Kolonist
Slaveholding and the Survival of Expansive Anglo-Dutch Elite Networks (1650s–90s)
On a spring day in 1664, a mother and her child were sold at public auction in New Amsterdam. Their names were not recorded—they exist in the record only as “female negro with a child” (een negerin met een kint)—but they remain connected to one another as family.1 Yet their family ties survive the ravages of time alongside the price a slaver placed on them, and the other three enslaved people sold as property in the northern Dutch colony. This was a violent moment, one of debasement, voyeurism, and profound loss. These human beings were destined to bondage, brokered by the Varlet family, a fate that forcibly entwined their lives to the Dutch leadership of the colony. Eight years earlier, when in the autumn of 1656, Anna Stuyvesant stood before the minister in the Dutch Reformed Church at the base of Manhattan Island, her environment and circumstances contrasted sharply with the first time she was wed.2 She had lived with her first husband, Samuel, in Alphen aan den Rijn where he taught French.3 When he died, he had not left her penniless, but his death created a considerable social and financial void.4 Her father, a Reformed minister, was dead, and her brother Petrus and sister-in-law Judith had relocated to New Netherland.5 It was a tumultuous time, and Anna had four children to care for. In Alphen aan den Rijn, she had lived a middling life and was familiar with the community. Several men, including local merchants, ministers, or public servants, could have served as potential spouses.6 As a wife of one of these men, she would have been expected to be an able huysvrouw, keeping a keen eye on the maidservants—who Dutch literature and painting cast as a necessary albeit potentially devious element in the household, and performing some market tasks.7
FIGURE 5. Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bayard, ca. 1644, oil on wood, 34 1/2 x 48 in. (87.6 x 121.9 cm) 1915.7. Luce Center. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
But she left the Dutch Republic in 1654 alongside her four children accompanied by her half-sister Margrietje, when, despite official enticement, other Dutch citizens were loath to emigrate.8 The two women sailed toward family. Anna would carve out an existence for herself and her children that would differ significantly from the one that she left behind in the United Provinces. Her new husband, Nicolaes Varlet, traded tobacco and enslaved people from New Netherland to the Chesapeake and Curaçao, continuing the business connections forged by his father, Caspar, who had held such connections to Brazil.9 His sisters had married tobacco planters and relocated to the Chesapeake, where they, too, traded tobacco and human beings along with their husbands and maintained trade and slave ties to New Netherland.10 Margrietje was married a year before Anna in New Amsterdam, to Jacobus Backer, who would build his own trading presence in part through enslavement.11 Elite slaveholding family networks connected Albany to Maryland and Curaçao to Boston. What caused some white colonial families to thrive while others were suffocated by the transitions of swiftly changing colonial environments? For a core group of elite interconnected families, a vital component in their strategy for survival was slavery.
FIGURE 6. Map of New Netherland, New Sweden, New England, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean. Based on “Pas caarte van Nieu Nederlandt uytgegeven door Arnold Colom” of 1656. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.
Expanding Communities
Northern elite slaveholding families were geographically expansive, bursting through administrative boundaries in pursuit of economic opportunity built on ever-growing familial networks and the labor of the unfree. Anna and Nicolaes Varlet made their home in New Amsterdam, while a contingent of their close family, friends, and business associates migrated to the Chesapeake. They arrived as experienced slaveholders. Nicolaes’s sister, Anna Varlet, married Dr. Joris Hack—her first cousin—and relocated to the Chesapeake, settling with her family to Accomack County on the eastern shore of Virginia in 1651 alongside a number of Dutch émigrés and, in 1658, purchasing lands in Cecil County, Maryland, near brother-in-law Augustine Herman, who had also relocated from New Amsterdam.12 The Varlet Hacks were slaveholders with considerable property, including a nine-hundred-acre plantation located on Pungoteague Creek, a four-hundred-acre plantation on Matchotank Creek, and one hundred acres located on local islands.13 Anna owned land in her own right and controlled the ships that traded in tobacco, slaves, and other goods as the family’s Chesapeake contact.14 She formed a key node in the broader familial network and ever-expanding community.
The transactions that underpinned these networks benefited the elites, but they could be exceedingly cruel to the enslaved. During the summer of 1655 in New Amsterdam, a man named Nicolaes Boot purchased a dying enslaved woman at public auction.15 Nicolaes was a well-connected merchant who traded in tobacco, and other goods, and trafficked in human beings along the Eastern shore.16 His ventures were backed by the wealthy New Amsterdam investor, Jacob Moesman. The connections and story of the captive woman he acquired remain lost to history, except for her final moments. She fell to the ground and uttered a painful plea of “Ariba” [sic] (“come on” or “up”) as she actively struggled to move. Despite the evidence of her unsteady gait, her fixed and dilated eyes, and foaming mouth, the carpenter of the slave ship Wittepaert assured Nicolaes that she was not in pain, but merely “drunk.”17 She tried again, this time gesturing to her constricting chest and saying: “More, More” (her cry, transliterated into Dutch for the written record, was probably some conjugation of the Spanish verb morir—either morí, which means “I died,” muero, which means “I am dying,” or moriré, which means “I will die”); they were her last known words. Nicolaes continued home with the woman, although she had to be “carried in a wagon,” the rest of the way to his house. The woman suffered for five more hours before the surgeon “found her very low,” and she died “within half an hour in their hands,” a casualty in the pursuit of trade.18
On September 6, Meyndert Lourisen, skipper of the Wittepaert, sued Nicolaes Boot for the purchase “at public auction [of] a negress, according [to] the conditions, for the sum of fl. 230,” who “died on the following day,” a result for which the “deft. refuses to pay.”19 For Nicolaes and Meyndert, this was a transaction, nothing more, and accounts had to be settled. The callous dismissal of her final moments was offered as evidence of fraud in the court, rather than an appeal to human empathy. Meyndert had no doubt scanned the tortured faces of hundreds of captive people. He was moved by profits, not pity. Whatever succor might have been afforded her in her last moments was denied by the reading of her actions as drunkenness, a charge (while leveled against many New Netherland settlers) commonly attributed to Indigenous peoples and the enslaved. Meyndert would soon die himself, a casualty of the hostilities that broke out on Manhattan stemming from an act of violence directed against a Native woman.20 While the case captured the final agonizing moment of an enslaved woman, it was far from the last foray into the slave business for her purchaser and former enslaver, Nicolaes Boot. Nicolaes did not remain in New Netherland. He relocated to Virginia in the early 1660s after divorcing his first wife, and by 1667, his merchant ties secured for him an advantageous marriage to the now-widowed Anna Varlet Hack.21 The two were able to get a solid start in their new home after receiving headrights on the Black people that they brought along with them, enslaved people most likely from New Netherland.22
These wide-ranging family networks provided much-needed support when addressing challenges from outside the colony. In 1663 English privateers seized the Dutch yacht named Wapen van Amsterdam (or the Amsterdam Coat of Arms) during its crossing to America, and its complement of eighty-five enslaved people, who had been loaded in Guinea, landed in Virginia on September 10. Nicolaes Varlet, then commissary of the Dutch West India Company, went with “Councillor Johan de Decker” to “reclaim them.”23 Nicolaes’s knowledge of the Virginia slave market, borne of decades of family trade, and inroads with the local merchants would have been invaluable. His father, Caspar, had been heavily invested in the Virginia tobacco trade market alongside his uncle Daniel, although the two men remained based in Utrecht and then Amsterdam.24 They had invested in the Rensselaerswijck (1636) and the Wapen van Leeuwarden (1639), which had traded New Netherland goods for Chesapeake tobacco.25
Nicolaes was not venturing into unknown terrain, but rather into an environment of family contacts: specifically, that of his female kin. The society that Nicolaes encountered on the eastern shore of Virginia in 1663 was changing rapidly amid social transformations that would ultimately create a racially determined slave society.26 While the influence of local cases and events on the development of race-based slavery has been explored, the impact of Northeastern transplants remains understudied.27 The regional influence of enslavement flowed along family lines and in both directions, although Northeast to Southeast is rarely emphasized outside of studies of Native slavery. Such emigration was vital to the strengthening of Atlantic merchant ties during the first generation of the Stuyvesant-Bayard network. While regional forces were undoubtedly crucial to establishing the type of slaveholding activities that each branch of the family undertook, the commitment to the project of family expansion was pursued hand in hand with slaveholding.
By the time that Nicolaes was sent down to Virginia with his grievance over the seizure of the Wapen van Amsterdam, his sister, brothers-in-law, and their children were in the midst of a naturalization process, cementing the family’s position in the southern English colony.28 Just seven days after the Wapen’s arrival, the Maryland Assembly ordered “an Acte of Naturalizacon be prepared for Augustine Herman, and his Children and his brother in Lawe George Hack and his wife and Children.”29 Even though Joris had previously denied his Dutch heritage during the Anglo-Dutch wars, publicly substituting a German one instead to keep his trade unmolested by seizure, the Varlets still relied on family connections to keep the trade conduit of tobacco and enslaved human beings open between the Chesapeake and New Netherland.30 Anna, not Joris, was that contact. The West India Company directors relied on the strength of the Varlet family network in the bid to reclaim the lost slave ship and the eighty-four captives on board, although they were ultimately unable to accomplish this.31
Family transplants were not the only ones to benefit from their association with the budding slaving dynasty. In 1660 the former carpenter on the Stuyvesants’ bouwerij, Frederick Philipse, got his start in a regional trade corridor connecting New Amsterdam to the Chesapeake, pioneered by the Bayard/Varlet family and other Northeastern émigrés such as Augustine Herman. On September 20, 1660, the company passed a resolution to allow Frederick, identified as “late [the director’s] carpenter,” to charter the company’s sloop to make a trading voyage to Virginia.32 His connection with Petrus and the director’s vast network had offered him a way into a lucrative trade corridor in a society where the racial underpinnings of slavery were calcifying. That same year the Virginia assembly’s laws already assumed lifelong enslavement for runaway “negroes.” Elizabeth Key’s successful freedom suit decided in 1656, would be met five years later with partus sequitur ventrum, or the pseudo-Roman notion that slavery followed the condition of the mother, an overturning of centuries of English precedent.33 Two years later, in 1662, Willem Beeckman, whose family had arrived in the colony alongside the Stuyvesants on the Prinses Amelia and who was stationed as the vice director of Fort Altena on the Delaware River, asked Petrus to send him “a Company Negro; I require one to perform various services.”34 Such enslaved people had built the trade opportunities and even helped to construct the geography of forts and walls that surrounded elites such as Petrus, and others hoping to emulate his model.
Other community members built on the network laid down by the elite families and their associates. Enlarging the contingent from New Amsterdam to the Chesapeake was aspiring minister Michiel Zyperius and his wife Anna, who used the move as another moment to escape the bad reputation that had followed him across the world. Michiel had first been posted to Curaçao where he married Anna and was censured for baptizing enslaved people.35 They sailed up to New Amsterdam on the Spera Mundi—a ship that carried enslaved children, several of whom were earmarked for Petrus—where their tenure was likewise brief.36 In 1661, just months after the still unordained Michiel commenced his duties as reader (voorlezer) in the village of Nieuw-Haarlem on Manhattan, the classis sent a scathing letter to Domine Samuel Drisius who served as minister in New Amsterdam to a linguistically and ethnically diverse congregation. In it they warned that they received “a bad report” and that they had “been reliably informed that the same Michiel Siperius has from his young years onward been a bad person who in school at Alkmaar he was publicly chastised before all the scholars.” This public censure occurred due to “many wicked acts, such as obtaining goods from shops in the name of the rector, and taking them to a pawn shop.”37 His lackluster performance in Nieuw-Haarlem could not survive the additional rebuke, and Michiel departed New Netherland for Virginia.
His reputation lingered. On August 5, 1664, Samuel Drisius noted Michiel’s departure in a letter to the Classis of Amsterdam, writing, “Ziperius left for Virginia long ago. Through drinking, cheating and forging other people’s writing, he behaved himself most scandalously here, so that he was forbidden not only to preach, but also to keep school.”38 This created a shortfall in ministerial labor, which required that his Nieuw-Haarlem congregation attend services given by Henricus Selijns on Petrus Stuyvesant’s bouwerij. Drisius himself, fluent in English and Dutch, would be part of a delegation sent to Virginia.39 For his part, despite his disgraceful exit, Michiel and his wife Anna were not banished, but followed a well-trod route of emigration from New Netherland to the Chesapeake forged by the Varlets and the Hermanns. By the mid-1660s, they settled on the North River Precinct (present-day Kingston Parish in Matthews County), whose location was just across the Chesapeake Bay from a prolific tobacco and slave district that was the headright established in Accomack County by Anna Varlet Hack Boot, Petrus Stuyvesant’s cousin by marriage.40 Michiel ultimately became an Anglican, was finally ordained, and by the 1680s, became rector of the North River Precinct. The broad geographic reach of elite slaveholding networks led to an expansive community of individuals whose shared cultural ties followed them across colonial lines.
Crossing Colonial Lines
Men, women, and children also served as alternative currency that offered liquidity across contested borders. On May 31, 1664, the New Netherland Council passed a resolution agreeing that in exchange for “a quantity of pork and beef equal to 6000 lbs., the beef at 4 and the pork at 5 stivers the pound” that the West India Company would pay Captain Thomas Willet “in Negroes at such a price as may be agreed on” or “in case of not agreeing, in beaver or goods, beaver price.”41 While the resolution was timed in anticipation of the arrival of the Gideon, the business deal had been four years in the making. On October 28, 1659, Petrus requested more “negroes,” complained about Jewish trade competition for enslaved people, and discussed his association with Thomas Willet of New Plymouth as well as John Allyn of Connecticut. Thomas offered surety for the colony that year with the promise of payment in “negroes,” “beavers,” or other “goods.”42 After four years of nonpayment—not an exceptionally long time for a frontier colony in want of hard specie—Petrus backed up his promise made on behalf of the council, by securing a loan from two wealthy slave-owning contacts, Johannes de la Montagne and Jeremias van Rensselaer, who assured that Thomas would be “reimbursed satisfactorily either in good Negroes or other goods.”43 Payment “in negroes” was a matter of course across the Dutch Atlantic and had become a way of life in New Netherland, as the example of Lucas Rodenborch and Jeremias van Rensselaer, demonstrated. But Thomas’s acceptance of the payment illuminates the regional penetration of the practice: Captain Thomas Willet was a New Englander.44
In 1636, Thomas Willet wed Mary, daughter of John Browne, and relocated to Wannamoiset (near Barrington, Rhode Island).45 Before immigrating to the Narragansett Bay, he had spent time in Holland as a Puritan refugee and gained fluency with Dutch language and culture, a familiarity that he would transform into a brisk trade with New Netherland and then revisit again when, nearly thirty years later, he became the first English mayor of New York.46 Although he arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1630, he would go on to ply intracolonial trade and slave ties. His cross-colonial slave experience would not be a singular occurrence, but rather presage centuries of commercial slave ties. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Rhode Island and New York would emerge as prolific Northern ports, and although Newport would dwarf New York City in numbers of transatlantic slave ship departures, New York would eclipse Rhode Island in slave population and transatlantic voyages that returned to the colony.47
Thomas began trade with the Dutch colony during Willem Kieft’s tenure, though his qualifications came highly recommended to Petrus Stuyvesant by New Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford.48 New England traded with its Dutch neighbor, and ships laden with salt from Bonaire would arrive in Boston and in turn be loaded with provisions destined in part to feed enslaved workers on the Dutch Caribbean island.49 Despite the persistent request for more enslaved workers to support the citizens of New Netherland, the WIC directors earmarked such captive cargoes for English markets in the Chesapeake, and Petrus used them to square accounts like Thomas’s in New England. Petrus’s connections with Thomas, John, Jeremias, and Johannes evidence a long-term investment in an expansive slave network that would survive the fall of the colony.50
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Stuyvesants had an Atlantic household, with their eldest son Balthazar following in his father’s footsteps and seeking to advance his career on the island of Curaçao.51 That same year, a group of enslaved people, including children, who had lived, served, and worshipped on lower Manhattan found themselves thrust onto the Caribbean slave market.52 The Stuyvesants had used Caribbean marketplaces to purchase several enslaved children before, but the group with children whose fates made it into the family correspondence were unusual: they had been sold by mistake.53 Although Vice Director Matthias Beck wrote to Petrus Stuyvesant his message was clearly meant for Judith: “Among other things, I have noticed in your honor’s welcomed letter the great mistake that has been committed here in the trading of your honor’s slaves; especially the small children, since they had been presented for baptism with good intentions by Mrs. Stuyvesant, your honor’s beloved.”54
Judith’s “good intentions” to baptize the enslaved children were made during a heightened decade of activity when her name appeared in the baptismal records as witness nine times.55 During their baptismal service, she would have most likely heard the familiar words of Genesis 17:7 intoned: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant.”56 The covenant that she witnessed for these children was everlasting, a heritage to be passed down to successive generations. Baptism, the minister (likely Henricus Selijns) would have reminded, was intended in place of circumcision, and as recipients, “infants are to be baptized as heirs of the kingdom of God, and of his covenant. And parents are in duty bound, further to instruct their children herein, when they shall arrive to years of discretion.”57 The daughter of the Reformed minister Lazare Bayard, and mother to two sons, Judith would have been familiar with the parental responsibility to raise such baptized children in the faith.
Standing before the predikant, Judith Stuyvesant was performing an officially unsanctioned act, one that would leave no trace in the Reformed Church Baptismal record: all notations of slave baptisms ceased between 1652 and 1665.58 Henricus Selijns had assured his superiors in 1664 that he stopped the practice of slave baptism because enslaved parents only wanted freedom for their children and had little interest in deep and abiding faith.59 But, perhaps it was Judith’s presence that encouraged the exception. The maintenance of the Reformed faith was keenly important to the Bayards: due to Judith’s father Lazare’s position as a minister to a small Walloon congregation in Breda, the family had been forced to leave the city after it fell to Spain in 1625. They resided in Amsterdam as religious refugees before Breda was restored to the United Provinces, and they returned in 1637.60 As the wife of the director general, she was well-positioned to fulfill the promises she had made to these children before God. Yet her promises came to ashes. Although her family’s Reformed identity had persevered even when forced from their birthplace, Judith’s role as the children’s spiritual guide was stymied under the force of slavery.
Judith, herself, was not merely a bystander in the children’s ultimate end as her family was heavily dependent on the slave market in the Caribbean. The Stuyvesants were not shocked by the children’s presence in Curaçao—implying that they could have been the agents of the relocation that would have severed any ties the enslaved people held in New Netherland—but instead, they were upset about their sale. Petrus had already sent an enslaved couple, Lucia and Joseph, down to the island to tend cattle “at pasture there” along with “Paulo and Diego or Jacob.”61 Curaçao was certainly squeezed for enslaved people. Enslaved people were sometimes borrowed from private enslavers on the island to fulfill transshipping contracts. In one notable instance, the colony’s vice director, Matthias Beck, gathered sixty-two individuals from various parties around the island to fill three Spanish ships, which had arrived to pick up enslaved people from the not-yet-arrived transatlantic slave ship Eyckenboom.62 Arguably, such an enslaved group, sent down to Curaçao by Petrus to work primarily on company landholdings could have been caught up in such a scenario. It was not the first, nor the last of such clandestine sales.
Children were churned by the Curaçao market, some destined for Petrus and his wider network of friends and kin. Matthias Beck facilitated such transactions. Petrus could have met Matthias in 1655 while the latter was in Barbados after being exiled from Brazil following the Dutch colony’s fall to the Portuguese, although it is possible that they met during the 1630s while they were both stationed in Brazil.63 It was Petrus’s only known trip to the English island, but it would mark an overture for the family’s cross-colonial designs in the Caribbean, one that mirrored Petrus’s earlier efforts in New England. Matthias had owned a sugar mill with two hundred enslaved people in Brazil and was interested only in enslaved captives who could be worked the hardest; any others, he argued in a letter to the West India Company’s Amsterdam leadership, were not worth the provision of feeding.64 In 1659, Matthias reported that “two boys and a girl” had been set aside from Coninck Salomon a slave ship from Guinea. Another two children pulled from a compliment of three hundred captives—people who could have been the children’s parents, siblings, or other relatives—were selected “for the commissary Van Brugh” and “two young Negros” purchased by the commissary Laurens van Ruyvan “for the account of his brother.” Matthias also sent Petrus, “a young female Negro for Mr. Augustinus Heermans,” in Maryland.65
The Stuyvesants and Becks were tied by marriage to one another, bonds that linked them to the Chesapeake contingent. Judith and Petrus entrusted the well-being of their eldest son to Matthias’s care, trusting that he would be able to see to it that Balthazar was set up properly on Curaçao.66 A month before Petrus sent Judith’s complaint along to Matthias, the West India Company organized a slave auction held in New Amsterdam. Among the purchasers were the wealthiest settlers in the colony. Petrus’s own brother-in-law Nicolaes Varlet bought five new enslaved arrivals, including the enslaved woman and her child (een negerin met een kint) who opened this chapter at public auction for 360 guilders.67 In total he spent 1,035 guilders for five human beings. Another brother-in-law, Jacobus Backer, bought three enslaved people, one man and two women spending 1,175 guilders. Such purchases were part of a wider market for enslaved people. Captive Indigenous people had been traded from the Northeast and the Chesapeake to Curaçao and other islands since the 1640s, a policy enacted for New Netherland under Willem Kieft and continued by Petrus’s regime.68 Slavery ultimately trumped salvation, and material family ties overshadowed spiritual bonds.
Blood and Enslavement
Despite Petrus’s expansive trading ties, 1664 closed with the English invasion of New Netherland. As ships approached, the colony’s council descended into chaos. Amid the melee, a group of Black people who held a provisional freedom from the WIC secured their full freedom for themselves and their children.69 In a later certificate, drawn up during the English period to prove the freedom of these Black families, their deference is dramatically emphasized—they were described as falling to their knees and praying. That this episode does not appear in the request itself but rather as proof of the veracity of their manumission highlights that they were not hoping for heavenly deliverance, but an earthly assurance of freedom.70 Their status was already an anomaly but their successful negotiation of freedom at the fall of the Dutch colony, reads almost mythically. It was as Susanah Shaw Romney noted, “The penultimate act” of the Dutch colony, affected by a ragtag council on Petrus’s personal bouwerij.71 Their success would ensure the continued existence of one of the oldest free Black communities in North America. The Dutch colonial experiment with slavery would be situated by later generations of scholars as a much milder regime, the calm before the storm of English rule, with its burning pyres of Black men.72 Yet the elite families that formed the core of the Northern slaveholding regime remained, and their networks established under Dutch rule proved resilient and flourished under the English.
Of course, the Dutch era had its own public burning, a year before Petrus’s tenure.73 Despite the English takeover, Petrus retained his standing among the community of former Dutch colonists and his identity as a slave-holder. Several colonists living on his bouwerij testified that the day before the arrival of the English, Petrus “had as much grain as possible threshed by his own Negroes and servants and brought into the fort every day, whilst the frigates remained at the Narrows. This we are ready, at all times, to confirm by oath.”74 Such measures were in addition to the call from council leaders for all residents to work alongside the enslaved to prepare the city against invasion.75 If the memory of the punishment of laboring with the enslaved lingered in the minds of New Amsterdam’s populace, social revulsion in addition to the overwhelming numbers of the English invasion fleet, might explain the colonists muted response. Notwithstanding his actions on behalf of the Black people who he emancipated during the fall, Petrus remained a committed slaveholder. On October 6, 1664, the newly installed English governor Richard Nicolls issued a Hue and Cry on behalf of a deposed Petrus Stuyvesant, demonstrating that despite grappling with the fall and impending official censure, the former Dutch leader still prioritized tracking down people he claimed as property. His personal resources had been severely limited by the loss of the colony but, nevertheless, he promised to give any slave catcher, “full satisfaction for their labour and charge.”76 The final transactions that Petrus made as governor and his first act as a private citizen were dark reflections of one another.
After being relieved of his command, Petrus had time to contemplate his excuse for the colony’s fall. His initial testimony included the want of provisions occasioned by the burden of the joined colony of New Netherland and Curaçao. The second added to his first explanation, the strain that the slave ship Gideon had placed on the colony: “That about 14 or 16 days before the arrival of the frigates . . . came, in the ship Gideon, between 3 and 400 half-starved Negroes and Negresses who alone, exclusive of the garrison, required one hundred skeples of wheat per week.”77 The specifics within Petrus’s testimony should not be taken at face value, as he was incentivized to embellish by the particularities of the Dutch Republic’s legal system.78 Despite the dire picture he drew for the Amsterdam leadership, Petrus had a third of the Gideon’s captive people sent to Fort Altena, a city colony on the Delaware.79 Some of them had survived the middle passage from Guinea or Angola, where nearly half of the captives had been weakened by an outbreak of typhus and remained on Curaçao’s seasoning camps.80 Others were people in their mid-thirties, already “seasoned” on the island of Curaçao, and judged old by colonists eager to purchase the lives of others.81 Upon arrival at Fort Altena, they were taken into Willem Beeckman’s custody. They would ultimately be seized by the invading English, the fate that befell most of the people formerly owned by the West India Company.82
Petrus was allowed to leave and returned to the renamed colony of New York.83 A pear tree sapling planted on the bouwerij would in later generations come to symbolize the Stuyvesant family’s rootedness to lower Manhattan.84 Among their neighbors were a diverse group of fellow colonists that included Africans who had lobbied for their freedom on the eve of English conquest.85 A generation of community members would celebrate their nuptials on the bouwerij, and its mixed character would stand out to later travel writers. Although much had changed, much remained the same. Following the transition, the Stuyvesant family was still intimately tied to the slave trade and seasoning camps of the Caribbean, and they still owned human beings.
The wide-ranging geographies of elite networks provided security and constancy even at times of upheaval. Petrus’s eldest son Balthazar’s short vagabond life was steered by Caribbean trade markets and his connections to New York. He traded between Curaçao and New York after the fall of the Dutch colony to the English.86 Balthazar first settled on Curaçao. Matthias Beck, the man tasked with setting up Balthazar on the island, had already put a sugar mill on St. Joris, a former company garden that in later years would also be used for “seasoning” new African arrivals.87 Balthazar continued to communicate to his family in New York via his cousin Nicolaes Bayard.88 The two maintained their family relationship and social prominence; they also remained large landowners in New York, Kingston (Esopus), and New Jersey.89
Other elite Dutch colonials maintained their ties to the Caribbean and expanded their slave-trading connections after the English takeover. Cornelis Steenwijck directed a portion of his vast fortune toward slave trading. In 1667, he co-owned the Leonora—a four-hundred-ton frigate sporting thirty-six mounted guns—bound for Ardra on the Bight of Benin.90 Captained by Jacob Dircksz Wilree and Dirck Jansz Klinckert, the Leonora left the Bight of Benin with 338 enslaved captives but arrived in its first American port of call—Fort Amsterdam, Curaçao (modern-day Willemstad)—with 291.91 Those who had survived the journey together could have found themselves herded onto St. Joris, Matthias Beck’s land and seasoning camp, while others continued onward to Martinique. Two years later, in 1669, Cornelis co-owned the slave ship Vergulde Posthoorn, along with three other investors, one of whom was Amsterdam-based Jan Baptist van Rensselaer.92 The vessel arrived first in Elmina on April 21, 1668, continuing on to Ardra, where it loaded up with 548 enslaved human beings. It arrived in Fort Amsterdam, Curaçao, with 471 enslaved captives, weakened by an ordeal that had only just begun. Like the enslaved from the Leonora, the group would have been seasoned on the island of Curaçao before the lion’s share—387 people—departed for sale in Martinique and St. Kitts.93
Balthazar Stuyvesant also had slave trade connections with Steenwijck. In 1668, he coinvested alongside his cousin Nicolaes Bayard and Cornelis Steenwijck in the Leonora and Leeuwinne, a Dutch pinas (pinnace) built for speed and easy maneuverability in the harbor. The ship departed Ardra in the Bight of Benin on November 10, 1668, with 147 captives bound for Willemstad, Curaçao, though only 126 people lived to disembark.94 By the time of the cousins’ investment, Curaçao was firmly entrenched as the Dutch transshipment center for enslaved captives, but it was only one island in a burgeoning landscape of Caribbean profits. Curaçao was made a designated transshipment location for Spain’s newly restored Asiento de Negros by 1662, when a contract was made for two thousand enslaved people to be delivered to the island. 1668 brought a new contract for an additional four thousand enslaved people.95 In 1672, Balthazar moved to the Danish Island of St. Thomas, which had, until 1666, been a Dutch colony before its loss to Denmark, and was in the process of transforming into a sugar plantation colony and slave depot for the Danish West India and Guinea Company.96 He moved again, this time to St. Eustatius, a Dutch island that had become a regional center for the clandestine slave trade and was where his two daughters were born.97
Cousins Nicolaes Bayard and Balthazar Stuyvesant shared a common engagement with slavery that would have been foreign to Nicolaes’s father Samuel, after whom Nicolaes chose to name his firstborn son, and the Calvinist grandfathers for whom Balthazar was named. Balthazar Stuyvesant was Samuel’s godfather.98 His final move, to Nevis, occurred during the heyday of the island’s seventeenth-century traffic in human beings. In 1673, it became the Leeward base of trade for the Royal African Company, and five years later, Nevis’s Black population would soar after a shift to large-scale sugar works.99
Balthazar’s family connections were intertwined with slave networks and persisted after his death. Nicolaes Bayard took Balthazar’s two surviving children, daughters Judith and Catherine, into his household. He married his stepfather’s sister, Judith Varlet, becoming ever more enmeshed in the slavery kinship networks originally forged by his mother, Anna, in her second marriage.100 His landholdings included a large portion of the north side of Wall Street, land that had formerly been set aside by the West India Company as “Negro lots,” where he rented to members of the free Black community.101 And he remained a slaveholder. His 1703 household inventory included three enslaved people: two men and one little girl, who, if they were not sold by the time of his death, likely ended up owned by his son Samuel.102
Links to a broader regional slavery increased over time. Petrus Bayard, Anna’s eldest son and Petrus Stuyvesant’s namesake and nephew, ventured away from New York, drawn by the religious pietism of the Labadists, to Cecil County, Maryland.103 There, on August 11, 1684, with Peter Sluyter, Jasper Danckaerts, John Moll, and Arnoldus de la Grange, he signed the deed for 3,750 acres bounded by the Bohemia River that would come to be known as the Labadie tract.104 The group’s members hailed from Friesland, New York, and Delaware.105 The world was in constant flux around them, as a wholescale demographic shift was underway, one that would end with the emergence of the Chesapeake as the central slave region.
But that slave-centered destiny was not preordained, but rather the result of individual choices and compromises. The Labadists embraced antislavery in Europe and debated as to the prudence of American settlement citing the vices of tobacco and slavery.106 When in 1680, the Labadist party led by Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter scouted the site that they would eventually settle in Maryland, their language was disdainful of the tobacco cultivation and servitude that they encountered. Jasper compared the food’s coarseness to the dogged treatment endured by the denizens of Maryland, but though his meditation dwelled on the wretched condition of the servants, he offered little but passing concern for those enslaved.107 The Labadists quickly lost any antislavery scruples with the establishment of two settlement ventures—in Maryland and in Suriname, the first-named Bohemia Manor and the second Providence Plantations. According to one polemicist, Peter cruelly treated those enslaved at Bohemia Manor.108 In the end, economic promise trumped religious conviction.
Those without such landed slave ties struggled during the English takeover. The lives of colonists and traders were often subject to the whims of the lords who decided colonial boundaries. Bohemia Manor existed in Lord Baltimore’s Maryland after the fall of New Netherland and was supplied by New York traders who sailed around New Jersey and up the Delaware River, continuing the relationship between the regions that was established during the period of Dutch rule when they were New Amsterdam and the Colony on the South River. William Penn changed that when he convinced his friend, the Duke of York, to grant him the west bank of the river as part of his Pennsylvania colony. Traders without landed connection to the area would need to work with Philadelphia merchants to bring goods to the Delaware Valley, unless they sailed much further south to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and back up around the peninsula. Jacob Leisler did not have these landed connections, while the Bayard family did, and so their fortunes began to diverge.109
Religious zeal could threaten family unity, but slaveholding ambitions overcame those challenges, in part because discourses of difference had deep roots in Judeo-Christian ideologies. Although Peter Bayard traveled with the Labadists to Maryland, and copurchased land that came to be known as the Labadie tract, he did not remain in Maryland. He had initially abandoned his wife Blandina to become a Labadist, but by the final decade of the seventeenth century, he returned to New York, renounced his vow of chastity and a country life in favor of a house in the city. Peter also participated in the regional slave culture that bound his scattered family in one purpose, like his former coreligionists in Maryland had done. In 1693, his wife inherited from her mother, Sara Roelofs’s estate a “negro boy, Hans.”110 At the time of the 1703 city census, Peter’s household inventory listed an enslaved woman.111 Thirty enslaved individuals were held by his extended family who were nearby neighbors.112 The Bayards did renew their physical presence in Bohemia Manor. Peter’s son Samuel permanently settled on the tract in Cecil County with his brother-in-law Hendrick Sluyter.113 The Maryland and Pennsylvania branches of the Bayard family would remain deeply enmeshed within the political, merchant, and slaveholding elite of the region.114 Slave-owning overcame religious and geographical divisions to bind this family together.
Several interconnected trader families expanded their own social footprints beyond the boundaries of New Netherland during the final decades of Dutch rule by capitalizing on slaveholding connections. These colonists created migratory networks of power that followed the Delaware River into Maryland, the tobacco trading routes onto the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, and into New England. Wide-ranging networks of power and colonization forged through the trading of commodities, which came to increasingly include human beings, were indelibly shaped by gender, race, and community. Such colonial links were not forged solely along patriarchal lines but were dependent on female networks of family and friendship. Enslaved people offered liquidity to their transactions and meaning to their constructed social identities. From English émigré Thomas Willet to Caribbean transplant Balthazar Stuyvesant, Curaçao’s burgeoning transshipment economy in captive human beings continued to be a part of such elite business portfolios. Controlling a considerable number of enslaved people was a key element of the colonial identities of the Stuyvesants, their cousins, and wider networks, even as they also allowed the existence and landed status of a free Black community of New Netherland.