New York at War (6 page)

Kieft soon revealed to de Vries his plan for handling the Indians. On the twenty-fourth, while conversing with de Vries at table, Kieft revealed that he intended “to
wipe the mouths
of the savages” and justified the plan by declaring that he had been petitioned to do so by three of his cronies who had served among the Twelve Men. The “savages” they had in mind, however, were not the Mahican aggressors, but rather the families of defenseless Tappans and Wecquaesgeeks, many of whom now sought refuge under the very guns of Fort Amsterdam, some along the East River shore at Corlears Hook north of the town, others across the Hudson at the Dutch village of Pavonia (today Jersey City). Kieft had lost his patience with the local bands, whose sachems promised to hand over wrongdoers to face Dutch justice but never did. Kieft seemed incapable of recognizing that negotiation might better serve his purpose. Now, he surely thought, the Indians would learn a lesson.
³⁶

Flabbergasted, de Vries exploded at Kieft, but to no avail. “You wish to break the mouths of the Indians,” he claimed to have warned the director, “but you will also murder our own nation. . . . My own dwelling, my people, cattle, corn, and tobacco will be lost.” Waving de Vries off, Kieft readied his companies of soldiers and volunteers to launch two simultaneous nighttime attacks at Pavonia and Corlears Hook. Despondent and now powerless to sway the one man who could halt the attack, de Vries remained in Kieft’s house inside the fort. “I went and sat by the kitchen fire, when about midnight I heard a great shrieking, and I ran to the ramparts of the fort, and looked over to Pavonia. Saw nothing but firing, and heard the shrieks of the savages murdered in their sleep.” De Vries was able to accomplish one good deed that night: a terrified Indian couple, acquaintances of his, arrived at Fort Amsterdam, seeking refuge from what they assumed to be an attack by their Mahican enemies. De Vries warned them that the attackers were in fact Dutch and managed to help them escape back to the woods before any soldiers stopped them.
³⁷

De Vries’s memoirs go on to describe the Pavonia attack: “When it was day the soldiers returned to the fort, having massacred or murdered eighty Indians. . . . Infants were torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces. . . . Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown. . . . After this exploit, the soldiers were rewarded for their services, and Director Kieft thanked them by taking them by the hand and congratulating them.”
³⁸
Some historians have suggested that de Vries may have exaggerated the horrors he described. Regardless of the level of wanton cruelty involved, there seems little doubt that Kieft’s troops killed about eighty Indians at Pavonia for no good reason. Even more grimly, the dirty work at Corlears Hook was performed not by soldiers but by forty-nine civilian volunteers. Fear, resentment of Indian “insolence,” perhaps even brutalizing past experiences with war in
Patria
may explain but not excuse their actions.

As de Vries had predicted, New Netherland now reaped the whirlwind. Through his unprovoked attack, Kieft managed to enrage every band of Lenape dwelling in the expanses of forest and meadowland surrounding the town. Eleven local tribes now joined together to avenge themselves on the
Swannekens
. Indians descended on isolated farmsteads, torching houses and haystacks, slaughtering livestock, murdering farmers, and taking their wives and children into captivity. The patchwork frontier of settlements on Long Island, in New Jersey, and up the Hudson dissolved as refugee families swarmed into the streets of New Amsterdam and the smoke of their burning homes drifted over the bay. Before boarding a London-bound ship on the East River in March, Rhode Island’s Roger Williams witnessed the stampede of terrified settlers. “Before we weighed anchor,” he later remembered, “mine eyes saw the flames at their towns, and the flight and hurry of men, women and children and the present removal of all that could for Holland.”
³⁹

David de Vries had correctly foreseen the fate of his own farm, where Indians destroyed his “cattle, corn, barn, tobacco-house, and all the tobacco.” His farmhands managed to survive by huddling in his house and keeping the warriors at bay by shooting through the loopholes de Vries had built into its walls. Luckily, the Indian whose life he had saved at Fort Amsterdam soon appeared and prevailed on the attackers to move on. De Vries returned to Fort Amsterdam and confronted Kieft once more, asking him, “Who would now compensate us for our losses? But he gave me no answer.”
⁴⁰

In the first week of March 1643, Indians appeared on the Long Island shore opposite the fort, waving a white flag. De Vries and another Dutch emissary agreed to accompany them to Rockaway, far across Long Island on its Atlantic coast. There, in the woods, the two Dutchmen sat in the middle of a circle of sixteen sachems. The most eloquent of the chiefs, possibly Penhawitz of the Canarsie, rose to remonstrate with the two agents from New Amsterdam. “He told how we first came upon their coast; that we sometimes had no victuals. . . . They helped us with oysters and fish to eat, and now for a reward we had killed their people. . . . They had preserved these people [the Dutch] like the apple of their eye; yea, they had given them their daughters to sleep with, by whom they had begotten children . . . but our people had become so villainous as to kill their own blood.” With the recriminations aired, de Vries escorted the sachems by canoe to Manhattan, where Kieft agreed to negotiate a treaty with them. As a peace offering, Kieft gave them gifts, but some of the chiefs told de Vries privately that the gifts were paltry, considering the loss of Indian lives.
⁴¹

The war flared up again repeatedly over the next two years, as embittered Indians continued to prey on remote farmsteads. Kieft responded with a sporadic series of hit-and-run ambushes on Lenape villages, much in the fashion of the “little war” in which Dutch and Spanish rovers ravaged the countryside of the Low Countries. A modern map of the Greater New York area bears mute testimony to the protracted bloodshed of Kieft’s War. At an Indian village near Hempstead on Long Island, Kieft punished the Canarsie by sending Captain John Underhill, an English mercenary, to lead an attack that took 120 Indian lives. At Pound Ridge in Westchester County, Underhill’s men surrounded a Lenape village and burned it to the ground, killing several hundred men, women, and children. On what is now the Hutchinson River in the Bronx, Indians killed the great religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson and seventeen others, sparing only her eight-year-old daughter, Susannah, whom, like many female and juvenile captives, they adopted into their band. From the woods, Indian braves yelled to the Dutch: “What scoundrels you Swannekens are! You war not against us, but against our innocent women and children, whom you murdered; while we do your women and children no harm, but give them to eat and drink, yea, treat them well and send them back to you.” One of Kieft’s critics confirmed the justice of the charge. During prisoner exchanges, he averred, “our children . . . on being returned to their parents would hang around the necks of the Indians, if they had been with them any length of time.” Susannah Hutchinson, who was ten years old before she was returned to Europeans, had forgotten how to speak English and left her adoptive Lenape parents only with great reluctance.
⁴²

In the autumn of 1645, Kieft’s War finally burned itself out. Both sides were exhausted, and the parade ground before the fort was busy with delegations of sachems arriving to make treaties. About a thousand Indians had lost their lives; untold scores of colonists had died, seen their homes ruined, or fled back to Europe. Following the massacres of early 1643, New Amsterdam’s resources had declined perilously. The fort’s soldiers lacked ammunition and gunpowder, and surviving farmers hunkered down in the town, too fearful to plant their autumn corn and grain crops: the specter of a famine loomed.

Kieft’s position as director of the colony had shown signs of weakening even before his war petered out. Once again in need of popular support to raise taxes and pursue his war, Kieft had consented to the election by forty-six family heads of a new committee, now consisting of eight men. This time, however, Kieft’s foray into providing the townspeople with representation had backfired on him. While agreeing that the war, once started, had to be pursued against all hostile tribes, the Eight Men also began covertly to send complaints and petitions back to WIC headquarters and the States General in
Patria
. All that the settlers had spent two decades building, they told the authorities at home, had now been “through a thoughtless bellicosity laid in ashes.” One conscience-stricken writer claimed that on Judgment Day the
Wilden
“will stand up against us for this injury.” The critics demanded Kieft’s recall and the creation of a full-fledged municipal government for New Amsterdam with independent magistrates, as in Holland. When Kieft insisted that the Eight impose a tax in order to pay the ongoing expenses of the war, a majority refused, at which point he summarily dismissed them. But their complaints had reached powerful men in the Netherlands, and Kieft’s days were numbered.
⁴³

Well before the cessation of hostilities, David de Vries had had enough. Impoverished by the destruction of his two farms, he took a job as a pilot on board a trading ship bound for English Virginia. De Vries left New Netherland in October 1643, never to return, just as a new Indian raid left the village of Pavonia a corpse-strewn, smoking ruin. He could not go, of course, without offering his nemesis a bitter parting shot. “In taking leave of Willem Kieft,” de Vries noted in his memoirs, “I told him that this murder which he had committed on so much innocent blood would yet be avenged upon him, and thus I left him.”
⁴⁴

In 1655, nine years after the WIC divested Willem Kieft of his directorship of New Netherland, and eight years after he drowned when the ship carrying him back to
Patria
sank off the Welsh coast, the Lenape made a final stand against the strangers who had so violently upended their world. At dawn on September 15, the citizens of New Amsterdam awoke to shouts and the echoes of running feet in the streets outside their homes. Seemingly out of nowhere, hundreds of Lenape braves milled about the town, having landed on the Hudson River shore just above the fort, where they had beached some sixty-four war canoes.

As Dutch householders fumbled to get their clothes on and reached for the nearest saber or musket, Indians declared that they had come down the Hudson River to attack enemy tribes on Long Island and were stopping at Manhattan to ferret out their “northern” foes hiding in the town. Alarmed townspeople realized the explanation made no sense, since few if any Mohawks or Mahicans were present. Their anxiety grew as groups of Indians pounded on house doors, demanding entrance to check for their enemies. What made the bizarre behavior even more ominous was that the fort’s contingent of soldiers was absent, having sailed under Kieft’s successor, Peter Stuyvesant, to the Delaware River to vanquish Swedish interlopers there. In short, the town was virtually defenseless, a fact the Indians realized. It was as if the Lenape, in one last angry thrust to maintain their way of life and their dignity, were striking at the heart of everything that threatened them: the town that had sent forth the tax collectors and soldiers.

Tensions soon reached the breaking point. In the late afternoon, as braves continued to loiter about menacingly, an Indian woman picked some peaches from a tree in Hendrick van Dyck’s orchard on the outskirts of New Amsterdam. Van Dyck, a veteran of Kieft’s punitive expeditions, raised his pistol and killed the woman. Pandemonium ensued, as braves running for their canoes aimed their arrows at armed civilians, who came scrambling out of the fort’s gate and over its walls to respond with gunfire. The year 1643 was replaying itself in all its misery. Over the course of the following days, Indians killed at least forty whites, captured a hundred more, and destroyed twenty-eight plantations, where they burned thousands of bushels of grain and slaughtered or drove away five hundred head of cattle.
⁴⁵

Upon his return from the Delaware, Stuyvesant, a far more astute leader than Kieft, ransomed most of the captives and managed to make peace. With a foresight that his predecessor never possessed, Stuyvesant ordered outlying farmers to consolidate themselves into fortified villages surrounded by palisades and guarded by log blockhouses, to which he deployed small details of his soldiers. The village of New Haarlem (later Harlem) at the northern end of Manhattan was one byproduct of this policy.
⁴⁶

The “Peach War” would not be the final agony of the Dutch-Lenape confrontation. War would rage again a few years later on the Esopus Creek, one hundred miles north of the city. But apart from a number of such sporadic incidents, the tribes of western Long Island, northern New Jersey, and the lower Hudson Valley buried their war hatchets for good. No longer would they challenge Europeans for domination of the estuary surrounding Manhattan Island.

A tragic convergence of factors had blighted whatever chances the Dutch and Indians possessed for living in peace: Dutch anxiety at being surrounded by a numerous and strange people, a fear that easily turned into panic and aggression; Lenape anger at the encroachment of settlers whose conceptions of land tenure and so much else were utterly alien; and a foolish tax imposed by a myopic administrator hard-pressed to find a way to finance his colony. Also in play were a clash of two military cultures whose members found retaliation easier than making a lasting and meaningful peace, the pervasive abuse of alcohol on both sides, and European presumptions of Indian savagery that, in turn, were used to justify European savagery against Indians. Where now stand the red-brick housing projects of Corlears Hook and the brownstones of Turtle Bay, 250 years of North American war between Europeans and Indians began, just as surely as they began in the woods of the Chesapeake and New England.