Claiming Space

Dutch colonization in New Netherland and the significance of enslaved laborers in doing so can best be understood when placed solidly within the context of global Dutch expansion in the seventeenth century. The West India Company in North America did not operate in a vacuum. Instead, seemingly local decisions often proved reflective of more global trends. During the seventeenth century, both the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company conquered and settled various territories in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions. Although they were separate companies that operated in different parts of the world, their main objectives and tactics were often very similar.⁸

The WIC and VOC are frequently described as either militaristic machines or mercantile companies. Yet, acquiring territory proved a crucial element of the companies’ military and economic success. Thus, the companies, whether it was the VOC or WIC, developed various systems to claim colonial spaces.⁹ As Gerrit Knaap points out, how one perceived the Dutch East India Company’s main objectives depended largely on where one was located. In the Dutch Republic, the VOC may have appeared a predominantly commercial enterprise, but when observing the company from Ambon, Indonesia, it clearly functioned as a political authority.¹⁰ Similarly, whereas people in the Dutch Republic may have considered the West India Company’s objectives in New Netherland primarily commercial, the Munsee who lived on Manhattan prior to Dutch colonization would undoubtedly have disagreed.

Indeed, claiming territory or colonial space became a central element of these companies’ missions, and they developed various approaches to do so effectively. Among others, the companies used legal claims to assume colonial space. The Dutch, who only recently had been able to free themselves from the yoke of Habsburg oppression, often portrayed America’s indigenous populations as “natural allies” in their continuous fight against their Spanish foes.¹¹ Thus, instead of using violence at the offset, the Dutch West India Company in North America used Dutch law to negotiate what it claimed were legal purchases of indigenous peoples’ lands. However, these indigenous peoples did not see these agreements as transfers of territory but rather as permissions for the Dutch to access the land. As Erin Kramer explains, New Netherland’s indigenous populations continued to farm and hunt on the land the Dutch now claimed was theirs.¹²

In addition to such supposed legal claims, the Dutch asserted their control over newly conquered territory through modifications of the natural and built environment. In the VOC’s Cape Town settlement, for instance, the company’s garden worked by enslaved people served as “a more direct claiming of the landscape.”¹³ In places like Batavia in Indonesia and New Amsterdam in North America, Dutch-style vernacular architecture and city planning, including canals, not only helped make these settlements feel and look Dutch, they also proved a powerful tool of asserting Dutch control over these foreign spaces.¹⁴

Importantly, the companies understood it was necessary to have a supportive population to firmly maintain Dutch control in foreign territory. While the WIC’s charter stated in its preamble that the company’s primary objective was advancing trade, the charter’s second article reveals the importance of settler populations in doing so when it detailed that the company “must advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts.”¹⁵ Of course, these territories were not really “unsettled.” Instead, the East and West India Companies regularly displaced, massacred, or oppressed indigenous populations. In the Banda Islands, for instance, the VOC had the majority of its original inhabitants slaughtered, starved, and deported.¹⁶ A massacre at that scale did not happen in New Netherland, but WIC officials certainly did not hesitate to kill, enslave, or displace the region’s indigenous populations when deemed necessary. When the Munsee of Manhattan and surrounding regions continued to use land the Dutch claimed to own, relationships between them and the Dutch quickly escalated. The company considered itself the rightful owner of the land, and thus demanded tribute and attacked the Munsee, destroying entire villages, when they did not respect Dutch claims to the land.¹⁷

The WIC and VOC explored various avenues to establish settler populations in these spaces to help keep them in firm control of the Dutch.¹⁸ Although the companies promoted their overseas colonies, they generally struggled to motivate Dutch migration to these faraway places. Thus, both the WIC and the VOC developed wide-ranging tactics to attract and maintain settlers.¹⁹ For instance, as Deborah Hamer and Leonard Blussé show, the VOC in Batavia encouraged marriages with indigenous women as a way to tie VOC soldiers and freeburghers to the region.²⁰ The companies also relied on non-Dutch European populations to claim these colonial spaces. Alison Games explains that the Dutch often practiced “cohabitation,” in which they let conquered European colonists stay in a now Dutch colony, in part to ensure control over the colonial space.²¹ Such was the case in Suriname and Brazil, where the WIC allowed English and Portuguese settlers to stay after these colonies had come under Dutch control. At times, the companies also accepted non-Dutch European settlers to come into their colonies and establish settlements to help with colonization.²² In New Netherland, for instance, company officials allowed some English settlements even when they worried these colonists might challenge Dutch sovereignty in the region.²³

When it proved too challenging or costly to attract or retain European settlers, the companies looked to non-European populations. In Batavia, Amboina, and Taiwan, the VOC relied in part on Chinese immigrants.²⁴ The VOC used various tactics to attract these migrants to the Dutch colonies, promising Chinese migrants who came to Taiwan land and tax exemptions. Consequently, Chinese migration to Taiwan became so substantial that according to historian Tonio Andrade this Dutch colony essentially became “a Chinese colony under Dutch rule.”²⁵

The companies also used forced migration to supplement free settler populations. In fact, as Pepijn Brandon and Karwan Fatah-Black point out, the Dutch “came to appreciate the enslavement of non-Europeans on a more systematic basis as a way to build their empire.”²⁶ Already in 1623, Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote, “There is nothing, I say again, that will do the Company more service and profit than the purchase of a large number of slaves.”²⁷ Increasingly, East India Company officials like Coen considered slavery an effective method to populate their colonies.²⁸ Thus, after Dutch officials had rid the Banda Islands of their original inhabitants, it largely replaced them with enslaved laborers.²⁹ In Batavia, the VOC imported large numbers of enslaved people from, among others, Coromandel.³⁰ Consequently, as Remco Raben explains, the enslaved population in VOC-controlled cities like Batavia quickly reached 50 percent.³¹

Both the Dutch East India and West India Companies applied various strategies to secure their claims of colonial spaces. But laying claim of foreign territory effectively required a settler population, and both the WIC and VOC often struggled to motivate Dutch migration to these places. The VOC began using enslaved people to settle conquered territory in the early seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, when the West India Company could not attract enough European colonists to its North American colony of New Netherland, it similarly relied on enslaved people to help claim this space for the company.

Populating New Netherland

Disregarding the indigenous populations, the Dutch often described New Netherland as empty space that needed to be populated. Nicolaes van Wassenaer, for instance, wrote in his Historisch Verhael that the region’s land “could not be properly cultivated in consequence of the scantiness of the population.”³² The company needed people to populate the land, but due to the relative prosperity of the Dutch Republic, the hazardous journey to unknown frontier lands did not appeal to many Dutch men and women.³³ Thus, the company sought various ways to populate the land with settler populations. Following the examples of the VOC and the Portuguese before them, the WIC considered importing enslaved Africans to help settle the colony.³⁴

To attract settlers to New Netherland, the company laid out a plan for colonization in the “Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions,” ratified by the States General in 1629. The company offered patroonships to investors who would send fifty adults to their estates within the first four years of settlement.³⁵ However, except for Rensselaerswijck, these patroonships largely turned out to be failures, and by 1639 only about six hundred Europeans had settled in New Netherland.³⁶ In an effort to further encourage migration, the company offered benefits to immigrants such as the right to participate in the fur trade. It also opened up the region to English migrants from Rhode Island and New Haven to further boost the population. Because immigration remained low by 1644, the States General—the Dutch Republic’s governing body—proposed that the transatlantic journey to New Netherland should be made more affordable to colonists, and it suggested that a significant number of farmhands and slaves should be transported to the colony to help develop the region’s agriculture.³⁷

When Dutch servants did agree to travel to the colony, they often did not stay permanently, and some of them did not even complete their contract.³⁸ Colonist Thomas Chambers of Rensselaerswijck, for instance, complained in 1651 that his servant Adriaen van Bil refused “to serve out his term and wastes and neglects his time, claiming to be free.”³⁹ Jacob Bouwensen had traveled to the colony as a servant of Johannes Winckelman, but once in New Netherland, Bouwensen breached this agreement when he contracted his labor to someone else.⁴⁰ Three company servants—Jan Claesz from Bellekum (ship carpenter), Bastiaen Symonsz Root (sailmaker), and Meyndert Gerritsz (house carpenter)—fled the colony in 1647. They made it to New Haven, where, to the company’s dismay, English authorities protected them.⁴¹ And they were not the only servants who ran away. The frequency with which indentured servants fled their masters during the Dutch colonial period led the council in 1640 to forbid anyone to harbor, feed, or assist these runaway servants in any way, because, the company claimed, their frequent escapes caused unharvested foods to spoil in the fields.⁴²

Immigration finally increased more significantly in the 1650s when economic prosperity in the Dutch Republic declined, making migration to New Netherland more appealing.⁴³ At the same time, the colony received several settlers from Dutch Brazil after the Dutch lost control over this South American colony in 1654.⁴⁴ Consequently, by 1655 the colony’s European population reached about 3,500 people.⁴⁵ European migration continued to increase during the last fifteen years of the Dutch colonial period, bringing New Netherland’s European population to somewhere between seven and eight thousand people in 1664.⁴⁶

To supplement the colony’s population and further promote Dutch immigration, the company and the States General facilitated and at times requested the importation of enslaved Africans into New Netherland.⁴⁷ They promised to provide the patroonships with twelve enslaved men and women for the advancement of the colony.⁴⁸ These enslaved laborers could attract potential colonists, and they would help cultivate the land.⁴⁹ A 1644 company report suggested that it would be beneficial to bring enslaved laborers from Dutch Brazil to New Netherland because this would be less expensive than attracting Dutch farm workers who, according to the report, could only be persuaded to leave the Dutch Republic for a lot of “money and promises.”⁵⁰ On several occasions, the directors of the company emphasized that enslaved workers were sent to New Netherland for agricultural purposes, and for that reason they were not to be sold outside of the colony.⁵¹ When in 1653 Juan Dillian of Curaçao requested permission to bring African captives to Curaçao instead of New Netherland, the colonial council denied this request, explaining in a letter to Lucas Rodenburch, vice director at Curaçao, that “the company would much rather see the population promoted first in New Netherland. For which reason all servants are to be kept there as much as possible, and must not be sent out of the country.”⁵² For the same reason, the company directors promised to send enslaved laborers to the colony in 1659, but only under the condition that they would be used to cultivate the land instead of being transported elsewhere.⁵³

Even as late as 1664, by which time the colony’s European population had grown significantly, the company directors again instructed Director General Petrus Stuyvesant that the enslaved Africans who arrived in New Netherland on board the ship Gideon should not be taken outside of the colony.⁵⁴ Initial correspondence between the company and Stuyvesant stipulated that the Gideon would transport three hundred African captives to the colony, a third of whom were supposed to help cultivate the land of the New Amstel—or Nieuwer-Amstel—colony, a territory by the Delaware River that previously was under Swedish control and now belonged to the city of Amsterdam. Thus, the city of Amsterdam also recognized that enslaved Africans could help settle and develop its colony.⁵⁵

It should not be surprising that the West India Company, or the city of Amsterdam, would look toward importing enslaved Africans to help settle the region they called New Netherland. The VOC was doing so successfully in its colonies, so surely it could work elsewhere. Although the number of enslaved people in New Netherland never reached the percentage of enslaved inhabitants it did in places like Batavia and Amboina, they certainly played an important role in West India Company efforts to claim this space for the Dutch.

Slave Trade

The demand for enslaved people promoted a steady importation of African captives into the colony. Generally these enslaved men, women, and children were brought into New Netherland in relatively small groups through intercolonial trade, as was the case in most seventeenth-century North American colonies.⁵⁶ Sometimes they had been captured from Portuguese or Spanish ships by privateers or pirates who then brought them to New Netherland. Geurt Tijsen, for instance, was accused of selling African captives in New Netherland whom he had taken from a Spanish ship.⁵⁷ Indeed, Johannes de Laet estimated that by 1636 the West India Company had captured as many as 2,356 African captives on board Spanish ships.⁵⁸ Only two Dutch slavers transported more than 200 African captives to the colony: ‘t Witte Paert in 1655 and Gideon in 1664.

The WIC largely controlled the slave trade with New Netherland, but by the 1640s growing demand for enslaved laborers among Dutch settlers led a group of New Netherlanders to request permission to import African captives themselves. By 1652, the company directors in Amsterdam decided to allow such imports by individual settlers as long as they abided by certain regulations. In the end, however, no settler-sponsored transatlantic slave trade journeys occurred during the Dutch colonial period. Dutch merchants did fund the journey of ‘t Witte Paert in 1654–55, but to the company’s dismay, most of the African captives who arrived in New Netherland on board this ship were transported to the English colonies in the Chesapeake. To discourage such exportation of enslaved laborers, the company determined that a duty should be paid for enslaved laborers who were transported out of the colony.⁵⁹

As more individuals in New Netherland began to rely on enslaved labor, a local slave trade emerged. Individual slaveholders bought and sold enslaved workers in private agreements or at public sales. In March of 1656, for instance, Maria Verleth sold enslaved women at a public auction in New Amsterdam.⁶⁰ The company also sold enslaved men, women, and children at public sales. One of these auctions took place in New Amsterdam in May of 1664 when the company sold thirty enslaved men, women, and children. At this public sale, William Maerschalck, Adriaen Vincent, Nicolas Verleth, and Jacob Leisler or Leyseler, who would later lead the now famous Leisler’s Rebellion, purchased enslaved people from the company. In a letter to Vice Director Beck, Director General Petrus Stuyvesant boasted that some of these people were sold for as much as 600 guilders.⁶¹

At times, the company sold enslaved people in return for much-needed provisions. In 1664, for instance, the company bought meat and bacon “to be paid with negroes.”⁶² When the company received a number of enslaved laborers from Curaçao that same year, it sold the weakest among them at auction to the highest bidder in return for food provisions.⁶³ Although these auctions usually occurred in New Amsterdam, at least one public sale took place in Beverwijck (now Albany) in 1659 when three men and one woman, all of whom were enslaved by Cornelis Martensen Potter, were auctioned.⁶⁴ Settlers who purchased these enslaved Africans brought them to their homes or farms, thus dispersing them across New Netherland and sometimes beyond the Dutch colony.⁶⁵

The enslaved men, women, and children who were brought to New Netherland came from various African, European, and American regions. Most of them arrived from West Central Africa where Dutch merchants had established important trade relations.⁶⁶ Temporary Dutch control of Luanda in present-day Angola from 1641 to 1648 further promoted Dutch trade with this West Central African region. Enslaved Africans who had been captured from Portuguese ships by Dutch or French privateers also often originated in West Central Africa, which further solidified their predominance among New Netherland’s enslaved population. Other areas that supplied captives to Dutch slavers included the Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. Especially in the second half of the seventeenth century, enslaved men, women, and children from these West African areas became more numerous in the Dutch colony.

Most enslaved laborers who were brought to New Netherland had experienced the traumatizing Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas at some point during their journey to the Dutch colony. Dutch slave ships traveled from various African locations to Brazil (under Dutch control from 1630 to 1654) or the Dutch Caribbean and Curaçao, which would become a Dutch slave depot in 1659, in particular.⁶⁷ At least 13 percent of the African captives transported on board these seventeenth-century Dutch slave ships did not survive the infamous Middle Passage.⁶⁸ In addition to the poor conditions on board these ships, including a lack of food, crowded spaces, and unhygienic conditions, slave ships could fall victim to privateers, pirates, or natural disasters. Moreover, their horrific circumstances brought some enslaved people to take their own life when they had the rare opportunity to do so.⁶⁹ Thus, the transatlantic and intercolonial slave trade that transported enslaved men, women, and children to New Netherland so that the company could claim this space more effectively came at a very high cost of human life.

Enslaved Labor

Enslaved men and women were more than just additional bodies that populated the colonial space. The challenge to attract free Dutch colonists and reliable Dutch servants made the labor of enslaved Africans all the more important. The men and women enslaved by the company helped build the colony’s infrastructure and fortifications, such as Fort Amsterdam, clear the land, develop its agriculture, and tend to the livestock.⁷⁰ During times of war, enslaved men were often armed to help defend the colony.⁷¹ For instance, when the Dutch fought the area’s Munsee during Kieft’s War (1643–1645), armed enslaved men helped secure Dutch settlements. During these years of warfare, Willem Kieft guaranteed Cornelis van der Hoykens, the colony’s fiscael (a local official responsible for upholding of company rights), that all of the company’s enslaved laborers would be at his command.⁷² Not only did enslaved workers complete crucial parts of the colony’s infrastructure, they were tasked with work that European settlers would rather avoid because they were either physically taxing or considered demeaning.⁷³

Because the company mainly employed enslaved laborers in physically strenuous labor, it preferred strong, young men. In 1657, the company advised Stuyvesant to teach its enslaved workers certain trades, such as carpentry, brickmaking, and coopering, as had been common practice in, for instance, Brazil, but Stuyvesant responded that these men would not be capable of learning such trades.⁷⁴ Two years later, when Stuyvesant requested that eighteen to twenty enslaved men be sent to New Netherland from Curaçao, he stressed that they should be “stronger and more masculine” than the few they had previously received, suggesting that these enslaved workers were predominantly used for strenuous physical labor.⁷⁵

Enslaved men who worked in chains likely produced some of the most physically tasking labor, such as the digging of canals. Their circumstances were so severe that working alongside them became a form of punishment in the colony. The first time the colonial council sentenced someone to work along company slaves was in 1639 when Gysbert Cornelissen received this sentence for public disturbance and hurting a soldier.⁷⁶ In 1642, this punishment made its way into the colony’s ordinances when the council decreed that those who were found guilty of certain crimes, including murder and desertion, should be sentenced to “work with the negroes in the chain” (“in de ketting gaan”).⁷⁷ Since then, several men received this punishment. In 1654, for instance, the court sentenced Elias Emmens to work with the company slaves for one year, and four years later, in 1658, the council sentenced Nicolaes Albertsen to have his head shaved, receive a public flogging, have his ear pierced, and work with the company slaves for two years.⁷⁸ Albertsen was among several men who were sentenced to work with the company slaves that year.⁷⁹

The records do not reveal how common this practice was in New Netherland or which enslaved people were subjected to labor in chains. In some VOC colonies, such kettinggangers (chain laborers) were a special class of enslaved people, generally war prisoners or enslaved men who were put in chains for disciplinary purposes.⁸⁰ In fact, individual enslavers could request the VOC to place enslaved men in chains temporarily. These kettinggangers were doing the most physically challenging labor, and they often slept in guarded barracks that were locked at night. Although the New Netherland records provide little insight into the conditions of kettinggangers in this colony, it likely resembled the practice in the VOC colonies.

The company also used enslaved laborers to assist local officials and complete tasks that the European settlers resisted doing. Among others, the company assigned enslaved men to apprehend and return runaway servants and slaves. In 1654, for example, the colony’s council sent enslaved men to Long Island “to attack and return some escaped servants and runaway negroes.”⁸¹ In Beverwijck, the schout—a local official responsible for law enforcement—often received the assistance from one or more company slaves in tending the guardhouse fire or to act as jailer.⁸² Enslaved men often served as public executioners, a job that the Dutch especially loathed: Jan “the Negro,” for instance, had been hired to execute Wolf Nijssen, and the council identified the executioner responsible for Manuel de Gerrit de Reus’s hanging as a Black man.⁸³ The company also considered employing one of the enslaved men to oversee others when the directors of the company advised Petrus Stuyvesant in 1663 that “one of the oldest and most competent slaves” could serve as overseer for the company’s remaining seven or eight enslaved laborers in New Amsterdam. They suggested that an enslaved man could be persuaded to take on this job if he would be promised his freedom in return.⁸⁴

When the company was not using their labor, it sold enslaved workers or hired them out to individual settlers or colonial authorities. Settlers could lease enslaved laborers or complete farms or boweries called bouwerijen from the WIC; in so doing, the company avoided having to provide for its enslaved workers at times when it did not need their labor.⁸⁵ In 1644, for instance, the company hired Maria, daughter of Groot Manuel, out to Nicolaes Coorn for four consecutive years. During that time, Coorn had to provide her with food and clothing.⁸⁶ In November of 1661, the city of New Amsterdam requested “four capable [bequame]” enslaved men, and a month later the council provided the city with three laborers under the condition that the burgomaster, or mayor, feed and clothe them.⁸⁷ Such practices became so common that at one point the company could not find enough enslaved workers when it needed them because these laborers had been rented out to others. On December 19, 1656, for instance, the company directors wrote to the director general and council that they “were surprised to learn that altogether too many of these Negroes are employed in private service.”⁸⁸ In 1658, Jacques Corteljou resisted orders to return an enslaved man he had hired from the company because he relied on the man’s labor.⁸⁹ Evidently, some of these settlers became significantly dependent on the labor of enslaved workers.

Not surprisingly, an increasing number of individuals purchased enslaved laborers, whose labor they used for a wide variety of tasks. Most of these enslavers lived in New Amsterdam and its surroundings.⁹⁰ Some enslaved Africans tended to these settlers’ farms, while others worked on docks, in domestics, in lumber, or they assisted artisans in the workplace. During the 1650s, shipmaster Egbert Van Borsum required an enslaved man to assist him with the ferry, and Pieter Taelman had two enslaved men labor on his tobacco plantation.⁹¹ Settlers also used enslaved workers to run errands for them, as did Cornelis Van Ruyven, who had an enslaved man carry supplies from Manhattan to his wife in Midwout, Long Island.⁹² In rare cases, individual enslavers tasked enslaved laborers with the capture and return of servants or enslaved laborers who fled. Jan Janzen van St. Obin, for instance, ordered one of his enslaved workers to return a runaway servant in September of 1659.⁹³

Although enslaved Africans often performed physically taxing work, some of them had specialized skills that proved especially valuable to free settlers. Correspondence between Jan Baptist van Rensselaer and his brother Jeremias van Rensselaer, for instance, showed that Jan’s enslaved laborer Andries was a skilled horse trainer. Initially, when Jan Baptist returned to patria, he asked his brother to sell all his belongings, including Andries. Soon after, however, Jan Baptist sent another letter to his brother requesting that he “please send him [Andries] over in the first ship and contract for his passage at the lowest price possible. I need him very much at Cralo [the family estate in the Dutch Republic] to take care of my horse.” Toward the end of the letter, Jan Baptist once again urged his brother to “not forget to send the Negro.” Not surprisingly, he expressed great disappointment when Andries did not arrive in the Netherlands “as everything was ready for his arrival.”⁹⁴ Before Jeremias had received Jan Baptist’s request to send Andries, Jeremias had boasted in a letter to his brother that Andries had “taken care of the horses and has done it so well that during my time the horses have never looked so fine.”⁹⁵ Not surprisingly, then, Jeremias refused his brother’s request for Andries, claiming “it would be nothing but foolishness to try to have him serve in a free country, as he would be too proud to do that.” While Jeremias’s praise of Andries dissipated now that the possibility of losing him loomed, he acknowledged his interest in keeping Andries, stating that he “could not spare him very well.”⁹⁶

Andries had likely learned how to care for horses in his African homeland. Van Rensselaer’s description of Andries as a proud, “tall and quick fellow” suggests that he may have been of Senegambian descent, since he used adjectives Europeans often used to describe Senegambians. The Jolof kingdom had a well-trained, highly skilled cavalry, and horses in this area required special care to survive the region’s climate.⁹⁷ Whether or not Andries had learned to train horses in Africa or the Americas, he was among the enslaved Africans whose specialized skills were considered especially valuable in New Netherland.

Enslaved men and women proved essential to the colony’s development not only because their mere presence helped claim this space for the Dutch. They were at times armed to protect the colony, helped build public works and infrastructure, and cultivated the land, providing the company and free colonists with much-needed labor and provisions. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of individual settlers in the region relied on enslaved laborers. In all these capacities, these enslaved women, men, and children proved crucial in Dutch efforts to solidify their control over the region.

Hierarchies of Enslavement

On February 25, 1644, only three years after he survived his hanging, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, together with ten fellow company slaves—Paulo Angola, Groot Manuel, Cleijn Manuel, Simon Congo, Antonij Portugies, Gracia, Piter Santomee, Jan Francisco, Cleijn Antonij, and Jan Fort Orange—obtained a conditional freedom that also became known as half-freedom. These men and their wives received their freedom under the condition that they pay yearly fees of “30 schepel [a Dutch measuring unit equal to about ¾ bushel] of maize it be wheat, peas or beans, and a fat hog,” render their services available to the company whenever it needed them, and their children—including those who were not yet born—would remain at the service of the company as “lijff eigenen.”⁹⁸ The council proclaimed that if they abided by these conditions, the men and their wives would be “free and at liberty just as other free people here in New Netherland.”⁹⁹ Indeed, free settlers in the Dutch colony also had to provide their assistance to the company when requested and pay yearly fees for their land. Yet, what clearly distinguished these half-free men and women from free settlers was the fact that their children remained company property.¹⁰⁰

These men and women were not the only ones to receive such a conditional freedom from the company; in fact, at least forty enslaved men and women would be manumitted conditionally during the Dutch colonial period, although the conditions of their freedom often differed. In 1662, for instance, the company granted freedom to three women under the condition that every week they return to do domestic work at the director general’s house. The company also granted freedom to several of the men it enslaved in December of 1663, but it required that they monthly return to labor for the company.¹⁰¹ Some colonists followed the company’s example: Philip Jansz Ringo, for instance, granted freedom to Manuel de Hispanien for an annual fee of one hundred guilders to be paid for over the course of three consecutive years.¹⁰² Ringo stipulated that he would have the right to reenslave De Hispanien if he did not abide by these terms.

These conditional freedoms have received ample attention from scholars. Some historians have argued that these men and women received half-freedom because they were old and thus they were no longer useful to the company.¹⁰³ Others have suggested that granting conditional freedom to several of its enslaved laborers proves that slavery in New Netherland was of a milder form.¹⁰⁴ Such suggestions have contributed to the widely influential view that slavery in New Netherland was different from slavery elsewhere, that it resembled indentured servitude, and that it was not very important to the development of the colony. Close examination shows, however, that providing a conditional freedom was a logical and rather pragmatic step for the company; in fact, it demonstrates these enslaved laborers’ continued importance to the colony’s development. Half-freedom proved an opportunity for enslaved people who served the company loyally to obtain a conditional freedom. But what happened to enslaved men and women who were not considered loyal servants? Certainly, they forfeited their chances of such a freedom, and they may even have been condemned to working in the chains as kettinggangers. Thus, with these various degrees of enslavement, the company tried to force a certain degree of loyalty from the people it held in bondage, necessary when partly relying on enslaved people to maintain control over the colonial space.

With half-freedom, the WIC created an in-between status: the conditionally freed men and women were neither enslaved nor free, and their fate still depended on the goodwill of the company. Whatever the conditions of their freedom were, these freed people continued to have varying obligations to their former enslaver, in this case the WIC. For the company, the most significant benefits of such manumissions were threefold: (1) it would still have access to their labor when it needed it, (2) the freedmen and women continued to cultivate the land and help keep this area in firm control of the Dutch, and (3) such conditional manumissions created a hierarchy of enslavement, which the company used to force loyalty from the men and women it held in bondage.

The freedmen were still required to help the company whenever it needed them, a common practice in the colony where men generally could be called upon by authorities for assistance. In May of 1653, for instance, company officials requested that all healthy men, including the freedmen, help fortify New Amsterdam.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, by demanding yearly dues from the freedmen, the company ensured that these men would cultivate the land they received and share part of their harvest with the company. In so doing, the company continued to reap the benefits of their labor. Moreover, by giving them land in Manhattan and by keeping their children in bondage, the company effectively tied these families to the region, which meant they would still contribute to Dutch colonial efforts. Although the company may not have used these children’s labor, these children were still considered company property, and several families would eventually petition the company for the children’s freedom.¹⁰⁶

Importantly, granting such a conditional freedom was not exclusive to this Dutch colony, nor was it unprecedented or uncommon. In both the Greek and Roman worlds, they had a specific term to refer to such freedmen and freedwomen: the apeleutheroi in ancient Greece and the paranomê in the Roman Empire. Like the half-free people in New Netherland, these freedmen and freedwomen became a distinct class of people who had obtained a conditional freedom but who were still obligated to their former enslavers.¹⁰⁷ In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, freedwomen and freedmen were similarly obliged to pay respect to their former masters by assisting them when necessary. Failure to do so could result in reenslavement.¹⁰⁸ A similar conditional freedom could also be found in Dutch East India Company territories. In Batavia, for instance, freed people continued to have certain responsibilities to their former enslavers.¹⁰⁹ Often, these societies used such opportunities to obtaining a conditional freedom to strengthen a system of enslavement.¹¹⁰

That the West India Company would follow these examples should not be surprising. Dutch-Roman law often used Roman legal examples to help sort out new legislative circumstances. At its core, New Netherland’s judicial system rooted in Dutch-Roman law, which combined Roman law with elements of Germanic customary law.¹¹¹ In addition to consulting Roman legal examples, East and West India Company officials also tended to model colonial practices on those of the Portuguese and Spanish who had come before them.¹¹²

Like De Reus, several enslaved people found ways to improve their circumstances in the Dutch colony. It is important to acknowledge, however, that most of New Netherland’s enslaved people never obtained conditional or complete freedom.¹¹³ The majority of enslaved men and women lived in bondage until they died. Amplification of the half-free status has obscured their experiences. Using enslaved laborers to help claim the colonial space was not without risk. Why would enslaved men and women support and even help protect their enslavers? The company may have created a hierarchy of enslavement to help sustain such a system of bondage and colonization. It is likely that the company used the threat of chained labor to discourage resistance from the men and women it enslaved in the same way that it used half-freedom as a reward for so-called loyal service.

At the time of the botched hanging, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus had been enslaved by the company for at least fifteen years.¹¹⁴ During those years, he became an active participant in the Dutch Reformed Church, and he had used the colony’s judicial system successfully to obtain unpaid wages. Only three years after he miraculously escaped execution, he and ten fellow enslaved men, several of whom had confessed to killing Jan Premero, obtained a conditional freedom that came to be known as half-freedom.¹¹⁵ According to the council minutes, the company granted them this conditional freedom because they were Christians, had been loyal to the company, and had long been promised their freedom.

Why did De Reus and his accomplices escape execution? And why were they able to obtain a conditional freedom only a few years after they had killed another enslaved man who was considered company property? De Reus and the many other enslaved Africans who toiled for the Dutch West India Company and individual colonists proved integral to the colony’s survival. Not only did they complete a large part of the necessary labor, but they also settled the land, helped protect the colony, and could be used to attract Dutch settlers. Thus, the company used these enslaved men, women, and children to effectively claim the colonial space they called New Netherland when they failed to attract enough Europeans to do so.

But using an enslaved population for such colonial purposes was not without risk. The company needed a system that would keep these enslaved people from undermining the company’s colonial aspirations, and it looks like the company developed a hierarchy of enslavement to do so. The company provided a select group of enslaved people with conditional freedom and plots of land, ensuring that these African descendants cultivated and populated New Amsterdam’s land while also serving the company in times of need. At the same time, other enslaved men were forced to work in chains, forced to do some of the most physically tasking labor. Such a hierarchy of enslavement, similar to what was used in VOC colonies, appears to have been an important strategy to use enslaved people to help claim space for the company in foreign territories.