Volume 1, Chapter 39, Governors and Government
The Dutch West India Company began operations in 1623, and in the same year the first party
of permanent Dutch settlers landed in the New World, apart from a settlement near Cape
May on the Delaware Bay in 1614. The new colonists landed in Manhattan. Others in the party settled
Built in Fort Orange, the settlers significantly were a party of Walloon emigres.
Appointed Governor or Director General of New Netherland was Captain Cornelius May.
Under May's aegis, the Dutch quickly began to expand over the vast Virgin Territory.
Fort Nassau was built on the east bank of the Delaware River, now Gloucester, New Jersey,
opposite Philadelphia. Another Dutch party built Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut River,
and we have seen the fate meted out to it by the English planters of Connecticut. Still
other Dutchmen settled on what is now the coast of Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Why
didn't the English, who had laid claim to the whole coast, seriously molest the Dutch
For the first decade the English were busy fighting with Spain and France. After that came the troubles and distractions of the Puritan Revolution. It was only the advent of the restoration period that enabled England to turn serious attention to exerting its power over New Netherland as well as over Massachusetts.
In the spring of 1626, Peter Minuit took over as director general, and it was he who, in
a series of fateful decisions, laid the pattern of social structure for New Netherland.
In the English colonies, the chartered companies and proprietors tried to gain immediate profits
by inducing rapid settlement.
The need for these inducements led to the inevitable dissolution of original attempts
to maintain feudal land tenure, as lands were divided up and sold, and half-hearted attempts
to collect feudal quit-grants from the settlers were abandoned in the face of their stubborn
evasion and resistance. Moreover, the need for inducing settlement also led the companies
Royal Colonies or Proprietors to grant, from the beginning, substantial rights of democracy
and self-government to the colonist.
Happily, none of the English settlements began as royal colonies.
Either they were settled by individuals for individual temporal or spiritual gain, or
they were governed by profit-seeking companies or proprietors who were induced by hopes of
of Profit to grant substantial or even controlling rights of property and self-government to
the settlers. North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut began
as individual self-governing settlements, Virginia and Massachusetts as chartered companies,
Maryland and South Carolina as proprietorships. But the Dutch West India Company and Minuet
decided quite differently. As profit seekers, they first concentrated on their monopoly of the lucrative fur trade, and for this trade, extensive settlements were not needed.
Whether by design or not, the effect of Dutch policy was to discourage settlement greatly, and to hamper the development of the vast area over which the Dutch West India Company had been assigned its monopoly.
For example, one of Minuit's first actions was to order the colonists back, to concentrate
them around the fort in New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan, which had been purchased
from the Indians. This arbitrary policy left only a few traders at Fort Orange and only
one vessel on the Delaware, Fort Nassau being completely abandoned. This action stemmed from
from the company's high-handed decision to retain its exclusive monopoly of trade.
To leave too many individuals on the interior would foster illegal competitive trading.
Second, the Dutch perpetuated a feudal type of land tenure by insisting on leasing rather
than selling land to the settlers.
It is no wonder that with no settler permitted to own his land and thus help to dissolve
Feudalism and Land Monopoly and with no one permitted to trade on his own account, the pace of settlement was very slow. Furthermore, the form of government was by far the most despotic in the colonies. There was no self-government or democracy, no limitation whatever on the arbitrary rule of the company and its director general. The director, along with a council of five, appointed by the Amsterdam Chamber, ran the
The entire government, its legislative, executive and judicial functions.
They were joined by two other officials appointed by the company, the scout fiscal, who made arrest and collected revenue, and the coup men, the secretary of the colony.
There were no legislatures or town meetings of any sort.
By 1629 it was evident that the colony was growing very slowly.
Only 300 persons, for example, lived in New Amsterdam.
The company, therefore, decided to spur settlement.
But instead of dissolving its land monopoly into a system of true private property for landed settlers,
it decided to make the monopoly into a more elaborate feudal structure,
subland monopolists placed over large particular areas in New Netherland.
In the Charter of Privileges and Exemptions of 1629, the Company decided to grant extensive tracks of land to any of its members who would bring over and settle fifty or more families on the tract.
The tracks were required to lie along the banks of the Hudson or other navigable rivers, and were granted in huge lots of sixteen miles along one shore of the Hudson, or eight miles on both shores.
The depth on either side of the Hudson was indefinite. The grantee was termed a Patroon,
or Lord of the Manor. In imitation of the feudal lord, the Patroon was to possess civil
and criminal jurisdiction over his tenants, or peasants. The tenants had the formal right
of appeal from the Patroon's manorial courts to the feudal overlord, the company's government,
But in practice the tenants were forced to forgo this right. The property of any tenant
dying in testate reverted to the patron, and the tenant was forced to grind his grain at
the patron's mill. The tenants were exempted from colonial taxation for ten years, but
in return they were compelled to stay on the original estate for the entire period. To
To leave was illegal, an approximation of medieval serfdom.
Aside from being a temporary serf and having no hope of owning the land he tilled, the
tenant was also prohibited from weaving any kind of woolen, linen or cotton cloth.
Even the patroons were prohibited from weaving in order to keep the monopoly of the trade
in the hands of the company government and to maintain a monopoly of the colonial market
for Dutch Textiles. This provision, however, was continually evaded and led to numerous
conflicts. Neither tenant nor patron could engage in the fur trade, which was still reserved
to the company and its agents. Apart from these commodities, the patrons were at liberty
to trade, but were required to pay a 5% duty to the government at New Amsterdam for exporting
The use of slaves in domestic service or in tilling the soil was also sanctioned.
The patrons were required, however, to purchase the granted land from the local Indians.
It should be noted that Manhattan Island was exempted from the granting of patron ships.
The land of that valuable island was to be reserved for the direct monopoly of the company
government of the province.
While the incentive to become a tenant remained minimal, the incentive to become a Patroon
was now considerable.
It should not be surprising that the receivers of these handsome grants of this special privilege
were leaders or favorites of the company itself.
Thus, the first Patroonship was granted by the company to two members of its own board
Board of Directors, Samuel Godden, President of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company, and
Samuel Blumert, who granted themselves a large chunk of what is now the state of Delaware,
as well as 16 square miles on Cape May across the Delaware Bay.
Godden and Blumert took five other company directors into partnership to expand the capital
of the Patroonship, and one of the partners, Captain David De Vries, was sent with a group
of settlers to found the Patroonship of Swannendal, now Luz, near Cape Henlopen in Delaware.
The Swannendal Manor was settled in 1631, but the settlement soon ran into difficulties.
For one thing, it was chiefly designed as a whaling station, but de Vries soon found
out that whales were scarce along the Delaware coast. Furthermore, the Swannendorf settlers
managed to provoke the Indians into attacking and massacring them. The settlers had emptied
a pillow, leaving the remains as waste which happened to contain a piece of tin embossed
with the emblem of the States General of New Netherland. An Indian chief found the abandoned
in 2010 and used it for his tobacco pipe, whereupon the settlers, in an act unexcelled
for stupidity, even in the sordid history of white treatment of Indians, executed the
hapless chief for treason to the Netherlands. It is hardly puzzling that the Indians proceeded
to attack and wipe out the settlement. In addition to these calamities, the Patroons
The Mises then quarreled and dissolved their partnership. They sold the land back to the company government in 1634 for a handsome 15,000 guilders. The first Patroonship in New Netherland had proved to be a failure.
The second Patroonship was also a failure. Michael Pugh, another of the grasping company directors, managed to obtain a grant for himself of the area that now includes Hoboken, Jersey City, and the whole of Staten Island.
Pugh called his colony Pavonia, which he organized on the side of Jersey City for a few years.
The Indians, however, proved troublesome, and the Patroonship was losing money, and
so in 1637, Pugh sold the land back to the obliging company for 26,000 guilders, land
of course that the company had originally granted Pugh as a gift.
The first successful Patroonship, and the only one that continued past the demise of
New Netherland and through the 18th century, was the grant to yet another Amsterdam Chamber
Director, the wealthy jeweler Killian van Rensselaer. Van Rensselaer's domain, Rensselaer
Wick, prospered because of its superior management and because its area was strategically located
for Fur Trade with the Iroquois. It included virtually the entire area around Albany, now
Albany and Rensselaer counties, except Fort Orange itself, which remained the property
of the company government. Immediately there began conflicts between the Hudson River Patroons
and the government, for the Patroons began to ignore the Dutch West India Company's
Legal monopoly of the highly lucrative fur trade, and the company began to tighten its
regulation to enforce this monopoly.
The Patroons' illegal fur trade not only endangered the company monopoly, it also led them to
concentrate on furs rather than encourage a large agricultural population, which the
company government was now trying to foster.
As a consequence, Peter Minuit was fired as director general by the company in 1632 on
charges of being too soft on the patroons.
Succeeding Minuit was Wouter von Twiller, a clerk in the company's Amsterdam warehouse
chosen because he had married into the powerful Van Rensselaer family.
Conflicts with the patroons over fur trading continued in the Van Twiller regime.
Externally, New England began the process of overrunning Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut River.
However, the English occupation of the abandoned Fort Nassau on the east bank of the Delaware was ended as Van Twiller reoccupied the fort and drove out the settlers.
Further Dutch expansion took place during the Van Twiller administration.
Art Corson erected Beaver Road Fort on what is now the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware.
A good part of the expansion of land was accomplished for the benefit of Governor Van Twiller himself.
He and his friends were given land grants and purchased at large speculative tracts of land from the Indians.
The tracts were concentrated on western Long Island, notably in the present flatlands of Brooklyn.
Van Twiller himself purchased Governor's Island. None of these purchases was approved, as was legally required, by the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company. What is more, the director saw to it that his own farms received the best services from the government.
In addition to the conflicts over land irregularities and fur trading, the Scout Fiscal opposed the director's methods.
When Van Twiller fired the Scout Fiscal, Lubertus van Dinklagen, the latter complained to the State's General.
Furthermore, although some tobacco was now growing on Manhattan Island, the emphasis on the fur trade was helping to discourage agriculture and permanent settlement.
The States General, perturbed that emphasis on fur was discouraging permanent settlement in New-Netherland, ordered the dismissal of Wouter von Twiller in 1637.
But if the Dutch colonists had been chastised with whips, they were now to be chastised with scorpions.
Arriving in 1638, the new director, Amsterdam merchant Willem Kieft, proceeded to impose an absolute despotism upon the colony.
First, he reduced his council of advisors from five to one, and on this rump council of his advisor and himself, he had two votes.
To appeal his decisions to the Netherlands was now made a high crime.
time. Assured of absolute power to issue his decrees, Kieft outlawed virtually everything
in sight. All trade of any commodity whatsoever was outlawed, except by special license issued
by Kieft. Any trade or doing business without a license had his goods confiscated and was
subject to further punishment. To guard against possible trade, all sailors were prohibited
from being on shore at night, under penalty of forfeit of wages and of instant dismissal
on second offense. All sales of guns or ammunition to the Indians were prohibited on pain of
death. All sorts of immoralities were prohibited. Heavy restrictions were placed on the sale
of liquor. Any tavern keeper selling liquor to tipsy customers was subject to a heavy
to be fine and to confiscation of his stock.
A tax was placed on tobacco.
It is no wonder that de Vries, who had strongly opposed the tyranny of Van Dweller, had far
more to resent now.
At the very time that Kieft was imposing his despotism on New Netherland, however, overall
company policy for the colony was changing drastically for the better.
It was becoming increasingly evident to all that something needed to be done to obtain
permanent settlers for this very thinly peopled territory.
Characteristically, the Patroons suggested a stronger dose of the medicine on which they
were prospering, feudalism.
The Patroons, in their proposed new project, suggested that the Netherlands take the path
by which England was ensuring the profitability of Virginia's large plantations, furnishing
them with white indentured servants, paupers, convicts and vagabonds. Instead, the West
India Company made the vital decision in the fall of 1638 to liquidate and abolish all
of its monopolies in the New World, including fur, manufacturing and the right to own land.
Even foreigners were to have the same liberties as Dutchmen. The only monopoly retained by
the company was that of transporting the migrating settlers to America. Furthermore, the new
freedom to own land was made effective by granting every new farmer the right to a farm
he could cultivate, although the company did insist that the farmer pay it rent for a half
dozen years, as well as the more reasonable provision that the farmer repay it the capital
and in 1640 the company liberalized the Patroon system further in a new Charter of Privileges and Exemptions.
The size of the Patroon grants was greatly reduced, 200 acres being awarded to anyone bringing over five settlers and freedom of commerce was strengthened.
This liberalization led to an immediate and pronounced influx of settlers into New Netherland.
In one year, the number of farms on Manhattan Island more than quadrupled.
De Vries arrived with organized parties of settlers who went to Staten Island.
Jonas Bronk made a settlement on the Bronx River.
Englishmen, taking advantage of the full rights for foreigners, also poured in to settle on the vast land available.
Some came from Virginia and raised tobacco. Others fled from Massachusetts Bay.
The only requirement was that they take an oath of allegiance to the Dutch Netherlands.
But while relations between individual settlers of the two countries were harmonious and naturally so,
the relations between the two governments, each rapaciously claiming sovereignty, were equally, naturally, quite troublesome.
An individual settler of whatever nationality can clearly and evidently demarcate for himself
a tract of land by transforming it by his labor. But there is no such clear-cut criterion for imposing
governmental sovereignty. Therefore, while individuals of different nationalities can
peacefully coexist within any given geographic area, governmental territorial conflicts are
are perpetual. Thus, Director Kieft, alarmed at the growth of Connecticut, seized the English
town of Greenwich and forced the citizens to acknowledge Dutch jurisdiction. Angered
also by New Haven and Connecticut settlements on eastern Long Island, Kieft laid claim to
all of what now are King's and Queen's counties in another convenient purchase from the Indians.
In 1639, a group of settlers from Lynn, Massachusetts landed in Cal Bay, Queens. They tore down
the arms of the Dutch States General from a tree and carved on it a fool's head. But
Kieft drove the New England settlers away, and they went east to found the town of South
Hampton. Long Island was particularly important as a source of wampum, beets from seashells
Wampum was particularly important to the white man as the best commodity to trade with the Indians for furs.
Until the advent of the Kieft administration, relations with the Indians had been cordial, but now they began to deteriorate.
For one thing, oft times the cattle of the many new agricultural settlers strayed onto Indian property
Many new agricultural settlers strayed onto Indian property and ruined Indian corn fields.
When the Indians very properly protected their corn by killing the white man's invading cattle,
the white settlers, instead of curbing their cows, exacted reprisals upon the Indians.
Moreover, the Indians of the Lower Hudson, Connecticut, and what is now New Jersey, were
For all members of the Algonquin Confederacy, the Algonquin's traditional enemies were the
powerful and aggressive Iroquois of upstate New York. Now the new kieft ruling that no
arms may be sold to any Indians on pain of death was vigorously enforced in the neighborhood
of Manhattan, but not against the valuable fur supplying Iroquois to the north. The Algonquins
The Algonquins were naturally embittered to find the Dutch eagerly supplying their worst
enemies with arms while they were rudely cut off. To meet the Algonquin's problems, Director
Kieft did not take the sensible course of repealing the prohibition against selling
them arms. Instead, he had what seemed to him a brilliant idea. Fort Amsterdam was really
for the Algonquins as much as for the Dutch. Therefore, they should also be taxed to pay for its upkeep.
Therewith, Keefe's despotism reached out to the Indians as well, except that they were not so helpless to resist, as were his hapless Dutch subjects.
For sheer gall, Keefe's demand upon the Indians for taxes in corn, furs and wampum was hard to surpass.
The Tappan tribe of Algonquins was properly sarcastic and denied that the fort was any protection to it.
The Tappans had never asked the Dutch to build their fort, and they were therefore not obliged to help maintain it.
At this point of growing tension, some employees of the West India Company,
India Company, re-travelling to the Delaware River in 1641, landed on Staten Island and
stole some pigs belonging to David de Vries. As often happened in the colonies, the hapless
Indians were blamed a priori for the theft. In this case, Kieft, without bothering to
investigate, decided that the Raritan Algonquins were to blame. He promptly sent out an armed
A troupe that murdered several raritans and burned their crops. The raritans, having
no recourse in Dutch courts, had only one means of redress, violence. In reprisal they
destroyed De Vries' plantation and massacred his settlers. Kieft, always ready to escalate
a conflict, proclaimed a bounty of ten fathoms of wampum for anyone who brought in the head
of a Raritan Indian.
At this juncture, an Indian from Yonkers, who as a little boy had seen his uncle murdered
in Manhattan by a gang of white servants of Peter Minuet, now murdered a Dutch tradesman
in revenge.
When Kief demanded the murderer, the Indian Sakem refused to surrender him, reasoning
that the balances of justice were now even.
Kieft was now building up to an Indian war on two fronts, but the people were refusing
to bear arms or to pay for looming dangers in costly conflict. To raise funds and support
for a war, Kieft in 1641 called together the first representative group of any kind in
New Netherland, an assembly of heads of families, who chose a board of twelve men, headed by
by De Vries to speak for them. Although De Vries had more personal reasons to be anti-Indian
than the director, he advised caution. The surrender of the murderer must be insisted
upon, but the colony was not ready for war. Moreover, De Vries adopted the great English
tradition of redress of grievances before supply. When a despotic king was finally forced
To call an assembly in order to raise expenses for a foreign war, the assembly would drive
a hard bargain and insist first on liberalization of the tyranny. This is what the twelve men
did before consending to war in 1642. They demanded that Kieft restore the council to
five members, of whom four would be chosen by popular vote. They also demanded popular
the representation in the courts, no taxes to be levied without their consent, and greater freedom of trade.
One of their demands, however, was the reverse of liberal, that importation of English cattle be excluded,
clearly a desire for further privilege by the patroons.
Kieft finally responded in characteristic fashion by dissolving the twelve men
and proclaiming that no further public meetings might be held in New Amsterdam without his
express permission. Although the Dutch had failed to obtain the murderer from the Westchester
Indians, a year's truce had been arranged by Jonas Brunk. Then in 1643 an Indian was
made drunk and robbed by some Dutch at the Hackensack settlement. In revenge, the Indian
killed a Hackensack settler. The chiefs of the Indian's tribe hastily told de Vries,
the patron of Hackensack, that they would pay 200 fathoms of wampum to the victim's
widow, which they felt was reasonable compensation. De Vries advised acceptance of the offer,
But Kieft insisted on surrender of the murderer.
The murderer, however, had fled upriver to the Haverstraw Indians.
Kieft immediately demanded that the Haverstraws surrender him.
At this point, a new factor intervened.
A force of aggressive Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy, each armed with Dutch muskets,
was sent upon the Hudson River tribes to terrorize an exact tribute.
Although the Dutch would not break their treaty with the Iroquois by fighting them, De Vries
did agree to give shelter to the Algonquin refugees at his main Patroonship of Riesendal
at Tappan, and other refugees took shelter at Pavonia and on Manhattan Island.
was now divided among the Dutch. De Vries, backed by Councilman Dr. Law Montagu and Reverend
Everardus Bogardus, advised peaceful mediation in the Indian conflict. But Kieft, over their
passionate protest, saw only a heaven-sent chance to pursue his grand design of liquidating
the Indians. In this, he was supported by Van Ten Hoeven, the secretary of the colony,
and especially by Marin Adriensen, a member of the Twelfth Men and a former freebooter
in the West Indies. In an extraordinarily vicious sneak attack, Dutch soldiers at midnight
of February 25, 1643, rushed into the camps of sleeping refugees at Povonia and Corleers
Hook on Manhattan Island and slaughtered them all. In all, well over a hundred Indians were
massacred, including the hacking to pieces of Indian babies. Led by Adrianson, the soldiers
exultantly marched back to Fort Amsterdam in the morning, bringing back many Indian
heads. Director Kieft rather aptly called it a truly Roman achievement. Taking their
cue from this treacherous official massacre of peaceful and friendly Indians, some settlers
at flatlands fell suddenly on a group of completely friendly Marek Kawiak Indians, murdered several,
The Algonquians could give but one answer to this outrage. All out war on the Dutch. The entire Algonquin peoples, led by the Haverstraws, rose up against their tormentors. It was during this total conflict that poor Anne Hutchinson was killed by Indian raiders. The English settlements of Westchester were all wiped out. Even Riesendahl was attacked, but notably.
The long island settlements were also destroyed as well as those on the west bank of the Hudson. The only long island settlement spared was Gravesend, a colony organized by Lady Deborah Moody, a Baptist refugee from Massachusetts. Only a half-dozen farms on Manhattan Island remained in the area.
and in tact. By 1644, almost all the Dutch settlers were forced to abandon their homes
and fields to destruction and to retreat behind the wall of Fort Amsterdam, now Wall Street,
at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, around which fort the village of New Amsterdam had
grown. Fort Orange and Rensselaerwijk in friendly Iroquois County around Albany remained unmolested.
One of Kieft's contributions to the struggle was to be the first white man to offer a bounty
for Indian scalps.
The disastrous consequences of Willem Kieft were now becoming fully evident.
A needless and terribly destructive war had been inflicted upon the Dutch as the sole
result of Kieft's tough, hard-line policy toward the Algonquins.
Their indignation against Kieft now rose insistently, and demands grew for his expulsion.
De Vries, embarking for Holland, bitterly warned Kieft that the murders in which you
have shed so much innocent blood will yet be avenged on your own head. Typically, Kieft
tried to disclaim all responsibility by throwing all the blame on his advisor in slaughter,
Maren Adriaensen
Adriaensen, whose farm had just been destroyed, naturally grew somewhat bitter at this treachery
and with a few comrades rushed into Kieft's room to try to shoot the director.
The assassination attempt failed.
The man who fired the shot was instantly killed and his head publicly displayed.
With the Dutch community facing disaster, the despotic Kieft, his treasury empty, was
again forced to consult the leading colonist in order to raise money to fight a war of
his own creation.
In late 1643 he chose a board of eight men for this purpose. No funds could be obtained
from the West India Company because it was in the process of going bankrupt, and money
raised by piratic attacks on Spanish shipping could only be highly irregular. Regular funds
Taxes were also needed to maintain a company of soldiers, recently sent by the company
and peremptorily quartered upon the town. Faced with this problem, Kieft turned to one
of his favorite devices, the imposition of a crushing tax.
Kieft proclaimed an excise tax on the brewing of beer, on wines and spirits, and on beaver
The eight men strongly objected, arguing rather lamely, that taxes could be levied only by the home company itself, and, more cogently, that it was the business of the company and not of the settlers to hire and maintain soldiers.
Furthermore, they protested that the settlers were ruined and could not pay taxes.
The suggestion of the eight men to tax speculators and traders was not, however, very constructive.
Kieft replied in his usual brusque fashion,
In this country, I am my own master, and may do as I please.
The people of New Amsterdam now had to confront not only Indians on the war path,
but further tyranny and exactions at home.
Naturally, their grumbling opposition to Kieft redoubled,
and it was hardly allayed when Kieft made an appointment with some of the eight,
and then failed to keep it.
The brewers refused to pay the tax. The matter was taken into court, but in essence, Kieft was the court, and speedy judgment was rendered against the brewers, whose product was confiscated and given to the soldiers.
Hostility to Kieft now filled the colony, and he was generally reviled as a villain, a liar, and a tyrant.
Finally, the long-suffering colonists could bear Kieft no longer.
Speaking for the colonists, the eight men in October 1644 directly petitioned the states
general in the Netherlands to remove Kieft forthwith.
The eight men wrote eloquently of their plight under Kieft.
Our fields lie fallow and waste.
Our dwellings and other buildings are burned.
Not a handful can be either planted or sown. We have no means to provide necessaries for
wives or children. The whole of these now lie in ashes through a foolish hankering after
war. For all right-thinking men here know that these Indians have lived as lambs among
us until a few years ago. These hath the director by various uncalled-for proceedings so embittered
against the Netherlands Nation that we do not believe that anything will bring them
and peace back.
This is what we have in the sorrow of our hearts to complain of, that one man should
dispose here of our lives and property according to his will and pleasure, in a manner so arbitrary
that a king would not be suffered legally to do.
We pray that one of these two things may happen, either that a governor may be speedily sent
with a beloved peace to us, or that the company will permit us to return with wives and children
to our dear fatherland, for it is impossible ever to settle this country until a different
system be introduced here and a new governor be sent out.
The petitioners also asked for greater freedom and more representative institutions to check
the executive power.
This Creed de Cour of the oppressed people of New Netherland was heeded by the West India
Company, and Kieft was removed in May 1645. It was perhaps not coincidental that the Algonquins
and the Dutch were able to conclude a peace treaty soon afterward, in August, under pressure
to be sure of the pro-Dutch Mohawk tribe. The parties sensibly agreed that whenever
Where a white man or an Indian should injure the other, the victim would apply for redress
to the jurisdictional agencies of the accused.
An ironical part of this peace treaty was the Algonquin agreement to return the kidnapped
granddaughter of Anne Hutchinson, who now liked Algonquin life and who was returned
against her will.
Even a peace treaty could not be carried out, it seems, without someone being coerced.
Unfortunately, the company was delayed two years in sending the new governor, and Kieft
continued to oppress the citizenry in the meanwhile.
Even the coming of peace did not completely lift the burdens of the people.
The people had happily rejoiced when they heard the glad tidings of Kieft's ouster.
Chief immediately threatened all of his critics with fines and imprisonment for their sedition.
He continued to prohibit any appeals of his arbitrary decisions to Holland. The director
was thereupon denounced by the influential Reverend Mr. Bogardas in his sermons. What
are the great men of this country but vessels of wrath and fountains of woe and trouble?
They think nothing but to plunder the property of others, to dismiss, to banish, to transport
to Holland. To counter this courageous attack, Kieft decided to use the minions of the state
to drown out Bogardus's sermons, by soldiers, drum rolls, and even by roar of the fort's
cannon. But Bogardus would not be silenced. Kieft then turned to the method of violence
to stop his critic to the legal proceedings of his own state.
Keefe's charges against Bogardus in Keefe's court included scattering abuse, drinking
alcohol and defending criminals such as Adrienson in his attempt to assassinate the director.
When these charges were served on Bogardus, he defiantly refused to appear, challenging
and Kieft's legal right to issue the summons. With the people solidly on the minister's side, Kieft was forced to yield.
Finally, at long last, Kieft's replacement, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived in May 1647.
So great was the jubilation of the people in getting rid of this incubus that almost all of the fort's powder
was used up in the military salute celebrating the arrival of the new director.
When Kieft handed over the office, the conventional vote of thanks to the old director was proposed,
but two of the leading eight men, Cornelius Mellon, the Patron of Staten Island, and the
German Joachim Coyter, refused to agree, saying that they certainly had no reason to thank
Kieft.
Moreover, they presented a petition for judicial inquiry into Keefe's behavior in office.
But apart from being no liberal himself, Stuyvesant saw immediately the grave threat that a precedent
for inquiry into a director's conduct would hold for any of his own despotic actions.
The late 19th century historian John Fisk aptly compared Stuyvesant's position to that
of Emperor Joseph II of Austria-Hungary during the American Revolution over a century later.
Stuyvesant felt as in later days the Emperor Joseph II felt when he warned his sister Marie
Antoinette that the French government was burning its fingers in helping the American
rebels.
I too like your Americans well enough, said he, but I do not forget that my trade is that
of King, c'est mon métier d'être roi. So it was Stuyvesant's trade to be a colonial
governor. Stuyvesant loftily declared that government officials should never have to
disclose government secrets on the demand of two mere private citizens, and furthermore
to petition against one's rulers is ipso facto treason, no matter how great the provocation.
Under this pressure, the petition of Mellon and Coyter was rejected in the council, even
though the company, in a mild gesture of liberality, had agreed to vest the government of New
Netherland in a three-man Supreme Council instead of Keith's one-man rule, a director-general,
a vice-director and the scout fiscal.
All however were company appointees.
The Dutch soon found that the jubilation at the change of directors should have been tempered.
From his speech upon arrival, I shall govern you as a father his children, Stuyvesant indicated
no disposition to brook any limits to his rule. Even on the ship coming over he had
angrily pushed the new scout fiscal out of the room because the latter had not been summoned.
When Stuyvesant assumed command, he sat with his hat on, while others waited bareheaded
before he deigned to notice them, a breach of etiquette. He was, as one Dutch observer
exclaimed, quite like the Tsar of Muscovy. Furthermore, Stuyvesant was not willing to
let the mail-in-coitor matter rest with the rejection of their petition. He now summoned
and Kieft eagerly accused these two malignants of being the real authors of the libelous eight-man petition.
Kieft suggested that the two defendants be forced to produce all their correspondence with the company
and to show cause why they should not be summarily banished as pestilent and seditious persons.
Stuyvesant agreed, but Mellon and Coyter showed so much damning evidence against Kieft that these charges were quickly dropped.
But if one charge fell through, another must immediately be found.
Mellon and Coyter were now indicted on the trumped-up charge of treachery with the Indians and of attempting to stir up rebellion.
Without bothering about evidence this time, Stuyvesant rushed through the pre-arranged verdict of guilty.
Stuyvesant was eager to sentence Mellon as the leader of the two to death, and he seriously pondered the death sentence for Coyter also.
For Coyter had also committed two grave crimes. He had dared to criticize Kieft, and he had shaken his finger at the ex-director.
Stuyvesant remembered the philosophizing of the Dutch jurist Josa de Damhouder,
he who so much as frowns at a magistrate is guilty of insulting him. He also recalled the admonition
of Bernard Dinas de Muscatelis, he who slanders God, the magistrate, or his parents must be
Stuyvesant was persuaded by his more cautious advisors, however, not to execute Mellon and
Coyder. Instead, both were heavily fined and banished. Banishment, however, raised the
danger that they would spill their tales of woe to the authorities in Holland, so Stuyvesant
warned Mellon, if I thought there were any danger of your trying an appeal, I would hang
I knew this minute from the tallest tree on the island. This was in line with Stuyvesant's
general view of the right to appeal. If any man tries to appeal from me to the state's
general, I will make him a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland and let him appeal
in that fashion. The ironic climax of the Kieftasaga occurred when Kieft finally left
for Holland in August 1647 with a large fortune of 400,000 guilders, largely amassed from
his term in office and with Mellon and Coyter in tow as his prisoners. The ship was wrecked
and Kieft drowned in seeming confirmation of De Vries' prophecy. Before his death,
he purportedly confessed his wrongdoing to Mellon and Coyter, who were rescued and were
are able to gain their freedom in Holland.