Colin Woodard (11 page)

These characteristics—diversity, tolerance, upward mobility, and an overwhelming emphasis on private enterprise—have come to be identified with the United States, but they were really the legacy of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Indeed, many of the historic achievements of the American Revolution were accomplished by the Dutch nearly two centuries before the Battle of Lexington: a successful war of independence against an enormous monarchical empire (the kingdom of Spain), the declaration of an inborn human right to rebel against an oppressive government (the 1581 Act of Abjuration), and the creation of a kingless republic.

In the early 1600s, the Netherlands was the most modern and sophisticated country on Earth, producing art, laws, business practices, and institutions that became the standards for the rest of the Western world. They invented modern banking, creating at the Bank of Amsterdam the first clearinghouse for the disparate coins and currencies of the world, all exchangeable for Dutch florins, which became the preferred medium of international exchange. In 1602, they invented the global corporation with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, which soon had hundreds of ships, thousands of employees, and extensive operations in Indonesia, Japan, India, and southern Africa. Shareholders were drawn from all levels of society—wealthy merchants to maidservants and day laborers—fostering broad social support for the company's enterprises. Dutch oceangoing ships—10,000 of them in 1600—were of advanced design and dominated the shipping of northern Europe. By the time the Dutch West India Company founded New Amsterdam, the Netherlands had assumed a role in the world economy equivalent to that of the United States in the late twentieth century, setting the standards for international business, finance, and law.
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Uniquely among the people of seventeenth-century Europe, the Dutch were committed to free inquiry. Their universities were second to none, attracting thinkers from countries where the use of reason was curtailed. Among the émigré intellectuals living in Holland was René Descartes, the French philosopher who believed inquiry should be based on “good sense” rather than the authority of the Bible or the philosophers of antiquity. His ideas would form the basis of modern science, and they were first published in the Netherlands—as was Galileo's
Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences
(1638), a book that would never have been approved by the Pope's censors back in Italy and that effectively founded modern physics. Baruch Spinoza, an Amsterdamborn Sephardic Jew who had been excommunicated by his rabbi, published philosophical texts that have been credited with inspiring everything from biblical criticism to deep ecology. While in exile in Amsterdam, John Locke composed his
A Letter Concerning Toleration
(1689), which argued for a separation of church and state. Dutch scientists invented the telescope and microscope and used them to discover everything from the rings of Saturn to the existence of sperm cells. They were able to share their discoveries and ideas with the world because Dutch officials accepted the freedom of the press. Modern scholars have estimated that Dutch printers were responsible for half of all the books published in the seventeenth century. The Netherlands' tiny oasis of intellectual freedom squeezed between the North Sea and the Catholic Inquisition was the incubator for the modern world.
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The Dutch Republic had also become a haven for persecuted people across Europe. While heretics were being burned at the stake in Spain, the 1579 treaty that created the Netherlands stated that “everyone shall remain free in religion and . . . no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion.” While Jews were barred from entering France or England, thousands of Sephardic refugees from Spain and Portugal lived in Amsterdam, worshipped in the world's largest synagogue, and invested in the trading companies that founded New Netherland and the Dutch East Indies. Catholics, Mennonites, and Lutherans lived peaceably alongside the Calvinist majority. In 1607, the Englishman William Bradford and his band of Pilgrims arrived in Holland, where they were welcomed so long as they promised to “behave themselves honestly and submit to all the laws.” From Leiden—a university city where foreign refugees comprised a third of the population—the Pilgrims published pamphlets denouncing King Charles, an activity local officials refused to suppress, even after being requested to do so by the English monarch. But the Netherlands' religious pluralism wasn't for everyone, including the Pilgrims. “Many of their children,” Bradford explained, “were drawn away by evil examples,” by “manifold temptations” and “the great licentiousness of the youth of that country” and “into extravagant and dangerous courses” that got “the reins off their necks.” The Netherlands was too free; the Pilgrims would eventually flee to the American wilderness where they could exert stronger control over their children's upbringing.
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Relatively few people, however, wanted to leave the Netherlands for an uncertain life across the Atlantic. There were no armies of desperate paupers willing to be sold off as temporary slaves, no oppressed religious sects seeking a more tolerant environment to nurse their faith. New Netherland, like New France, would be challenged by a shortage of colonists. Those who did come tended to be either adventurers seeking their fortunes or foreigners with weak ties to the Netherlands who perhaps shared the Pilgrims' desire for a simpler, more controllable environment. In 1655, thirty-one years after its foundation, the colony still had only 2,000 residents. There were only 9,000 when the British took control in 1664, a quarter as many as were living in the younger colonies of New England.
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New Netherland's growth was also hindered by its decidedly corporate character. The Dutch founded the colony as a means to prevent the English from dominating the American continent, but they tried to run it as cheaply as possible. Already engaged in Asia, Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the government didn't wish to invest many resources in North America, a relatively low-priority project lacking the obvious economic returns of the spice, sugar, and tea trades. Instead, the republic's authorities outsourced the project to the private sector, turning governance of its North American colony over to the West India Company. The people of New Netherland would enjoy religious tolerance and considerable economic freedom, but they would not have a republican government. To the contrary, the West India Company would appoint its own governor and advisory council who would rule the colony without interference from any sort of elected body. All trade with the mother country had to be carried out on the company's ships, and it had a monopoly over the most profitable commodity, beaver furs. Even so, the company found it difficult to bear the costs of expanding the colony beyond the Manhattan area. To help, it offered wealthy investors the opportunity to create their own aristocratic estates on the manorial model farther up the Hudson Valley in exchange for transporting settlers to New Netherland. The would-be manor lords, or “patroons,” were granted county-sized parcels of land where they would serve as judge and jury over all civil and criminal proceedings, including capital crimes, literally giving them the power of life and death over their tenants. Most of these patroonships failed because few settlers were willing to become tenant farmers when there was free land for the taking elsewhere (the great Van Rensselaer estate near Albany being the one exception). The patroons themselves often became exceedingly wealthy, but usually through trade; with only a few exceptions, a landed aristocracy did not develop in New Netherland.
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The result was a colony as tolerant and diverse as the mother country. In 1654, a boatload of penniless Jewish war refugees from the Dutch colony of Brazil was met with hostility from the anti-Semitic governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who called them a “deceitful race” and tried to cast them from the colony. His superiors in Amsterdam overruled him, calling his plans “unreasonable and unfair” and pointing out that Jewish shareholders had invested a “large amount of capital” in their company. When Stuyvesant tried to limit Quaker immigration (“this new unheard of, abominable heresy”), the people of Flushing protested, writing that “the law of love, peace and liberty in the states extends to Jews, Turks [i.e., Muslims] and Egyptians [Gypsies], which is the glory of the outward state of Holland.” Company officials warned the bigoted governor to “not force people's consciences but allow every one to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbors, and does not oppose the government.” Tolerance, they noted, had served the mother country well and was vital to the success of its colonies. Today, it lies at the heart of what makes New York City possible.
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While relations with the Indians were generally fair and cordial, this was more the result of Dutch self-interest than of enlightened thinking. Unlike their European rivals on the eastern seaboard, the New Netherlanders remained outnumbered by the Indians throughout the period of Dutch rule. Offending the five tribes of the Iroquois nation would have been not only suicidal but also bad for business, as they were the source of most of New Amsterdam's fur supply. The weaker Algonquin-speaking tribes of the lower Hudson were another matter. Occupying prime farmland and, after 1640, possessed of few beaver, the Algonquins were an obstacle to the colony's expansion. Tensions over land provoked a series of bloody wars in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s, with terrible bloodshed on both sides. New Netherlanders didn't regard the Indians as servants of the devil—intermarriage was perfectly legal—but did not particularly value their presence beyond what it meant for the bottom line.
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The Dutch trait of tolerance was just that. They didn't celebrate diversity but
tolerated
it, because they knew the alternative was far worse. The Dutch people, much like those of Champlain's native Saintonge, had internalized the lessons of Europe's horrific (and ongoing) religious wars, in which many of their countrymen had perished. Insistence on conformity—cultural, religious, or otherwise—was self-defeating, causing strife and undermining trade and business. This begrudging acceptance of difference remains a hallmark of Greater New York City today, where it seems all the cultures, religions, and classes of the world are thrown together onto the same street, wrestling with one another for advantage in the markets of commerce, politics, and ideas.

The elite families that came to dominate the region in the late seventeenth century were founded by a very Dutch type, the self-made man. The founder of the Van Cortlandt dynasty arrived in New Amsterdam as a soldier, became a carpenter, trader, alderman, and, ultimately, the city's mayor. Frederick Philipse was a butcher when he arrived, worked as a pawnbroker and fur trader, and was able to attract the hand of a wealthy widow, Margaret de Vries, who managed the activities of her own merchant vessel; by 1679 he was the wealthiest man in New York, with a plantation in Barbados and a manor house in Yonkers. Jan Aertsen Van der Bilt arrived as an indentured servant in 1650; his third great-grandson, Cornelius—born on Staten Island—would make the “Vanderbilt” family one of the wealthiest in history. The first Van Burens were tenant farmers on the Rensselaers' manor; their sons became independent farmers, and their fifth great-grandson was president of the United States.
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New Netherland was primarily a commercial society in which much of the governing elite was associated with the Dutch West India Company. This company was no more moral than its English counterparts: if a commodity was profitable, it was pursued, including trade in captive humans. Indeed, full-on slavery was introduced to what is now the United States not by the gentlemen planters of Virginia or South Carolina but by the merchants of Manhattan. In 1626, while Africans in Tidewater were still being treated as indentured servants, the company imported eleven slaves to address its shortage of laborers. By 1639 there was a slave camp five miles north of the city, presumably providing workers to man the company's farms and docks. In 1655, the company slave ship
Witte Paert
arrived in New Amsterdam from West Africa with 300 slaves who were sold at public auction, increasing the city's population by 10 percent. In the last decade before the English conquest, New Amsterdam was rapidly evolving into North America's greatest slave market. Even though most slaves were transported to Tidewater, an estimated 20 percent of the city's population was of African origin by 1670. Not all were enslaved, however. Some were granted their freedom by their owners, and many company slaves eventually earned “half freedom,” which allowed them to marry, travel, and own property while paying a fixed lease on themselves. By the time New Amsterdam became New York, the city already had a multiracial character and multigenerational legacy of slavery; the latter institution would continue to be present in Greater New York right into the 1860s.
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Bolstered by the slave trade, New Netherland was beginning to flourish when a hostile English fleet arrived in August 1664. New Amsterdam was taken by surprise—the two countries were not then at war—and grossly outgunned, not only by the ships in the harbor but by Yankee rebels from eastern Long Island who marched to Brooklyn, ready to loot the city. During a tense standoff, the Dutch negotiated an unusual surrender agreement to ensure the survival of Dutch norms and values. New Netherlanders would keep their business and inheritance laws, property, churches, language, and even their local officials. They could continue to trade with the Netherlands, making New Amsterdam the only city in the world with simultaneous ties to both major trading empires. Most important, religious toleration was ensured. New Netherland would be renamed New York, but its culture carried on.
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