from nine
O'Clock in the evening untill the reveille beat in th e morning." Given the absence of
streetlights, keeping a lookout for crime or fire wasn't the easiest of tasks. If the watch­
men discovered anything amiss, they were to use their rattles to rouse the populace.
Stu yvesant was, however, prepared to spend "a considerable amount of money" for
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LENAPE COUN' T RY AND NEW AM STERDAM TO
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"very proper and highly necessary public works"-by which he usually meant projects
that enhanced the town 's security, commerce, or moral order. He had masons patch up
the fort and oversaw renovations to the church . He established a post office and autho­
rized a municipal pier on the East River, at the foot of what is now Moore Street. Draw­
ing on Dutch skill in mastering marsh y terrains, he had a sullen cr eek on the site of
modern Broad Street deepened and widened into what became known as "the Ditch"­
and then had its sides planked up to make a little can al, rather grandly called the Heere
Gracht. The canal in the heart of town was both useful and, like the windmills, a com­
forting reminder of life in the Netherl ands. To pay for all this the director-general
placed "a reasonable excise and impo st on wines, brandy and liquors which are import­
ed from abroad."
Within a decade of his arr ival, and de spite bouts of official penny-pinching,
Stuyvesant's campaign to tidy up New Amsterdam helped spur its evolution from a
seedy, beleaguered trading post into a well-run Dutch town . His su ccess was hardly
total, and a conspicuous gap remained between prescription and practice: foraging
swine, wooden chimn eys, overflowing privies, smelly accumulations of garbage, and
tavern brawls continued to frustrate municipal authorities for years. Nor indeed would
he have been able to accomplish so much had he not also been able to resuscitate New
Amsterdam's economy.
A W ELL-RE GULATED EC ON O M Y
One of Stuyvesant's m ost pr essing concerns was to create more orderly markets in the
city. To combat widespread fraud in the sale and transfer of real estate-the transition
to private -ownership in New N etherland had given rise to a rather chaotic land mar­
ket-he announ ced th at all conveyances of real est ate would be invalid without his
approval and until prop erly recorded by the pr ovin cial secr etary. To regulate the sale of
local produce and ensur e an ad equate supply of food-the indispensable precondition
for municipal growth-Stuyvesant directed that a municipal mark et be held ever y
Monday along the Ea st River shore for "meat, bacon, butter, cheese, turn ips, r oots,
straw, and oth er products of the farm." Eight years later, in 1656, Saturday officially
became the day when " country people" m ight offer their goods and wares to town sfolk
"on the Beach or Strand, near the end of the Heere Gracht," and farmers from Brook­
lyn, Gowanus, and Bergen sold produce from th eir boats parked in the canal, their dick­
erin g with householders reminiscent of similar scenes in the Netherlands. Stuyvesant
also established a ten-day free market, to be held ever y St. Bartholomew's D ay (August
24). "Corresponding to the legal Amsterdam Fair, " it would be a time wh en ordinary
municipal regulations were su spended, prices would be subject onl y to the law of sup­
ply and demand , and no stranger could be arrested . In 1659, moreover, the burgomas­
ters made the space in fr ont of the fort available for a forty-day-long "market for fat and
lean cattle" each au tum n; soon the market would be housed in a new building with tiled
roof, later called the Broadway Shambles. Proclamations for the se events were issued in
E n glish as well as Dutch and attracted farmers and their herds from as far away as
Southampton.
Stuyvesant kept close watch on retail markets too. He required all persons who kept
a "private shop" in cellar or garret, or who carried "on any Trade by the small weight
an d m easure," to use "genuine Amsterdam ells, mea sures and weights" th at had been
in spected at th e fort . He was not, on the other hand, prepared to establish price con-
S tuyvesant
troI s. When town smen petitioned him in 1657 about the high cost of "Necessary com­
modities and household supplies"-charging that not only "Merchants, but also, conse­
qu ently, Shop-keepers, Trad esmen, Brewers, Bakers, Tapster s an d Grocers, make a
difference of 30 , 40 & 50 percent when they sell their wares"-he took no action .
In st ead, he banned "Scotch tr aders"-itinerant merchants from Holland or elsewhere
who began visiting the colony soon after the West India Company aban do n ed its
monopoly on trade in 1639. By selling the ir wares at steep discounts and paying outra­
geous sums for beaver pelts, these "destroyers of trade," as Stuyvesant called th em ,
could beggar the town's permanent residents. He th erefore prohibited anyone from
doing bu siness in New Amsterdam who had not built a "decent citizen dwelling" and
lived in it for three consecutive years. The directors of the West India Company were
avid supporters of free trade, however, and they overruled his ban on "Scotch traders."
Stuyvesant was prepared to impose stricter controls on artisans than on merchants,
esp ecially in such vital local enterprises as brewing, slaughtering, and baking. In the face
of repeated complaints abou t th e supp ly and quality of "black" bread-a mainstay of
(he local diet-he established the assize of bread customary in the Netherlands, order­
ing bak er s to produce only eight-, four-, or two-pound loaves, at fixed prices, using
un adulterated wh eat or rye flour "as it came from the mill." At the sam e time, to stimu­
late domestic produ ction, Stuyvesant handed ou t monopolies for the manufacture of
tile, bricks, potash, salt, and other products (it isn't clear how many su ch enterprises
were actually launched, or how long they survived). H ere again West India Company
officials reje cted policies the y thought might discourage prospective settlers. Interfer­
ence with the law of supply and demand, they explained, reduced "the expectation of
gain" that "is the greatest spur to induce people to go thither. " Similarly, Stuyvesant's
monopolies seemed "very pernicious and impracticable especially in a new coun try,
which begins onl y to de velop, and mu st be peopled and made prosperous by general
benefits and liberties to be granted to everybod y."
Soon, however, the burgomasters were issuing ordinances to the sam e effect. "All
bak ers , bre wers , shopkeepers and merchants" should " sell th eir goods at reasonable
prices to th e people," th ey announced in 1658. Porters, cartmen, tradesmen, and labor­
er s wer e told wh at they could charge for the ir services; outsiders or "stranger s" wer e
forbidden to offer their wares for sale except at stated tim es and places.
Now it was th e bakers who protested, openl y defying the ordinance requiring them
to sell coar se bread at fixed pri ces. Squeezed by the rising cost of grain, they routinely
sifted th eir flour with br an, short-weighted loaves, and surrep titiously produced more
of the higher-priced white bread and cakes than the law allowed. In 1661 the most frus­
tr ated bakers, led by Joost Teunissen, suspended work altogeth er on the grounds they
could no longer earn a living . The magistrates were sympathetic but unrelenting: th ey
warned the bak ers to resume pr oduction or face the los s of their licenses, raised th e
fines for substandard loaves, and appointed inspectors to check the weight and quality of
all bread sold within New Amsterdam. As the court told Reynier Willemsen, the public
interest always came first: to practice your trade in New Amsterdam, you must agre e to
"bake good and fit bread for the best possible accommodation of the community."
Stuyvesant did address one of the greatest concerns of the bakers, and of ever yone
else in the colony: the ste ady inflation of wampum, New Netherland's principal curren­
cy. Too much of it , Stuyvesant observed, wasn't the genuine article- "u npierced and
only half-finished, made of stone, bone, glas, shells, horn, nay even of wood, and bro­
ffil
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LE NAPE COU NT RY AND NEW AM STERDAM TO
1664
ken ." As always, bad money dro ve out the good , and people were complaining that
"they cannot go to market and buy any commodities, not even a little white bread or a
mug of beer, from the traders, bakers and tapsters." At the same time, the quantity of
wampum in cir culation was ri sing sharply. The New England colonies had recentl y
demonetized wampum, started to coin their own money, and begun to dump huge
quantities of wampum, good and bad, on their Dutch neighbors. Wages and prices in
New Amsterdam soared, and it was getting hard for anyone to make a living in the fur
tr ade .
Stuyvesant respond ed by ordering that all wampum used as money must hence­
forth be strung ("upon a wire, as hitherto it has usually been done") and that its value
would be fixed at the rate of six white or three black beads per stiver for high-quality
"merchantable" or "trade" wampum and eight white or four black beads per stiver for
inferior wampum . Shopkeepers and tradesmen who refused to accept the poorer grade,
if properly strung, faced stiff fines. Stuyvesant also pleaded with the company to ship
over enough hard coinage to serve the colony's needs or let it mint coins of its own, as
the English had done. N either he nor the company considered demonetizing wampum,
however, and it remained legal tender.
But Stuyves ant's most far-reaching suggestion for New Amsterdam's economic
revitalization came in response to events unfolding on the international scene. In 1648
th e Dutch finally won their long struggle for independence-a boon for the nation's
private merchants but a disaster for th e West India Company, which had always depend­
ed on war with Spain to justify its existence and generate income. Soon after Stuyvesant
arrived in New Amsterdam, th e company's prospects looked grimmer than ever. By
1649 it couldn't afford to laun ch a single ship for the defense of Brazil, and the price of
its shares on the Amsterdam Exchange had sunk to an all-time low.
As Brazil slipped from its grasp, the company instigated a momentous revolution in
th e Atlantic slave trade. During the 1630S and 1640S it had imported nearly thirty thou­
sand slaves from Africa to work the Brazilian sugar plantations. The increasing precari­
ou sness of th ose markets prompted the company to direct its attention elsewhere­
above all to the British and French West Indies, where white indentured servants had
been producin g tobacco on myriad small holdings. On one island after another, compa­
ny agents as well as independent Dutch mer chants not onl y convince d the planters to
adopt slave labor but loaned them money and equipment to make the switch to sugar,
several times m ore profitable than tobacco. By the early 1650S sugar was well on its way
to becoming th e principal crop of the Caribbean, large plantations were emerging as the
basic unit of pr oduction, and the company was funn eling ten s of thousand s of African
slaves every year into the region. (On Barbados, richest of the new sugar colonies, the
black population soared from under six thousand to better than eighty-two thou sand
between 1645 and 1667.) Dutch slavers had even started probing Virginia and Mary­
land, and there was good reason to believe that Chesapeake planters would soon follow
their West Indian counterparts in adopting slaver y.
It was in this context that it occurred to Stuyvesant and company strategists that
Ne w Amsterdam would make a convenien t entrepot for the slave trade in North Ameri­
ca and a sour ce of vital supplies for the plantation economies developing to the south . It
might also be profitable to establish a local market for slaves, perhaps even bring them
dire ctly from Angola, thus bolst erin g New Amsterdam's labor force, hastening the reoc­
cupation of its hinterlands, and securing th e entire colony against encroach men t from
Stuyv esant
Nieu Amsterdam, mid -seven teen th ce ntury.The figu res in this Du tch prin t-two
colonis ts, a woman holding a baske t of fruit an d a man with toba cco leaves, as well
as the bar e-chested slaves beh ind th em -are id en tical to th ose in a co ntem po raty
depiction of'Barbados, exce pt they are see n here with New Amste rda m in th e
background .Wh ich carne first is un known , b ut this version nicely con veys th e
West I ndia Compa ny's growing involvement with slavery and th e s lave trad e in
New Nethe rlan d, (P rint Collection . Miriam an d Ira D.Wallach Division ofArt,
P rints and Ph ot ographs.Th e New York Publ ic Lib rary As tor, Len ox an d T ilden
Fou ndati ons )
New England . Stuyvesant was one of the new polic y's most ardent supporters. H is tour
of duty on Curacao coincided with the construction there of vast pens capable of hold­
ing thousands of slaves at a time, and it was he who suggested the administrative unifi­
cation of Curacao with New Netherland.
The last Dutch stronghold in Brazil fell to th e Portuguese in 1654, and implemen­
tation of the new policy got und erway the very next year. A company ship, the Witt e
Paert (White H or se), anchored in the East River with nearly three hundred Guinea
slaves-the first specifically intended for local buyers-stowed bel ow decks in condi­
tions so cramped and filthy that residents must have been able to smell the ship from the
far side of town. Additional shipments arrived before the end of the decade , though the
real surge of imports did not come until after 166o, when som e four hundred slaves
were sold at public auction in the space of three or four years. By the mid-r otios New
Netherland had about seven hundred slaves all told, three hundred of whom were held
in New Amsterd am, far outnumbering its seventy-five or so fre e blacks and con stituting
over 20 percent of the town's total population.
That population had meanwhile grown rapidly, for at the same tim e it began
importing slaves, the West India Company had mounted its most ambitious campaign
yet to attract free colonists. It issued a more liberal set of Freedoms and Exemptions
and publi shed a barrage of promotional pamphlets pr aising New Netherland 's abun­
dance of rich, easily cultivated land .
ffil
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LENAPE COUNTRY :'. N D NEW AI\1STERDAj\l TO
1664
Although immigration figures are incomplete and inexact, it appears that the com­
pany's efforts-in tandem with Stuyvesant's reform program-succeeded admirably.
By the mid-r oyos New Netherland's population had climbed to perhaps thirty-five
hundred men, women, and children; a decade later, to nine thousand. Of that number,
some fifteen hundred lived in New Amsterdam alone, roughly three times as many as
Stuyvesant found fifteen years earlier. Only one-fourth of the town's three hundred
adult white males could claim have lived there longer thanhe had. The newcomers
were as diverse as ever, too: half of them hailed from Germany, England, France, and
the Scandinavian countries. By the mid-rboos, indeed, only 40 percent of New Nether­
land's population was actually Dutch, while r9 percent was German and rs percent
English. But these weren't the same kind of people who had been drawn to the colony
during its first twenty or thirty years. Seventy percent came over in family groups, many
of them couples in their early twenties with small children. Only one in four was a sin­
gle male, and for the first time a small but significant proportion, about 6 percent, were
single women. Better than half were farmers or skilled craftsmen (a few fishermen
showed up as well). Only one in eight was a laborer or servant. The rest were soldiers.
io
"PERSONS OF Q UALITY"
Travelers disembarking at the new East River pier in these years would have found
themselves near the heart of a bustling, cosmopolitan little seaport. Directly in front of
them, facing the river, lay the Strand, a two-block stretch of Paerle Straet (Pearl Street)
crowded with taverns, workshops, warehouses, cottages, and brick residences built in
th e Dutch manner, one or two stories tall, gable-ends out. Just upriver, one block to the
right, was the entrance to the Heere Gracht, now lined with houses almost up to what
is now Exchange Place. A block to the left stood Stuyvesant's new Great House, a "cost­
ly and handsome" two -story residence of whitewashed stone-later known as the
White Hall (whence the present Whitehall Street)-which boasted extensive gardens
and a private dock for the director-general's barge of state. From there it was a short
walk acros s the Marktvelt, past Brugh (Bridge), Brouwers (Brewers, now Stone), and
Marktvelt (Marketfield) streets-all den sely built up-to the parade-ground (now the
site of Bowling Green) at the front gate of Fort Amsterdam. The Heere Wegh (Broad­
way), which led north from the parade-ground, past the company's garden, was only
beginning to attract construction, though. Indeed most of the area beyond the upper
end of the Heere Gracht was still occupied by orchards, gardens, and grazing cows.
Although the physical transformation of New Amsterdam was remarkable enough,
the really striking change, less apparent to the casual observer, was the appearance of an
embryonic class system where once there had been only emplo yees of the West India
Company. At the top of this new social order stood a few dozen wealthy, socially estab­
lished, and politically well-connected private merchants from Holland. They were a
new phenomenon in town, so much so that in 1656 an embarrassed sch out had to ask
where he should jail "persons of quality, or of good name and character," who broke the
law. (He was told they could be held in a tavern, if they had the money to pay for their
lodgings.)
Some of these "persons of quality" were representatives of the handful of Dutch
commercial syndicates that dominated the colony's trade after the West India Company
abandoned its monopoly in r639 . Their business consisted for the most part of
exchanging a few basic items of local origin (furs , skins, tobacco, timber) for imported
S tuyvesant
essential trade goods (duffel cloth, liquor, gunpowder). Johannes Pietersen Verbrugge
and his cousin Johannes Gillissen Verbrugge came over for the firm of Gillis Verbrugge
and Company; Allard Anthony, a prosperous Amsterdam merch ant, served as New
Amsterdam agent for the firm of Pieter Gabry and Sons. Other important newcom­
ers-Abel de Wolff, Cornelis Steenwyck, Jan Baptiste van Rensselaer, and William
Beekman-enjoyed close family and professional ties with leading West India Company
stockholders, priv ate merchants, governm ent officials, and military men. Cornelis van
Werckhoven had served as governor of the Amsterdam poorhouse and was an officer in
th at city's burgher guard . Arent van Hattem was a nobleman and former alderman of
the city of Culemborg.
Women like Annetje Jans played a major part in the accumulation of wealth by this
nascent upper class. Jans was one of two daughters of Tryn Jonas, the West India Com­
pany's midwife. Around r630 Annerje married Roeloff Jansen, an Indian trader and
agricultural foreman up at Fort Orange. Thanks largely to her business acumen, the
cou ple prospered, and later they moved down to Manhattan, where the y occupied a
sixty-acre farm along the North River shore near the foot of what is now Jay Street .
Roeloff's sudden death in r636 left Annetje with several children to raise on her own but
with an attractive estate. Two years later, after getting him to sign a prenuptial agree­
ment that protected the interests of her children by Jansen, she married Dominie Boga­
rdus, moved into his new house near the fort, and leased out her North River farm. O ver
the next ten years, while bearing several more children, she parlayed the farm's income
into a modest real estate empire. After the dominie's death in 1647 she did not remarry
but continued to manage her various properties and the marriages of her numerous
children . By the time of her own death in r663 she had become the titular head of a
large and powerful clan that included affluent merchants and entrepreneurs (women as
well as men), influential magistrates, and the colony's only physician .
Annetje's younger sist er, Marritje, was equally gifted a~ making her way in the
world . Her first husband was the West Indi a Company's chief shipwright on Manhat­
tan, her second a carpenter turned farmer. When she married for the third and last time
it was to Govert Loockermans, a fur trader and landowner who was probably N ew Am­
sterdam's richest man at the time of their marriage in 1649. As it happened, Govert's
sister, Anneken, had married Oloff Stevens en van Cortlandt, one of the soldiers who
came over with Van Twiller. Although Oloff, like Govert, had a talent for making money
and knew the right people (Kieft helped him along with the job of comp any commis­
sary), it was Anneken who guided the family fortunes for thirty-odd years. She invested
heavily in real estate around New Amsterdam (acquiring along th e way a big farm in
what is now Greenwich Village), and she is said to have talked Oloff into opening a
lucrative brewery by the fort . Like her sisters-in-law Annetje and Marritje jans, she also
passed her business and social talents on to her children . One daughter, M aria, having
run the family brewery while still in her teens, married Jeremias van Rensselaer and ran
Rensselaerswyck by hers elf for fifteen years after his death. Two oth er daughters found
husbands in the Philipse and Schu yler families, while a son, Stephanus, would become
one of the colony's greatest landowners.
None of this would have seemed odd or unusual back in the Netherlands, where
strong and assertive Dutch wives were commonplace. In Dutch law, a unique mixture of
Roman and Germanic antecedents, women enjoyed far greater autonomy than they did
in the patriarchal En glish-s peaking world . A Dutch woman had recourse to legal
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51
•
LENAP E CO UNTRY AND N EW AMSTERDAM TO
1664
pr ocess and cou ld file claims ag ainst a man. She could own property and retain con trol
of it after marriage. With her husband's permission, she could borrow money, conduct
business and make contracts in her own name. Prenuptial agreements spelling out these
rights were mandator y, and the law allowed husbands and wives to prepare mutual wills
stipulating that the death of one would not deprive the oth er of t~eir comn~ on property.
A Dutch wife wasn't her husband's peer : the law gave him extensive au thority to control
her actions and allowed him, among other thin gs, to sell or bequeath their common
property without her consent. Even so, culturally as well as legally, his power was quali­
fied by the convi ction that a submissive wife was in compatible with a strong household . I
In ot her ways as well-and in sharp cont ras t to the bulk of New Am st erdam's
inhabitan ts-the members of thi s emerging municipal elit e were unmistakably Dutch
in taste, manner, and outlook. They commissioned comfortable bri ck and stone town­
houses whose st eeply pitched gables, high stoops, double door s, and manicured gardens
of roses , tulips, and lilies wouldn't have looked out of place in one of Am sterdam's bet­
ter nei ghborhoods . Those who could afford to followed Stuy vesan t's example in fur­
ni shing their hou ses, as did wealthy inhabitants of Amsterdam, with furniture of rare
woods, p aintings, fine ch ina , and heavy silver. Wives of wealthy merchants dressed in
the fashionable styles of Amsterdam and Paris, with dr esses sent over from Europe or
made locally by seamstress es. Their husbands' tas tes ran to silk or velvet breeches an
to coats flower ed with silver lace. Emulating the merchant nabobs of th e Dutch em pire
in the East Indies, the y sur roun ded themselves with servants and slaves. Many import­
ed spinets and vir ginals to satisfy their love of musi c. A few amassed modest libraries.
Jonas Br onck, for one, owned twenty printed books, eighteen pamphlets, and seventeen
manuscript books. Some even wrote themselves: Jacob Steendam, a man of substance
with interests in th e slave trade and local real estate, found time to compose poetry. His
"Com plaint of New Ams terdam to her Mother"-the city's first poem-presented th e
town-as-narrator describing ill treatment at maternal hands ("I, of Amsterd am, was
born,lEarly of her bre asts forlorn ," etc.).
They were highly sociable, too. The dir ector, the council, the burgomaster s, and th e
or p han master s frequently held me etings in taverns. Many com mercial bargains were
st r uck in th e taprooms where merchants gathered to exchange and discuss news. Jolli er
st ill were the drinking clubs who se members gathered at favorite taverns to eat and
drink. Arguably th e bes t-known establishment was the Stadts Herbergh or City Tav ern
on the East Ri ver. It s ground-floor taproom was always thronged with mer chants, sea
captains, and Indian trader s, and it was one of three places in town designat ed for th e
posting of official notices. Metje Wessels's tavern over on Pearl Street was n oted for its
terrapin feasts. On the Sabbath, after the sermon, many families dined at an inn, and
some publ icans provided bowling greens, where customers could play ninepins at all
tim es except during divine serv ice. The more vigorous enjo yed ice-skating , boat racing,
and anglin g parties, esp ecially up at an island in th e middle of the Kalch-hook pond
where the Lenapes once fished .
J . No te too tha t D utch name s were patr onymic but not patrilineal, meaning that the family lineages typical of
Eng land and Eng lish colonies didn 't ex ist in New Nether land. Thus, if Roeloff'jans had a daughter named Volc k­
je, she would be known as Volckje Roeloffse (or Roeloffsen). If she marri ed J an van H ocscn , she could keep the
name Rocloffsen or take the name J ansen (also spelled Jan sz or Jan se); it wouldn 't be unusual to find her listed bo th
ways in th e record s.
Stuyvesa nt
CO MMON F O LK
Below the mercantile elite of N ew Amsterdam's new soc ial hi erarch y wer e the white
work ing people of mod est me an s, not exclusi vely Dutch, who pro vided the grow ing
community with its basic goods and services. The backbone of this middling class con­
sisted of a hundred or so skilled craftsmen and their famili es, plu s a few dozen innkeep ­
ers, boardinghouse own ers, sur geons, and notarie s.
Onl y a few ar tisans still worked for the West India Company. Back in 1644, survey­
ing th e havoc wroug h t by Ki eft 's War, th e com pany's Bo ard of Accounts had recom­
mended slashin g the number of it s salari ed "officers and serv ants" thr oug ho u t New
N et herland . "Carpenter s, mas ons, smiths and such like ou ght to be discharged, " th e
board added, "and left to work for whomsoever will pay th em. " The directors evid ently
con cur red, for over the next ten or twent y years company em ployees becam e a distinct
and shr inking minority of th e colony's population. In N ew Am st erdam , cou n ting
ever yone from Stuyvesant down to th e poorest labo rer, only seventy- five of the to wn' s
adult white males, rou ghl y one in four, remained in the company's service after 1660.
M any form er employees stayed on and put down roots in Ne w Amste rdam . Abra­
ham Willemsen, for example, had been a seaman in the company's service wh o married
a local girl in 1647, petitioned th e court to release him from his obligations to the com­
pany, and settled in town as a carp enter. (It' s mor e th an likely th at he'd been moonlight­
ing as a carpenter for some time already. As Stuyvesant explained to his supe r iors in
1659, a commo n soldier employed by the company, "except on extraordinar y expedi ­
tions , has onl y to go on gu ard duty in his garr ison every third day" and th e rest of the
time endeavored "to earn elsewh ere something to suppleme nt his small pay and board­
money"-no better, in most cases, than thirty guild ers per month.)
By the early 1660s old- time rs like Willemsen had been joined by a new genera tion
of immigrant arti sans representing a wide variety of trades. Coopers made the barrels,
hogsh eds, pipes, and kegs in whi ch mer chants exp orted flour, salted meats, fish, and
beer. The town's bakers (ten of th em now) mad e br ead, spec ial cakes for festi vals and
weddings, and th e hard biscuits th at form ed a large part of the diet of sailo rs at sea.
Evert Du yckinck , the glazier and fire-bu cket ar tist, installed leaded glass, painted with
fam ily coats of arm s, in the wind ows of the chur ch at two and a half beaver skins a pan e.
Th er e were brewers like Isaac and Joannes Verveelen, who ran the famou s Red Li on
Brewery, carpenter s like Frederik Flipsen and Thomas L arnb ertsen, shoemaker s like
Coenraet ten Eyck, and tailors like H endrick K ip, along with twelve but chers, several
tan ners, three silversmiths, and assorted hatters and masons.
These middling pe ople of N ew Amsterdam tended to live in hou ses like th e on e
built for schoolmaster Roelantsen . Made entirely of wood, it was thirty feet long, eigh­
teen feet wide, an d eight feet high, with a small gar re t abo ve th e beams. The sing le
cham ber served as a combination dining room, living room, and bedroom, with a bu ilt­
in corner bedstead for the husband and wife (children slept on straw pallet s in the gar­
ret). It was illuminated by transom windows by day, hom emade candles at night. In the
rear was the fireplace, where M evrouw Roelantsen kept her iron pots and pans, and a
door to the back gard en, where she grew Indian corn. In quarters like these, furniture
was crude, books few, an d paintings absent. With the arrival of housew ives skill ed in
domestic arts, however, came an increase in the apparatus of domestic production­
vessels and impl ements for making butter, cheese, candles an d soap, for spinnin g and
51
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LENAP E COUNT RY AN D KEW A MSTER DAM TO
[664
dyeing yarn, and for cutting and stit ching imported duffle cloth int o articles of clothing.
These sh ir ts an d shifts, along with household linen, wer e wash ed and dried by th e
housewife or her young daughter, down by the grassy bank s of a pebbly brook that ran
from N assau Street to the East River, along what is today Maiden Lane.
The remainder of New Amsterdam's free white inhabitants com prised a diverse,
shifting lower class of laborers, cartmen, transient sailors, apprentices, soldiers, minor
West India Company functionaries, farmhands, and indentured servants (too man y of
th e latt er, Stuyvesant complained, were runaways) -the same kind of people who until
recently had made up the bulk of the colony's popul ation.
Popular culture in New Amsterdam centered on the town's always numerous tav­
erns , grogshops, and pothouses, wher e noisy, pipe-smoking crowds of men and women
drank, gambled, and played games like backgammon, handball, and bowling. (Women
were particularly fond of a pipe, Nica sius de Sill e observed in 1654. "Young and old ,
the y all smoke.") The Wooden Horse, a particular favorite of sailors and soldier s, was
located in a thatched cottage on the corner of Wh itehall and Stone streets. In its sm: II
single room, boastin g only one window and reeking of smoke and stale beer, men sat at
long wooden tables, dimly lit by flickering candles, drinking West Indian rum, French
brandy, and local br ews. The owner was a Fr enchman named Philip Gerard, who had
on ce been sentenced to ride the wooden horse in his days as a soldier for the West India
Company.
Places like the Wooden H orse tended to treat the nine o' clock closing law casually,
and their patrons often disturbed the peace with drunken brawls, som etimes involving
knives, cutlasses, and pikes. J an Peeck, a cantankerous old Indian trader, lost his license
for entertain in g " disorderly pe ople" in his taproom near Smits Vly on the East River
s hor e. (H is eq ually troublesom e wife would be banished from New Am sterdam ten
years later for selling liqu or to the Indians.)
The up surge of immigration to Ne w N etherland during the mid- I 650S an d earl y
1660s was accompanied by an exuberant revival of holidays long associated with popu­
lar cultur e in Europe. For centuries, peasants and craftsmen, soldiers and sailors had
periodicall y thrown restraint to the winds and indulged th emselves with feasts, games,
mock courts, rac es, proce ssions, and wild merrymakin g that inverted the everyday order
of societ y. A King of Mi srule presided over Twelfth N ight festiviti es, maidens chased
young m en about the streets on St. Valentine's Da y, servants froli cked in the market on
Pinkster (Whitsunday or Pentecost to the En glish), and whole villages cavorted about
maypoles on May Da y. In the N etherlands, the Shrove Tuesday festivities, marking the
end of Carnival and th e beginning of Lent, involved Rabel aisian consumption of meat
and drink (hence M ardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday") .
By the end of Stuyvesant's first decade in office, the people of New Amsterdam
were celebra ting the se and other volksvermaken or " folk pleasures" with gusto.Just as in
th e N etherlands, they greeted Pinkster with singing and dancing while a "Queen of the
Feast" or "flower bride," dressed in white and holding a May-branch in her hand, led a
procession of m aidens through the streets of the town. In r 663 the tranquility of
Harlem was shattered by young men "shouting, blowing horns, etc." around a maypole.
Shrove Tuesday, too, was now routinely commemorated by the traditional bacch anal of
eating and drinking whil e, as in Europe, young men dressed up like women and paraded
about the streets. Another traditional bit of Shrove Tuesday fun , likewise resurrected
in N ew N etherland, was Pulling the Goose. In this rough country sport, a live bird,
Stuyvesant
its neck smeare d with oil or soap , was tied by a r ope betw een two poles: contes tants
on horseback then rode at full gallop toward the tethere d goose and tr ied to yank off
its head.
,
THE NEGR O E S LOT
The bottom rungs of N ew Amsterdam society were occupi ed by Africans, thou gh th eir
lives and working conditions varied widely. Most still belon ged to the West India Com­ pan y and worked on im portant agricultural, public, and mil itary projects. In 1660
Stuyves ant requested additional slaves be sent u p from Curacao for company us e:
"They ought to be stout and strong fellows," he explained, "fit for immediate employ­
ment on this fortress and oth er works; also, if required, in war against the wild barbar­
ians, either to pursue them when retreating, or else to carry some of the soldiers ' bag­
gage." Four years later he rep orted that he had utilized a recent shipment of slaves to
harv est food, chop wood, and repair oxcarts.
In time, because of th e company's chr onic unwillingn ess to spend mone y, its slaves
were also trained for more highly skilled tasks. In r657 Stuyvesant appealed to th e
dire ctors in Amsterd am to send him some ship's carpenters , onl y to be told that Dutch
wor kmen were far too expen sive and th at car pentry, bri cklaying , and other trades
"ought to be taught to the N egroes as it was formerly done in Brazil." He app ear s to
have followed orders, inasmuch as contemporary deeds begin referring to Negro caulk­
ers, blacksmiths , and carpente rs.
Other of N ew Amsterdam's slaves worked in private households , eith er as domestic
servants or agri cultural labor ers . S tuyvesant himself acquired forty slaves, far more
than anyone else in the colony; some were domestics, the rest labored in the fields and
orchards of his pri vate bouwerie, a coun try estate lying between what are now 5th and
zoth streets, east of Fourth Avenue all the way to th e East River-a "place of relaxation
Th e Peasa nt D ance. hy Pi eter Bruegticl the Elder. Aft er ]650. su ch SCCII CS of lu n and
fro lic wer e be com ing more common in New Amsterdam and neig hboring villages. (Art
Resum ee, I II (' .! Kun sth isto risch es MU Sl · UIl l. Vien na )
55
56
IQ
LENAYE COlJNTRY AND NEW AMSTERDAJ'\iI TO
r664
and pleasure" (as one admiring visitor described it) that Stuyvesant acquired by taking
over, either by purchase or fiat, several of the "Negro Lots" or "Negroes' Farms" the
West India Company had previously set aside for former slaves. (Nicholas Bayard, his
son-in-law, combined six others into a two-hundred-acre farm nearby.) Most privately
owned slaves in the colony, however, belonged to farm families in outlying villages like
Flatbush, where they and th eir masters often slept in the same houses, ate the same
food, and worked side by side in the fields. Overall, they were predominantly rnale­
roughly 130 men for every hundred women.
Some Africans were free because the company continued with its half-freedom pol­
icy of conditional manumissions. In 1662 three slave women were liberated, on condi­
tion that one of them do housework for the director-general each week. The next year
Mayken, an old and sickly black woman, was granted outright freedom by the West
India Company, "she having served as a slave since the year 1628." M ayken was almost
certainly one of the original three females imported from Angola thirty-five years earli­
er, whom Dominie Michaelius had accounted "lazy and useless trash ."
Disparities in condition and location made it difficult for Africans in New Amster­
dam to establish communities of culture, yet not impossible. Men and women formed
families against great odds-there were twenty-six black marriages recorded in t i e
Dutch Reformed Church between 1641 and 1664-although the dominies were
increasingly reluctant to baptize either slaves or their children. In 1664 Dominic Henri­
cus Selyn s informed the Classis of Amsterdam that he and his colleagues had halted the
latter practice altogether- "d ue to their lack of knowledge and faith , and because of
their worldly aims. The parents wanted nothing else than to deliver their children from
bodily slavery, without striving for Christian virtues." In some instances couples adopt­
ed orphans, gathering them into kin units at great cost. In 166 I free blacks Emanuel
Pietersen and his wife, Dorothy Angola, sought freedom "for a lad named Anthony
Angola, whom they adopted when an infant and have since reared and educated." Their
petition was gr anted, after the y paid the West India Company three hundred guilders
(five times the original purchase price of Manhattan).