Nieuw Amsterdam As Manhattan

By Harrison Diskin 

In the summer of 1641, a Wiechquaskeck man murdered Claes Smits, an aged wheelwright who lived in a small house north of Fort Amsterdam. He had visited Smits’ house to exchange beaver skins for duffels of cloth. But as Smits bent over to grab the cloth from a chest, the Native man (the records have not preserved his name) struck him dead with an axe. The commander of the Dutch garrison at Fort Amsterdam pursued the man back to his village and accosted him with questions. Why, the commander asked, had he killed the wheelwright during a peaceful exchange? Years back, the man retorted, when the Dutch were still building their fort, he had come to Nieuw Amsterdam with his uncle to trade Beaver skins. While there, several Dutchmen had killed his uncle and stolen the skins. The man had resolved that day to seek justice for his kin and had found his opportunity as he stood in Smits’ home. Perhaps he had not entered the house with the intentions of claiming justice. But the intimacy of the space and the analogous dynamic of exchange presented the man with an opportunity he chose not to miss.[1]

Smits’ murder helped spark the devastating conflict between Europeans and Native peoples that quickly became known as “Kieft’s War,” for the Director who bore much of its responsibility. Willem Kieft’s (1597-1647) antagonistic policies towards Munsees had soured relations that, until then, had remained mostly peaceful. In fact, Munsees were so incensed by Kieft’s reluctance to show them the same reciprocity as the colony’s previous director, Wouter van Twiller, that they gathered in crowds outside of Fort Amsterdam to demand the previous director’s return.[2]

Adrian Van der Donck painted this watercolor on two sheets that he glued together into a canvass measuring roughly 21x12.5 in. The image depicts  New Netherland around 1649-50, shortly after Kieft’s War [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek].

While the war proved disastrous for Munsee Indians, many of whom sued for peace in the aftermath of massacres led by the English soldier John Underhill, Native peoples retained their ability to shape their relations to the colonists who lived in their midst. Indeed, Kieft’s war almost cost the Dutch their colony: a coalition of Munsees turned Manhattan and the outlying Dutch villages into an incinerated landscape, forcing hundreds of colonists to flee to the inadequate protection of Nieuw Amsterdam, where they set up makeshift huts of straw in the shadow of the decrepit fort.[3] The West India Company recalled Kieft to Amsterdam in 1647 to defend himself. But Kieft never made it. The ship that carried him sank off the coast of Wales. In his stead, the Company sent Petrus Stuyvesant (1610-1672), who tried to take a different approach to Dutch-Native relations. If Kieft’s war revealed that Manhattan remained Indigenous territory, Stuyvesant’s tenure was marked more by continuity than change.[4]

Unlike Kieft, Stuyvesant understood that he needed to find a less violent way to police the interactions of Natives and Europeans. Part of his approach was to confine contact between them to easily regulated and surveilled spaces of Nieuw Amsterdam. He also proposed a series of strict procedures to regulate the presence of Native peoples within those spaces: no Native could spend the night in Nieuw Amsterdam, but rather in a “separate place to be determined by the situation of the village,” and no Native could enter it with any weapons.[5]

It was not just the Native peoples who came into European communities that concerned Stuyvesant, but colonists who visited Indigenous territory and spaces. The Director was hard pressed to stop Europeans from bringing goods to Munsee and Haudenosaunee villages to trade for wampum, beaver skins and other commodities. In 1652, for example, Stuyvesant voiced his concern that such actions would only encourage Native peoples “in their laziness,” or worse, would provide them with opportunities “to take the lives of those carrying” trade goods.[6] In other words, Stuyvesant sought to maintain the upper hand against Native peoples by confining trade and communication between colonists and Natives to spaces that he felt he could control.

Yet Stuyvesant struggled to shift the balance of power in favor of the colonists. On the morning of September 15, 1655, sixty-four canoes unloaded nearly 2,000 Indigenous peoples onto Manhattan Island (an enormous number when one considers that Nieuw Amsterdam’s population stood at only 2,500 people by 1664).[7] The Natives timed the invasion to coincide with Stuyvesant’s absence — they knew he had left Nieuw Amsterdam two weeks prior with Company soldiers to evict the Swedes from the Delaware River. The Colonists likely had a difficult time identifying them, but the group of Natives probably included a mixture of Wappinger and Esopus Indians as well as Munsees living in the island’s vicinity.

The Natives spread out over the city and entered colonists’ homes. Their confident movement through Nieuw Amsterdam displayed just how many of them had become intimately familiar with the village’s spaces and were at ease wandering about. While on the island, they threatened the burgemeester Paulus Leendertsen with a hatchet and shot an arrow through Hendrick van Dijck, the former state attorney. They set fire to dozens of buildings in Nieuw Amsterdam, the outlying villages near Pavonia, and on Staten Island, igniting grain and killing five or six hundred head of cattle. By the end of three days, fifty or sixty colonists were dead and as many as 100 taken prisoner.[8] While the motives for the attack were unclear, the Dutch came to believe that the Natives had retaliated against van Dijk in retribution for his murder of a Munsee woman picking peaches from his orchard. The episode took on the name “Peach War” to reflect its supposed origins. More recently, however, scholars have reinterpreted the event as a collaboration between Munsees and Susquehannas in response not just to the murder itself, but to the Dutch having shored up their influence in the Delaware valley after retaking New Sweden.[9]

Then, in early October, Natives captured a Long Islander named Pieter Schoorsteenveger along with five other colonists, prompting Stuyvesant to complain that the “freemen, contrary to my orders, are not staying together, but rather each is running here and there.”[10] A colonist named Steven Necker soon appeared before Stuyvesant and his council on behalf of the Hackensack sachems Pennekeck and Oratam to convey their demands in exchange for the captives: cloth, gunpowder, lead, kettles, guns, swords, wampum, knives, shoes, stockings, axes, and tobacco pipes. But Stuyvesant refused to pay. He feared that doing so would only encourage other Native peoples who together held some seventy-three Dutch prisoners from their attack on Manhattan Island.[11]

Minute of the Appearance of Steven Necker before Stuyvesant’s Council on October 13, 1655, [NYSA_A1809-78_V06_0100}

The deliberations that Stuyvesant and Council held amongst themselves and the negotiations they entered into with Natives reveal that Indigenous peoples, despite decades of colonial violence, continued to retain the upper hand in many situations because of their knowledge of the landscape. Stuyvesant recognized these advantages: “the Indians often deceive us by waving the flag and often lure us over about trivial matters, which fatigue our people by having to sail back and forth, without receiving any decision from them concerning our prisoners.”[12]  Evidently, the Dutch were at the beck and call of their Indigenous neighbors, unable to control the course of the negotiations. Natives would return the hostages on their own terms.

In a gesture of good will, Penneckeck sent fourteen prisoners to Manhattan but repeated the Indigenous demand for gunpowder and lead.[13] By late October, the Natives had won. Stuyvesant and the Burgemeesters voted unanimously to offer the sachems Oratam and Pennekeck the lead and gunpowder they sought. The Dutch lacked any viable alternative “because [the prisoners] are scattered among the Indians here and there far into the interior.”[14] Native peoples thus forced the Dutch to provide them with the very weapons they desperately tried to keep out of their hands — weapons that could only help them retain the upper hand in their relationships with European colonists — even after they had just attacked Manhattan.

But episodes of conflict and violence were not the only ways in which the Dutch experienced the dependency that characterized much of their 17th-century interactions with Indigenous peoples. Indeed, the Dutch relied upon Native peoples in order to colonize the geographical space they called New Netherland. Nieuw Amsterdam’s status not as an isolated outpost, but as a piece of a larger colony, hinged upon the cooperation of Munsee Indians who built much of the connective tissue between the region’s far-flung European towns and villages as they carried letters and spoken messages between them.[15]

Dutch officials’ dependence upon Natives to carry information speaks to a level of trust that belies narratives that emphasize only the incompatibility of Natives and newcomers. But it also hints at a broader tragedy: that the gradual and increasing dispossession of Native peoples stemmed in no small part from their willingness to assist their European neighbors. Kieft’s refusal to reciprocate the same generosity that Munsees had shown the Dutch was perhaps a harbinger of things to come. But even then, Munsees had performed their dissatisfaction by publicly demanding the return of a director who had offered a more advantageous relationship.

Ultimately, then, many Native peoples cooperated with Europeans because they felt it in their best interest to do so. Such was likely the case with the Massapequa sachem Tackapousha, for example, who saw the 1655 Manhattan attack as a crucial opportunity to cultivate an alliance with Stuyvesant against Indians with whom his people had been at war for nearly twelve years. In November of 1655, Tackapousha sent a delegation of seven Natives to offer the Dutch “absolute friendship” and reaffirm the peace the two peoples had enjoyed since his own father, Penhawitz, or “One Eye,” had negotiated an end to Kieft’s War.[16]

These negotiations were but one stage in a continuing partnership between the Dutch and Massapequa Indians. On March 12, 1656, for example, the residents of Hempstead entered into an agreement on behalf of Stuyvesant with Tackapousha and the Massapequa, which also included representatives of Matinecock, Rockaway, Canarsie, and Merrick Indians. The two parties agreed to forget and forgive all past injuries to one another and to create a kind of protective alliance against both the English, who wished to usurp “Dutch” lands, and Tackapousha’s enemies who proved more than willing to satisfy English imperial desires by selling off Massapequa lands. The Massapequa thus temporarily protected their own territory and secured their position as the leading supplier of wampum to the Dutch.[17]

Notwithstanding their cooperation, Dutch colonists and Munsee Indians — in particular the Esopus Indians — continued to fight one another in a series of violent outbursts along the upper Hudson river. All the while, Stuyvesant wrung his hands over the state of Nieuw Amsterdam’s palisades and pressed for the construction of new defensive works for protection against both Native peoples and the growing English threat. But he knew that in the end such physical markers would only work if local Indigenous peoples accepted the presence of the Dutch. Native peoples knew the North American landscape far better than Europeans did, and in many cases, they knew Dutch spaces better than Europeans knew theirs. Even in Nieuw Amsterdam, the most densely populated and best-defended part of New Netherland, Indigenous peoples continued to determine the fate of the colony. The small enclave of North America that the Dutch called Nieuw Amsterdam remained the ancestral landscape of Manhattan.[18]

Harrison Diskin is a PhD Candidate at USC. He is writing a dissertation titled “Making Manhattan: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Place, 1614-1703.” 

[1] From the “Korte Historiael Ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge,” of David Pietersze De Vries, 1633-1643 (1655), Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 213. This episode is repeated in “Report of the Board of Accounts on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 148-155; and again in “A Short Account of New Netherland, form the year 1641 to the year 1646,” NYCD, I: 183.

[2] NYCD, 1: 151.

[3] “Eight Men to the Assembly of the XIX” NYCD, I: 190-191. For an influential account of Kieft’s war, see Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006): esp. part 5.

[4] I use the name “Manhattan” intentionally, because of its origins as an Indigenous place name. It was the first Native place name between the Chesapeake and Maine to be recorded by Europeans. See Ives Goddard, “The Origin and Meaning of the Name ‘Manhattan’,” New York History 91:4 (Fall 2010): 277-293. I am grateful to Erin Kramer for bringing this article to my attention.

[5] For just one example, see “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” in Charles T.Gehring, trans. And ed., Council Minutes, 1655-1656, New Netherland Document Series (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995-): 134.

[6] Charles T. Gehring trans. and ed., Council Minutes, 1652-1654, New York Historical Manuscript Series (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1983): 43.

[7] Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 32.

[8] “Remonstrance to the States General Concerning the Recent Conduct of the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 120-123.

[9] Cynthia Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2008). See in particular chapter 7. More recently, Andrew Lipman followed van Zandt’s lead. See Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 187-188.

[10] “Letter to the Capt. Brian Nuton Regarding the Dangerous Situation,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 95.

[11] “Minute of the Appearance of Steven Necker with Ransom Demands of the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 95-96; “Resolution Not to Pay the Ransom Demanded by the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 97.

[12] “Letter to Capt. Post Concerning the Prisoners,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 100.

[13] “Minutes of the Release of Fourteen Hostages,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 102.

[14] “Reply of the Indians to the Council’s Proposal,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 119.

[15] For just a few of the many examples of this practice, see New York Historical Manuscripts, Vols. XVIII-XIX, Delaware Papers (Dutch Period), Translated and Edited by Charles T. Gehring (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Col., Inc., 1981), 30; 36; 111; 134; 148; 226; 229. For a discussion of similar occurrences in early New England, see Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 2015).

[16] “Propositions Made by the Indians of Long Island,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 145.

[17] “Articles of Agreement Betwixt the Governor of ye New Netherlands and Tackpausha,” Joseph Osborne et al., eds., Records of the Towns of North and South Hempstead, Long Island, New York, 8 vols. (Jamaica, NY: Long Island Farmer Print, 1896), 1:40-42. From this point, the above collection of documents will be abbreviated as “RTH.” Lipman makes this claim about the Massapequa role in the Wampus supply chain in The Saltwater Frontier, 188-189.