Neger
Race, Slavery, and Status in the Dutch Northeast (1640s–60s)
During the early winter of 1660 in the forested landscape of northern New Netherland, a Black man was compelled to work. He had tied a blanket around his ears to block out the chilly weather as he struggled to ensure that his enslaver’s household would have enough wood to make it through the harsh winters that beset the area.1 With his labor he worked to provide some semblance of the life his Amsterdam-born enslaver Jeremias van Rensselaer had left behind. The work was unrelenting, backbreaking, and commonplace. It was also surveilled.2 As the man toiled, Petrus Stuyvesant watched him, and wanted his labor for himself. He offered to compensate Jeremias with one of his own slaves or to order another enslaved person from the Caribbean Island of Curaçao.3 Jeremias agreed to the offer, and the man found his life passed into the hands of another. The following summer, Jeremias sat down to pen a letter to his elder brother, Jan Baptist, detailing the encounter, in which he devoted over half of a manuscript page toward complaining about the enslaved man he referred to, not by name, but by an array of derogatory terms: “the beast” (het Beest), a “foul useless beast” (een onnut vuyl Beest), “clumsy oaf of a neger” (een lompe vlegel van een neeger), and a “dumb beast” (een domme beeste). With the last epithet, which he attributed to Petrus, he first wrote and then crossed out “dumb neger” (een domme negger).4 Such crude language rarely opens discussions of enslavement in New Netherland specifically or in the Northeast more broadly, but it is central to understanding not only the self-perception of enslavers like Jeremias van Rensselaer, but also the cultures of influence they spawned.
FIGURE 3. Jeremias to Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, June 2, 1661, SC7079 Box 4 Folder 42: Van Rensselaer Manor Papers. From the collections of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York.
Archival sources offer varied reflections of moments lost to time. The unnamed enslaved person described in the letter emerges not as a man at all but a “dumb beast.” In writing about an event that had occurred seven months earlier, Jeremias sought not to faithfully capture the exchange, but to conjure for his older brother, Jan Baptist, certain sentiments: disdain, humiliation, and power. A wider gaze captures more than just the perceptions of one man. It exposes the bonds between three men at the furthest outpost of Dutch American settlement. It brings into focus a fourth man sitting in Amsterdam imagining the scene his twenty-eight-year-old younger brother imparted. It interlaces the northern woods with the continental shelf of South America and Amsterdam’s opulent canal houses. By the time Jeremias committed his thoughts to writing, a cottage industry of maps marked out the boundaries of the joined colony of New Netherland, which included the southern Caribbean Islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. It was a world connected by waterways and secured by both the expansion and forced depletion of social and kinship ties.
Such an entwining fashioned the colonial experiences of New Netherland transplants. Some European migrants would forge new beginnings, becoming influential in a variety of slaveholding settings in colonial North America. They would build networks of wealth and power that endure to this day. Though steeped in premodern values and mores, these migrants were creating something new. Although the enslaved have been positioned as exotic foreigners on the margins of the heterogeneous tapestry of New Netherland’s colonial story, they were far from peripheral. Densely interconnected families built their colonial identities during the period of Dutch rule in no small part through engagement with enslavement. Their efforts consciously constructed networks of slaveholding that would tie the region together far beyond the bounds of New Netherland. Out of such slaveholding experiences, they reconceptualized their environment. They created an interconnected slaveholding network birthed in New Netherland that would ensnare generations of captive people.
Boundaries of Differences
That unnamed laborer’s unique existence held value, though the specific contours of his life will never be known. He was perhaps no older than thirty years. Had he been older, it is likely that Jeremias would have mentioned his age in the litany of complaints that he offered about the man. The laborer lived within a wider set of social geographies that knit together enslaved, bonded, and free people in the Dutch colony. The enslaved laborer was not the only person held in bondage by the twenty-eight-year-old Jeremias. An accomplished horse groom named Andries was also claimed by the young man.
In the fall of 1657, Trijntjen (Catherina) Rodenborch sold Andries to Jeremias’s older brother Jan Baptist.5 Who was Andries and where did he come from? The historical record is frustratingly vague. A year before the sale, Trijntjen returned to New Netherland where she had grown up, alongside her husband Lucas (the former vice director of Curaçao), daughter Elizabeth, and an enslaved man, whose name the West India Company (WIC) directors did not bother to record in their letter to Petrus Stuyvesant. The document was not intended as a memorial, but rather to inform Petrus that Lucas had not been paid the “balance of his salary.” The WIC instructed Petrus to ensure that Lucas could “balance” his owed wages in New Netherland with “Negroes, horses and whatever else may be of service to him.”6
Eight months later Lucas was dead, and Trijntjen petitioned that some of her late husband’s back wages be paid out in specie.7 Petrus had presumably complied with a portion of the WIC’s directive and supplied some of Lucas’s back salary in human beings, because by September 1657, Trijntjen placed several enslaved people up for sale.
Rensselaerswijck-based Jan Baptist bought one of these captive people, tasking his brother, Jeremias—who was the family’s resident merchant contact in New Amsterdam during the summers—with choosing a person from among the enslaved people that Trijntjen was offering for sale. Jeremias attended the sale with New Amsterdam merchant Oloff Stevensz. van Cortlandt, and they settled on “a tall, quick fellow who can work well.” Jeremias promised to send him up to his brother “at the first opportunity.”8 Andries resisted so much during the year following the purchase that Jan Baptist remembered the time as one marked by “trouble and arguments.” Nonetheless, Andries’s labor was valued—neighbor Jan Labatie offered Jan Baptist 100 guilders a year to hire Andries out.9 Jan Baptist had not set up that arrangement by the time that he left the colony in the early fall of 1658.10 Instead, he left Andries on Rensselaerswijck, serving his younger brother Jeremias, who had become the new director, with the understanding that Andries was still his slave.11 As the months passed and Jan Baptist remained in patria that understanding became more fungible, at least to Jeremias. By February of the following year, Jan Baptist decided to sell Andries, and requested that his younger brother affect the sale. By April he had thought better of the decision and requested that Jeremias send Andries to the Dutch Republic: “I need him at Cralo [Crailo] to mind my horse” (Ick hebbe hem noodtsaeckelijk op Cralo vande [winter] op mij paerdt te passen).12 How Andries remained in Rensselaerswijck and the wider community and family context of the episode illuminates the ways in which slavery was made in fits and starts during the first generation of settlement.
Andries spent his days of toil between the patroon’s town house in Beverwijck and the lands situated along the flats of the Hudson.13 The patroonship, the largest in the area, covered a massive amount of acreage, which included islands, rugged mountains, and dense forest. Patroons, according to one version of the “Freedoms and Exemptions,” were allotted “twelve black men and women out of the prizes in which Negroes shall be found, for the advancement of New Netherland,” although the company did not deliver on this promise.14 The lion’s share of the labor on patroonships like Rensselaerswijck had been planned for tenant farmers. So, how, exactly were the twelve Black men and women, wrested as the booty of privateering raids, going to advance New Netherland? Although the WIC failed to deliver on the initial promise of proposed enslaved laborers, the narratives of two men enslaved to the Van Rensselaers show that their ultimate presence was a catalyst for society building.15
The patroonship proposed by the WIC directors, while reflective of land arrangements in the Dutch Republic, would also nod to the new work arrangements that built Dutch colonial aspirations throughout the world.16 A patroon’s identity would be based on racial as much as class difference. This was the edifice on which the entire colonization program would be built. Even if New Netherland would never match the revenue outflow of Recife or become the slave-trading depot for Dutch slavers like Curaçao, it was erected on the assumption of a subordinate class with little hope for advancement.17 The first patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, intended Rensselaerswijck to contribute to the larger Dutch Atlantic economy that was fueled by slavery, exporting its grain harvests to Brazil, which would be deployed to feed the company slaves.18 Rensselaerswijck relied on a tenant, bonded, and enslaved labor force and exported goods to Native societies and throughout the Atlantic world. As Kiliaen explained, “As to the farm of Bijleveldt, I see that your honor has it worked by one farm hand and one negro, which may well be done and it still yield profit.” He sought to expand such a mixed work scheme for the farm belonging to Coenraed Notelman, the fiscael of the WIC at New Amsterdam.19 After Kiliaen’s death, his eldest son Johannes inherited the title of patroon of Rensselaerswijck, though, like his father, he never left Holland.20 Instead, his half-brother Jan Baptist traveled to New Netherland to manage the patroonship until 1655 when he returned to Amsterdam, leaving the directorship to his younger brother Jeremias.21
Rensselaerswijck became the only financially viable patroonship. Although technically in the hands of distant patroons such as Kiliaen and Johannes van Rensselaer, it would be governed by directors who spent a considerable amount of time in the Hudson Valley, such as Jan Baptist and Jeremias, men who would construct a colonial environment, created in part by enslaved labor. They would build their dynasties through strategic marriages executed in Dutch Reformed churches while sitting on courts that slowly eroded and invalidated the social and community ties between the enslaved. They would pass down dowries and legacies that honored the connections made at baptisms through carefully chosen witnesses. The relationships and community built by enslaved and freed people using the same avenues were systematically closed, as over time baptism, witnessing, and marriage became institutions reserved for the freeborn and not the enslaved.22
Andries was pulled between chaos and tumult. Jeremias complained that Jan Baptist had left the patroon’s house in such an awful condition that it needed considerable repairs.23 Jeremias’s town house, gallingly zoned within the boundaries of Beverwijck after a violent and contentious dispute between the patroonship and the colony, was newly completed and decorated with flourishes of his family’s wealth, but crowded, serving as the meeting place for colony business and housing an enslaved and a servant staff.24 In contrast, the van Rensselaer home on the Keizersgracht was opulently appointed, decorated with goods purchased as a result of the family’s precious gem business as well as dividends from the Dutch East India Company.25 The family manor named Crailo, located on feudal lands held in Het Gooi, would have been the closest approximation of life in Rensselaerswijck, and is where Jan Baptist planned to place Andries to tend his horses, but the flat expanse of the Dutch countryside would have contrasted sharply with the rolling foothills that marked the northern river valley.26
Andries would have already seen the grachten, or canals, of Amsterdam by the time of Jan Baptist’s letter, if he was the unnamed man who arrived in New Netherland with his former enslaver, Trijntjen Rodenborch. Jeremias compared Andries’s “worth” to the price of other enslaved people who had lived thirteen to fourteen years in the Caribbean, and two “here among the Dutch,” implying Andries had such Caribbean experience in addition to his service in New Netherland.27 As Andrea Mosterman argued, his skill with horses could point to Andries’s origins in Senegambia. Colonial enslavers in the Caribbean and Spanish South America highly prized Senegambian captive people for their cattle and husbandry skills.28
Andries’s skill attending horses offered him some leverage. Andries’s position as a groom is certainly what spared him from being sold in February 1659 as Jan Baptist had initially planned. Jeremias noted that during the winter, Andries had “taken care of the horses alone and has done it so well that during my time the horses have never looked so fine.”29 Alone in the brutal winters of the Hudson River Valley, Andries took care of his enslaver’s horses. He might well have understood that Jan Baptist had a mind to sell him and used his skills to remain in the community by impressing his indispensability to Jeremias, a young man who engaged in winter sports and boisterously raced sleighs with his comrades.30 Andries would have known the danger of sale that Jan Baptist’s departure posed to him if he had witnessed other enslaved people sold away. When Jan Baptist reversed his previous decision to sell Andries and instead requested that Jeremias “do not forget to send the Negro,” it was to tend his new “roan piebald horse, a 3-year-old Spanish mare, being full of worms.”31 Andries could have had experience leveraging his skilled labor as a groom while living in the Caribbean. Aruba, Bonaire, and to a lesser extent, Curaçao supplied horses to New Netherland, and at least some enslaved people used their knowledge of horses to escape.32
In any case, using his skill as a groom to avoid the life disruption of sale was a gamble because it was this skill that led Jan Baptist to desire him in Holland. Amsterdam merchant families were heavily invested in the slave trade and enslaved people were held captive in the Northern European city, as well as others throughout the republic.33 Such a relocation could have afforded Andries opportunities to connect to the Black community in Amsterdam, living in Rembrandt’s neighborhood near the Jewish section that Mark Ponte highlights inspired the painter’s artistic renderings of urban life.34 How ever, Jeremias was loath to let his brother’s enslaved man go, so he stalled. He never sold Andries outside the family following Jan Baptist’s February letter, and after sending a letter in May praising Andries’s skill attending his horses, he pointedly ignored his brother’s request to send Andries to Holland.35 By August, Jeremias wrote to Jan Baptist that “friends here have advised me against [sending Andries to Holland], saying that it would be nothing but foolishness to try to have him serve you in a free country (vrijlandt), as he would be too proud to do that.”36 For Jeremias, Rensselaerswyck specifically and New Netherland in general was no free land; even in Rensselaerswijck whose enslaved population was overshadowed by New Amsterdam’s in terms of numbers, Jeremias imagined that Andries’s actions and even sentiments were controlled by a communally and socially enforced bondage. Jan Baptist knew better; enslavement was a reality everywhere: both in the Dutch Republic and in its broader empire.
Andries continued to resist. Jeremias complained of the difficulty “to get him to do anything for anybody if I have not expressly ordered him to do so.”37 Andries clearly had options: he lived at the crossroads of several different settlements and cultures and was a part of the working community of Beverwijck. Andries lived and worked alongside laborers of different social statuses. A maid worked in the patroon’s house and two Dutch servants lived in the house during the same period as well. A tailor would board in the house on occasion. Later, another two enslaved people—one Native—would also live and work there. Two enslaved people named Mookinga (which appears to be a Dutch transliterated version of the Angolan name, Muxima) and Manuel had been sold at auction in New Amsterdam and sent up to the fort to labor.38 Though he tried to present his retention of Andries as a favor to Jan Baptist by highlighting Andries’s behavior, Jeremias ultimately admitted, “To tell the truth, I could not spare him very well.” He offered to pay his brother “de somma 50 heele bevers” or the equivalent of fifty whole beavers (roughly 400 guilders).39
Jeremias was uninterested in sending Andries on what he believed would be a one-way trip to Holland, but was keener to trade enslaved people with powerful New Netherland colonists. The young Jeremias was surrounded by friends who did not hesitate to offer their opinion of proper mastery. Such slaveholding friends could have included the Van Cortlandts who resided in Manhattan and the Schuylers who lived in Beverwijck. As Janny Venema notes, other friends also included fur traders Volckert Jansz Douw, Jan Thomasz, Pieter Hartgers, and town surgeon Abraham Staets.40 Jeremias’s friendships maintained his family’s prestige as one of the four controlling trading families in the colony.41 Indeed, he noted that he had purchased the laborer mentioned at the beginning of this chapter on the suggestion of Petrus Stuyvesant for his brother’s account in order to settle debts.42 Such ties illuminate the social importance these colonists placed on shoring up local relationships through ties of bonded reciprocities.43 Jeremias would rather hold onto the labor and life of a captive Andries, following New Netherland-based friends’ advice, than send him across the ocean to toil for his brother. Such penchant for following local friends rather than the desires of his distant blood relations, would lead to Jeremias courting and ultimately marrying Maria van Cortlandt without asking his mother Anna’s permission.44 Perceptions that equated the Dutch Republic and other Western European lands with freedom—despite the sharply contrasting realities of those enslaved within European societies—would persist as imagined boundaries of empire. Jeremias’s slaveholding actions should be read as part of a continuum of constructing difference at work throughout the Dutch overseas empire, but it was also profoundly local. The language that Jeremias used to describe these two enslaved people—one “a dumb beast” and the other “too proud”—would come to define not just the intrinsic and labor-based value they each provided, but also their relational worth for establishing status and prestige within expansive American dynastic families.
A Bouwerij in Lower Manhattan
When the laborer formerly enslaved by Jeremias left southward down the Hudson toward New Amsterdam, he was headed toward an uncertain future.45 His story highlights how much silence remains in the recounting of history, shadowing not only his name, identity, and past, but also the motives and ministrations of his captors. Yet such fragments also contain the power to disrupt. Various firsts have opened the story of enslavement: the arrival of the first slave ships or the stories of the first African-descended residents. His journey away from Rensselaerswijck and toward New Amsterdam presents alternate focal points for the narrative of early American enslavement. The Stuyvesant family’s properties would ultimately include holdings in Wiltwijck (present-day Kingston) and Bergen County (in New Jersey).46 But their domestic lives were mostly spent on their properties in Manhattan—the house in town that the English would rechristen Whitehall and their bouwerij (bowery). The bouwerij was a place of enslavement as well as a place for creating networks between free Blacks. It served as both a physical and social place for connection and disconnection, and became the locus from which an expansive network of slaveholding connections was formed, yet it was immortalized in the written record as a “place of relaxation and pleasure.”47 The man’s sale, and those like it, connected the lives of enslavers to each other and to the far-flung reaches of the Atlantic world, but the veneer applied to this network of oppression was one of peace and calm—an intentional dissonance that, like Jeremias’s descriptions of both Andries and the unnamed laborer, fed into the self-perceptions of enslavers and the cultures they influenced. By following the lives of the Stuyvesant family; their transatlantic migration as well as the social elements of their American lives revolving around church, household, and neighborhood, I highlight the process of becoming enslavers.
In the 1660s, the bouwerij was a compact village of its own, situated on the shores of lower Manhattan. A number of New Amsterdam’s enslaved workers lived nearby. Composed of a farmhouse and barn chapel surrounded by gardens where foodstuffs were grown, the bouwerij’s landscape would have differed from that in the northernmost reaches of the colony.48 By then the wooded landscape that had covered Manhattan had been cut back and cleared for the island’s southernmost settlement. Such labor was completed in part by numerous Black workers. An enslaved man named Balthazar, who had been held captive in the Spanish Caribbean, seized by French pirates, before being sold in New Amsterdam, toiled for Petrus.49 Enslaved and free people worked the bouwerij’s fields of wheat and garden plots. Others owned by the WIC toiled on the chain gang, to relime the fort and construct the palisade.50 An Angolan woman, named Mayken, enslaved to the WIC who had been among the first group of Black people to arrive in New Netherland, worked as a domestic in one of the Stuyvesants’ Manhattan houses. She labored alongside her friends Lucretia and Susanna.51 The bouwerij sported a chapel—one of the last construction projects for the bouwerij carpenter Frederick Philipse, before he secured a contract to trade tobacco and enslaved people in Virginia.52 In good weather, the services there would be led by twenty-three-year-old Henricus Selijns, who remarked to his superiors back home of the mixed community that he found, one which included forty Black people from the “negro coast” (modern-day Congo and Angola).53
FIGURE 4. Map of New Amsterdam, the bouwerijs, and the southern portion of Manhattan Island. Based on the Castello Plan of 1660. From The New York Public Library.
Petrus Stuyvesant’s domestic world in 1660 included his wife Judith and two sons, Balthazar who was thirteen and Nicolaes Willem who was twelve.54 From the beginning of their colonial American lives, the Stuyvesant family’s experience was entwined with enslavement. By the winter of 1660, the family had become so comfortable with enslavement that the lives of men, women, and children became currency that underwrote their personal and professional relationships. But their lives in New Netherland, surrounded and supported by bondage, was little more than a decade old. Before then, only Petrus had been exposed to the Atlantic slave market. He had begun his American career sometime before 1635 as a commissary or supercargo on the Fernando de Noronha island chain off the northeastern coast of Brazil. By 1639, he had been posted on the island of Curaçao, starting as a commissary but working his way up to director in 1642.55 Petrus’s tenure was marked by raids against the Spanish and, as director, he had considerable access to and control of the people enslaved by the WIC who endured a brutal existence on the island. The enslaved were given just enough rations to survive, despite being set to work on the salt pans. They were subjected to whippings and sale. They frequently ran away in protest. In a resolution dated May 19, 1643, drawn up at Fort Amsterdam on Curaçao, by Petrus Stuyvesant, Brian Newton, and Lucas Rodenborch, the group found it “necessary for the maximum security of the island, as long as the Negroes remain working there, to keep 3 to 4 horsemen there together with 8 to 10 soldiers, in order to provide a guard for the countryside both against surprise (Spanish) attack and the escape of Negroes.”56 On May 26 the following year they whipped and sold a group of four enslaved “Negroes and Mulattoes” caught attempting to escape the harsh island regime by building “a raft near the east point.” Judging the groups’ escape seditious, they counted the punishment mercy, noting “we did not sentence them to death, which they well deserved, but found it most profitable for the Company, after whipping them severely, to send them off to St. Cruz or other Caribbean islands to be traded for provisions.”57 The dramatic difference in perspective between enslavers viewing the vulnerability of their political positions, which partially depended on the “allegiance” of peoples highly motivated toward insurgency, and those of freedom seekers was stark. This sentence reflects the intersection between the fear of high treason and the desire for continual profit from the sale in human beings, which motivated the group’s flight.
Later in 1644, Petrus’s leg was crushed by a cannonball during a siege against St. Martin. He returned to the Dutch Republic to recuperate where he met and married Judith Bayard. Around a year after their wedding, the pair departed from the island of Texel on the Prinses Amelia, bound for New Netherland and Petrus’s new role as the director general of the joint colonies of New Netherland and Curaçao “and the islands thereof” (en d’ Eylanden van dien, which included Aruba and Bonaire).58 Seven months pregnant, Judith received her introduction to enslavement on the island of Curaçao during the spring of 1647, when the Prinses Amelia docked there for a month before continuing on to New Amsterdam.59 Petrus’s half-sister Margrietje, full sister Anna, and Anna’s four children—Balthazar, Petrus, Nicolaes, and Catharina—would emigrate seven years later, following the death of Anna’s husband Samuel Bayard, who was also Judith’s brother. Petrus had business on the island—he was tasked with briefing island management of the details of the transition to his new administration.60
Even from the ship they would have witnessed the work routines of the enslaved enforced by institutionalized torture and heard the cadence of different languages. Some captives were brought by the Spanish in the sixteenth century from Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Others could have been traded from Caribbean islands like St. Christopher, from Spanish South America, or from Dutch Brazil. In the early years of the trade, such captives were the plunder of Dutch privateers who attacked Portuguese slave ships in Africa and then shipped the enslaved people to the Americas, but by the time that the Stuyvesants arrived in Curaçao the Dutch were firmly entrenched for direct trade from the Gold Coast to Pernambuco. Those arrivals who hailed from West Central Africa—an area that encompassed the Kongo basin and in the south, Angola—would have spoken a variety of Bantu languages. Those who hailed from the Kongo would have had exposure to Roman Catholicism and a number of captives would have been baptized Catholics before arriving in the Americas. A debate as to the numbers of this trade persists, but for the period of the Dutch slave trade, nearly 500,000 African captives were transported to Dutch America, with more than 200,000 arriving during the seventeenth century. The Dutch represented nearly 12 percent of the slave trade during the seventeenth century but were eclipsed during the eighteenth century by the meteoric numbers attained by the British. Numbers from the direct trade after 1651 indicate that most of Curaçao’s enslaved population hailed from West Central Africa and the Bight of Benin. The Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast made up another large share of the imported Dutch captive population during the period, with much less coming from Senegambia and Sierra Leone.61
Lucas Rodenborch, the island director who had worked closely with Petrus, lived on the island with Trijntjen. The Rodenborchs’ household was served by people enslaved to the family and those owned by the Dutch West India Company.62 Judith would have observed the expectations of deference from captive people that enslavers such as the Rodenborchs had come to expect. Though she had no doubt encountered Dutch maidservants in the United Provinces and understood those customs of decorum, and lived in a society where Black servants in various states of unfreedom were present (across Europe during the early modern period), she would have seen new patterns of behavior imposed by torture.63 She also would have encountered another side to Petrus, the only one of them who would have been accustomed to a world dominated by enslavement. In the years to come, he would help implement the WIC’s vision for a more expansive slave footprint in the North American colony.64 Judith was getting a crash course in how to function as an enslaver.
By the time the family arrived, Curaçao had a legal framework for slavery, which included punishments for running away and admonitions against sex with African and Native women that emphasized the contact as “unchristian-like intercourse.” Such laws could have been a reaction to sexual abuse, a reflection of a racially rooted unease, or a disgust with sex outside of Christian marriage but likely were an acknowledgement of the key role nonwhite female agriculturalists served on an arid island where famine was constant. As Linda Rupert has noted, the early legal code included strict protections for enslaved gardens, a potential nod to the dire need for such enslaved women’s agricultural prowess.65
The same year that the Stuyvesants stopped in Curaçao on their way to New Netherland, Englishman Richard Ligon arrived on the island of Barbados, at the very beginning of the sugar boom. Sugar was still worked in part by European servants, but it was quickly being racialized. Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados would describe the beginnings of sugar on the island as well as circulate for a seventeenth-century Northern European market an image of Atlantic slavery and African cultures.66 Likewise, the families that would depart the southern Caribbean island for the northern colony of New Amsterdam would inscribe a narrative of their lives that would be intertwined with the struggles and hardships of the enslaved. Such stories would circulate in accounts of captivities, in the margins of financial records, within the pages of baptismal records, and perhaps more prevalently, in the laws and cases that stood as an enduring monument to their attempts to control. But before the emergence of a slave society in the Chesapeake, before slavery followed the condition of the mother, before slave patrols tracked down runaways and enslavers published their hue and cry, a group of family members and their friends learned what it meant to be colonists in the teeming cauldron of the Caribbean. Thus initiated, they would have left the island of Curaçao armed with a set of expectations for their lives in colonial North America, one that foregrounded slavery.
New Netherland contained a small community of enslaved people by the time of the Stuyvesants’ arrival in 1647 and, unlike in Curaçao, the institution was not codified into the legal structure of the colony. The first official shipment of Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1627, when the Bruynvisch landed.67 Additional captives would come on further ships before Petrus and his family set foot on Manhattan, but as scholars have rightly pointed out this first generation of New Netherland’s enslaved people did not face the legal and social restrictions of later generations.68 How much of this is owning to the uniqueness of New Netherland’s culture is debatable. Access to landowning, the courts, and even church membership existed in the Chesapeake during the same time and was not restricted until the 1660s and later, although Virginia’s 1639 law did prevent arming “Negroes,” in contrast to what was practiced in New Netherland. There is no evidence to suggest that Black New Netherlanders owned white indentured servants as was the case in the Chesapeake, nor did any free Black landowner in Manhattan rival the social status of Anthony Johnson.69 New Netherland colonists with sufficient financial resources were permitted personal ownership of enslaved people, and their ability to buy and sell these individuals was safeguarded. In a 1642 resolution of the Amsterdam chamber of the WIC, the company directors explicitly state that former director Wouter van Twiller “may dispose at his pleasure of his cattle, movables, Negroes and all that belongs to him” on his former company farm.70 The use of Black people enslaved by the company for construction and defense was also well established in the colony. Slavery’s growth was encouraged by company leadership in Amsterdam, although they could not always be the sole channel for delivery of enslaved labor.71 In 1646, two years after eleven formerly enslaved individuals successfully argued for freedom for themselves and their spouses (a freedom that would exclude their children), the WIC issued instructions to the new director general and the Council of New Netherland that, “for the promotion of agriculture there, it is deemed proper to permit, at the request of the Patroons, colonists and other farmers, the conveyance thither of as many Negroes as they are willing to purchase at a fair price.”72
After Petrus had settled in, he began his tenure as the only director general of a newly joined colony. He entered the position with a picture in his mind of how the space he inhabited should be arranged, one that was shaped by his experience in a slaveholding colonial environment. Petrus began his colonial career in Dutch Brazil in 1635, serving partly under the direction of the governor general, Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. Johan Maurits was heavily invested in the slave trade, as Carolina Monteiro and Erik Odegard argue, carving out an extensive slave-trading network and personal ownership of over thirty individuals in addition to the control of another fifty people enslaved to the company by the time that Stuyvesant assumed his post as director of Curaçao in 1642.73 Under Petrus’s predecessor Willem Kieft’s term, in 1646, the slave ship Tamandare docked in New Amsterdam, dooming some of its compliment of enslaved men women and children to toil in New Netherland, while Willem sold most for export. Petrus inherited Willem’s company responsibilities, which included an expanded desire for enslavement in the northern Dutch colony and, a year after his installation, Petrus received word from his superiors that they felt “more negroes could be advantageously employed and sold” in New Netherland than “the ship Tamandare has brought.” At the very beginning of his term, Petrus would have had to keep the WIC’s 1647 guidance in mind, which pronounced the company’s own proslavery stance at the beginning of his tenure: “We shall take care, that [in the future] a greater number of negroes be taken there.”74 In 1648, the WIC made explicit their commitment to encouraging the importation of Angolans who were intended to “be employed in farming.”75 For his own part, Petrus asked for a salary increase as well as “the transfer of a bouwerije, stocked with two horses, six cows and two negro boys.”76
Shortly after the Stuyvesants began their new lives on Manhattan, a free Black family gathered for the baptism of their son Sebastiaen, an effort to secure their social and religious standing.77 The little boy’s father, Jan van Angola was joined with his chosen witnesses Emanuel Congoij and Marie van Angola. The geographic origins embedded within their surnames suggest that Jan, Marie, and Emanuel could speak to one another in several languages, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Portuguese, a creole form of Portuguese similar to what would become Papiamento, and Dutch. Like the multicultural settlers that populated New Netherland, they were creating their own American community out of networks of family, land, language, and religion. It was, as Susanah Shaw Romney, Jeroen Dewulf, and Graham Russell Hodges have argued, an Atlantic African community that would have been recognizable throughout the Americas, but with creole as well as identifiably Dutch elements. There are several enslaved men named Jan in the records during these years, including Jan de Neger who was enslaved in Rensselaerswijck and had, in 1646, performed one of the area’s first executions.78 Rensselaerswijck’s domine Johannes Megapolensis requested freedom for Jan Francisco, the younger, due to his service to the colony, causing Van Laer to speculate that this was the same Jan who had served as executioner.79
Jan sought to incorporate his son as a member of the free African community, claiming Christian liberty through baptism, and physical freedom by naming him Sebastiaen, after Bastiaen, the leader of the free Black community. Bastiaen, who was known as the “captain of the Negroes,” could have been a sailor, a WIC employee who had been granted freedom by the company in 1640.80 Sebastiaen’s baptism was one of the five within the African and African-descended community that evoked his name “based on Bastiaen’s exceptional connections.”81 They exemplified Ira Berlin’s “Atlantic creole” who thrived during the “charter generation,” of Black settlement.82 A West Central African man, Paulo de Angola, had been granted “a certain parcel of land on the east side of the Klock of the Fresh water” in 1645.83 Paulo and a group of ten other people enslaved to the West India Company had been granted their freedom and those of their wives in return for an annual tax of their harvest.84 Their children, however, remained enslaved to the company. Enslaved and free parents would struggle to protect their children from the abuses of slavery, frequently appearing at the baptismal font or in New Netherland’s courts in pursuit of such aims. Their aspirations to build a thriving free community were zealous, like many other inhabitants of the diverse colony, but their racial otherness and the competing aims of family building by white settlers made such strivings a daily struggle. While they lived in community with one another, they also had relationships with white neighbors, many of whom had business, religious, and personal connections with the Black community.
Judith Stuyvesant’s life had been drastically transformed in her new colonial home. She had lived most of her life a single woman in the Dutch Republic and, within a year and a half of marriage to Petrus Stuyvesant, that life was gone forever. In its place were new duties as a new mother, and as the wife of the director general, stationed at a small but expanding outpost of the Dutch empire manned by a mixed workforce that included enslaved people.85 While the society she left did have a population of enslaved people who served in Dutch centers like Amsterdam and Delft, the immediate diversity both in background and circumstance of the denizens of New Amsterdam would have made for a glaring change. Three months after arriving, on August 11, 1647, a very pregnant Judith stood alongside commissary Hendrick van Dijck, Van Dijck’s wife Lydia, and two others to witness the baptism of twins Jan and Aelje. Two weeks later another child, Jan, the mixed-race child of captain Jan de Vries, was baptized in the Reformed Church in New Amsterdam.86
Another seven weeks later, Judith’s first child, Balthazar Lazarus—named for both her and Petrus’s minister fathers—was baptized in new Amsterdam.87 His witnesses were chosen from the leaders of the colony and included the Huguenot physician Jean de la Montagne, whose tobacco plantation, named Vredendael, had been recently destroyed by warfare, and Cornelis van Tienhoven. As secretary, Cornelis formalized the sale of enslaved people to New Netherland’s denizens shortly before the Stuyvesants’ arrival and helped place an unfree African child whose parents had successfully wrested freedom from their captors.88 Alongside them stood Anneken Bogardus, whose husband, Everardus, had facilitated the baptism of many of the community of enslaved and free Black people that populated New Amsterdam.89 These elite neighbors stood and promised to raise Balthazar in the knowledge of the Reformed faith, and their example would school him on the earthly engine of empire. He and his brother Nicolaes Willem, baptized a year later, grew up on the bouwerij surrounded by a community of free and enslaved Native, African, and African-descended men, women, and children.90
Such enslaved laborers would have served Judith and her young family, cleaning the house and preparing the food that had come to represent the taste of the republic in its far reaches of empire. In later generations, the enslaved population’s grasp and syncretic transformation of Dutch culture became a defining aspect of life in colonies with old Dutch populations.91 Judith’s American life would be spent in close living proximity with the enslaved in and around the bouwerij, as well as a group enslaved by the West India Company who lived in a house on the Slijksteeg in New Amsterdam and fifteen free Black households who lived and farmed along the wagon road in parcels of land granted them by Petrus in 1659. Henricus Selijns, the Brooklyn minister who visited the bouwerij on Sunday evenings, would have preached to a multiracial congregation that incorporated flocks as far as New Amsterdam. Ægidius Luyck, a schoolmaster and future minister, had been hired as rector of New Amsterdam’s Latin School. As he was married to a relative of Judith, he doubtless visited the bouwerij regularly.92 The Stuyvesants were surrounded by a host of relatives and friends who lived nearby. Many of them would marry and create networks of slavery that would crisscross the Americas. A Northeastern slaveholding culture that would last for two centuries was born out of communities in lower Manhattan.
Dishonorable Work
Unlike the discoverable lives of the Stuyvesant family, the laborer who opened this chapter and sailed down to New Amsterdam in 1661 was drawn in the barest of terms. He suffered from some unnamed chronic ailment or injury, and he had been employed at strenuous work. The scars of such a life sunk so deeply that they would be still visible in the bones of enslaved people excavated centuries later.93 By calling the enslaved man a “dumb beast,” Jeremias (and presumably Petrus as well) evoked an animality and carnality that underlay nascent notions of racial difference. Jeremias could have deployed the adjective dumb to mean that the man could not speak or had trouble speaking, evidencing a certain unease toward disability that was infused by racial disdain. Jeremias’s earlier description of the man began by noting he had a “mouth that looked like a flounder ^when he grinned” (een beck als een schol soo scheen ^als hy gruickacten) suggest the man had a facial paralysis consistent with a stroke or cerebral palsy. It could also have been a racialized disparagement of the man’s lips, just as other Dutch travelers read monstrosity in African women’s breasts.94 Jeremias’s choice of the work beck, which evokes an animal’s beak rather than a human mouth, linked his assessment to popular travel literature describing African people as beasts. Jeremias also described the man as clumsy and noted disparagingly that he tried to break the piece of wood by standing on it as opposed to swinging an axe. He complained that the man could do less work than a child despite looking fit and eating as much as three men (hy niet soo veel doen [cost] als een kint & wel voor drie man eten), and freely expressed that he regretted the man had not died when he had earlier fallen ill (ick bleft even wel noch met hem op gescheept).95 His words are laced not only with racial antipathy but with clear disgust for the man’s physicality. Despite Jeremias’s criticisms, Petrus clearly intended a future of labor for the man, one that would be both backbreaking and dishonorable. He could have even been sent to war. Several months earlier, Petrus had requested that the slaves the Amsterdam directors had ordered sent to New Netherland should be “stout and strong fellows” (heel cloecke ende starcke negros) who were “fit to work on this fortress and other works; also, if able, in the war against the native neighbors, either to pursue them, or else to carry the baggage for the soldiers.”96 Notions of race were intimately tied to conceptions of capabilities and honor, and this racially coded world shaped relationships between Petrus, the Esopus and other regional Indian nations, Africans, Creoles, and New Amsterdam’s other white settlers.
Hogs, cows, horses, and goats infested the island of Manhattan in the 1640s leaving destruction in their wake. Petrus lamented the deplorable condition of the fort, crumbling and overrun with the settlers’ uncontrolled animals. He saw an island in need of cleaning and construction, if any hope of proper defense or social order could be achieved. He set enslaved Africans and white company servants to the arduous repair of the fort, but after toiling for two summers their work was ruined by settlers’ animals left to run free.97 Petrus was incensed by the destruction, and assigned the company-appointed fiscael, Hendrick van Dijck the task of prosecuting colonists who failed to keep their animals in check. Hendrick was offended, not by the animals, or the destruction, but by the implication that the assignment he’d been given by his superior was one more properly suited for a “negro.” Or so he claimed, in the testimony he gave to the States General in 1652, against Petrus. He recounted that he was ordered to “look to the fort’s hogs” and keep them “from the fort.”98 Hendrick complained that Petrus employed him “mostly as his boy; ordering me to look to the hogs and keep these from the fort, which a negro could have easily done.”99 In phrasing his complaint this way, Hendrick deliberately tried to cast Petrus in a bad light and ignored that his duty was not to herd hogs himself, but to prosecute colonists who flouted the colony stipulation to keep their animals controlled. By this time, Hendrick and Petrus had an acrimonious relationship and Hendrick’s account of past events was no doubt soured by their bad blood. Hendrick chose to express his anger at his debasement in terms that both referenced the omnipresence of enslaved labor in the colony and connected to the concept of honor in the minds of authorities in the Dutch Republic.
Both men had lived in the Dutch American colonies, at different poles of empire, and both understood the socially infused decorum of race and enslavement. This was not Hendrick’s first time in New Netherland. He served as an ensign during the series of battles that would come to be known as Kieft’s War and, in 1642, was tasked with helping to lead an attack on a Wappinger town located on the mainland, northeast of the island of Manhattan, near the present-day town of Pound Ridge, New York. The raid occurred at night, and the colonial forces shot and killed 180 people and then set fire to the town, marking one of the most brutal episodes of the war with the deaths of over 700 men, women, and children.100 After such bloody actions, Hendrick ultimately returned to the Dutch Republic where the WIC appointed him fiscael, and sent him back to America along with Petrus.101
Petrus’s actions toward Hendrick disturbed the fiscael because of their social and racial implications. In his testimony Hendrick complained that during the group’s sojourn on Curaçao before continuing onto New Netherland, Petrus confined him to the ship for “some three weeks,” while allowing “all the other officers, nay, even the soldiers” to leave “immediately on their arrival,” because Petrus did not recognize his authority to act as fiscael on the island of Curaçao.102 If so, then confined to the ship, Hendrick’s thoughts could have been drawn to the slave ships that coasted off of Atlantic African shores. Such vessels were filled with men, women, and children, some of whom had been branded with the mark of the Dutch West India Company, before arrival in the Americas.103 Although Curaçao would not transform into a major transit depot for the slave trade until a number of years later, by 1647 the enslaved would already be omnipresent on the island, visible even from within the holds of the ship—they would have toiled at every servile occupation and were closely watched. The contrasts between white and Black work must have been in Hendrick’s mind constantly.
Colonization afforded European newcomers latitude in reinvention. While new modes of labor, such as the large-scale mechanized sugar works became racialized from the start, other tasks that had been worked by Europeans on the continent, such as tending hogs, building fortifications, and serving as executioner, underwent a more gradual process of racialization.104 It was this process that came to define the ways that elite colonists across North America came to construct themselves against racial slavery. Three years after his complaint against Petrus, Hendrick was called on to argue a case for his son-in-law, Nicolaes de Meyer, that hinged on understandings of difference. Hendrick maintained that another colonist named Gabriel de Haes had no evidence to support a suit of assault against Nicolaes because the witness statement was “a declaration only of a negro, or a young Indian, which in law is invalid.”105 However, Hendrick was arguing based on perceived cultural practice, not legal precedent. In this case, the court ignored the legal argument and decided that, as the accusation pertained to a criminal matter, it should be prosecuted by the New Amsterdam schout.
Creating a group of people who were forever enslaved and who carried that condition as a hereditary curse was a process that was neither completed until well after the English takeover, nor was it a straightforward linear development. It was a reactive process, borne out of social fears as well as hopes for what European settlers would make from the new environment. Every space that opened for an individual act of resistance both shaped and reaf-firmed the images that the elite held of themselves. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the families that settled in New Netherland did not come wholly ignorant of cultural expectations between themselves and those they held in perpetual captivity. Stock notions of slaves and enslavement promulgated by biblical texts and popular exegesis, the fear of being enslaved that inhabited popular rhetoric in the wake of Dutch independence, and the Black Legend all had several centuries to imprint an outline of slavery in the minds of those who departed for New Netherland’s shores.106 They did not merely use those expectations unquestioningly but instead transformed the expectations that they held for the enslaved in the wake of changing personal and social conditions.
Work and dishonor were closely linked, but in the presence of race-based slavery, they were transformed. This was not a phenomenon unique to the Dutch outpost in North America—a process of racialization was at work across the Americas—but its North American variant can be traced as firmly to the banks of the Hudson as to the Chesapeake Bay. On February 3, 1639, Gijsbert Cornelissen Beyerlandt was accused by the colony’s fiscael, Ulrich Lupoldt, of being a “trouble maker” who had wounded some soldiers at Fort Amsterdam. Who exactly was involved in the altercation or what it was about, remains unclear. It was so violent that the wounded soldier required the services of a surgeon and resulted in Gijsbert’s banishment from the colony. Before he was set to depart, he was “condemned to work with the Negroes for the Company until such time as the first sloop shall sail for the South River and to serve the Company there and furthermore to pay the wounded soldier fl. 15, the surgeon a fee of fl. 10 for his services and the fiscael a fine of fl. 10.”107 The sentence of being forced to work with those who filled lowly positions was not a new one. In Amsterdam, high-status convicts or debtors were forced to fill humiliating positions as punishment for crimes against the state that did not merit a traitors’ death.108 It was a symbolic act that attacked the status of the prisoner, yet in this case, there was an undeniable racial caste. Gijsbert’s experience was clearly intended to travel with him. Back in the Dutch Republic, he would carry as his final memory of the colony of New Netherland, his experience of being condemned to work alongside the enslaved at the most repulsive and back breaking labor that the colonial authorities could conjure.
Being made to work like enslaved people was humiliating to European colonists and surfaces often in the records when parties perceived their honor was at stake. In 1652, Brant van Slichtenhorst was the director of the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, fulfilling an administrative role that would have been similar to Petrus’s, albeit on a smaller scale. The director controlled the resources of Rensselaerswijck and, to a certain extent, the actions of his tenants, which put him at odds with WIC employees when it came to the harvesting of firewood. Petrus and his council received complaints, and they were not amused with the “impertinent, unbearable and unchristian-like tyranny of the present commander or, as he styles himself, director of the colony of Rensselaerswijck.” Forbidding WIC employees from cutting firewood in the public woods and prohibiting the inhabitants of the patroonship from bringing firewood for the fort, “both the officials and servants of the Company are compelled to carry the firewood, which they have begged from him, on their shoulders as bondservants [dienstbaerheyt] . . . to the disregard, indeed, contempt of the honorable Company, its officials and good servants.”109 In his 1647 Dutch-English dictionary Henry Hexham defined dienstbaerheyt as bondage or servitude, and thus I have used the term bondservant to more closely capture this meaning.110 Nearly a decade earlier dienstbaeren had already begun to be used interchangeably with slaven on the Dutch coastal forts in Guinea.111 The “disregard” and “contempt” associated with the work would have only been deepened by such association.
Petrus’s social and physical worlds were increasingly bound up in the promotion of agriculture and remained tied to local politics with regional import. While Petrus was headed down the Delaware River in a successful bid to capture the colony of New Sweden, fighting broke out in and around New Amsterdam. Provoked by Dutch aggression, several hundred members of various Indigenous groups launched a series of attacks on several New Netherland towns. After the fighting ceased, almost thirty farms and a large amount of grain was burned, five hundred to six hundred head of cattle were lost, fifty colonists were killed, and another hundred taken hostage.112 Scholars have deepened our understanding of this moment: Jean Soderlund argued that the fighting was the result of political alliances that originated with Lenape groups allied with the Swedish on the Delaware, and Andrew Lipman posed the action as highlighting the importance of Native maritime power.113 When the directors in Amsterdam wrote to Petrus in 1656, outraged over reports of Hendrick van Dijck’s role in precipitating the battle, they were reacting to a report that all of the fighting had been avoidable and began only after Hendrick killed a Native woman who took some peaches from his yard.114 Such fights over the products of and rights to the land were not perfunctory and the racial and gendered import of the action remains crucial to understanding the ways that colonists and colonial administrators conceived of the world they sought to claim.
While it is unclear what punishment, if any, Hendrick received, it is clear that some of Petrus’s subsequent actions were also inspired by defense of his own personal interests through the physical control of the free and enslaved community of New Netherland. In the years following this incident, he manumitted several other enslaved people and granted them land, albeit land that abutted his bouwerij. “In the years 16[59 and] 1660, I ordered and commanded the Negroes listed below to take down their isolated dwellings for their own improved security [and] to establish and erect the same along the common highway near the honorable general’s farm.”115 But this was not purely for their “own improved security.” In a letter to provincial secretary Cornelis van Ruyven in 1660 warning him to be ready for attack after a successful battle against the Esopus, Petrus closed with an admonition to “let the free and the Company’s negroes keep good watch on my bouwerij.”116 The use of free and enslaved Black people for defense extended beyond the director general’s bouwerij. Black and Indigenous people were used as messengers, for logistic support, and as soldiers. Jeremias van Rensselaer was traveling through the Maquas’ (Mohawk) country in early June 1660 when an enslaved man arrived with an urgent message. Vice Director Jean de la Montagne entrusted him with “a note saying that in the Esopus there had been trouble between the Dutch and the Indians and that on both sides people had been killed.”117
Under Petrus’s tenure, in the aftermath of the Second Esopus War, the sentence of working with the Negroes was given to Indigenous combatants, a racially coded punishment rooted in dishonor. In a letter sent during the summer of 1660, Petrus Stuyvesant sentenced several of the young Esopus leaders who had spearheaded the attack to Curaçao “to work with negroes.”118 Such action was not taken in a vacuum. By the mid-decades of the seventeenth century, a burgeoning Indian slave trade from the Northeast and Southeast to the Caribbean, South America, Bermuda, Europe, Atlantic Africa, and beyond promised a permanent exile that hung like a conjured threat. While the economic commitment to slavery in New Netherland increased in the final decades of Dutch rule, the social construction of a racial system based on identifiable difference had already begun to infuse the culture of the northern Dutch colony before the tenure of Petrus Stuyvesant.119 While certain forms of work had always been associated with dishonor, the impact of Atlantic slavery constructed a culture of expectation that racially coded modes of work. Thus transformed, slavish work held vital significance to the ways that white colonists imagined their social fortunes within the Dutch colony.
In the spring of 1664, after enduring the journey from Rensselaerswijck to New Amsterdam, Jeremias van Rensselaer was not in a jovial mood. His rancor would have been lessened somewhat if the New Amsterdam delegation had not objected to him, as the representative of the oldest court in the colony, presiding over the New Netherland colonial assembly. The meeting was convened by Petrus Stuyvesant to discuss the state of the colony. In April 1664, Rensselaerswijck, New Amsterdam, and other towns and patroonships met to discuss improving New Netherland’s defense, but by September, the entire colony would be lost without a fight to the English. Yet, for Jeremias, all that lay in the future. While in New Amsterdam, he also protested to the West India Company for handing out parcels of land in an area claimed by Rensselaerswijck. Piqued by the attitude of the West India Company, Jeremias wrote to Jan Baptist. In the letter, he described the company’s negative reception of his protestations, writing they had treated him “als oft het mÿn neeger geseijt had” (“as if my Negro had said it”).120 His choice of imagery vividly illuminates how the slavery he encountered in the Dutch American colony informed his own self-perception and how Jeremias processed all that he conceived as improper in the boundary dispute between Rensselaerswijck and the West India Company. Communities of acquisitive settlers exploited and reified preexisting racialized conditions to build their family fortunes. Drawing from their everyday experiences, such families created networks of power that traded on distinctions in value attributed to racially coded activities and individuals. Nevertheless, the traumas of a racially coded system of bondage persisted within the Dutch colony even though no formal slave code was issued.