New York at War (5 page)

The explosion came in 1640, after the colony’s petulant and shortsighted director-general, Willem Kieft, imposed a tax on the local Lenape. A Dutch merchant who had gone bankrupt in France, Kieft managed to flee from his creditors into the good graces of the West India Company, which dispatched him in 1638 to run New Netherland from Fort Amsterdam. The stupidity of many of Kieft’s actions seems glaringly obvious today. But the new governor was up against the perennial challenge faced by his predecessors: how to support the colony financially when the Nineteen Gentleman at home proved stingy and the colonists themselves resisted paying taxes for public expenses they argued were the company’s responsibility. Desperate for revenues, Kieft sent sloops across the bay and up the Hudson to impose a tax payable in
sewant
, corn, or furs. The Dutch soldiers and fortifications this tax paid for, Kieft’s agents proclaimed to the sachems, would protect them from their powerful enemies, the Mohawks. Extorting what amounted to protection money from villages and farms had become a customary way for armies back home to survive on the land; Kieft perhaps imagined himself merely doing what any self-respecting Dutch general would have done.
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The Lenape response was furious. They had not asked for Dutch protection from the Mohawks, and they viewed the tax as extortion. In the following months, panicked colonists came into Fort Amsterdam with news of isolated clashes flaring up like brushfires out in the countryside, where nothing shielded Dutch farms from the surrounding wilderness. In the spring of 1640, Raritan Indians attacked one of Kieft’s boats, the
Vrede
(Peace), near Staten Island. Losing patience in the face of what he regarded as
Wilden
impudence, Kieft decided to nip their defiance in the bud by unleashing his soldiers against the Raritans.
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By 1640 the garrison at Fort Amsterdam was home to about one hundred WIC soldiers and officers. With their muskets, sabers, and gunpowder horns clinking and rattling as they drilled before the fort to the martial beat of their drummers, the soldiers must have been a reassuring sight to settlers fearful of Indian attack. Yet their presence in the town was not always a pacific one. Seventeenth-century soldiers were a callous and often brutal lot, exploited and exploiting. The wars tearing apart Europe in this era, including the Dutch war against Spain, the French religious wars, and the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, created a labor market for thousands of men whose job requirements boiled down to their willingness and ability to kill and destroy. A roving international pool of poor transients—the sons of peasants and laborers—flocked into mercenary armies raised by princes and entrepreneurs who sold their services to the highest bidder. In return for fighting, the soldiers received meager wages, often supplemented by whatever loot and pleasures they could extort or pillage from the populace around them. The Dutch Republic relied on thousands of such hirelings in its war against Spain, much to the harm of Dutch civilians, whose villages and farms ended up in the path of troops who robbed, raped, and put communities to the torch with little regard to the political loyalties of the victims. “In the figure of the soldier God has cursed us all,” the Dutch poet Vondel wrote in 1625.
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WIC soldiers, Kieft’s troops among them, tended to be as intractable as they were violent. In Amsterdam and other Dutch ports, tavern keepers known as
zielverkopers
, “sellers of souls,” recruited men to fill the ranks of the WIC army and navy, but not before they made sure the recruits ran up a tab that entitled the recruiters to a big cut of their pay, which the company dutifully advanced to them. Most recruits had little choice as to where the WIC might send them: these boys and men, as often German, French, Swiss, or Czech as Dutch, could end up guarding a slave market in West Africa or a Brazilian plantation as easily as being dispatched to Manhattan. Drunken brawls and stabbings were not unknown within the walls of Fort Amsterdam or out on the streets, where soldiers and townsmen sometimes clashed. Most soldiers regarded the island only as the setting for a tour of duty and felt little loyalty to the community around them. As one of them explained, since neither “trades nor farming have we learned, the sword must provide our living, if not here, then we must seek our fortune elsewhere.”
²⁹
These were the men Willem Kieft expected to restore order, to exact from the Raritans the respect and obedience due him.

On July 16, 1640, fifty soldiers accompanied by several other WIC employees sailed across the bay from Fort Amsterdam, their destination a Raritan village in the New Jersey meadows west of Staten Island. The soldiers plundered and burned the village. After killing a number of Indians and losing one of their own, the Dutchmen marched back to their boat with a prisoner, the brother of the village’s sachem. On the ride back across the bay to Manhattan, Govert Loockermans, a ship’s cook who had risen to become a WIC clerk, “tortured the chief ’s brother in his private parts with a piece of split wood,” or so a WIC official later told a confidante. When the troops reached Fort Amsterdam and reported to the director, Kieft seemed satisfied with the expedition’s results.
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The Raritans bided their time immediately following the raid. They waited thirteen months and then, in September 1641, attacked in the Staten Island woods, burning the farmhouse and tobacco sheds of a Dutch plantation and killing four of its tenant farmers. Kieft offered a wampum reward for the head of any Raritan brought to him. Two months later, Pacham, a leader of the Tankiteke Indians north of Manhattan, walked into the fort bearing a grisly present for the director-general, a severed hand on a stick, which he claimed to belong to the Raritan sachem who had led the Staten Island attack. The Tankitekes had captured and executed the culprit because Pacham “loved the Swannekens . . . who were his best friends.” Whether this was a genuine trophy of war, or an Indian ruse meant to fool Kieft, by the end of the year the Raritans had agreed to a formal peace treaty with the Dutch.
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Despite the best efforts of some local Indians to avert catastrophe, Pandora’s box had been opened and now proved impossible to shut. In August 1641, a young brave of the Wecquaesgeek Indians dwelling north of Manhattan entered the home of Claes Swits, an elderly wheelwright living near Turtle Bay in the woods above New Amsterdam. As Swits bent over a chest to retrieve goods to trade with the Indian, the brave smashed in his skull with an axe. Outrage and fear seized the Dutch settlement anew, especially when a Wecquaesgeek sachem answered Kieft’s demand for the perpetrator by refusing and jeering that “he was sorry that twenty Christians had not been murdered.” The fact that the brave was avenging the robbing and slaying of his uncle by three Dutchmen sixteen years before, a senseless crime he had witnessed as a boy on the shore of Manhattan’s Fresh Water Pond, did little to quell the anger and concern of the settlers, or Kieft’s intention to exact retribution for Swits’s death. Who was safe if an innocent wheelwright could be tricked and killed in cold blood?
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Bridling under the criticism of a faction of townspeople who blamed him for mishandling the Indians, Kieft now decided he needed some show of popular support before taking his next step. This, presumably, would silence his critics, as well as deflect blame if the Nineteen Gentlemen at home started asking hard questions. On August 28, he convened a meeting of New Amsterdam’s male family heads to confer with him about the proper response to Swits’s murder.

The council that Kieft had assembled immediately pushed for another confrontation with the local Indians but also took steps to curb the director’s inept leadership. A majority agreed on the need to punish the Wecquaesgeeks if they did not hand over the killer, but they counseled that an attack should be delayed until after the fall maize harvest was in, perhaps during the winter when the natives would be hunting and easier to catch off guard. With Kieft’s approval, the family heads chose a group of twelve leading citizens from among themselves to make preparations for such an attack. Overnight this new committee of twelve, appointed to prosecute war, became the first forerunner of representative government in New York’s history.

The Twelve Men, as they came to be called, included some of New Amsterdam’s most respected burghers and merchants. Particularly notable in their ranks was one David de Vries, a ship captain who owned land on Staten Island and on the Hudson River shore a few miles above the fort. He had been at sea since his teenage years, and early on he had stated his ambition “to travel and see the whole wide world in all its four quarters.” By the time he took possession of land on Staten Island at age forty-five, he had traded with Russian fur hunters and (allegedly) battled a polar bear in the Arctic Ocean, fought and beat North African and Turkish pirates, and served as a commander in the French royal navy.
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De Vries’s memoirs, published in the Netherlands in 1655, provide us with much of what we know of Kieft’s Indian wars. That his account skews and exaggerates those events is obvious, painting most other New Netherlanders (including Kieft) as drunkards and cowards and himself as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. De Vries held a long-standing grudge against the WIC for its interference in some of his trading ventures and also seems to have coveted the post of director-general of New Netherland for himself. But David de Vries also had genuine grievances. Raritans had destroyed his Staten Island farm and killed his tenants in 1641 after Kieft provoked them. Now that he was one of the Twelve Men, de Vries intended to stand up to Kieft and check his reckless course.
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In January, the Twelve Men agreed with Kieft that it was time to teach the Wecquaesgeeks that they could not escape punishment for Swits’s death. But de Vries and others cautioned against rash measures that would escalate the conflict as the attack on the Raritans had done. Several weeks later, an expedition of soldiers, civilian militia, and company slaves moved through the forests of what is now Westchester County in pursuit of the
Wilden
. While the mission turned into an embarrassment—the Indians merely moved deeper in the woods, leaving the Dutch to burn two palisaded native “castles” to the ground and return to Manhattan empty-handed—the sachems decided to make peace and agreed to a treaty.

Military action also offered de Vries and his eleven colleagues an opportunity to expand the purview of their job. Now that they had consented to Kieft’s war, they wanted something in return. They petitioned the director to create a full-fledged town government for New Amsterdam complete with independently nominated magistrates to consult with him, like villages and cities in
Patria
. In response, Kieft abruptly disbanded the Twelve Men, reminding them that redress for Swits’s killing was their only authorized topic for discussion.

David de Vries. No portrait survives of his adversary, Director Willem Kieft. Engraving by Cornelis Visscher, 1653. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,
WWW.NYPL.ORG
.

While de Vries was surely relieved by the return of peace, he could not have been entirely comfortable with the means that were used to achieve it. De Vries trusted the Indians no more than most of his countrymen did, and he described them as “savage heathens” in his memoirs. He warned one settler not to mistreat the Indians because “they are a very revengeful people, and resembled the Italians that way.” But he also asserted that “there is not one-fourth part as much roguery and murder among them as there is among Christians.” De Vries treated the Lenape with a modicum of empathy that earned their gratitude, and from time to time they enlisted him as an emissary who could talk sense to other Dutchmen for them. He understood a basic fact of colonial life that seems to have eluded Kieft and his supporters: violence against the Indians, especially in the form of attacks on noncombatants and acts of wanton sadism, led only to an escalating cycle of devastation deadly to vulnerable white settlers who had spread out into the hinterland far from Fort Amsterdam’s sheltering walls. De Vries was himself one of those settlers, seeking to create a new farm on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson after the Raritans burned his Staten Island plantation.
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On February 22, 1643, de Vries’s Staten Island nightmare seemed to spring to life again. On that day, groups of panicked Indian families, most of them Wecquaesgeeks and Tappans, suddenly overran his farm. They were fleeing before an onslaught of eighty or ninety Mahicans from the north, “each with a gun on his shoulder,” bent on subordinating them. Having decided to ask Kieft to lend several soldiers to protect his homestead, de Vries paddled a canoe down the frigid river to Fort Amsterdam, where he found the director excitedly anticipating some impending event that he would not divulge. Kieft refused to lend the soldiers to de Vries, but the director’s odd behavior sufficiently piqued de Vries’s curiosity to keep him at the fort.