XV
New Netherland Threatened Without and Within
NOWHERE in America was there a better situation for a great fur emporium than Manhattan Island. There, converging into a protected harbor which was easily accessible to seagoing ships, were arteries of fur traffic that tapped both hinterland and coastal trade. Indeed, the beaver trade that originated at Manhattan in the round-bellied Dutch ships of the seventeenth century was the genesis of a commerce that was to make New York the greatest seaport in the world.
But, although the Hollanders at New Amsterdam had this material advantage and were exploiting it with all their energy, their occupation of New Netherland was insecure to say the least. In English eyes they were squatters on English territory, and the English had the physical means to do something about it whenever they wished.
Logically, of course, the Englishmen had a very poor case. In the light of their own Elizabethan theory that occupation of a territory was necessary to back up any claim of possession, the Dutch title to New Netherland was certainly valid. The Hollanders had searched out and settled the country. The Englishmen had not bothered to do either. Yet, stubbornly, they had never once conceded Dutch sovereignty.
Naturally, they had to come up with a new interpretation of Elizabeth’s historic pronouncement. It took the following line of reasoning. James I had long since defined Virginia as extending from the 34th to the 45th parallel, and, in fact, had granted it by charter to two great joint-stock companies of London and Plymouth before Captain Hudson ever went out to America for the Dutch. Such an act of sovereignty could be considered equivalent to taking possession of that territory! Therefore the Dutch were intruders!!
And, a quarter of a century after this “act of sovereignty,” parts of Dutch New Netherland—Connecticut, Long Island and the west bank of the Delaware River—were being reconveyed by the original English patentees or the king himself, all without benefit of having yet been settled by Englishmen.
That no official action was taken to eject the Hollanders can be attributed to the alliances of the Thirty Years’ War. However, the time was not too far away when England and Holland, relieved of their compacts, were to become deadly rivals. Already, in fact, patriotic Englishmen smarted with the knowledge that a foreign country which had to import its timber for shipbuilding, and one which had so recently been helped to independence by them, was growing rich on a carrying trade that should be in British bottoms. The ultimate conquest of New Netherland was a foregone conclusion as far as they were concerned.
Meanwhile, pressure on New Netherland from individual traders with the backing of London and New England merchants prepared the way for the anticipated military action.
The pressure on New Netherland began in 1633 when a trading vessel from England invaded the Hollanders’ North River for furs. Her name was the William. She was the first English ship ever to ascend the Hudson. At the time, the annual returns there were estimated at 16,000 beaverskins, and no one was better qualified to appreciate this rich business than the factor in charge of the William; for, he was none other than a former Dutch commissary on the Hudson, Jacob Eelkens, who himself had driven a great trade with the Indians at Fort Orange. In 1623 however, after incurring the displeasure of the West India Company, he had been summarily discharged. Now he was in the employ of English merchants, William Cloberry and Company of London, and he was of a mind to square accounts.
Defying both Governor Wouter van Twiller and the threatening guns on Manhattan, Eelkens proclaimed haughtily that the Hudson River belonged to England and then proceeded upstream. Van Twiller didn’t fire on him. In fact, the irresolute Dutch governor broached a cask of wine while he deliberated on the situation. Not until he had been roundly twitted for timidity by his drinking companions did he acquire enough spirit to dispatch three ships with some soldiers after the renegade Hollander. By the time this force caught up with Eelkens, he was anchored near Fort Orange, where he had established a well-stocked trucking station ashore and was enjoying a lucrative trade for beaver with the natives, all at the expense of the frustrated Dutch commissary there.
Van Twiller’s soldiers, upon their arrival, arrested the turncoat interloper, and the William was convoyed back down the river to Manhattan where all the pelts aboard were confiscated. Then Eelkens, protesting loudly, was escorted with his empty ship out of the Narrows, never again to bother his countrymen on the Hudson.
But this same year, 1633, there was pressure of a more serious nature on the Dutch. It came overland, and it was not to be repulsed so easily.
The fur traders of New England hankered for the beaver that abounded in the valley of the Connecticut River where the Hollanders were taking annually some 10,000 skins. Of course Dutch Captain Adrien Block had discovered and explored the Connecticut, or “Fresh Water” as he called it, in 1614. And since fur traders from New Amsterdam bartered traditionally on the river, even establishing a temporary trading post and laying out the foundations of Fort Good Hope near the site of present-day Hartford in 1623, there was not much question in their minds about the jurisdiction of New Netherland. Admittedly, however, they had made no permanent settlements.
Neither had the English who now coveted the valley’s beaver meadows. However, they had lately done some exploring and liked what they found. Edward Winslow of New Plymouth went up the river in 1632 and was so impressed that he selected a site for a house. And John Winthrop of the Bay Colony let it out that because his colony extended “to the south sea on the west parte,” the Connecticut River, or the greater part of it anyway, belonged to Massachusetts under its charter.
So the Hollanders at New Amsterdam, a bit alarmed, bestirred themselves to complete the fort which had been commenced by them some ten years earlier. After buying “most of the lands on both sides” of the Connecticut River from the Indians, they built a strong house of yellow bricks at their old trading post and set up two cannon there to secure the river above them.
But, even while their commissary, Jacob van Curler, was building this fort in 1633, it was being enveloped by the New Englanders. Fur traders from Massachusetts Bay fought their way straight west through the wilderness that summer to reach the upper Connecticut valley north of Fort Good Hope. In the fall a party of Pilgrims from New Plymouth sailed up the river from the south for the same purpose.
It was John Oldham, an adventurous trader of ten years experience in New England, who pioneered the way for the English. With three companions he blazed what was to become known as the “Old Connecticut Path” from Watertown in Massachusetts to the Connecticut River. On his return he made an enthusiastic report on the valley and its beaver meadows, while delegations of Mohegans from the Connecticut valley offered alliances and otherwise made things most attractive to prospective settlers. They wanted the men of Massachusetts, or any other white men with guns, to settle among them. It was the only way they knew to even scores with their recent conquerors, the Pequots.
There were 4,000 Englishmen clustered about Massachusetts Bay at the time and quite a few were of a mind to get away. Puritanical intolerance, given free rein in this new American colony, was making too much of a strait jacket out of life for many of them. Connecticut sounded almost too good to be true. Some of the bold ones began making plans to migrate to the bounteous valley the following year.
In the meantime Winslow’s people at New Plymouth moved more quickly. With them fresh beaver territory was always a pressing necessity. Their very survival as a colony depended on their fur exports. They also sensed profit in taking sides with the Mohegans. Whereas the Massachusetts men cautiously avoided any complicating alliances with the Connecticut valley Indians, the Pilgrims in their desperate anxiety for pelts were quite willing, as usual, to involve themselves in inter-tribal disputes. In this case it led to most unhappy results for the traders, the farmers, and their families. Some have claimed that it was the genesis of the fierce war between the Pequots and the white men that exploded a few years later.
In any event, by early September of 1633 Captain William Holmes of New Plymouth, carrying a prefabricated house frame in “a great new bark,” was on his way up the Connecticut River. Undaunted by the Dutch fort and the Hollanders, who “threatened [him] hard, yet ... shot not,” Captain Holmes sailed past Fort Good Hope and erected his house above it at Windsor. There his people established a trading post that prospered at once on upriver furs at the expense of the Dutch traders below them. Strongly palisading this post, Holmes and his company then stood firm against a force of seventy Hollanders who were sent from New Amsterdam to eject them.
The Pilgrim coup was short-lived however. Competition from Boston had even more to do with this than Indian troubles, for in another three years a wholesale exodus from Massachusetts to the Connecticut was under way, over 800 people already having moved west to the fruitful valley. In the forefront of this migration were the fur traders, but farmers followed them to found Wethersfield and other towns. Invading Windsor, they swallowed up the small band of their Pilgrim brethren there.
The Puritans completely surrounded the isolated Dutch trading post at Hartford. But, although the New Englanders on the Connecticut at this time outnumbered the population of all New Netherland, they made no attempt to oust the garrison of Hollanders in their midst. Some twenty men, sent out by the younger Winthrop from Boston, did however take possession of the Dutch claims about the mouth of the Connecticut. There they tore down the arms of the States General which had been affixed to a tree and contemptuously engraved “a ridiculous face in their place.” When a Dutch sloop came from New Amsterdam to dislodge them, it was compelled to withdraw in the face of two cannon threateningly mounted ashore. The Boston men then went about constructing fortifications and buildings which they called Fort Saybrook.
After that the English had control of the river and, as they thought, easy access also to the beaver trade “of that so pleasant and commodious country of Erocoise before us.”
One Puritan merchant, William Pynchon, who was to found a great fortune in the Indian trade, now spearheaded the economic attack on New Netherland’s northern flank. Because of his relentless search for fur he did more than any other man to defeat the Dutch traders and to expand the frontiers of Massachusetts.
William Pynchon was one of the original company of twenty-seven grantees of Massachusetts. For their concession these adventurers were committed to pay the crown one-fifth of all the gold and silver ore found within the limits of the grant. Pynchon, however, wasn’t interested in ore. He was of a more practical bent of mind. He traded with the Indians near Boston from the start, supplying them with guns and ammunition in exchange for their beaver.
Although this trade in guns was carried on with the court’s approval, Pynchon was severely criticized for doing it, fined in fact. Annoyed about this, dissatisfied anyway with the dwindling fur trade about the bay, and not being particularly in sympathy with the rigid Calvinism of the church he had helped to found there, Pynchon’s eyes turned westward.
This keen-minded, resolute man was probably one of John Oldham’s financial backers when that extraordinary adventurer pioneered the Connecticut Path. Pynchon himself made a trip up the Connecticut River by shallop in 1635 and chose a location for a trading post near the Indian village of Agawam. Somewhat above the other river towns which were being laid out, this strategic site was relied upon to intercept most of the Indian trade from the north and west.
Early in 1636 Pynchon with his son-in-law, Henry Smith, led a group of traders overland to Agawam. They shipped their goods by water. For 18 fathoms of wampum, and 18 each of coats, hatchets, hoes and knives, with “two extra coats thrown in for good measure,” land was purchased from the Indians, and a trading settlement was established. It wasn’t too long before every one was calling this trading post Springfield, in honor of its founder’s home town in England.
In the resolutions which were framed for the government of Springfield a provision was shrewdly included to limit the population. This was intended to prevent an influx of farmers who would spoil the fur trade. Actually, the founder brought out only twelve families. As a result of his plan the main business of Springfield for many years was the beaver trade.
There was a provision in the resolutions, too, for obtaining a minister, Pynchon himself acting in this capacity until the Reverend George Moxon was finally installed. It is recorded of this good parson that when he did arrive he preached a sermon that lasted for twenty-eight days. It is also a matter of record that an early purchase for the church was an hourglass. But whether its purpose was to impose a time limit or to insure good measure is not stated.
Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat, raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By 1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco, later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the Iroquois.
Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds.
Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of the richest men in New England.
Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement.
The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the establishment of a permanent trading post among them.
Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores of the Sound for settlement.
The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of the red men.
This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams, who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel, prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside—until, by a final campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from the face of the earth!
An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and children.
The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death were slaughtered as they tried to escape—all except seven who managed to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible affair—for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.
Another main body of the Pequots was routed soon afterward. But that did not end the bloody harassment. A month later, a large force from Massachusetts under Captain Stoughton, together with Captain Mason’s Connecticut men, surrounded all that remained of the once powerful tribe. This occurred in a swamp at Fairfield where the remnant of the tribe had taken refuge. The warriors put up a brave fight, but the odds were too great against them. Those few who escaped this final butchery were divided among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, never more to be called Pequots.
The shores of the Sound west of Fort Saybrook were open now to settlers. A wave of migration from Boston resulted in the founding of New Haven, Stratford, Norwalk, Stamford, and other towns. The New Haven people, forming their own government, even spread across the Sound to Long Island which, of course, had long been occupied only by the Hollanders, whose traders exploited the natives there for the wampum so essential in the beaver trade.
To halt this encroachment on the very nerve center of their trading territory, the Dutch hurriedly purchased from the Indians all the country that remained open between Manhattan and the oncoming English, acquiring legal title to additional lands on Long Island as far west as Oyster Bay as well as to all that triangle of territory between the Hudson and the Sound south of Norwalk. The latter comprised much of present Westchester County. However the English encroachment along the north shore of the Sound, as a practical matter, was halted no farther east than Greenwich.
Only in the Narragansett country, after 1640, did the Dutch hang on to any substantial beaver trade east of Greenwich. Rhode Island, by then well populated with Englishmen, tried to keep them out. However, the Dutch simply supplied the Indians there more generously with rum and guns—in return for beaver. So did some interloping but enterprising Frenchmen. And so did some of the New Englanders themselves, for that matter. Nowhere was the competition for beaver more keen or more dangerous than in Rhode Island.
English laws at the time sincerely prohibited the sale of liquor or firearms to the savages. But such laws were difficult to enforce on a wild frontier where uncontrolled profits could be scooped up so easily. Roger Williams was later to write that he had “refused the gain of thousands by such a murderous trade.” Some of his neighbors in the wilderness and even some of his own trading associates had no such scruples however.
Richard Smith who became wealthy on the Indian trade was a man of this stripe. He and Roger Williams, along with John Wilcox, “a sturring, driving, somewhat unscrupulous fellow,” began trading in the Narragansett country as early as 1637. Each of them built trucking houses on the much-traveled Pequot and Narragansett Trail at the site of present-day Wickford. As trading practices sharpened over the years, neither Smith nor Wilcox hesitated to meet the increasing demands of the natives for liquor and powder. Williams was revolted. In 1651, when he was about to go to England, he sold his house and trading interests to Smith for 50 pounds sterling. That left Smith without any competition for this lucrative fur trade, as he had bought out Wilcox some years earlier.
Men like Smith and Wilcox furnished tinder for many flaming atrocities in Rhode Island. But their murderous trade was “the most profitable employment in these parts of America ... by which many persons of mean degree advanced to considerable estates.” Rhode Island was truly one of the most fertile of all beaver grounds—while it lasted. That was until 1660. By then the beaver was all but exhausted, while, with the help of the white man’s goods, the Indian trapper was well on the way to destroying himself too.
It had been the same of course on every fur frontier in America. In Rhode Island the fateful process of the aborigine’s extinction was just exaggerated in dreadful degree. As native drinking increased, atrocities mounted and bloody retaliation followed. Yet, in spite of this terrible situation, the English themselves came to recognize wine and spirits as the chief staple of the Indian trade, while futilely putting new laws on their books intended to limit the natives’ consumption!
For their part the Hollanders never had any compunction about distributing hot waters or firearms among the savage neighbors of the New Englanders, who after all seemed bent on taking over all of New Netherland. Protected by ships, of which the Rhode Islanders had none, the Hollanders drove a continuing trade at their long-established posts in Narragansett Bay, especially at Dutchmen’s Island which they had fortified. As late as 1647 the natives were transporting their pelts in canoes to Dutchmen’s Island, where it was said they could lay in a supply of strong waters sufficient to keep an Indian village in an uproar for a week and acquire all the guns and powder they wanted. And the Dutch continued to trade in the bay for some years after that, until the beaver of Rhode Island was almost exhausted.
In fact at no time, until 1650, did the New Netherlanders give up any part of their claims south of Cape Cod, even though they hadn’t been able to stem the overland flood of English traders and settlers. In 1647 they did seize an Amsterdam ship, trading at New Haven without a license from the Dutch West India Company, and brought her into New Amsterdam where she was confiscated in spite of excited protests from New Haven. On land, however, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered. Furthermore, troubles at home, especially with the savages, kept them close to the valley of the Hudson after 1640.
Curiously enough, the New Netherlanders’ troubles at home beginning in 1640 sprang largely from their sale of firearms to the distant Iroquois.
These lake country Indians, with practically inexhaustible supplies of the finest beaver, thought nothing of offering as many as twenty heavy skins in exchange for a musket. The great profit in this traffic had proved irresistible to the Dutchmen. So the authorities at Manhattan often winked at the illegal purveyance of arms and powder by their traders to such faraway savages. If their consciences bothered them at all, they were comforted by the knowledge that their Iroquois allies maintained a bulwark against competitive traders from French Canada, as well as against the enveloping English.
At the same time however, prompted strictly by self-preservation, the New Netherlanders clamped down hard on any “bosch-lopers” who sold arms among their Algonquin neighbors. This was good policy for the Hollanders of course, but it left the river tribes at the complete mercy of their ancient and terrible Iroquois enemies, especially the Mohawks, who descended upon them periodically to collect taxes.
Added to this touchy situation was the asininity of a reckless Dutch governor, one William Kieft, who himself attempted to collect taxes from these same river Indians for the support of his fortifications on Manhattan. When he adopted wholesale butchery and the surprise tactics of the Iroquois to enforce his demands for tribute, things became explosive. The Dutch found themselves waging a sanguinary five-year war against local tribes who in turn managed to terrorize Manhattan and the surrounding plantations.
This war, though sporadic and spotty, was fought with a thirst for blood on both sides. Massacres and other atrocities were committed by reds and whites alike, as the Indian league against the Hollanders spread up the Hudson above the Highlands. In 1643 a shallop coming down from Fort Orange with four hundred beaver skins taken in trade with the Mohawks was plundered, to signal a general massacre that resulted in the virtual evacuation of all the outlying plantations in the lower valley as surviving colonists fled to Fort Amsterdam.
It took a final annihilating blow, no less terrible than the recent English offensive against the Pequots, to end the war. And it was Captain John Underhill who delivered it with the same dreadful efficiency he had demonstrated during the Pequot campaign. Underhill, now a Boston “heretic” living under the jurisdiction of the West India Company, led 150 Dutch soldiers into the mountainous region north of Stamford where the remnant of the Indian league against the New Netherlanders had a strongly palisaded town. When it was all over 700 Indian corpses darkened the snow. The Dutch lost 15 men.
Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations. While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck.
Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned.
Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter. He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did.
He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to the lord of Rensselaerwyck.
Van Rensselaer also made it clear that company as well as private fur traders were to keep off his property. This caused much bitterness. Fort Orange, about which the patroon had established his domain, was the official post of the Dutch West India Company, the emporium where their traders traditionally bartered for beaver with the Iroquois. After Rensselaerwyck was established Fort Orange continued to be the commercial center of this profitable trade, so much so that the flourishing little trading village which sprang up there under the very cannon of the fort, and which was to grow into the strategically important city of Albany, was originally christened Beverwyck. Kiliaen van Rensselaer of course had no jurisdiction over Fort Orange, the company’s private precinct, but he considered Beverwyck within his domain. The resulting rivalry between his traders and the company’s representatives, with guns for the savages as bait for beaver, was anything but neighborly.
The company’s management at Manhattan only quickened the tension when on occasion the authorities there confiscated firearms en route to the patroon of Rensselaerwyck. In one case, in 1644, a ship out of Holland for Rensselaerwyck was discovered to be carrying 4,000 pounds of powder and 700 guns intended for the Indian trade, and these munitions were seized with considerable show of propriety. But what then happened to them is not stated, although one well-informed old chronicler suggests that they got along probably in due course to the Iroquois as usual in return for their precious beaver. In any event, the confiscation represented only one slight interruption in the continuous flow of these murderous trade goods to the lake-country Indians.
The feud between the company and the patroonship on the upper Hudson really settled down to cases in 1648 after Kiliaen van Rensselaer died and his young son’s contumacious new commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, took over the management of Rensselaerwyck. For, in the meantime, that little snappish captain, Peter Stuyvesant, had arrived in New Netherland as the West India Company’s Director General.
Stuyvesant was by way of being a reformer, so long as the reforms were in the company’s trade interests. One of his first acts to attract more settlers was to permit the popular election of “Nine Men” who, when called upon, were to assist the governor and the council in matters concerning the general welfare. But when the “Nine Men” proposed to serve the general welfare without being called upon by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant proceeded to knock them down. And when the right of appeal to the home government was suggested, the governor stamped about arrogantly on his pegleg and dared anyone to try it. He said he would make the appealer “a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland, and let him appeal in that way!”
Brutally dictatorial though he may have been, the new governor was earnest nevertheless in all things, reforms included. He took very effective steps, for instance, to check the smuggling of beaver into New England where it could be traded tax-free for European goods. And, while setting up tighter export controls, he also increased the tax on furs. Furthermore, he not only forbade the sale of liquor to the natives but he tried his best to enforce the contraband on firearms for use as trade goods.
Naturally, such policies were obnoxious at Rensselaerwyck, where gun-running was popular and company taxes were not. There too the commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, headstrong in pretensions to complete independence of the company, was itching to prove his insubordination.
So, when Stuyvesant, with his penchant for issuing autocratic proclamations, decreed a certain fast day not to van Slechtenhorst’s liking, the Commissary of Rensselaerwyck pounced upon it, rejecting it as an invasion of “the right and authority of the Lord Patroon.” When the governor went up the river to challenge his adversary he was met with open defiance.
It was Stuyvesant’s edict then that “no new ordinances affecting trade or commerce within the colony were to be made, unless with the assent of the provincial authorities.” Also, with regard to the company’s jealously guarded “precincts” about Fort Orange, no more buildings were to be erected at Beverwyck within range of the guns of the fortifications. Such encroachments on the company’s precincts rendered the fort insecure, the governor claimed. And further, he ordered, the wooden palisades of the fort were to be replaced with a stone wall, the stone to be quarried on an adjoining tract of land.
Van Slechtenhorst’s reply to all this was that he would build wherever he pleased because all the land around belonged to the patroon. He noted sarcastically that the patroon’s own trading house had once stood on the very border of the fort’s moat. No sooner had Stuyvesant departed than the wilful commissary went right ahead erecting houses, “even within pistol shot” of the palisades. Furthermore, he forbade the quarrying of stone for new walls to replace the palisades.
The feud, continuing unabated, was eventually referred to Holland where the States General sustained the Governor of New Netherland on every point. Although by this action the aspirations of the patroonship for independence were dashed beyond hope, van Slechtenhorst resisted stubbornly until 1652, when he was arrested and transported down to Manhattan. In the end also, the village of Beverwyck was officially declared free, to become a part of the “precincts” of Fort Orange.
Meanwhile, for Governor Stuyvesant, there was the more vital problem of the New Englanders who were hungrily gnawing away at Dutch fur trading territory.