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Making Manhattan: sovereignty, material culture, and the politics of place, 1614-1664

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Making Manhattan: sovereignty, material culture, and the politics of place, 1614-1664

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Content MAKING MANHATTAN: SOVEREIGNTY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE, 1614-1664 by Harrison Diskin A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (HISTORY) December 2022 Copyright 2022 Harrison Diskin ii For Phyllis Diskin, Jonathan Diskin, and Amy Beleckas iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation owes its existence to more people than I have space to name. I’d like to acknowledge a handful of scholar-mentors at the University of Southern California who provided invaluable guidance and encouragement: Steven Ross, Karen Halttunen, Sam Erman, Edgardo Perez-Morales, Natania Meeker, Lindsey O’Neil, Jason Glenn, Antonia Szabari, Deborah Harkness, Lisa Pon, Hector Reyes, Alice Baumgartner, Susanna Berger, Veli Yashin, Megan Luke, Daniela Bleichmar, William Deverell, Philip Ethington, Richard Fox, Anne Goldgar, Paul Lerner, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Ketaki Pant, Vanessa Schwartz, Benjamin Uchiyama, and Jacob Soll. I owe a particular debt of gratitude at USC to the support of the USC Visual Studies Research Institute and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Research Institute. I am deeply grateful, as well, to the wonderful community of graduate students at USC. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Steven Samols, Jillaine Cook, Gary Stein, Daniel Wallace, Emily Warren, Yesenia Hunter, Nicholas Gliserman, Julia Brown-Bernstein, Randall Meissen, Simon Judkins, and Jenna Glemser. Countless others beyond USC have offered essential support. I would like to recognize Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Teofilo Ruiz, Davide Panagia, Ed Cahill, Steve Jaffee, Cathy Kelly, Zara Anishanslin, Jennifer Van Horn, Erin Kramer, Christopher Minty, Stephen Bann, Martin Jay, Michael Hattem, Darrin McMahon, Peter Stacey, Katherine Mooney, Charles Upchurch Andrew Lipman, Susanah Romney, Daniel Richter, Roy Ritchie, James Porter, and Tim Ingold. I benefitted enormously from the assistance of Laura Ritter and Regina Doppelbauer at the Albertine Museum in Vienna. I am especially grateful for the conveners and fellow members of the Omohundro Institute Coffeehouse Table on the Dutch Atlantic: Jared Hardesty, Deborah Hamer, Andrea Mosterman, Nicole Maskiel, Cary Carson, Chris Slaby, Danny Noorlander, iv Eileen Speijer, Evan Haefeli, Marsely Kehoe, Melissa Morris, Timo McGregor, Virginie Adane, and Suzanne Litrel. I have been especially fortunate to have a wonderful dissertation committee. It has been a true privilege to benefit from the expertise and wisdom of Vittoria Di Palma and Eric Slauter. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal has proved a guiding force and source of intellectual inspiration from the beginning. I owe more than I can convey to Peter Mancall, without whom this dissertation would not exist. Finally, I could not have begun, continued, nor completed this dissertation without the encouragement, love, and wisdom of my parents, Phyllis and Jonathan Diskin, and my fiancée, Amy Beleckas. “Making Manhattan” is dedicated to them. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………….v List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….vi Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Wigwams and Forts, 1609-1640………………………………………………………8 Chapter 2: The Village, 1640-1653……………………………………………………………...49 Chapter 3: Boundaries and Edges, 1653-1664………………………………………………….109 Chapter 4: Conquerors in Name, 1664 Reconsidered…………………………………………..188 Epilogue: A Tortoise of Ash……………………………………………………………………225 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………229 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: “Figurative Map,” Adriaen Block, Netherlands 1614 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…………………………………………………………………………….24 Figure 2: “Figurative Map,” Cornelis Hendricks, Netherlands 1616. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…………………………………………………………………………….25 Figure 3: “Hartgers View of New Netherland,” Joost Hartgers after Krijn Frederycksz, Amsterdam c. 1650 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]………………………….…30 Figure 4: “Nieu Amsterdam Cum Privilegio Ordinum Hollandiae et West-Frissae”, Unknown Artist, Netherlands 1643 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]………………………...69 Figure 5: “Watercolor View of New Netherland,” Adriaen van der Donck, New Amsterdam c. 1649-50 [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]………………………………………..95 Figure 6: Detail of “Watercolor View of New Netherland,” van der Donck……………………96 Figure 7: “Prototype View”, Unknown Artist, Netherlands 1650-1653, [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…………………………………………………………………………....99 Figure 8: Top: “Visscher View,” Nicolaes Visscher, 1651-53. Bottom: Restitutio View, Unknown Engraver, 1673. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]……………………102 Figure 9 “Visscher Map,” Nicolaes Visscher, Netherlands 1650-53 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…………………………………………………………………………….103 Figure 10: “The Castello Plan,” Unknown Artist, c. 1665-1670 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…………………………………………………………………………..109 Figure 11: “Mannados Plan,” Unknown Artist, 1664 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]…….202 Figure 12: “Nicolls Map”, Unknown Artist, 1664 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]………..205 vii ABSTRACT “Making Manhattan: Sovereignty, Material Culture, and the Politics of Place, 1614-1664” explores the entangled nature of arguments over sovereignty, material culture, and the built environment in the daily experience of the Native peoples and European colonists who lived on and around Manhattan Island during the seventeenth century. Not only did Europeans deploy objects and images to give material support to their legal claims of possession, but the experience of material life structured the languages that colonists deployed in demanding a reorientation of their community’s internal sovereignty, and the ways that others chose to respond. Such a fact can spur historians to pay greater attention to the constitutive role that material life plays in the genesis and transformation of political ideas. Yet just as important, material culture and the politics of places reveals that European efforts to erect a convincing scaffolding of sovereignty hinged upon Indigenous knowledges, material practices, and presences. Sovereignty in New Amsterdam thus emerged not just from the interrelationship between peoples, objects, and places, but at through a combination of European and Indigenous ways of knowing, acting, and being. Sovereignty was a product of many hands, an accumulation of many things, and a project ever in the making. 1 INTRODUCTION When I began this dissertation, I had planned to tell stories about a handful of eighteenth- century buildings. I hoped to use each building as a prism through which to look anew at broader developments in political consent and the boundaries of belonging before, during, and after the Age of Revolutions. I set out to understand how New Yorkers of varying identities tried to create a political community to which they belonged by making public spaces for themselves within the city. How, for example, did a political elite and the architects with whom they collaborated understand the relationship between their efforts to enact a government and their need to do so within spaces they commissioned, designed, and built? To what extent did urban design reflect or shape political principles? How could buildings, as symbols of the political order, help generate consent amongst the governed? And how did subjects and then republican citizens use these buildings not only on the terms delivered to them, but as venues for making their own claims about political belonging? I never wrote that dissertation. At least, not exactly. Within months of beginning research, COVID shut the doors on the archives that housed most of my primary source materials. In the weeks leading up to this, I had spent time reading through some of the extant records from Manhattan’s period of Dutch occupation. These sources are unique in that most of them have been translated and printed. Some of these translations are notoriously imperfect, but many have been updated thanks to the painstaking efforts of the New Netherland Institute. 1 With archives closed and an abundance of printed and digitized materials 1 Having never expected to work on Dutch-language sources, for the purposes of this dissertation, I’ve had to rely heavily upon the translations of others. Scholars have, for some time now, recognized that of the available printed documents, those translated by Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow contain numerous inaccuracies. At several crucial moments, where my interpretation of a document hinges upon the language, I have managed to refer back to the original Dutch source. However, readers should keep in mind that references to sources translated by O’Callaghan and Fernow may contain errors. For a more detailed discussion of these translations as well as the 2 at my disposal, I decided to bide time by writing a single introductory chapter set in that period of Dutch occupation, hoping the exercise would allow me to contextualize my future research against a deeper history of colonialism. That single chapter became a dissertation. Yet while the historical context changed, the underlying questions did not. Making Manhattan remains a story about the endless fights we wage as we seek to fix ourselves and our communities in place. It remains a story about the ways in which geographical space, place, and material culture structure the conditions of political and intellectual possibility, and mediate political relationships between peoples of diverse backgrounds. Communities are assemblies of collective life and politics the way that we choose to organize them. Political thought is how we justify these choices and advocate for others. But we always organize collective life in space, be it settled or sentient. Politics, then, is an act of building and place-making, and the way we justify and think about our polities reflects and shapes the ways that we make them. 2 We seem to be deeply conscious of this entanglement of politics, place, and material culture. It informs some of the most basic metaphors we reach for when we talk about the political process: we “construct” and “erect” new governments; constitutions provide a “scaffolding” or “framework” and those who write them are “framers” and “architects.” 3 We original Dutch sources lost to the state capitol fire of 1911, see Charles Gehring, “New York’s Dutch Records: A Historiographical Note,” New York History 56:3 (1975), 347-354. 2 Throughout this dissertation, I will refer to both “space” and “place.” I use the term “space” to refer to a physical location, and “place” to refer more specifically to locations that people have made meaningful. The historian Tim Cresswell made this helpful and simple distinction. See Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 12. I have found a number of other scholarly and philosophical discussions of place to be useful in writing this dissertation. See especially Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley. CA: University of California Press, 1998); Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World 2 nd . Ed (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Oxford, UK: Routledge Press, 2018). 3 I am drawing upon two works that are foundational to their respective fields, which were published around the same time. For the definition of politics as organized collective life, see Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), xvi. For the centrality of space to the communal experience, see Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961). 3 cannot hope to fully understand the development of political discourse until we account for its relationship to place and the material life of the political community. I offer the chapters that follow in hopes that they spur others to pay closer attention to this relationship and to delve deeper into the material realities it reflects. Scholars have long recognized that political concepts, like sovereignty (the political concept most central to this dissertation), are entangled with material and aesthetic life. 4 As the editors of a recent volume put it, “sovereignty is established and maintained as much by aesthetic, artistic, theatrical, and symbolic structures as by political claims over everyday life, war and peace, and life and death.” 5 Early American and Atlantic world historians of material and visual cultures, too, have elucidated the broader intersections between political and aesthetic practices. 6 Yet we still lack a framing for the relationships between material life and political ideas strong enough to cut across historical fields. How, we must continue to ask, do objects, images, and the experience of 4 See chapter 1 for my preferred definition of sovereignty: “Supreme authority within a territory.” For the entanglement of politics and aesthetics, see especially Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Louis Marin, The Portrait of the King (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1995); Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2010); Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jason Frank, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2021). 5 Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr eds., The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017): 3. 6 In a North America and Atlantic world context, see especially Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740- 1790 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Robert S. Duplessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art Politics and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman, eds., Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600-1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021). 4 material life structure political ideas and languages? How can we more fully re-tie the world of political ideas to what the philosopher Dan Eugen Ratiu called the “continuous flux of daily experiences of an embodied self?” 7 In “Making Manhattan: Sovereignty, Material Culture, and the Politics of Place, 1614-1664,” I explore the entangled nature of arguments over sovereignty, material culture, and the built environment in the daily experience of the Native peoples and European colonists who lived on and around Manhattan Island during the seventeenth century. Instead of treating sovereignty and the constitutions they inform as prescriptive programs for legitimate governance, I interpret constitutions and their implicit and explicit definitions of sovereignty as working stalemates between governors, who attempted to impose order on colonial populations, and colonists and Native peoples, who chose sometimes to work with colonial governments, and other times against them. 8 Both colonists and Indigenous peoples—sometimes in alliance, other times in 7 Dan Eugen Ratiu, “Remapping the Realm of Aesthetics: On Recent Controversies about the Aesthetic and the Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Life,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 4 (2012): p. 404. Scholars working across a number of philosophically informed disciplines including the history of emotions, gender, race, and disability, along with political philosophy and the philosophy of aesthetics, have in fact turned towards the sensory in recent decades. For a small sampling, see especially Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael Jackson, Paths Towards a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Enquiry (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); Paul Harrison, “Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the Everyday,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18:4 (2000): 497-517; Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Judith Butler, On Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge Press, 2011); Lenore Manderson, Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries and the Social Self (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011); Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’expérience esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2015); Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) Tina Chanter, Art, Politics, and Rancière: Broken Perceptions (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018). 8 I use the term “constitution” throughout this dissertation to refer simply to the particular organization of a community, a definition that accords with the lineage of constitutional from Aristotle through the early modern period. As much as possible, I focus on the aspect of constitutions that concern questions of sovereignty. I hope to turn to constitutionalism directly in future work. For constitutionalism broadly, see Charles Howard Mcilwain, Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940); Hannah Arendt, “The Great Tradition: I. Law and Power”, Social Research 74:3 (1953/2007): 713-726; Bruce Ackerman, “The Rise of World Constitutionalism,” Virginia Law Review, 83:4 (1997): 771-797; Scott Gordon, Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1999); Clifford Ando, “the Origins and Import of Republican Constitutionalism,” Cardozo Law Review, 34:3 (2013): 917-936; Paul F. Kjaer, 5 conflict—deployed subversive practices rooted in material culture and the politics of place. They gathered in private homes and occupied public space to coordinate and carry out acts of insurgency. They structured their demands for representation as critiques of the built landscape. They created objects and images that offered alternative visions of political participation—like European-style cityscapes that portrayed colonists as active participants in public life, or Native- made memory-sticks and other object-based mnemonics that registered promises that colonial governors had made to Indigenous populations and Native demands on colonial governments. And they monopolized and supplied objects in high economic or cultural demand, whether furs, wampum, or guns, that forced those in power to recognize and accede to their political agendas. In practice, sovereignty thus “emerged” from the shifting relationships between peoples, their governors, and the spaces they inhabited and objects they made. By deploying place- and object-based practices, European colonists and Indigenous peoples forced colonial governors to revise their community’s constitutions—in particular their accounts of internal and external sovereignty—to represent their interests in both formal and informal ways. Colonists deployed critiques of the built environment—the rotting and decrepit fort, churches built on unsuitable land, and homes rendered piles of ash by warfare with Native peoples for which their governors bore the blame (or so they said)—to demand a greater share of sovereignty through a representative municipal government. Munsees (Algonquian-speaking Natives living in the vicinity of Manhattan Island and the Delaware Valley) occupied colonial spaces and deployed insurgent tactics, forcing European governors to acquiesce to their demands to represent themselves in colonial courts when Indigenous lands and rights were at stake. Constitutionalism in the Global Realm: A Sociological Approach (London: Routledge Press, 2014); Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty and Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford Press, 2016). 6 Furthermore, both Munsees and the Haudenosaunee who lived in the upper Hudson Valley made Europeans dependent upon Indigenous objects, like furs and wampum, Native supply networks for food and resources, and Indigenous knowledges of the landscape. By keeping Europeans dependent, Indigenous peoples forced colonial leaders to de facto represent their interests at the level of local and regional government at crucial moments of conflict. From the mid-seventeenth century, the colonists of Manhattan threatened Native peoples’ abilities to live in their ancestral landscape. As the environmental historian William Cronon has argued, newcomers’ buildings, paths, and fences encroached on Natives lands and impeded their mobility. Yet despite their differences, Natives and Europeans built a material landscape that often gave way to cross-cultural dialogue and exchange. Residents of Manhattan and the surrounding area crossed boundaries more often than they erected them. Their lived practices contradicted European rhetoric about sovereignty, which described a community as a closed, bounded and protected assemblage of rights-bearing, European individuals. Thus, both Indigenous peoples and European colonists utilized the politics of place and visual/material cultures to actively participate in and shape governments that often denied to them formal institutions. Retelling the history of Manhattan and Northeastern America in this way alters both our understandings of colonialism in this well-traveled corner of the Atlantic world and the deeper origins of both sovereignty and representative government. First, and foremost, my dissertation shows that affective experience and material life directly shaped the languages and practices that Europeans and Native peoples alike drew upon as they negotiated their own politics, as well as that which they shared with one another. Second, it demonstrates that the boundaries that colonists erected between the categories of European and “Indigenous” were never as solid as 7 they imagined, and that colonial sovereign borders hinged upon the participation of Indigenous place-knowledges and material practices. Third, it uncovers the extent to which Native peoples’ actions shaped purportedly European institutions of governance and discourses of sovereignty. Often, the proximity of Indigenous peoples and the opportunities and challenges those cross- cultural relationships presented spurred colonists and colonial administrators to refine the political systems they had originally intended to transplant directly from Europe. These phenomena, taken together, suggest the need for a new vision of sovereignty, neither as a pre-set design of governmental legitimacy, nor a fixed account of who can claim belonging within a political community, nor a static account of legitimate control over geographical space, but as an emergent phenomenon from the relationship between people, their governors, and the physical setting in which they seek to emplace themselves as a community. The process of “making” a sovereign community was, and remains, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold put it, “a confluence of forces,” rather than a “transposition from image to object.” 9 9 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture (Oxford, UK: Routledge Press, 2013), 22. 8 I. WIGWAMS AND FORTS, 1609-1640 It was a pleasant morning in late September 1609. The wind blew out of the South at regular intervals, swirling to a stiff gale. Two older men paddled up the river, the periodic gusts pushing them forwards. They carried with them strings of woven beads fashioned from the white centers of knobbed whelks and the purplish interiors of quahog clams. Four women travelled with them, two older and two younger, maybe sixteen or seventeen years of age. As they neared their destination, hollow thuds sounded at regular intervals, growing louder as they moved up river. They travelled towards a hulking mass atop the water. One of the old men had seen the boat before and met the strangers who travelled with it. He now returned with others. Approaching the vessel, the repeating thuds echoed from a man chopping wood along the water’s edge. Others busied themselves atop the wooden figure. 10 The strangers appeared glad to see the old man again and invited him and his companions to join them. Once aboard, the second elderly man extended his hands outwards, offering the beads, or wampum, he carried, most likely as a form of customary hospitality, and possibly to cement a future alliance with a client. Munsees deployed wampum not as simple trade goods, but to enhance their spoken words and to “add power to messages and speeches that constructed relationships,” as the historian Amy Schutt put it. Wampum gave words legitimacy and anchored promises of partnership and clientage in a physical object within which resided sacred power. 11 10 I am drawing details for this account from Robert Juet, “The Third Voyage of Henry Hudson,” 1610, printed in Frederick Jameson ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1909), 24. 11 Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 10-12. See also Robert Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 9 The old man then gestured to the land around him, using the movements of his body to invite and instruct. 12 The guests were welcome here so long as they respected its ancestral inhabitants. The earth around them was peopled with those ancestors: the dead bonded the living to the land. 13 The strangers’ leader offered a knife in return and invited all six to share a meal. Just after midday, the old men signaled that it was time to leave, indicating that the ship’s crew should follow behind. They pushed off in their canoes and paddled south, but no one followed. The old man returned the next day to extend the invitation once more, but again the guests declined. He left and did not see them again. We know of these events because of Robert Juet, who sailed with Henry Hudson aboard the Halve Maen, a ship of 80 tons. He sat one evening and recorded the day’s activities in his journal: This morning, two Canoes came up the River from the place where we first found loving people, and in one of them was the old man that had lyen aboord of us at the other place. He brought another old man with him, which brought more stropes of Beades, and gave them to our Master, and shewed him all the Countrey there about, as though it were at his command. So he made the two old men dine with him, and the old man’s wife: for they brought two old women, and two young maidens of the age of sixteene or seventeene yeeres with them, who behaved themselves very modestly. Our Master gave one of the old men a Knife, and they gave him and us Tabacco. And at one of the clocke they departed downe the River, making signes that wee should come downe to them; for wee were within two leagues of the place where they dwelt. 14 12 For two especially good accounts of nonverbal communications between Indigenous and Europeans, see James Axtell, “Babel of Tongues: Communicating with the Indians,” in Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (Oxford University Press, 2000), 46-75; Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2019). 13 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 24-25. For a short but helpful account of Wampum, see Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 141- 142. For a great account of the use of Wampum for the incorporation of Europeans into indigenous practices, see Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For broader accounts of Dutch-Indian trading relations, see Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960); Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (New York: Knopf, 1965); Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). For the Archaeology of Manhattan Island in particular and use of burials as evidence of a “tethering” to place, see Anne-Marrie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archeology of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 14 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 24. 10 Like many before him and countless after, Juet read the day’s events through his European eyes, with all the assumptions about culture, trade, and gender that befit someone of his upbringing. He laid words down and built sentences. Each sentence siloed an observation and cordoned off its interpretation. Adjectives like “loving”, added to the neutral noun “people”, affixed naïve, child-like qualities to the local inhabitants. “Maidens” and “modestly” trapped the two younger women within European expectations about marriage and sexuality. Among the collection of sentences, however, one word jutted out like a wayward brick, threatening the paragraph’s stability. Juet recalled the second man’s gestures. He had motioned to the surrounding landscape, directing Henry’s Hudson’s attention to its many topographical features “as though it were at his command.” Whatever Juet’s intentions, conscious or otherwise, the pronoun “his” remains ambiguous today. What is the antecedent? Perhaps Juet used it to refer back to Hudson himself, in which case the Natives, at least in his view, were not only child-like, but overawed by the ship’s captain. Overawed, in fact, to the point of recognizing Hudson as “master” of the land. But the word’s ambiguity invites us to consider other possibilities: that Juet’s journal provides a glimpse into a misunderstanding, one of many that would create the unstable foundations upon which all colonial encounters rest. The pronoun lived (and continues to live) a double life, on the one hand signaling invitation to settle; on the other, instructions for respect. 15 15 For general accounts of Hudson’s voyages, see especially Donald S. Johnson, Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson (Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha International, 1995) and Peter C. Mancall, Fatal Journey: the Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (New York: Basic Books, 2009). For accounts of encounters between Natives and English that inform the way I read and seek to deconstruct and even decolonize documents like Juet’s journal, see Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian, from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Press, 1979); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Collin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel 11 Three days later, Juet returned to his journal: “This is a very pleasant place to build a town on. The Road is very neere, and very good for all winds, save an East North-east wind. The Mountaynes looke as if some Metall or Minerall were in them. For the Trees that grow on them were all blasted, and some of them barren with few or no Trees on them. The people brought a stone aboard like to Emery (a stone used by Glasiers to cut Glasse) it would cut Iron or Steele: yet being bruised small, and water put to it, it made a colour like blacke Lead glistering; it is also good for Painters colours.” 16 With these words Juet clarified his meaning. This was a place to settle. The old man had extended his arms as a gesture of invitation only. There were no further instructions. Juet’s words also suggest that, at least in his understanding, place anteceded settlement. Juet saw a land that would give itself up for the creation of community, which he signaled by referring not just to the land’s economic potential, but to its ability to sustain aesthetic pursuits: “good for painters coulours.” Juet’s comments raise an intriguing question: does place exist prior to people, or do people construct place? 17 Juet’s log suggests that if one were to have posed the question to him, he might have erred towards the second of these definitions. Building a new settlement, after all, is a pursuit that demands a constructionist attitude. We build places—places do not build us. So goes the sentiment. Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degree: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Idem., Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Brooks, The Common Pot (2008). For a recent account of nonverbal communication between Europeans and Indigenous, see Carayon, Eloquence Embodied (2019). 16 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 25. 17 For a broad introduction to the relationship between “space” and “place”, see Cresswell, Place: an introduction, (2015), 15-17. See also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Press, 1964); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995) For the distinction between place as constructed and place as a prior given, see Malpas, Place and Experience (1999); Casey, The Fate of Place (1997). 12 Yet place structured Juet’s understanding of what he saw even as he sought to fix his experiences into a stable narrative of what a Dutch settlement might look like on this new landscape. As he interpreted and recorded the events around him, as he worked those events into an account that justified and pointed towards colonization, the places through which he passed, created both by nature and the Indigenous peoples who had assembled them into communities of their own, set the parameters for what Juet could imagine as possible. Clarifying his narrative could not fully stabilize either the wayward pronoun or the lived reality of the places to which the old man had gestured. They took shape both in Juet’s imagination and on their own terms, neither fully separate from the other. Beginning in the early years of Dutch colonization in New Netherland and their encounters with the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, two political competitions waged in and through space gradually took shape. The first was an imperial struggle between colonists and Indigenous on the one hand, and Dutch and other European powers on the other. The second arose between the West India Company and the employees and the free burghers who sought to build lives for themselves in New Amsterdam—lives that extended beyond the limitations of a company town. Both struggles centered on the command of space through human presence and building projects, the construction and circulation of objects, and the usage of material dependent languages. Both reveal the growth of multiple conceptions of sovereignty that were all fractured from the start, even as leading members of the West India Company sought to fix both the symbolic and practical stability of their trading post in material form. *** 13 As he travelled up and down the Hudson River, Juet encountered Indigenous peoples—many of whom historians today would call Munsees—who lived in what he probably understood to be permanent settlements. The existence of buildings and palisades suggested as much, and Juet took special note of those Natives who engaged in intensive agriculture. Stopping near Sandy Hook Harbour, Juet recorded that the Indigenous he encountered “are very civill” and “have great store of Maize, or Indian Wheate.” 18 But when he scanned the landscape through which he travelled, Juet saw much vacant, uncultivated soil: an abundance of natural resources ready to be put to productive use. He also saw people living outside the type of political order to which he was accustomed. Hudson, too, noted that some of the Natives he met had no houses, but slept “under the blue heavens, some on mats of bulrushes interwoven, and some on the leaves of trees.” 19 Hudson rendered the local inhabitants as a mobile people who carried whatever possessions they had with them, but laid no permanent claim to the land. Intended for European readers, Hudson and Juet crafted their accounts with care, hoping not just to elicit from the West India Company a concerted effort to colonize, but to offer some initial justification for doing so based primarily upon their reading of Indigenous land practices and material cultures. But Hudson and Juet had stepped onto a historical landscape which they barely understood. The Native peoples they encountered had crafted their communities through hundreds upon hundreds of decisions about how and where and in what manner they desired to live and construct their lives, decisions which reflected no less of an effort to build polities on the lands to which they laid ancestral claims. Juet and Hudson could not, or chose not, to recognize a 18 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 18. 19 Hudson’s journal is lost to us, but Johannes De Laet excerpted this passage in his 1625 “History of the New World.” See Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 48 14 landscape that told of its deeper pasts. 20 Perhaps this led the Dutch after Hudson’s voyage to claim lands where they did: especially the southern tip of Manhattan Island. While the Dutch would plant themselves in other places too, they planned for the settlement on the Island to be “of greater importance.” 21 Unlike their neighbors in the northern parts of the Hudson Valley, the Munsees who lived on and around Manhattan Island seem not to have practiced the intensive farming of maize, beans, and squash that Europeans encountered elsewhere in the northeast. They inhabited a rich environment of wild plants, animals, and shellfish and they decided against the agricultural practices of neighboring Indigenous groups, similar to their coastal Algonquian neighbors to the north east. 22 Archaeological evidence suggests that coastal Munsees tended to live in relatively small communities at sites with contemporary names like Archery Range, Ward’s Point, and Washington Heights-Inwood—sites which they situated along the coast’s bays and coves for their access to fresh water and wild foods. They built houses in small clusters from the materials their landscape provided. They constructed few of the longhouses in which their neighbors in the Hudson Valley lived, opting instead for the smaller, conical wigwams which they assembled by standing saplings along the structure’s perimeter and bending the tops to create arched roofs. They tied these vertical supports together with more saplings along a horizontal axis to create a grid like interior structure and covered the outside with overlapping sheets of bark. 23 20 See in particular Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” WMQ 3:53 (1996), 435-458; and Juliana Barr, “There is No Such Thing as ‘Prehistory’: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us about Colonial America,” WMQ 3:74 (2017), 203-240. 21 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 49-50. 22 For the latter, see especially Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996) and Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 23 For a succinct account of Wigwam construction, see Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (New York: Harry N. Abrams Press, 2009), 115. For a more in-depth discussion of Indigenous building practices, see Peter N. Nabokov and Robert Easton eds., Native American Architecture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989). 15 Munsees drove stakes into the earth and built racks upon which they dried meat, fish, and shellfish. They built workshops in which they crafted stone tools and shaped pottery. These places were loci of religious, social and political life. People gathered and smoked and deliberated. Material structures and the activities that took place within them physically anchored assumptions about gender as men purified themselves in sweat lodges and women passed their menstrual periods and gave birth in designated buildings. The Indigenous set out from these sites of permanent or semi-permanent residency to gather food, storing what they collected in earthen pits. The regular movements of their feet between these sites etched trails into the island, trails which the Dutch would follow and widen into roads of their own. One of these trails, perhaps the primary path, began at today’s Battery Park and followed the island’s spine up towards Inwood. Just north of Greenwich Village, a second path split to the west, leading to fishing sites along the Hudson. These walking paths tied together sites of fishing and small-scale agriculture with seasonal campsites and more permanent villages. And beneath these places lay the dead—burial grounds filled with the bones of kin, some of which people had brought from great distances and reburied again, only strengthening the bonds between a people and the spaces they inhabited. The archaeologist Kent Flannerty argued that for communities that did not rely upon written deeds, the presence of ancestors offered tangible proof of a continuing relationship between a people and their landscape. 24 Building on Flannerty’s work, the archeologists Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall have suggested with caution that the emergence of highly visible burial grounds point towards the beginnings of a “concept of the collective guardianship of the land,” 24 Kent Flannerty, “The Origins of the Village as a Settlement Type in Mesoamerica and the Near East, in R. J. Ucko, R. Tringham, and G. Wembley eds., Man, Settlement, Urbanism (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1972), 29. 16 several thousands of years before Europeans arrived at Manhattan Island. 25 Quite apart from what Hudson and Juet believed they saw around them, the archaeological record tells us of a people with a culturally and historically contingent sense of place—a people for whom their land and their social, political, and religious communities existed on a great continuum. 26 Such realities suggest the broader issues with interpreting Native politics through the lens of European culture. Constitutive elements of European legal concepts like dominium—or sovereign possession of a geographical space—would not have had much purchase with the Munsees who inhabited Manhattan. Unlike Europeans, who believed themselves to have accrued God’s sanction to “rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over the beasts, and over all the earth, and over everything that creepeth and moveth on the earth,” as the widely read Geneva Bible worded it, Munsees understood themselves to be integrated within the fabric of a natural world brimming with plants, animals, insects, stones, and other-than-human beings, each animated by a spirit no less important than their own. 27 Indigenous conceptions of power relations between people and land thus emphasized partnership: as the beneficiaries of a landscape created by a power outside of human action, people were responsible for maintaining just and balanced relationship with the territories they inhabited. They could not dispose of them at will. 28 These practices of reciprocity and just 25 Cantwell and Wall, Unearthing Gotham (2001), 72. 26 Cantwell and Wall, Unearthing Gotham (2001), 113-115. For a brief account of the island’s main path, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. For studies specific to the Munsee speaking Lenapes, see especially Herbert C. Kraft, The Lenape: Archaeology, History and Ethnography (Newark, NJ: New Jersey Historical Society, 1987); Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991); Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow (2006); Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys (2009); Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Jean R. Soderlund, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 27 Geneva Bible, 1599, Genesis I: 26; Kraft, The Lenape (1987), 161. 28 The Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred has offered especially cogent discussions of these relationships. See Taiaike (Gerald) Alfred, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (Oxford, UK: University of Oxford Press, 1995); Taiaike Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in Joanne Barker ed., 17 exchange informed Munsee political and social values: all agreements between political groups required formalization through the exchange of objects like wampum. The importance of maintaining good relations—even those on unequal footing such a client groups of more powerful sachems, or Indigenous leaders—thus mirrored the necessity of maintaining balanced relationships with the natural world. 29 It is therefore difficult to take serious European claims of dominium since they reflected a one-sided reading of their encounter with Native peoples. From the viewpoint of Indigenous politics and practices of material exchange, Munsees likely understood themselves as incorporating the newcomers into their own networks of diplomacy and clientage. 30 Yet the Dutch, unable or unwilling to come to terms with Indigenous concepts of land use and material culture, sought to fill what they imagined to be political and social voids. Some of these voids existed in the spaces between the more established Indigenous settlements on land, spaces which the Dutch imagined to be vacant given the absence of what they understood as permanent structures or evidence of agriculture. Others they created through purchases, transactions which, they believed, gave them permanent and exclusive rights to the land and its Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self Determination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006): 33-50. See also Leanne B. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)145-174; Sean Robertson, “‘Thinking of the land in that Way’: Indigenous Sovereignty and the spatial politics of attentiveness at Skwelkwek’welt,” Social and Cultural Geography, 18:2 (2017): 178-200. 29 Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America, 15. 30 For scholarship that emphasizes Indigenous incorporation of Europeans as well as Native strategies of resistance, see especially Merrel, The Indians’ New World ( 1989); Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992); Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2003); Brooks, The Common Pot ( 2008); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Jeffrey Glover, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604-1664 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Joshua Reid, The Sea is my Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Barr, “There is No Such Thing as Prehistory,” (2017); Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Jacob F. Lee, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 18 resources. This concept, too, would not have occurred or made sense to the Indigenous from whom the Dutch “purchased” the land. To them, the land and its natural abundance could not be owned or possessed in permanence by any individual or group. 31 Nonetheless the Dutch came to these voids and built forts—four of them—and each red cedar log of each palisade, they believed, anchored their claims to the land. The Dutch intended the fort to claim the land not only against its former inhabitants, but against other European powers engaged in similar colonial expeditions. In other words, these forts fed into Dutch and European colonizers’ own conceptions of sovereignty that brought together a series of Western European legal traditions with assumptions about the relationship between land possession and proper land use. The European concept of sovereignty, at its most basic, refers to “supreme authority within a territory.” 32 While simple, this definition brings together different functions of sovereignty that European imperial and colonial actors sometimes wove together, and other times split apart, as they negotiated the construction of empires across the Atlantic. These functions included the ability to set territorial boundaries and prevent foreign political actors from interfering within them, the ability to control the political genesis of communities inside those boundaries, and the ability to define both the origins of legitimate authority and the distribution of power within the political community itself. The first of these functions corresponded imperfectly to the Roman legal concept of dominium, the right to possess a particular territory; the others to imperium, or sovereign jurisdiction within a particular territory. Throughout the Atlantic world, monarchs, legal theorists, imperial functionaries, colonial governors, and an array of colonists trained in the 31 For the classic account of this particular point of misunderstanding, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), see especially Chapter 4: “Bounding the Land.” 32 Daniel Philpott, "Sovereignty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sovereignty/>. 19 law or informally versed in its application invoked these concepts (though often not in their Latinate form) to define and contest the boundaries of imperial territories and the rights and obligations of colonial subjects within them. 33 But as the historian Lauren Benton argued, “sovereignty is often more myth than reality, more a story that polities tell about their own power than a quality they possess.” As Benton rightly noted, historians who have tried to reconcile early modern with modern conceptions of sovereignty have misunderstood that early modern Europeans tended to think of sovereignty as spatially elastic. Because subjecthood was portable, the legal authority of a monarch was not necessarily bound by territory. 34 But territory did matter, especially at moments of interimperial conflict over boundaries and jurisdiction. In such cases, the haphazard qualities of sovereignty encouraged imperial officials to emphasize symbolic demonstrations of dominium. European visual and material cultures—forts, boundary markers, maps, and images of colonial spaces— gave structure to and sustained European claims of dominium over colonial landscapes. Dutch colonizers built their first fort at the northern tip of the Hudson River in 1614—five year after Hudson’s voyage—in the form of a redoubt surrounded by an eighteen-foot-wide moat. They decorated it with eleven small catapult-like devices called pedreros, two cannons, and ten or twelve men as a military garrison. Johannes De Laet, the Dutch geographer and a director of the West India Company, took care to outline the chain of authority that endowed the Fort with its claims to power. It stretched from First Commander Henderick Christiaensz and his 33 Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576- 1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800 (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999). In a specifically Dutch imperial context, see especially Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) and Martine Julia van Ittersum, “Debating Natural Law in the Banda Islands: A Case Study in Anglo-Dutch Imperial Competition in the East Indies, 1609-1621,” History of European Ideas 42:4 (2016): 459-501. 34 Benton, A Search for Sovereignty (2009), 279; 186-189. 20 alternate Jacques Elckens across the Atlantic Ocean to the Company, then upwards to “their High Mightinesses,” the States General. De Laet enumerated for his European readers a legal geography that tied the political institutions of the Netherlands, loci of national and international sovereignty, to a physical anchor in North America, a space within and through which fort and garrison made claims of sovereignty and possession as they transformed raw authority into the exercise of power. 35 The Dutch built a second fort on the Delaware River, a third on the Connecticut River, and a fourth on the tip of Manhattan Island, the location they chose to be their primary site of habitation and the center of the colony’s political authority. 36 Maps conveyed Dutch claims of geographical possession eastward across the Atlantic, helping Dutch administrators to make sense of imperial space. 37 Adriaen Block drew the earliest 35 J. Franklin Jameson ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664: 47; Emily Mann, “To Build and Fortify: Defensive Architecture in the Earl Atlantic Colonies,” in Maudlin and Herman eds., Building the British Atlantic World (2016), 31-52. 36 E.B. O’Callaghan and B. Fernow eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (15 vols., Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1856–1883) I: 283-284. . From here I will abbreviate this collection of documents as NYCD. For the relationship between the construction of forts and the establishment of sovereignty in colonial spaces, see especially Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1610 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and MacMillian, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World (2006). For the development of the States General and in relation to claims of legitimate authority and sovereignty, see James C. Kennedy, A Concise History of the Netherlands (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Ch. 2. See also C. A. J. Armstrong, England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London, UK: Hambledon Press, 1983); James D. Tracy, Holland Under Hapsburg Rule, 1506- 1566: The Formation of a Body Politic (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Hemlut Georg Koenigsberger, Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For legal geographies as a concept, see Benton, A Search For Sovereignty, (2009). 37 Christian J. Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Heerman’s Chesapeake (New York: New York University Press, 2018): 10. For mapping in a specifically Dutch context, see especially Svetlana Aplers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and their role in Dutch Overseas Expansion in the 16 th and 17 th Centuries (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Batavian Lion International Press, 1998); Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 2; Elizabeth A. Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For the relationship between mapping and sovereignty, see Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. For other important accounts of mapmaking, see especially Martin Brückner ed., Early American Cartographies (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2011); Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); 21 map of New Netherland several years before the States General chartered the WIC. Block had sailed to New Netherland on behalf of the Van Tweenhuysen Company three times between 1611 and 1614. On his first voyage, he sailed as supercargo aboard the St. Pieter along with Hendrick Christiaensz who took up command of Fort Nassau. Next year, Block sailed again on the Fortuyn, and then once more in 1614. It was on this third voyage that he mapped the region. His third journey back to the fort had been delayed by floating ice that blocked his entrance to the Hudson River. As he waited for the ice to melt, a fire erupted and destroyed his ship, the Tiijger. Block ordered the carpenter who travelled with him to build a small yacht from trees on Manhattan island. He named the vessel Onrust, which translates to “restless” or “unrest”. 38 As he sailed up and down the Hudson river in the Onrust, Block drew a figurative map to send back to Amsterdam alongside a petition for trading privileges on behalf of the Van Tweenhuysen Company (Fig. 1). 39 The map is a composite drawing, the product of Block’s personal observations, the cartographical resources he had available to him, and Indigenous knowledge. This map provided the first visual representation of a permanent Dutch presence on North American soil. Through this image, Block offered perhaps the first argument in picture for a Dutch New Netherland. On first glance, the map shows imperial competition and conquest. The name “Niew Nederlandt” dominates the central field of vision and transforms the geographical space of North America into a Dutch place. This central unit of possession is bookended by “Virginia” to the south, and “Nova Francia” to the north. The landscape is contested by Europeans. The dominant Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2017). 38 Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 23-24. 39 NYCD, I: 12. 22 location of a Dutch place name is bolstered by the indication of Fort Nassau at the northern tip of the Hudson river. There are other words, too, though. “Pequats”, “Mahicans”, and “Sennecas”, for example, all indicate Indigenous presences. How were these Dutch and Indigenous names supposed to relate to each other? On the one hand, the map suggests through its use of scale that the Dutch dominate Natives. Yet the very existence of these names on Block’s map speaks to a reality in which the Dutch depended upon Native peoples for their knowledge of the landscape. The word “Sennecas”, for example, is placed in the Northwestern portion of the drawing, a geographical space which Dutch travelers had yet to explore. Indigenous informants had provided Dutch cartographers with this knowledge of their landscape. It is difficult to read this image of possession as a stable picture, given the reliance upon Native peoples it betrays. This map would not have been possible without the Indigenous. 40 Yet more than this, the geography itself dominates. Each word which Block added to the vellum map sits in contrast to depictions of a vast geographical landscape. The names appear as guests in a world of open space. Another map conveys this with even greater effect: a compilation map that Cornelis Hendricks produced to accompany a second petition (Fig. 2). He 40 For period specific work on mapping of the Atlantic World, see Dalia Varanka, The Art of Map-Making: Dutch Cartography from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, IL: The Newbury Library, 1985); David Buisseret, Tools of Empire: Ships and Maps in the Process of Westward Expansion (Chicago, IL: The Newberry Library, 1986); Matthew H. Edney, J.B. Harley and David Woodward eds., The History of Cartography (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987-): especially I:19 on indigenous mapping and III:1 on the Renaissance; John B. Harley, Ellen Hanlon, and Mark Warhus, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretive Guide to the Travelling Exhibition (Milwaukee, WI: Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin, 1990); Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Zandvliet, Mapping for Money (1998); Malcolm G. Lewis ed., Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); John Rennie Short, Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous People and the Exploration of the New World (London: Reaktion Press, 2009); Branch, The Cartographic State (2014); Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden (2015); Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Peter C. Mancall: Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 23 drew the map while he captained the Onrust after Block returned to Amsterdam. Cornelis Hendricks, an Amsterdam mapmaker for the West India Company, completed and published the map in 1616. Many of the map’s features were incorrect, a fact which Hendricks himself acknowledged in the key. What strikes the eye, however, is the vastness of space itself. Place names dot the map here and there and portray a series of locales, some Dutch, others Indigenous. But these words are cut off from each other by empty space filled with natural abundance. 24 Fig. 1: Adriaen Block’s 1614 Figurative Map. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] 25 Fig. 2: Hendricks’ Figurative Map of 1616. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] 26 From our contemporary point of view, we know that Native peoples filled these spaces. Nonetheless, the map represents with great power the experience of boundless space and opportunity, a subjective impression that might have urged the tone of immediacy with which European promoters of colonization wrote about the New World. These maps thus portray more than a landscape that was contested by various European powers and by Natives—a series of spaces which people transformed and accumulated into places of meaning. They also betray the silent actor that stands behind these ventures shaping the way in which Europeans imagined where to settle: space itself. The experience of space acted upon travelers (and at times outran their comprehension), who transformed what they saw into images that could circulate. In turn, these images structured the ways European promoters engaged with and wrote about the possibilities of space in North America. De Laet, for example, kept Hendricks’ map in front of him as he wrote his accounts of New Netherland. 41 The Dutch built a second fort on the Delaware River, a third on the Connecticut River, and a fourth on the tip of Manhattan Island, “where the staple right of New Netherland is intended to be.” 42 This last void the Dutch created with a purchase, a now infamous transaction. It is hard to know what exactly transpired between the erection of Fort Nassau in 1614 and November 5, 1626, the day that Pieter Schagen penned a letter to the States General that spawned a persistent misconception. A ship had arrived in Amsterdam the day before. It carried over 7000 beaver skins as well as some furs taken from otters and minks. It also carried news, which Schagen 41 The inscription reads: “Of what Kleyntjen [A Dutch explorer] and his companions have indicated to me about the location of the rivers and the places of the nations which they have found on their outward trip from the Maquaas to the inland along the New River down to the Ogehage, enemies of the above-mentioned Northern nations, I can at this point only find two partly finished drafts of maps. When I speculate how this and the other draft should be combined, I conclude that the locations for the nations of the Sennecas, Gachoos, Capitanasses and Jennecas should be drawn quite a bit further to the west.” For this translation see Zandvliet, Mapping for Money (1998): 187. We know specifically that De Laet had Hendricks’ map before him as he wrote of New Netherland. 42 NYCD, I: 283-284. 27 relayed in his letter: “our people are in good heart and live in peace there: the Women have borne some children there. They have purchased the Island of Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.” 43 Far from the 24 dollar legend to which this letter gave rise, the sum of 60 guilders is better estimated by the value of the furs with which the ship returned, much closer to 45,000 guilders. 44 Regardless of the price, the Dutch felt they had created a legal claim to settle on the tip of Manhattan Island. De Laet reported in 1626 that “several colonies have been sent by the Directors of the chartered West India Company…in order to continue the possession of those quarters.” Possession was not just a matter of law and contract—it required human presence. Among these colonies was that “fort of greater importance at the mouth of the same North River, upon an island which they call Mahattes or Manhatans Island, because the nation of Indians happened to possess the same, and by them it has been sold to the company. Here our people have made, as it were, their headquarters or principal colony, which they call New Amsterdam.” 45 But this colony needed a defined shape—one imposed from above. The West India Company contracted Krijn Frederycksz as their first architect and dispatched him to New Amsterdam with detailed instructions for building a settlement. Frederycksz was to oversee the construction not only of a fort, but a village clustered around a central marketplace. Notable burghers and political councilors were to surround the market square in neat, elegant homes. Another multi-purpose building was to house a hospital, church, school, and employees of the West India Company. Other homes were to be erected for farmers. The Company thus intended for New Amsterdam to resemble its older namesake, at least in its employment of 43 NYCD, I: 37-38. 44 Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 31. 45 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 54. 28 familiar civic forms like the marketplace, and the creation of an urban geography that reinforced their understanding of social order and hierarchy. 46 Frederycksz probably drew the young village around 1626 for the colony’s third director, Peter Minuit. The drawing then made its way back to Amsterdam, from which the publisher Joost Hartgers engraved copper plates in his small workshop on Dam Square (Fig. 3). It does not appear that Hartgers circulated this view widely, however, until he published his Beschrijvinghe Vaan Virginia, Nieuw Nederlandt, etc., in 1651. 47 Given the twenty-five-year gap between the date of Frederycksz’ drawing and Hartgers’ engraving, it is difficult to separate the elements that would have come directly from Frederycksz and those that Hartgers embellished in his workshop. There is more than enough evidence that Hartgers did not strive for an exact replica. When Frederycksz drew the fort, for example, the structure had only four bastions, but Hartgers depicts it with five. Similarly, the Indigenous who paddle their canoes bear a strong resemblance to those on a map of “Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova” in Willem Jansz Blaeu’s Novus Atlas, which he published in Amsterdam with his son Joannes Blaeu in 1635. 48 Yet when viewed in its entirety, the image depicts a message that corresponds with both the intentions of Frederycksz and Minuit in 1626, and Hartgers in 1651: an iconography of territorial possession, authority, and power. It is a picture of Dutch sovereignty at its purest. 46 Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture: From the First Settlements to the National Period (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1952), 100-101. For two dated but useful accounts that focus on the earliest history of the Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island, see A.J. Barnouw, “The Settlement of New Netherland,” in Alexander C. Flick ed., The History of the States of New York, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 215-258; and Victor Paltsits, “The Founding of New Netherland,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 34 (April 9, 1924), 39-65. For both Dutch efforts to replicate their own architectural traditions in colonial locales and their efforts to portray that replication in printed images, see Marsely L. Kehoe, “Imaginary Gables: The Visual Culture of Dutch Architecture in the Indies,” Journal of Early Modern History 20:5 (2019), pp. 462-493. 47 Stokes does an excellent job of dating the letter to 1626 and attributing it to Frederycks in I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan, 1498-1909, Vol. I (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915), 133. 48 Stokes discusses these similarities and does an excellent of laying out the differences between the Frederycks and Hartgers views in Stoke, Iconography of Manhattan, I: 133-135. 29 The fort draws the eyes, still and imposing. The only movement it betrays is the flag that stands above it and catches the wind. There is no sign of activity within it—no human presence. Instead the fort asserts its unchallenged authority through its overwhelming size in proportion to the island and the small buildings it dwarfs. The shading contains particular meaning. On the one hand it ties the edges of the island to the water that surrounds it, evoking the many Dutch entanglements between land and sea. But it ceases around the perimeter of the fort where it touches the colonial village. The buildings that dot the island are cut off from the fort by blank spaces and the clean bold lines that demarcate the moat. 49 Some of the homes and buildings that encircle the fort stand in neat rows and create streets between them. Many announce themselves as Dutch by their stepped and gabled roofs, an architectural style imported from Holland in particular. Shading between the structures leads the eyes down a path that begins near the southeastern edge of the island and moves inwards between the buildings and towards the fort. The path makes an abrupt stop at the moat and then circles around to the North and then to the West. Even as the smaller structures are cut off from the fort, they surround it like the branches of a tree. There is a symbiosis there, though one that suggests dependence and subservience of the village to the fort. 49 I was inspired to think about the way this shading emphasizing the relationship between land and sea thanks to Donna Merwick’s poetic reading of similar images in Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow, 1-2. 30 Fig. 3: The Hartgers View of New Netherland, based upon the sketch of Krijn Frederycksz. Hartger’s published the view in reverse. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan]. 31 There are no signs of people on the land. The buildings are the actors. Each member of the village silently labors in service of the fort. They exist for the sole purpose of supporting Dutch sovereignty and power in North America in particular, and across the Atlantic World in general. The only people in this image are those who paddle through the water. The fronts of their boats point towards the water’s edge, suggesting their movement towards land. But they have yet to reach it. Unlike the land, the water is not a space possessed fully by the Dutch—or by anyone. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius had clarified this point of legal uncertainty as early as 1609, when he published his influential Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), a section from his larger, posthumous work De Iure Praedae Commentarius (On the Laws of Prize and Booty). While people could have a kind of property in nature, Grotius argued, no one could claim a persistent right over parts of the natural world they did not put to consistent and direct use. Possession implied a kind of transformation. One could not transform the sea as they could the land. In an image of Dutch sovereignty and possession, the sea was the safest place to depict humans. Once upon the land, the buildings, each emblematic of a persistent use of space through possession and transformation, subsumed the lives of any individual into a political community that served only Dutch interests. 50 To this image we can add a written account. Nicolaes Van Wassenaer lived in Amsterdam where he practiced as a physician. But, having been sent in his younger days to study in Geneva at the expense of the Amsterdam magistrates, he agitated to write. He had published a poem in Greek on the siege of Haarlem, a tragic episode in the drawn-out struggle for independence from 50 Hugo Grotius, De Iure Praedae Commentarius, trans. G.L. Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Pres, 1950), I: 228. For an especially good overview of the work of Grotius, see Richard Tuck, “Grotius and Selden”, in J.H. Burns ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For an excellent recent discussion, see Annabel Brett, “The Subject of Sovereignty: Law, Politics and Moral Reasoning in Hugo Grotius,” Modern Intellectual History 17:3 (2020): 619-645. 32 Spanish dominion. Sometime in 1621, Van Wassenaer began to publish an annual pamphlet under the title Historisch Verhael alder ghedecnk-weerdischste Geschiedenissen die hier en daer in Europa, etc., voorgevallen syn (“Historical Account of all the most Remarkable Events which have happened in Europe,” etc.) As part of this regular series of publications, chronicled the events that took place in New Netherland between 1623 and 1630. Around the same time that Frederycksz drew New Amsterdam, Van Wassenaer began to include accounts of the colony in his pamphlet. A staunch Dutch Republican, Van Wassenaer tried to make two points especially clear in his account: first, that the Dutch furthered Protestantism in an age of global religious conflict, and second, that they did so and carved out their territorial enclaves across the Atlantic to the express detriment of the Spanish, from whom the Dutch Republic had won its independence. As he pursued these goals, Van Wassenaer included details of life in New Amsterdam. 51 Though he did not witness the events about which he wrote first hand, reading Van Wassenaer’s accounts alongside Fredericksz’ drawing permits exploration of how imperial designs and mandates interacted with the lived experience of building a new community, and the forms of belonging and political contest that these interactions might have created. Van Wassenaer first discussed New Netherland in February 1624, beginning like others, with the region’s topography and descriptions of its native inhabitants. He had immersed himself in the available literature and much of his writing was unoriginal. He repeated phrases, for example, about the Natives’ lack of religion which are near identical to those that De Laet, his contemporary, wrote. In fact, like De Laet, Van Wassenaer, too, had the Hendricks map before 51 For background information on Wassenaer, see Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 63-66. See also Schmidt, Innocence Abroad (2001), 212-14; 218; 225. For the original Dutch text, see Nicolaes Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael alder gedenck-weerdigste geschiedenissen die van den beginner de jaeres 1621…tot 1632 voorgevallen sijn (21 vols., Amsterdam 1622-1635). 33 him as he wrote his account. Yet Van Wassenaer paid much more attention to space than De Laet. He described where the Indigenous lived, in circular dwellings covered in the bark of trees, with a hole at the top to vent smoke that plumed from the fires. Within these dwelling spaces, he told his readers, the Natives sat on the ground to eat their meals, slept covered in leaves and skins, and reared their children, “bringing them up very much spoiled.” 52 He also described how the Indigenous lived in villages with loose ties to one another, in a state of general equality except at moments of conflict, when temporary leaders emerged to spearhead the war effort. 53 That Van Wassenaer misunderstood the ways in which Munsees organized their communities matters less than what his interpretation tells us about his own understanding of politics, power, and space. Van Wassenaer used his description of Native village life, which he cast as underdeveloped, to portray people who lived amidst “little authority.” 54 Van Wassenaer attributed what he believed to be the Munsees’ political immaturity to their mean living conditions. And he did so in contradistinction to a history of “European” authority and society. Wassenaer opened his next description of New Netherland with an account of the origins of politics. “Homo est animal sociable, is in some sense a definition, in some sense a description of man,” he began. “Men’s sociability led them to congregate and live peaceably together, from which arose hamlets, villages and cities, and afterwards chiefs were chosen among them; these, observing that the collected mass frequently so increased that they could with difficulty support themselves, separated a number of their people, who took up and settled the neighboring places.” 55 For Van Wassenaer, the essential characteristic that spurred people to organize themselves into communities was a natural sociability. As communities grew, however, they 52 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 69-70. 53 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 69-70. 54 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 69-70. 55 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 74. 34 developed hierarchies of leadership, a step which, in Van Wassenaer’s account, the Munsees had not yet reached. Long before, Van Wassenaer argued, others had. The patriarchs of the Old Testament, having become aware of the toll their growing populations took on the resources of their lands and settled communities, “sent some of theirs into the uninhabited valleys, and cultivated these.” So too had the Assyrians and the Persians, both wishing to enlarge their polities. And of course, having domineered over the western world, the Romans, too, had spread colonies. As they spread, they announced their presence to those around them by shaping the spaces through which they travelled into Roman places. Hence the “carved stones found everywhere.” 56 Authority, then, was not simply a matter of hierarchy, but the mobilization of the power that comes from mature political communities across space and through material culture. Van Wassenaer constructed the political identity and potential authority of Dutch imperial rule through its opposition to that of the Indigenous—and he did so through an interpretation of politics that recognized the act of founding a polity to be inseparable from its material growth and development. It was not simply that the Munsees lacked political maturity, but that this lack of maturity had manifest itself in the material form of underdeveloped communities. But Van Wassenaer was not only concerned with the relationship of power between Dutch and Indigenous. In his hands, the Romans offered a further lesson, one which applied more specifically to the people who would travel to New Netherland under the auspices of the West India Company: “Those sent thither, must acknowledge the senders as their lords, pay them homage, and remain under their sovereignty.” Thus in his accounts of Dutch New Netherland, Van Wassenaer invoked the politics of space and place not only to justify bringing European 56 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 74-76. 35 authority to Native lands, but also the subordination of Dutch colonial inhabitants to the sovereignty of the West India Company and the States General. Van Wassenaer’s narrative seems to offer a written corollary to Fredrycksz’ visual depiction of the settlement. Yet there are cracks in the narrative, and just as with Juet, we can exploit Van Wassnaer’s attentiveness to space and place to read beyond his ability to offer a static account of Dutch sovereignty or authority. In his efforts to convey the low economic station of Munsee leaders, for example, he also provided readers with a picture of interdependence that belied a narrative of Dutch occupation and dominance. The dwelling places of Munsee rulers, according to Van Wassenaer, were as bare as any others members of an Indigenous community, yet colonists nonetheless had to pay respects, offering axes, kettles, and brandy to sachems at their wigwams. 57 Even as he sought to illustrate the lower station of Indigenous material life and with it, their inability to marshal mature political power, Van Wassenaer revealed a budding relationship of interdependence, and even dependence, rather than dominance. More so, it was a relationship mediated through spaces. Dutch settlers acknowledged their reliance upon Native willingness to tolerate and accommodate their settlement by entering Munsee villages and dwelling places in patterns of movement that signaled respect and submission. Such displays of respect—acknowledgments of Munsee power—would have allowed Europeans access to Native hospitality crucial to their survival on North American soil. One Munsee (possibly Hackensack) man, for example, who went by the name Jasper, recalled late in his life to the Labadist traveler Jasper Danckaerts how in is younger years, he had brought fish to the doorsteps of Europeans who struggled to feed themselves. 58 57 Van Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael, 84v. 58 James, B.B. and J.F. Jameson (eds.), Journal of Jasper Danckaerts 1679–1680 (New York 1913, reprinted. 1959): 111. 36 And indeed, here we begin to see the political payoff Frederyckz and Hartgers reaped by confining people to the water. Both Munsees and Europeans interacted with the spaces through which they assembled their political communities in ways that cut against their intended symbolic purposes. And they did so in ways that created a working constitution that lived a life of its own, not fully of anyone’s design or control. Sovereignty on Manhattan Island, over time, would emerge from the interrelationship between the many people who inhabited New Amsterdam in particular, and the spaces they constructed to root their polity and themselves in place. *** By the time that Van Wassenaer authored his final report of New Netherland, the Dutch had built both a fort and a small village which near 270 people inhabited. In many ways, the village approximated the one that Frederycksz and Hartgers depicted in print. Inside the fort stood a small guardhouse with latticed sides, a barracks whose wood-board floors concealed a large cellar framed in stone, and a modest house within which the militia commander lived. 59 Outside it stood five stone warehouses and behind them a goathouse, a bake house, a tiled house in which the company’s smith, corporal and cooper lived, and a small house for the midwife (a woman from Maarstrand named Tryn Jonas). There was also a shed within which carpenters constructed boats and yachts and a sailmaker plied his trade in an upper loft, and a multipurpose wooden building which housed a stable on ground level, and a church in a room above. Wouter Van Twiller, the colony’s fifth director, lived in a house on a small plantation and the colony’s 59 Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638-1642, 108-110 (from here on abbreviated as RPS, 1638-1642). Published as Kenneth Scott and Kenn Styker-Rodda eds., Arnold J. F. Van Laer trans., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch Vol. I (Published under the Direction of the Holland Society of New York and Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974). 37 current director, Willem Kieft, occupied a dwelling house on “Farm No. 1,” on which also stood a barn, a boat house, and brewery. 60 But in other crucial respects, these buildings and the spaces they offered stood in stark contrast to the pristine settlement that Frederyckz had drawn. When he first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1628, Jonas Michaëlius, a Dutch reformed minister, was dismayed to find that people were only just “beginning to build new houses in place of the hovels and holes in which heretofore they huddled rather than dwelt.” This was not yet a space of stable and inviting households, but of material insecurity. Those who arrived in New Amsterdam with “no means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes,” wrote the provincial secretary Cornelis Van Tienhoven, “dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper; case the earth all around the wall with timber, which they line with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving-in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling; raise a roof of spars clear up, and these houses with their entire families for two, three or four years, it being understood that partitions are run through these cellars, which are adapted to the size of the family.” 61 Likewise, the fort’s imposing frame belied its decrepit state and the filth within. The soldiers who garrisoned it treated the structure more like a commode, urinating and depositing ash-covered waste in open view. This practice became so widespread that the city’s governing council had to legislate against it. 62 60 RPS, 1638-1642, 108-110. 61 This letter from Michaëlius was only discovered in the first few years of the twentieth century, and was printed with an editor’s introduction in Dingman Versteeg ed., Manhattan in 1628 as described in the recently discovered autograph letter of Jonas Michaëlius written from the settlement on the 8 th of August of that year, and now first published; with a review of the letter and an historical sketch of New Netherland to 1628 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904), 64. Tienhoven’s description is Quoted in Helen Reynolds, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776 (New York: Payson and Clarke, for the Holland Society of New York, 1929), 16. 62 Edmund B. O’Callaghan ed., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1868), 38. 38 What kind of relationships could colonists, soldiers, and elites have developed with spaces framed by “hovels” and “pits”; what kind of political community could have developed in dialogue with visions of three or four families crowded into seven foot cellars and soldiers defecating in and around the primary site of authority; how did the material and affective realities of New Amsterdam’s (at least nominally) colonial places shape the power dynamics that developed both between Europeans and Natives, and between the Dutch governing council and its colonial subjects? The material realities of Dutch New Netherland reveal a village filled not just with people who contested and repurposed colonial spaces to their own designs, but a village whose spaces themselves helped foster some of the conditions for a potentially volatile community. The village accentuated dissatisfaction and offered hidden spaces for illicit activity. It infringed upon the attitudes of its inhabitants and shaped the ways that the people who lived there assessed the quality of their lives and imagined political and legal solutions to their problems. Matters of space structured at the same time the conflicts that arose between Dutch and other European powers, Dutch and the Indigenous, and the village’s council and its unruly subjects. Director Willem Kieft (1597-1647) faced this reality on a regular basis, especially as he sought to protect New Netherland’s dominium from the incursions of other European powers. One day in particular, irritation would have flushed his face. Kieft was notoriously prone to anger, but this time he probably felt his frustration well justified. Since departing his official post, the colony’s incompetent third director, Peter Minuit, had styled himself a commander in the service of the Queen of Sweden. Kieft dictated as he sat around a table with the colony’s fiscal and secretary, reminding Minuit that “the entire South river of New Netherland has been for many years in our possession and secured above and below by forts and sealed with our 39 blood, which took place during your honor’s administration of New Netherland and is well known to your honor.” Minuit had begun to oversee efforts to construct a fort on the South, or Delaware River. Yet to Kieft’s knowledge, her Royal Majesty of Sweden had not given orders to encroach on Dutch territory. “We hereby protest,” continued Kieft, “against all costs, damages and loss, as well as all accidents, shedding of blood and trouble which may arise therefrom in the future, intending to maintain our rights in such way as we do deem best.” 63 Kieft understood that the balance of power in the region was already precarious, and that it was shaped by a triangular relationship of Europeans to Indigenous peoples to available space. Any shift in the balance could spark violence. Yet Minuit would likely have considered his own position to be as strong as Kieft’s. Minuit, after all, shared with other Europeans the same assumptions about the relationship between material presence and claims of territorial sovereignty, as well as the experience of boundless space that living in North America impressed upon them. We must consider the ways that maps such as those that Hendricks and Block produced circulated the Atlantic, representing open spaces to both current and aspiring colonial powers. And what of the decrepit state of the fort? Such a vision could hardly have instilled in competitors the respect the structure was supposed to command. Van Wassenaer had used the low material condition of Indigenous villages to justify Dutch colonization, but other European powers had access to the same method of reasoning. Fort Amsterdam alone could not extend a convincing claim of dominium much farther south than Manhattan, and the Dutch had yet to enact a comprehensive building program in the Delaware valley apart from the occasional 63 Council Minutes, 1638-1642, published in Kenneth Scott and Kenn Styker-Rodda eds., Arnold J. F. Van Laer trans., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch Vol. IV (Published under the Direction of the Holland Society of New York and Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 51-53. 40 wooden boundary marker. Kieft thus found himself engaged in a competition with Minuit over space, upon which rested the region’s already precarious balance of power. 64 As they sought to carve out a colonial enclave within the burgeoning world of Atlantic empires, Dutch officials offered such forts and maps, products of what the historian Patricia Seed famously called “ceremonies of possession,” to substantiate what they argued were better claims of possession in relation to other European powers who seem to have remained unconvinced of the legality of Dutch occupation. 65 In September 1632, for example, the English Captain John Mason complained to Secretary of State John Coke that the Dutch who had occupied parts of the region between Delaware Bay and Cape Cod were mere “interlopers,” who had published maps speckled with Dutch place names for locales that had in fact “been formerly discovered and traded unto diverse tymes by several Englishmen.” 66 Similarly, as he passed through the Delaware Bay in 1634 on his search for the Northwest Passage, English Captain Thomas Yong confronted Dutch traders who had come down from the Hudson Valley. Yong scoffed at the traders’ claims to have received their commission from the “Governor of New Netherlands,” responding, perhaps disingenuously, that he “knew no such governor, nor no such place as New Netherlands.” 67 Yet the regional balance of sovereign power hinged in equal measure on the maintenance of law and order within the community of New Amsterdam itself—especially when it came to ensuring that the people who lived in and travelled through New Amsterdam respected their 64 For the conflict between Kieft and Minuit, see Samuel Heed, “Peter Minuit and New Sweden’s Rocky Relationship with New Netherland,” de Halve Maen 84:3 (Fall 2011): 51-54. On the history of New Sweden, see Carol E. Hoffecker, New Sweden in America (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1995); Maria Gunlög Fur, Colonialism in the Margins: Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006). 65 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession (1995). 66 NYCD, 3: 16-17. 67 Thomas Yong, Letters, 1634, Accession 30966, Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia: Letter 2, October 30, 1634. 41 Indigenous neighbors. And so, in late June 1639, a cabin boy named Claes stood inside Fort Amsterdam and braced himself for the whip. It ripped into his flesh and stole his breath. The pain blinded him. The world must have shrunk in until only the pain was left. The pain and the whip, landing again and again. People stood and watched. Most of them were white. The man who commanded the whip was black. The woman Claes had wronged was Indigenous. He had snuck up behind her and severed the wampum which hung from her waist with a knife. None of that mattered now. But the whip’s lessons were likely not intended for Claes himself—at least not entirely. How could anything but the pain have mattered to the young boy? No room for regret or remorse. No room for thoughtful consideration. The whip would have absorbed his consciousness. No matter. The whip was not for him, really. It was for the people who watched. Each lash would have engraved itself into the onlookers’ emotional states as it marked the boy. It would have reminded them of the law, the rules, and of what happened when they were broken. It was for the governing council, each crack a refrain—the aural synonym to the words the council added to the majority of the laws, ordinances, and verdict that they published: “Thus done and sentenced in Fort Amsterdam.” 68 CRACK…Thus done and sentenced in Fort Amsterdam…CRACK…Thus done and sentenced in Fort Amsterdam…CRACK…The governing council sought to maintain the order of their nascent community and to uphold the function of an imperial constitution that depended on a mutual respect for Indigenous and European rights to property. And repeatedly, they tied each new addition to the practical function of that constitution—each law they passed—to the structure of the Fort, perhaps the Atlantic World’s most emblematic imperial structure. 69 68 Council Minutes, 1638-1642, 52. 69 See especially Emily Mann, “To Build and Fortify: Defensive Architecture in the Early American Colonies,” in Maudlin and Herman, eds., Building the British Atlantic World, (2016), 42 As this episode suggests, the Europeans who lived in New Amsterdam pursued agendas of their own that did not always coincide with that of their imperial leaders to uphold formal imperial legal and political structures in the nascent colony. In some of these cases, the Fort stood as a silent observer, and took on shades of meaning in light of those who inhabited it. On one such occasion, for example, the top half of a Dutch style door on the second floor of the main building within the fort, with its horizontal partition that split it in two, pushed back against the wall as Egbert van Borsum leaned over the bottom half. It was the late afternoon—probably close to 4 o’clock—and Borsum looked down from the second story to spy on the commotion below. Gerrit Jansen, one of the company’s gunners, had stormed out of the barracks towards the main gate, and sat down just outside of the fort’s entrance. Jan Gysbertsen (Borsum knew next to nothing about the man except that he had come from Rotterdam), met Jansen outside the gate. “Are you ready?” asked Jansen. With little more than a grunt and nod, Gysbertsen produced a knife and struck out at Jansen violently, tearing into the thin layer of skin that covers the side of the head. “The devil shall take you for this!” shrieked Jansen, as he moved towards his opponent to offer his response. Gysbertsen slashed again, cutting deep into Jansen’s left breast. Jansen staggered backwards managing a kick to Gysbertsen’s buttocks as he turned to run away. Jansen took several uneasy steps back through the gate of the fort and fell down. He was dead. 70 To the dismay of the council, the two men had sought justice which fell outside of the formal legal procedures witch they tried so hard to maintain. Other times, however, the fort took more of an active role in promoting indiscretion, especially as the people of New Amsterdam looked to improve their lives beyond the official limitations of their social station. The ever-troublesome Nicolaes Coorn, for example, was one of 70 See Borsum’s testimony to the governing council as well as testimony by Thomas Hall in the Council Minutes, 1638-1642, 51-53. See also Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638-1642, 24-25. 43 two sergeants garrisoned in Fort Amsterdam. As a high-ranking member of the militia, the West India Company would have expected him not only to execute his military responsibilities, but to set a good moral example to his soldiers. But the company paid Coorn too little to support both he and his wife. He looked for ways to pad his income. Coorn would take some of the axes the company supplied for chopping wood and sell them to the Natives who visited the fort in exchange for lucrative beaver skins. He hid the furs under his bunk until he could find a buyer. His bunk, tucked away inside of the barracks and hidden from the eyes of his commander and the governing council, offered space for more than one breach of duty. There were the other items, of course, which he managed to hide in its crevices: turnips, tobacco pipes, and cloth from the company which he rolled inside of bear skins. Coorn had not even stolen some of these items— the soldiers in his charge had. But he was disgruntled and chose to look the other way so long as he could benefit from their light fingers. Atop his bed he breached another oath: his marriage oath. He brought Indigenous and African women to spend the night with him in open view of many of the other soldiers. Within the barracks’ walls, the soldiers and their superior could share and nurture their grievances against the company, committing small acts of defiance with little fear of being found out. The soldiers had no reason to turn against their sergeant: Coorn would warn them to walk the other way or step into one of the fort’s darker corners when the garrison’s commander intended to pass off an order. Ulrich Lupoldt, the company’s fiscal, finally caught Coorn thanks to the deposition of WIC employee Jacobus van Curler, at which point the soldiers in his command finally loosened their lips. Coorn was demoted to the rank of private soldier to complete his term of service with the Company. Yet he would do so within the same familiar spaces of the fort, 44 barracks, and guard house, all spaces that promised opportunities for personal gain and indiscretion. 71 Not only did the governing council fail to instate and fully realize imperial order in relation to their own subjects, they also struggled to create a legal space that was exclusively European. Within the palisades of their fort, Kieft and Council began to hold court every Thursday. 72 By doing so within the enclosure, they sought to specify and contain in practice and symbol those who could claim membership to their community of rights and obligations. They sought to clarify the boundaries of their polity through staging legal spectacles in space. Permission to speak in this space and on this day indicated a recognition of political rights. At the start only white men could testify within these spaces. When the council required a woman’s deposition, a man spoke on her behalf. 73 And yet these very spaces offered staging ground upon which Munsees and other Indigenous made known their grievances and sought redress—spaces which they gradually transformed into places of mediation. Many of these mediations stemmed from an increasing Indigenous dissatisfaction with what Native peoples seem to have believed to be an uneven exchange relationship. Munsees in particular had assisted the Dutch from their first arrival. They had offered food and luxury goods. They had shared their knowledge of the natural world, teaching the Dutch how to farm the land into greater production by growing beans in the same plots as maize. They had shared their knowledge of how to use the land’s resources to build shelter that would insulate the newcomers from the weather—the Dutch had covered their early dwelling places in sheets of bark, a practice 71 Council Minutes, 1638-1642, 33-34. For general information on the unsatisfactory rates of pay to the Company’s soldiers, see Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 36-40. 72 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 10-12. 73 For example, see RPS, 1638-1642, 12; 38-38; 105. 45 that had no recent European antecedent. 74 And they had contributed their labor to the Dutch settlement on the tip of Manhattan, assisting individual colonists as they erected homes and the directors in their efforts to construct the fort. But the Dutch had often broke their agreements to fair payment in exchange for Indigenous labor. They would dismiss the Natives just before the work was complete without compensation. Groups of Munsees thus began to visit Fort Amsterdam every day, asking the council to rectify the situation. At first, the council would not permit them to speak on Thursdays, during their formal court sessions. But the Natives continued to appear. When the council remained hesitant, the Munsees made clear that they would find other means of paying themselves to the village’s cost if the Europeans continued their deceit. They forced the council’s hand, which finally passed an ordinance to “put a stop to and prevent as much as possible, in good time, all mischief” and to demand that all inhabitants “who are indebted anything to the Indians for wages or otherwise, to pay them without contradiction, and if they in future employ them, they shall be bound to pay them on the representation and complaint of the Indians, who for food reasons shall, in that case, be competent witnesses.” Not only had they achieved a temporary redress, but Indigenous peoples could now speak on matters by which they were directly affected. Even if they had to submit to European channels of legal redress, they could insert their voices into legal proceedings that had initially been closed to them. 75 And they could bring with them goods of exchange like wampum to incorporate the colonists into their own culturally contingent practices of conflict-resolution. The council nailed these words, written on paper, into the walls of the Fort Amsterdam. 74 See for example Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 83-84. 75 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 103. The council did not actually pass this as a formal ordinance until September 28, 1648, well after the disastrous wars between the Dutch and Indigenous that Director Kieft helped cause when he began to require tribute form the local Munsees in 1639. 46 In the shadows of these official deliberations, Natives and Europeans interfaced in other ways, too. Hans Steen was a corporal garrisoned in Fort Amsterdam. He watched the Indigenous enter and exit the fort on regular occasion. In addition to seeking justice, they came to trade beaver skins for wampum and hatchets. On one of these occasions, Steen called out to Native woman as she walked with her party towards the fort’s exit. He invited her inside the guardhouse. As she approached, Steen turned to the other guards on duty and warned them not to light the fire while his guest was present. The woman entered the small building and joined Steen in his bunk, covering them with the blanket that she carried with her. She left the next morning, carrying a brandy keg which contained two or three pounds of gunpowder. 76 It is difficult to know exactly in what kind of interaction Steen and this woman engaged. Was this an affair between two well acquainted people? Did the woman offer herself in exchange for a good which her people relied upon in their conflicts against Europeans and other Indigenous peoples? What forms of coercion might have shaped her decision to accept Steen’s invitation? Or does the record present a sanitized view that suggests a level of consent that the woman did not in fact offer? What we can say, however, is that Steen used the hidden spaces of the fort for sex with this woman, and in doing so, breeched the council’s insistent prohibitions against the sale or trade of gun powder to Native peoples, which they issued again and again, raising the fine and penalty each time. 77 But the episode suggest just as much to us about the ways that Native peoples used both the open courtyards and hidden alcoves of European colonial spaces to pursue agendas of their own. 76 See the testimony of five soldiers under Steen’s command, which they gave before the council on April 7, 1639: Council Minutes, 1638-1642, 44-45. 77 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 18-19; 47; 128; 205. 47 In his drawing of the fort, Frederycksz had displayed Fort Amsterdam in a position of uncontested dominance. But in reality, people used the fort’s spaces to construct a place of complex interaction, within which they pursued their own agendas and built their own lives. It was the ways in which these agendas intermingled with the West India Company’s own attempts to instate their vision of law and order through space that gave rise in practice to a colonial and imperial constitution that was, at best, fractured from the start. As people’s actions reflected back a kind of ambiguity on the fort, so too did the working constitution of their community become an ambiguous creation. It represented neither the full wishes of the Dutch West India Company, nor the States General, nor the governing council of New Amsterdam, nor of the colonial inhabitants who bucked against the dictates of all three bodies of authority. It was something else entirely, something that colonial inhabitant brought into existence through and around Fort Amsterdam. The final episodes in particular suggest two tentative conclusions. The first is that the fort did not simply contain institutions or offer a mere political stage. We might go as far as to say that the fort was itself a kind of actor—a constituent member, so to speak—as evidenced by the ways its very structure and internal layout offered, even suggested, opportunities for people to breech the established boundaries of acceptable conduct, whether from a legal or moral standard. The second, is that centering the history of place allows us to glimpse a more complicated story than one of European colonialism and Indigenous resistance. Rather, we begin to see a more nuanced process of political construction that took place at the intersection of European and Indigenous lifeways, networks and patterns of exchange, and forms of diplomacy and cultural interaction. And it was a process mediated by the geographical realities of space and the politics of place. 48 In the two decades after the construction of Fort Amsterdam, tensions within the settlement between the governing elite and its own inhabitants grew sharper and erupted at mid-century. So, too, did tensions between Europeans and Indigenous. The former expressed themselves not only in calls for a constitution that allowed the village’s residents a greater share in the colony’s sovereignty, but for a space separate from the fort within which a governing body could act and deliberate. The latter, in violence. Both point towards the ways that human engagement with place and material life shaped the languages and strategies that Native and European peoples drew upon to build an economic and political landscape that best matched their culturally contingent expectations about a well-ordered community. 49 II. THE VILLAGE, 1640-1653 Gillis Pietersen van der Gow walked through the fort’s main gate on March 22, 1639. Director Willem Kieft, still new to his post, had requested a meeting with the twenty-seven-year- old master carpenter for an account of all the building projects he had overseen during the administration of the previous director, Wouter van Twiller. 78 Gillis listed them for the record: outside the fort stood five stone warehouses and behind them a goathouse, a bake house, a tiled house in which the company’s smith, corporal, and cooper lived, and a small house for the midwife, a woman from Maarstrand named Tryn Jonas. There was a shed within which carpenters constructed boats and a sailmaker plied his trade in an upper loft, and a multipurpose wooden building that housed a stable on the ground level and a church in the room above. Wouter van Twiller lived in a house on a small plantation. Then, of course, there was the house on “Farm No. 1” into which Kieft had recently moved. A barn, a boathouse, and brewery also occupied the farm. 79 There were other buildings, too: those homes that belonged to the colonists who had begun to relocate to New Netherland. Some of these people were employees of the company. Others were not. There were the spaces which the Company’s enslaved Africans inhabited. But Gillis stopped his deposition at “Farm No. 1”. Next came Adam Stoffelson, the Company’s overseer, who overlaid Gillis’s account with a bleaker hue. The fort was “dilapidated, so that people could go in and out of said fort on all sides: all the cannon off the gun carriages; five farms vacant and fallen in to decay and on said farms or in any other place not a living animal on hand belonging to the Company.” There were 78 The States General approved Willem Kieft’s commission on September 2, 1637. Kieft arrived the following March aboard De Harinck to find a village on the brink of ruin. See “Resolution of the States general to Commission Willem Kieft…”, NYCD, I: 104. 79 RPS, 1638-1642, 108-110. 50 no working ships save the yacht Prins Willem. The company’s five stone houses needed repair, as did the wooden church above the stables, the company’s shed, and the smith’s shop. Only one of three grist and sawmills still operated. The second buckled under the weight of its rot, and the third still laid a mound of scorched wood and ash since it had burned to the ground. The company’s storehouse no longer resembled a structure, but a heap of decayed and rusted planks, floorboards, beams, and nails. 80 Stoffelson thus echoed the sad state of affairs that Cornelis van Tienhoven and the Dutch minister Jonas Michaëlius had characterized in their despairing letters to the Company and States General. 81 Like Gillis, however, Stoffelson left out many of the buildings that stood on the tip of Manhattan Island. These omissions are telling. The two men provided an account of only those spaces that corresponded to the Company’s goal of establishing a trading post. Neither offered much evidence as to the logic of their silences. But for the purposes of a Dutch presence of the kind the Company sought to realize, those other spaces were not just irrelevant, they were dangerous. From the earliest years of settlement in 1626, the West India Company had sought to build and stabilize their trading post on Manhattan Island. They had set guidelines for the purchase of land, for the redress of injustice, and for trade with neighboring peoples, all in a manner that stressed that sovereignty and power flowed downward from the Company to the villagers—not the other way around. They had built a fort both to contain and symbolize the locus of that sovereignty. Yet not only did the European and Indigenous peoples who lived in and around the fort alter its intended meanings through their actions, the fort itself provided spaces that all but suggested activities to the Company’s detriment. The fort fractured the company’s sovereignty and power. 80 RPS, 1638-1642, 112; 130-132. 81 See Chapter 1, FN 43. 51 If a space as tied to the Company as the fort could prove so unstable, then the village, which stood at a further distance from the WIC’s sovereignty, offered more insidious challenges. Within the homes, churches, shops, and taverns that stood outside the fort, the villagers grew to demand more of their polity than the experience of a trading post on the outskirts of what they believed to be the known world. At first they demanded protection and order, then space for their voices to be heard in the governing process. They demanded a shift in the flow of sovereignty itself through which they renegotiated the terms of their constitution. Yet the Dutch colonists did not live in isolation, but amidst overlapping networks of Indigenous trade, warfare, and habitation. Native peoples did more than anyone else to dictate the more arresting ways in which the colonists experienced space and place in New Amsterdam. As Algonquian-speaking Munsees entered the village’s spaces and invited the villagers into their own, they drew the colonists into their orbits of exchange and conflict. Native peoples and colonists alike experienced what the historian Donna Merrick called the “inevitable excess of things exchanged,” the unexpected cultural entanglements that lead to the shifting grounds of cooperation, accommodation, incorporation, and violence. 82 It was this experience, above all, which impinged upon the physical character of the Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island in ways that neither Director nor villager predicted, and which prompted the villagers to demand a reorganization of their polity’s governing structure that left a physical marker upon their landscape in the form of a town hall. As tensions between colonists and Indigenous heightened, European houses, all of which stood on former Indigenous lands, offered staging grounds for Native peoples to seek justice when Dutch legal channels proved unsatisfactory. The houses that Munsees set ablaze prompted 82 See Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow (2006), 102. 52 the colonists to rethink their relationship to the Director and council—their understanding of imperium, or sovereign jurisdiction within New Amsterdam—whose response proved increasingly problematic. At such moments, the village’s homes and taverns incubated the colonists’ dissatisfaction. They physically constituted a civil sphere outside the formal channels of colonial governance and offered spaces within which the colonists discussed their grievances. In the end, the colonists demanded a space of their own outside of the fort, within and through which they would assert their belonging to the polity as sovereign members of the decision-making process. As the civil bled into the political, the colonists reconstituted the political as the physical. They transformed their most popular tavern into a Stadt Haus, or town hall. Yet at the very apogee of their politicization, the villagers of New Amsterdam realized their civic consciousness by attempting to construct ever-harder boundaries between those who could belong to the community and those who could not. The entrenchment of the villagers’ political voice through space and in place took root against increasingly stringent policies that regulated Indigenous and African presences within and near New Amsterdam. No single reading of the material landscape can disclose the full scope of lived experience on Manhattan Island. By centering the spaces within and through which the people who lived in and around New Amsterdam crafted this consensus, we can recapture a world of alternative possibilities that speak to the contingencies and tragedies of New Netherland’s early history. For while one narrative of the events that led Dutch colonists and native peoples into a brutal war speaks to a process by which Natives and Europeans drew increasingly hard lines between one another, a different narrative points to profound moments of empathy and accommodation. These moments within the village’s spaces undercut any attempt to construct a narrative in which Munsees and Europeans understood themselves as occupying truly irreconcilable positions. Even 53 more so, centering material life during these crucial decades suggests that it was not Europeans who increasingly pushed Munsees to the margins of a colonial landscape (even if that is what happened in the long run), but Munsees who kept European colonialism in check. Ultimately, then, through the confluence of their material lives, Native peoples and colonists created the groundwork for a new constitution during New Amsterdam’s final decades of Dutch governance. They built a constitution in which the villagers shared sovereignty with the Director and Council, but fell short of their broader ambitions for European sovereignty over the North American landscape, fueling instead Munsee sachems’ efforts to incorporate European traders and objects as they sought to shore up their influence over their own client networks. *** From the day he arrived, Kieft sought to re-impose order upon the village of New Amsterdam. He passed most days inside the fort at a table where he deliberated with his council, which included a Secretary, Cornelis van Tienhoven, a Fiscal (a position that combined the duties of a sheriff and prosecutor), Cornelis van der Hoykens, and Ulrich Lupholtt, who acted as a vice-director. Bound by the laws of the Dutch Republic, they would sit and deliberate on how best to manage the affairs of New Netherland within their mandate. Here, the director and his council converted the sovereignty of the States General, which extended downwards through the West India Company, then Westward across the Atlantic Ocean and to New Netherland, into the exercise of power. In 1638, Kieft sharpened that power. He passed a law that prescribed a particular kind of movement through the village—a law that etched an arrow into the muddy streets that pointed from the village to the fort. The Director and council would hold court on 54 Thursdays. Each week, colonists who sought to resolve a matter through the proper legal channels would exit their place of dwelling or work and walk towards the gangly wooden structure that sagged and drooped here, and disappeared altogether there, to bring their case before the Kieft and council. 83 Court day standardized a repertoire of movement, drawing each villager inwards towards the fort as a place of authority. But as the villagers left their homes and their places of work (many of which were one and the same), they travelled not just to the fort to accomplish official business, but to other spaces, too, within which they built the bonds that sustained the young community. There were, for example, spaces of contemplation and prayer. Until Kieft’s administration, Dutch reformed services were conducted first within the cramped but intimate setting of individuals’ homes, and then inside of the wooden room on the second floor of the Company’s stables. 84 One can imagine the sounds and smells that interrupted moments of divine connection. Eventually this situation proved unsatisfactory for a village asserting itself as a “legitimate” community in a world of competing empires. The patroon holder David de Vries thus claimed in his travel notes that he cautioned Kieft “that it was a scandal to us when the English passed there, and saw only a mean barn in which we preached; that the first thing the English in New England built, after their dwellings, was a fine church, and we ought to do so, too, as the West India Company was deemed to be a principal means of upholding the Reformed Religion against the tyranny of 83 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 10-12. For Hoyken’s replacement of Lupholtt as fiscal, see RPS, 1638-1642, 200. 84 For Dutch Reformed Christianity in New Netherland and the broader Dutch Atlantic, see especially Oliver A. Rink, “Private Interest and Godly Gain: The West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland,” New York History 75:3 (July1994): 244-264; Willem Frijhoff, “The WIC and the Reformed Church: Neglect or Concern?” in Elisabeth Paling Funk and Martha Dickinson Shattuck eds., A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rensselaerswijck Papers vol. 2 (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2011): 297-208; Danny L. Noorlander, Heavens’ Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 55 Spain.” 85 Kieft apparently took his advice. He contracted John and Richard Ogden in May of 1642, two Englishmen who lived in Stamford, to build the village’s first freestanding stone church inside of the fort. The building was seventy-two feet long by fifty-four feet wide, and sixteen feet in height. John and Richard themselves were responsible for hauling the stone to the shorefront closest to the fort, at which point the church masters paid to have the stones transported the rest of the way. The carpenters covered the stone walls they raised with overlapping boards of oak, which over time turned slate from exposure to wind and rain. 86 Then there were those spaces that proved especially difficult for the governing council to control: the taverns. Initially, the council attempted to prevent taverns from popping up altogether, forbidding anyone from selling alcohol except for those who operated the Company’s store. Nonetheless, the villagers opened taverns of their own, of which many were little more than groggeries in private homes. These informal tavern owners forced the council to a point of grudging acceptance, who sought at least to keep these establishments closed during religious services and after ten o’clock at night. In a 1642 ordinance, the council bemoaned the “many accidents, caused for the most part by quarrels, drawing of knives and fighting, and the multitudes of taverns and low groggeries, badly conducted.” 87 The Council also sought to prevent the taverns from selling liquor to the Indigenous who visited the village each day as laborers and traders. With each ordinance, Kieft and council tried to extend their legal reach over spaces which proved time and again outside of their control—spaces that accommodated the types of 85 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 212. 86 Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1642-1647, 35 (from here on abbreviated as RPS, 1642-1647). Published as Kenneth Scott and Kenn Styker-Rodda eds., Arnold J. F. Van Laer trans., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch Vol. II (Published under the Direction of the Holland Society of New York and Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974). De Vries mentioned the changing color of the wooden boards in his notes. See Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 213. 87 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674,12; 25; 33; 34. 56 socializing of which the village’s governors were wary. Not only did the villagers gather to socialize and drink, a combination prone to inciting misconduct and violence, but they took advantage of spaces that offered an informal public sphere to air their grievances against the director, complaining to one another and fueling their shared dissatisfaction. Such was the case on a Sunday evening, for example, when the miller Abraham Pietersz complained openly of Kieft, referring to him as a rascal and liar. Unfortunately, he did so in earshot of Maurits Jansen, the tavern’s landlady, who testified under oath as such to the Council. 88 In response to the dangers of impolite sociability within the village’s disreputable establishments, on February 7, 1643, Kieft leased a two story stone building to Philip Gerritsen, to operate as the company’s official tavern. 89 “A fine inn, and of stone,” Kieft chortled with 88 Council Minutes, 1638-1649, 142. Much work has been done on the role that taverns play in providing spaces for political mobilization and public sociability outside the formal channels of politics. In thinking about the political potentiality of such socialization, I have been particularly influenced by the work of Reinhart Koselleck, in which he discusses the ramifications of the seventeenth century privatization of political opinion, which theorists of Absolutism and the state like Hobbes gave particularly clear voice to, in terms of the gradual growth and development of a public opinion which the state proved unable to control. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1998). See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: In Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1989). For scholarship that discusses taverns as spaces of political mobilization in early America, see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution in Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Peter Thompson, Rum, Punch, and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Vaughn Scribner, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil society (New York: NYU Press, 2019). For a perspective on tavern going that pays closer attention to the structuring of class and social groupings, see Sharon V. Sallinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For the broader early modern context, one must also look at coffee house culture and its intersection with work on the concept of the public sphere. See, for example: Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1986); Steven Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern history 67:4 (1995): 807-834; Lawrence Klein, “Coffeehouse Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-courtly Culture in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59:1 (1997): 30- 51; James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Markman Ellis, “The Coffee-House, a Discursive Model,” Language and Communication 28:2 (2008): 156-164 89 For polite culture and sociability in early America, see especially Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670-1770 (New York: Garland Press, 1989); Michal J. Mozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992); Lawrence E. Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 45:4 (2002):869-898; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (New York and London: Routledge Press, 2002). For an analysis 57 pride. 90 The Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, as it became known, developed into one of the most prominent sites of sociability in the burgeoning village. Yet even Kieft’s own tavern provided a space that exceeded his ability to exercise legal and moral influence over the community. 91 On the evening of March 15, 1644, for example, Nicolaes Coorn dined at the tavern with his wife and several other couples with ties to the fort’s garrison. They had finished their meal but continued to sit and enjoy each other’s company for several hours. John Underhill, an English captain already infamous for his leading role in the 1637 massacre of Pequots at Mystic River, entered the tavern with a lieutenant George Baxter and a company drummer. Given the presence of his guests for a private meal, Philip Gerritsen asked the Englishmen to step into a different room where they could enjoy their wine away from the gathering. Irritated as they were, Underhill and his friends agreed after a back and forth, and were soon joined by a fourth, Thomas Willet. After some time, Underhill invited the dinner party’s members to join them in the other room for a drink. A few accepted the invitation, but when Baxter returned at the behest of Underhill to pester the remaining guests, tensions rose. Drunk and feeling slighted, Underhill and his companions drew their swords and stumbled into the room where the remaining guests sat. They flung the mugs that hung from the shelves which shattered as they hit the ground and hacked their swords into the posts that supported the building’s second story. Coorn and his friends managed to subdue the Englishmen, and the case appeared before the provincial secretary and council. 92 that focuses instead on the “impolite,” see Helen Berry, “Re-Thinking Politeness in Eighteenth Century England: Moll King’s Coffee House and the Significance of ‘Flash Title,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 ser., 9 (2002): 65-81. 90 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 212. 91 RPS, 1642-1647, 102-103. 92 RPS, 1642-1647, 206-207. 58 For Kieft and council, regulating this sort of behavior was not a matter of arbitrary control, but the preservation of a young and fragile community. In 1646 the council brought charges against a captain named Johan de Fries and the language they employed is telling. Since arriving, the council members complained, de Fries had “cultivated the friendship…of some dangerous persons, enemies of the Company’s welfare and of this country and defamers of their authority notwithstanding the warning given to him by the director.” Yet they made clear that their concern extended beyond the Company’s welfare, for de Fries’ actions were “highly dangerous in this infant republic.” 93 The physical structures of the village thus consistently provided room for its inhabitants to undermine the young community’s health. “On the 7 th of June 1646,” the council charged, “[de Fries] is said in the presence of several persons to have made many contemptuous remarks about the director and to have maintained that the director had no power to grant commissions or to make captains.” De Fries’ actions, they argued, threatened to “undermine justice, which is the foundation of the republic, all of which are matters which cannot be tolerated in a place where it is customary to administer justice.” 94 In referring to the “foundation of the republic,” the council deployed not simply a theoretical argument about political stability, but rather, invoked what seems to have been a real concern that the buildings that stood outside the formal arena of politics constituted a civil sphere that threatened to fracture what the council believed to be the sovereign authority of the West India Company and its Director General. Such metaphors might have had the double effect of both indicating and obfuscating the anxieties that Kieft and Council shared about the ways in which the materiality of their polity seemed almost to work against them every step of the way. 93 Council Minutes, 1638-1649, 332. 94 Council Minutes, 1638-1649, 332. 59 But in a period in which the boundaries between public and private were blurred if not entirely fluid, homes, no less than taverns, threatened to undermine the Company’s vision of sovereign authority in New Amsterdam. The villagers who built their homes outside of the fort’s gate and walls created centers of gravity that overlapped and competed with that of the fort. Just as the villagers engaged in a series of legal dialogues with the Director and Council, fort and village grew together through their material conversations. Each house that rose from the ground presented a claim of personhood against a structure that made legal subjects of human beings. Through their dwelling places, the villagers ensured for themselves a physical presence within the community’s jurisdiction, and they populated the spaces to which they laid claim with the lives that they built, lives that not even the colony’s highest authorities could fully control. 95 Building contracts and leases alone cannot reveal the full contours of this story. The leases reinforced a vision of authority in which the villagers remained dependent upon the Director, who could dictate the legal terms by which the villagers lived their lives and built the spaces in which they lived. The building contracts, while placing greater emphasis on the desire of a particular villager, offer just the outline of a proposed space. The records tell, for example, of Thomas Hall, a prominent burgher, who contracted Jeuriaen Hendricksen and Pieter Wolphertsen in 1639 to build for him a dwelling house thirty-two feet long, eighteen feet wide, and nine feet high. Along the roof ran three joists with wooden corbels at the end, and the main living room featured a decorative mantelpiece. Isaac de Forest similarly contracted two English 95 For the concept of personhood, see especially Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les Carnets (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949); Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Press, 1996); Douglas Allen and Ashok Kumar Malhotra, Culture and Self: Philosophical Perspectives, East and West (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Laura P. Appell-Warren, Personhood: An Examination of the History and Use of an Anthropological Concept (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2014). 60 carpenters in 1641, John Hobson and John Morris, to build a house that was thirty-feet long by eighteen feet wide, illuminated by two four-light and two three-light windows. The roof was lined with four bracketed support beams and two free beams, and was split by a central partition, between which ran a passageway to separate a small pantry from the main living space. The house was covered with clapboards and featured and English chimney. 96 Yet homes are not just masses of wooden beams and joists, windows and mantelpieces. They gather—stories, objects, practices—and within each of these houses, the villagers transformed wooden spaces into places of meaning as they gave birth to children, celebrated triumph, mourned loss, and collected memories. They also gathered possessions and constituted themselves as members of a North American and Atlantic economy that New Amsterdam helped sustain. 97 As they accumulated possessions, the villagers drew themselves into the Indigenous, African, and European networks of trans-imperial and cross-cultural exchange that converged upon New Netherland. Through their possessions, moreover, the villagers constructed themselves as social beings, participants in the webs of economic and social exchange by which people define themselves as members of a particular community. 98 96 RPS, 1638-1642, 217-218; 338-339. 97 The scholarship on place has recently taken a turn towards the emphasis on the process of assemblage, derived in large part from scholars’ readings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. See in particular Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London, UK: Continuum Press, 2006). Jennifer Van Horn, in particular, has drawn on this concept of assemblage in her own work on early American material cultures: Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century America (2019). 98 The relationship between consumption and the construction of the self vis-à-vis the community is by now a well- trodden scholarly landscape. A representative sampling of conceptual and historical work would include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, UK: Verso Press, 1983); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, UK: Routledge Press, 1984); Arjun Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Russel Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988) 139-165; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John H. Plumb eds., The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of eighteenth-century England (London, UK: Europa Press, 1992); Helga Dittmar, The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have is to Be (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); T.H. Breen, 61 One can imagine, for example, Vrouwtje Ides, the widow of Cornelis van Vorst, the agent for the Pavonia patroonship, in the house she leased from Director Kieft. 99 In the morning, Ides might have covered herself in her lightweight reddish morning gown. As she dressed for the day, she could have chosen from pairs of stockings, undershirts, a red bodice, blue, steel-gray, and black petticoats, and furred jackets. She could have slipped her feet into leather patens. Ides’ clothes projected not just her economic station, but her participation in the networks of exchange that tied New Amsterdam to the surrounding Algonquian and Iroquoian speaking Indigenous who lived in its vicinity, and the Americas to Europe more broadly. Her fur cap was “turned” up with beaver from Indigenous-European trade networks. One of her white waistcoats was made of linen from Haarlem, not just a center of the bustling Netherlands’ tulip trade, but a manufacturer of linens and silks as well. Her shoes were covered in Spanish leather. Her different forms of currency reflected her comfort with navigating the many economic networks amidst which New Netherland existed: double and single stivers, English shillings, white and black wampum. Other possessions speak to more intimate moments that Ide’s would have spent within her home: spectacles for reading, napkins, white linen table clothes, goblets and pewter plates for eating; pillow slips and pillows, shifts, blankets and beds for sleeping and dreaming. There were the brass candlestick holders from which light would have danced across the house’s walls in the evening and early morning hours. Each of Ides’ possessions assembled in place rooting her person and identity within the walls of her home. Ides thus built for herself a life that her wooden walls sheltered and helped incubate, a life by which she probably The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk (2017); Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century America (2019). 99 For the lease, see RPS, 1638-1642, 16. 62 constructed a fair part of her identity as a person and as a woman of elite status living in New Amsterdam. 100 Yet while dwelling spaces offered to villagers the opportunity to construct identities by which they could assert their personhood, possession of a building did not guarantee financial stability, nor protection from all the uncertainties that life presented. Hans Nelissen, for example, died in December of 1643, leaving only a chest, a half-worn cloth coat, a pair of duffel stockings, 100 Vrouwtje Ides married Adam Stoffelson shortly after she signed her Lease with Kieft. When she died just two years into her lease, the provincial secretary inventoried her estate. The house itself stood just across the Hudson on a grant of land that once formed a part of the Pavonia patroonship, but the Company had taken assumed direct control over the land in 1636, long before Ides signed her lease. For Vrouwtje Ides’ estate inventory, see RPS, 1638- 1642. 323-327. For economies and networks in New Netherland and New York, see Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial new York (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Serena R. Zabin, “Women’s Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Early American Studies 4:2 (2006): 291-321; Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Romney, New Netherland Connections (2014). For the broader Atlantic context, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15 th -18 th Century. 3 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); P.C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580-1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Press, 1998); Claudia Schnurmann, “Atlantic Regional Identities: The Creation of Supranational Atlantic Systems in the Seventeenth Century,” in Horst Pietschmann ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580-1830 (Gottingen, The Netherlands: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002); David Omrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in an Age of Mercantilism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Natasha Glaisyer, “Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” Historical Journal, 47 (June 2004): 451-476; David Hancock, ‘Self-Organized Complexity and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651- 1815: The Case of Madeira,” in Peter Coclanis ed., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and personnel (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). For Trade networks between Natives and Europeans, see Cronon, Changes in the Land (2003); Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed., Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Daniel K. Richter ed., Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Elizabeth A. Fenn: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier (2015); Jessica Yirush Stern, The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). In thinking about the relationship between objects, consumption, and the self, I am drawing upon two bodies of scholarship. The first consists of work on the anthropology of material culture. See especially: Bourdieu, Distinction (1984); Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods (1996); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). The second falls more directly within the scholarship of Atlantic material cultures. See in particular: Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996); Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Rafaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal (2002); Charlotte Grant and Jeremy Aynsley eds., Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interiors since the Renaissance (London, UK: V&A, 2006); Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 63 some old rags “of no value”, a barrel of pork, some old papers, and an inkstand. He had passed the nights in his house upon a canvas bedstand stuffed with straw. 101 Similarly, in June 1640, Willem Quick died insolvent, and left his wife Anna Metfoort with a modest collection of possessions and a mountain of debt. After Willem’s creditors were satisfied, Anna was left only with “the clothes which she has on now to cover her nakedness.” 102 Declaring before the council that she had no idea where she would live after placing her possessions and home at the disposal of her late husband’s creditors, Anna’s name disappeared from the records. The extent to which Anna’s home failed to offer her protection from the law demonstrates the upshot of a legal culture which viewed husbands and wives as economic equals but did not guarantee their independence from one another. 103 New Amsterdam had yet to establish mechanisms for dealing with the potential ramifications when a woman such as Anna, who had remained financially dependent upon her husband, was unable to meet the financial burden of her husband’s spending without impoverishing herself. Nonetheless, those who were fortunate and well-placed enough to assemble vibrant lives within their homes accumulated possessions and built themselves into fully participating members of New Amsterdam’s socioeconomic life. In the process, they ingrained themselves within the village’s gradually developing political community and developed the sense of rootedness that tends to engender an attachment to place. 104 The experience of accumulating 101 RPS, 1642-1647, 184-185. 102 Council Minutes, 1638-1649, 120. 103 David Narret does an excellent job through his analysis of wills in demonstrating both the Dutch ideal of marriage as creating a singular economic entity between two partners and the shift to the legal fiction of coverture after the English assumed control of New Amsterdam in 1664. See David E. Narret, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). See also Linda Briggs Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from Dutch to English Law, 1643-1727 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983); Deborah A. Rosen, Courts and Commerce: Gender, Law, and the Market Economy in Colonial New York (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1997). 104 The philosopher of place Edward Relph has done much to develop this particular understanding of “rootedness’: and “attachment.” See Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London, UK: Pion Press, 1976), pp. 29-43. 64 goods, of socializing with similarly minded and similarly positioned members of the village as they moved through a series of physical spaces—homes, church, tavern—must have helped to generate the contours of belonging in New Amsterdam. But these spaces that rose from the ground did not simply contain a series of actions through which the villagers defined themselves as members of the community. The buildings themselves functioned as almost constituent members, too. Perhaps the greatest evidence for this comes from observing the ways in which the practices of belonging coalesced in juxtaposition to those meant to identify its very limits, a process that occurred simultaneously through law, space, and place. Across the North American colonies, historians have told stories of the many ways that European colonists began the work of constructing a racial order by directing internal economic and class tensions outwards against a common “Indian” enemy, or by legally defining white freedom through laws that created fictions of racial inequality for free and enslaved Africans and their children. 105 While historians usually trace the beginnings of this process to later decades in the seventeenth century, and though slavery remained a relatively small endeavor in New 105 For the classic account of this process, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975). For an account specific to New Amsterdam/New York that takes its cues form Morgan, see Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). For scholarship on enslavement in New Amsterdam and colonial New York, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History: Quarterly Journal of the New York Historical Association 59:2 (1978): 125-144; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and New Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1999); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris eds. Slavery in New York (New York: New Press, 2005); Romney, New Netherland Connections (2014), chapter 4; Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2017); Andrea C. Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021; Nicole S. Maskiell, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). See also: Willie F. Page, The Dutch Triangle: The Netherlands and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1621-1664 (New York: Garland Press, 1997); Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith eds., Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609-2009 (Amsterdam: Boom Press, 2009); Roger Panetta ed., Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 65 Amsterdam until the 1650s, the same processes took root in New Netherland, carried out through law and the built environment. Legally, the status of enslaved Africans was fluid in New Amsterdam’s early decades. Some laws illuminate racial categories in the making, such as an ordinance passed in 1642 stipulating that those in default for legal fees would be required “to work three months with the Negroes in chains, without any respect of persons.” 106 The council thus instituted an affiliation between Black bodies and criminal behaviors. Others show a fluid space in which African people passed in and out of enslavement. Thus in February of 1644, Kieft accepted a petition from and manumitted “the Negroes named Paula Angola, Big Manuel, Little Manuel, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, Simon Congo, Anthoy Portugis, Gracia, Peter Santomee, Jan Francisco, Little Anthony, Jan Fort Orange, who have served the Company 18 or 19 years.” Even so, their freedom hinged upon annual payment of “thirty skepels of Maize, or Wheat, Pease or Beans, and one Fat hog.” 107 Freedom came with an economic handicap, and freed peoples were still marked as occupying a different status within the community than their white neighbors. This legal regime was accompanied by a fluid landscape that erred towards silences and erasures. The buildings that announced New Amsterdam to those who passed through its streets spoke not of the African labor through which they had been built. In fact, their labor comes into view only once, on that morning when Kieft deposed Stoffelson. Kieft questioned Stoffelson in his capacity as the Company’s overseer as to what manner of work the Company’s enslaved peoples had been put to use. Stoffelson answered: they had worked on the walls of the fort, felled 106 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 33. 107 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 36-37. 66 trees for firewood, built the large house and guardhouse that stood inside the fort, cleared land, burned lime and gathered grain for the Company’s harvest. 108 But what of the buildings within which bonded people lived? Their places of dwelling faced a series of physical erasures which dictated the ways in which they and others likely understood the relationship between free and enslaved Africans and the community of New Amsterdam. Many of the Company’s enslaved peoples lived together in barracks under the watchful eye of Stoffelsen and the Company fiscal. 109 Yet the barracks were not fixed in place. As land became scarce and more white colonists entered into leases, the barracks were moved from one site to another, appearing at the moment of land purchase then disappearing again into archival silence. 110 There were also those enslaved peoples that the Company indentured out or sold to individuals in need of an extra hand—people who moved from one space to another, never permitted to claim one as their own. It is likely that in many of these cases, free and enslaved occupied the same dwelling space, albeit separate from one another if the tenant had the means to own a large enough house. Such is the case with Thomas Hall, who had leased van Twiller’s plantation from Kieft in 1641. In another instance, a young girl named Maria, the daughter of “Big Pieter”, was indentured to Nicolaes Coorn in 1644 for the term of four years, during which time she lived in his home. 111 Some free Africans acquired homes of their own and their presence slips through the records almost unintentionally. Gregor Peterson was deposed in 1639 in regards to an attack made upon the village’s deputy sheriff. But in the course of his brief deposition, other characters come into view. On the evening of July 27, 1639, a husband and wife described only as “a Negro and 108 RPS, 1638-1642, 112; 130-132. 109 RPS, 1638-1642, 112; RPS, 1642-1647, 188. 110 RPS, 1642-1647, 59-60; 384-385. 111 RPS, 1638-1642, 217-218; RPS, 1642-1647, 223-224. 67 Negress” complained to deputy sheriff Willem Bredenbent that a man named Thomas Walraven had assaulted them at their home. Bredenbent tried to diffuse the situation by sending Walraven, who appears to have been drunk, back to his house to sleep his stupor off, but the two men ended up in a scuffle with drawn weapons. 112 Even having had a space of their own, the process of engendering place requires a basic level of security of which this man and women were apparently denied. The impression that one gets from the records is of a people forced into a state of constant motion—legal motion through various degrees of freedom and enslavement, and physical motion as they moved from one place of work to another, one dwelling space to another, or made attempts to flee altogether. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has written that “the ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause: each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” 113 Kieft, council, and villagers forced upon New Amsterdam’s free and enslaved African peoples a constant mobility by which they were barred from creating place within the boundaries of New Amsterdam. They denied to these people the right to pause, so to speak, and appended to a long history of forced mobility from the coast of Africa to the Americas, a further series of movements that would have made their attempts to craft new communities and new forms of belonging especially difficult. 114 This is not to say that 112 RPS, 1638-1642, 201. 113 Tuan, Space and (1977), 6. 114 For recent work on slavery and space in New Amsterdam, see Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement (2021). For scholarship on spaces of enslavement and the relationship between architecture, slavery, and place, see in particular Allen G. Noble, ed. To Build a New Land: Ethnic Landscapes in North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Rebecca Ginsburg and Clifton Ellis eds., Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Idem., Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban slavery in North America 68 enslaved peoples did not use this mobility to their advantage, finding the cracks in authority that often coincide with fluid circumstances. 115 Yet the fact remains that against the backdrop of a series of African movements and erasures conducted through space, the white villagers could define themselves through the ability to construct place—they were granted spaces through which they could assemble themselves as constituent members of a polity that had begun to develop and grow as it paused in place. If African peoples themselves experienced a variety of forced mobilities, Dutch artists, it would seem, emphasized rootedness—both social and spatial—in their portrayal of enslaved Africans. The earliest and most famous image of Enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam first appeared in 1643 (Fig. 4). (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2017). For an account of the Atlantic slave trade the emphasizes the experience of mobility, see Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). On degrees of “reconstitution” and the creation of community within the experience of enslavement, see especially Sydney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972); Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 (1980), 44-78. For various broader accounts of an African Atlantic and Atlantic Slaveries, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, UK: Verso Press, 1998); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin Press, 2007); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 115 See especially Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement (2021), Chapter 2: “The Geography of Enslaved Life in New Netherland,” 31-51. 69 Fig. 4: “Nieu Amsterdam. Cum Privilegio Ordinum Hollandiae et West-Frissae”, Unknown Artist, 1643 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] The unknown engraver of this complex image foregrounded an allegorical meeting of a commanding, grim-faced burgher holding pelts in one hand and demanding with the other the produce from a young woman in modest dress. The foreground thus encodes the project of colonization in an allegorical female who surrenders the fruits of a foreign land to a domineering male persona. Yet these figures rest atop the bodies of Black men and women, whose dark skin is emphasized through the absence of clothes, muscular male bodies, and bare breasted women. Not only do they quietly hold atop their heads the colonial products which inform the dynamic of power between the maiden and the burgher, but they stand just below the village itself, forming 70 the deeper foundations atop which the buildings would increase in number and lavishness, as the village grew in trade and wealth. 116 The image provides a partial view into the early development of a colonial mindset that would, over time, increasingly attempt to circumscribe Black economic, social, and political prospects within the boundaries of forced labor, and outside that of full citizenship. Through surveying the physical character of New Amsterdam, it becomes clear that the working constitution that developed there was as much the product of the spaces within which colonists and village leaders sought to enact it as it was the product of charters and laws and the ways in which colonial leaders and inhabitants imagined and understood the cultural and political lives of their landscape’s various spaces. Through ordinances, Kieft and Council tried to set the outer limits within which European colonists could act. Yet those ordinances seemed not to have fully penetrated the physical spaces within which colonial residents passed their time. Even as Kieft sought to enact mandates within the parameters set for him by the West India Company, he faced a situation in which the precise ways that colonists took advantages of urban space (as much as one can refer to early New Amsterdam as urban) threatened to unravel his authority. While the fort offered one set of opportunities for this, the village offered yet another: places separate from the daily workings of the Director and council within which villagers built private and public personas as they accumulated material possessions, developed relationships with one another, and compared their grievances. 116 In reading the foregrounded figures as this kind of allegory, I am following Foot, Black and White Manhattan, 7. For scholarship on the representation of slavery, see especially Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000); John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Douglas Hamilton and Robert J. Blyth eds., Representing Slavery: Art, Artifacts, and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries Press, 2007); Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 71 Fort, taverns, and homes functioned not only as containers of meaning or stages for action. They actively shaped the ways in which the villagers could construct lives, build coalitions, and engage in illicit activities. They set the terms by which the villagers understood their relationship to their budding community—their relationship to sovereignty. But the power of place and the built environment extended beyond permission slips for indiscretion. They cut to the very heart of the process through which the colonists, in dialogue with their governing elite, sought to enact and contest the constitution of their polity. This dynamic comes into view only by widening the lens of focus to capture the colonists living at the heart of a series of complex and overlapping economic and political networks that their many Indigenous neighbors sustained. *** Alongside claims about territorial sovereignty and the geographical extent of Dutch jurisdiction in North America, the creation of New Netherland stirred questions amongst the colony’s residents about the nature of imperium, or the rights of colonists and their relationship to their governing powers and the sources of political authority. By the time Europeans arrived in New Netherland in the first decades of the seventeenth century, imperial officials and colonists (or at least those with enough education) had at their disposal a trove of languages for negotiating the precise distribution of sovereignty in their new communities. Colonists drew upon these fluid languages to demand the acknowledgement of varying degrees of popular sovereignty. Jean Bodin (1530-1596), perhaps the most influential early modern theorist of sovereignty and absolute monarchy, had offered terms that proponents of popular sovereignty could bend to their will. In his 1566 Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem, for example, Bodin had 72 suggested that the distribution of magisterial powers had to be derived from a prior source of authority—what the political theorist Daniel Lee has called the “imperium behind the imperium.” 117 While Bodin is often held up as the paradigmatic theorist of absolutism, he recognized that sovereignty within a state nonetheless resided with the people. Bodin was no particular fan of popular governance and tended to distinguish between sovereignty in theory and government in practice: the people remained the originators of sovereignty, but they had delegated the exercise of their sovereignty to a king, or head of state, who in turn authorized agents to exercise power on his behalf. 118 Yet Bodin helped to make it possible to argue that only the people were the legitimate source of sovereignty. 119 In justifying their independence from Spain and their constitution as a republic amidst the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648), some Dutch political thinkers did just that, developing a body of thought that continued to resonate with both the governors and better educated colonists who occupied the village of New Amsterdam. 120 In 1574, for example, Johan Junius de Jonghe, Governor of Veere in Zeeland and counselor to William of Orange, argued that it was the “people” who made a prince, for “a prince without his subjects is no prince.” 121 As such, the ‘true and legitimate power and dignity of all kings, monarchies and emperors, and the greatest unity of all people and provinces [does] especially consist and principally depend upon the 117 Jean Bodin, Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (Paris, 1566); Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (2016): 186. 118 Jean Bodin, Six Livres de la République (Paris: Jacques Du Puys, 1583): 123; 126-127. 119 Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 224. 120 For a broader discussion of Dutch political thought amidst the revolt, see Martin Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555-1590 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Eco O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Gerard T. Moran trans. (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum Press, 1980); Ernst H. Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic: Three Studies (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2000); Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Press, 2011). 121 Johan Junius de Jonghe, “Discourse” in Certaine Letters wherein is set forth a Discourse of the peace…1574 (London, 1576): 49. 73 assembly of estates,” representing “the people.” 122 The anonymous author of the 1579 Brief discourse on the peace negotiations now taking place at Cologne similarly argued that “dukes and princes have not been able to make any alterations in the matter of sovereignty or been able to levy duties or taxes, to have new money minted, or to make peace or war without the express [in other words, the kinds of coercive actions subsumed under the legal category of imperium] without the express consent of the States.” 123 And indeed, Grotius argued in the early seventeenth century that while a people could divide and distribute their sovereign rights—such as the power to tax or appoint judges—to a prince, they could always reverse the alienation of these rights if the original contract constituting a government intended the concession to be limited or contingent. 124 Over time, Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam drew upon such arguments as they questioned the distribution of powers in their community and sought to involve themselves more actively in its governance. At the outset of New Amsterdam’s colonization in 1624, the West India Company had outlined its vision of governance in a document (the original has not been preserved) called the Provisional Regulations, which offered colonists free passage and victuals for two years along with land, seed, and animals to build farms, in exchange for their settlement in New Netherland, their use of the Dutch language in all public documents, and their obedience. 125 The Provisional Regulations were thus animated by a contractual model of political authority, though one that clearly removed the exercise of government itself from the hands of the people. Colonists were subjects—nothing more. But when living conditions worsened amidst an escalating war with the 122 Junius, Discourse, 78. 123 Brief discours sur la negotiation de la paix, qui se tracte presentement à Coloigne entre le Roy d’Espaigne, & les Estats du Pays Bas (Leiden, 1579): fol. B1. 124 Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 267-270. 125 F.C. Wieder, De stichting van New York in juli 1625. Reconstructies en nieuw gegeven sontleend aan de Van Rappard-documenten (Werken Linschoten-Vereeniging 26) (s’Gravenhage, 1926), 111-117. 74 region’s Indigenous inhabitants, a number of the colonists began to question the legitimacy of this descending model of political authority. 126 Nearly all the evidence that survives—written, pictorial, archaeological—suggests that Dutch officials, colonists, merchants, and farmers entered almost immediately into a series of relationships with their Indigenous neighbors, most of which were mediated through the practices of trade and exchange. Over time, a broad pattern emerged: Algonquian-speaking Native peoples (especially Massapequa) on Long Island used European drills to manufacture and supply the colonists with wampum. Colonists then traded that Wampum to Iroquoian speaking Natives (Mohawks in particular) who lived in the upper Hudson Valley in exchange for furs which they sold on European markets. 127 From the start, the States General and West India Company sought to keep this trade confined to certain boundaries that defined what could be exchanged. They objected with particular vehemence to those colonists and free traders who supplied Native peoples with guns and alcohol. 128 But the Company concerned itself just as much, if not more, with where objects were exchanged. In fact, a fundamental anxiety about the spatial parameters of colonization pervade nearly all of the laws and ordinances the Director and council passed in order to police trading activities. Nearly each facet of Dutch-Indigenous interaction to which they objected could be boiled down to a concern over the proximity to which these peoples lived to one another, and the particular spaces within which they carried out their daily interactions. 126 For ascending and descending models of political authority, see Walter Ullman, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, UK: Methuen & Co., 1961). 127 For a standard account for this seventeenth-century relationship, see Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York (2010). 128 For an account of Indigenous-European Relations through the lens of warfare, as well as the role that European weapons played in shaping it, see Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 2008). For the classic account of Indigenous alcohol use, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 75 When the Dutch first arrived at the place many native peoples referred to as Lenapehoking, they took particular care to enter into peaceful relations with their new Algonquian-speaking neighbors. 129 The Dutch West India Company based the legality of their occupation upon those very relations. The historian Donna Merwick has argued that “for the Dutch, discovery established by first navigators recorded in place names and latitudes laid on charts and in logbooks, together with evidence of continual residence and continual trading, in fact established legal possession.” 130 Trade and peaceful interaction were the key words. Thus when the West India Company provided the colony’s first director, Willem Verhulst, with his instructions in January 1625, they emphasized that the region’s native inhabitants “must not be driven away by force or threats, but by good words persuaded to leave, or, be given something therefore for their satisfaction.” 131 When Peter Schagen penned his famous letter, he took care to emphasize that the Dutch people on Manhattan Island “live in peace.” Nicolaes van Wassenaer likewise emphasized how the European residents of New Amsterdam in the earliest years “remained as yet without the fort, in no fear, as the natives live peaceably with them.” 132 As more Europeans showed interest in New Netherland, the Company sought to ensure that further settlement would proceed within these parameters and not generate tensions between colonists and Indigenous peoples over land. In opening New Netherland to the settlement of Patroonships, for example, the States General and West India Company insisted, “The Patroons of New Netherland, shall be bound to purchase from the Lords Sachems in New Netherland, the soil where they propose to plant their Colonies, and shall acquire such right thereunto as they 129 For a dated but useful account of Indigenous place names in this region of North America, see Kraft, The Lenape (1986), xvii-xviii. 130 Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow (2006), 28. 131 Arnold J. F. Van Laer, ed., Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624-1626 in the Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1924). See Doc. C, P. 52. 132 NYCD, I: 37-38; Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 88. 76 will agree for with the said Sachems.” 133 Furthermore, these privileges applied only to the patroons: “all private and poor people are excluded from these Exemptions Privileges and Freedoms, and are not allowed to purchase any lands or grounds from the Sachems or Indians in New Netherland, but must repair under the jurisdiction of the respective Lords Patroons.” 134 The company sought to keep the spatial dimensions of their colony within check, and to preserve what they understood as the sovereignty of the region’s Native inhabitants. But the States General gradually plied pressure to the Company to open the region for further settlement, and between 1630 and 1640 the population of settlers swelled. While New Netherland remained much less populous than neighboring Virginia or New England, by the time Peter Stuyvesant ceded control of the colony to the English, the population had grown from somewhere around 270 people in 1628, to near 9,000 in 1664. Even as the Company desperately sought to control the spatial boundaries of this increased settlement, they proved incapable of preventing tensions from mounting between Europeans and Natives. 135 Two events marked something of a turning point. The first was an ordinance. On September 15, 1639, Director Kieft ushered through a resolution demanding contributions of maize, furs, and wampum from “the Indians who dwell around here and whom heretofore we have protected against their enemies.” Kieft argued that the colonists had protected these Munsees by constructing the town’s fortifications. The claim was dubious at best, but the underlying logic 133 NYCD, I: 99. 134 NYCD, I: 100. For scholarship on New Netherland’s system of patroonships, see especially Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Jan Folkerts, “Kiliaen van Rensselaer and Agricultural Productivity in his Domain: A New Look at the First Patroon and Rensselaerswijk Before 1664,” in Nancy Anne McClue Zeller, ed., A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rensselaerswijk Seminar Papers (Albany, NY: New Netherland Publishing, 1991), 295- 308; Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors in America: the Patroonships in New Netherland,” in L.H. Roper and BNertrand van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Press, 2007). 135 For these population statistics and rates of growth, see Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975): 34-36. 77 was clear: if Munsees were to benefit from the buildings of New Amsterdam, they should be responsible for supporting their upkeep. This logic implied a contractual understanding of the obligations of a citizenry, the only problem being that the Munsees were not, and were never invited to be, citizens of New Amsterdam. It is also unclear from whom Kieft believed the Dutch had protected the Munsees that lived north of the Delaware River. These groups of Native peoples did have enemies of a sort—in particular the Susquehanna to the west, and at various points sub-groups of the Haudenosaunee to the North. But there is little, if any, evidence to support Kieft’s claim. As violence mounted over the following years, the Dutch in New Netherland and the United Provinces understood this tax as a serious misstep by which the Indigenous “were totally estranged from our people.” 136 Then in 1640, there was a murder. Claes Smits, a wheelwright, lived in a small house he had built just north of the Fort. A neighboring Wiechquaeskeck man visited Smits’ house one morning to exchange beaver skins for duffels of cloth. As Smits bent over to grab the cloth from a chest, the Native man (the records have not preserved his name) struck Smits on the back of his neck with an axe and killed him instantly. The Commander of the Dutch garrison at Fort Amsterdam pursued the man back to his village, and when he finally caught up, accosted him with questions. Why, the commander asked, had he killed the aged wheelwright when Smits had invited the Native into his house for a peaceful exchange of objects? Years back, the man retorted, when the Dutch were still building their fort, he had come to New Amsterdam with his uncle to trade Beaver skins. While they were there, several Dutchmen stole the skins from his uncle and killed him on the spot. The man had resolved that day to seek justice for his kin, and had at last seen his opportunity while he stood in Smits’ home. Perhaps he had not entered the 136 “Report of the Board of Accounts on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 148-155. 78 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. 137 Two facets of this episode stand out. The first is that the Wiechquaeskeck man who killed Claes Smits framed his memories of Dutch arrival and his uncle’s murder around the fort’s construction. The material realities of place were never a specifically “European” phenomenon, but shaped both colonists and Native peoples’ relationships to the landscape and to one another. For the man who killed Smits, the presence of the newcomers could not be reduced to a series of spaces within and around which people spoke, negotiated, and traded. The fort as a place acted in dialogue with Indigenous practices. Its wooden and stone walls anchored the Native man’s memories—his grief—to a site of mourning, as the man incorporated the colonial structure into Indigenous spiritual practices of loss and recovery by which the deceased person’s kin would carry out an isolated act of retaliation as a form of social and emotional repair. The fort was both a recipient of cultural translation and an agent in shaping how the Wiechquaeskeck man structured the narrative her constructed to process his kin’s death and justify his action against Smits. 138 Then there is the location of the murder. The care with which the West India Company took to delineate the precise spatial dimensions of the patroonships and their incessant mapping ventures speak to their desire to keep the colonists at a certain distance from their Indigenous neighbors. Indeed, Dutch homes were no less susceptible to Indigenous translation than the Fort. 137 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. 138 For a short but useful account of Munsee attitudes towards death, see Kraft, The Lenape, 186-194. See also James Axtell, “Last Rights: The Acculturation of Native Funerals in Colonial North America,” in James Axtell ed., The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981): 110-128; Erik R. Seeman, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 79 Colonial administrators seem to have recognized, perhaps implicitly, the potential dangers of permitting Natives and Europeans to congress in the intimacy of Dutch homes. While the Director and council had previously relented on the question of Native presences within the fort, permitting Indigenous peoples to testify on court day, trade carried out inside of the colonists’ private dwelling spaces was another matter entirely. It is therefore not surprising that when the Board of Accounts in the United Provinces reviewed the events that had led up to the war, their first conclusion read: “because the Colonists, each with a view to advance his own interest, separated themselves from one another, and settled far in the interior of the Country, the better to trade with the Indians, whom they then sought to allure to their houses by excessive familiarity and treating. By this course they brought themselves into disrepute with the Indians, who, not having been always treated alike, made this cause of enmity.” 139 It was the private interactions and the spaces within which they were conducted that bothered the Company’s officials. The time that Munsees spent inside of Dutch homes threatened to blur the clear-cut separation between Indigenous and Dutch spaces that the Company sought to achieve as a means for maintaining a well-ordered trading post. In the eyes of the Company, this particular kind of socialization “created first, a division of power of dangerous consequence; then produced altogether too much familiarity with the Indians, which in a short time brought forth contempt, usually the Father of Hate. For, not satisfied with merely taking them into their houses in the customary manner, they attracted them by extraordinary attention, such as admitting them to Table, laying napkins before them, presenting Wine to them and more of that kind of thing, which they did not receive like Esop’s man, but as their due and desert, insomuch that they were not content, but began to hate, when such civilities were not shown to them.” 140 139 “Report of the Board of Accounts on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 148-155 140 “Short Account of New Netherland, from the year 1641 to the year 1646,” NYCD, I: 181-182. 80 What came into focus was a working consensus that developed apart from the wishes of the Dutch West India Company and the Director and council who sought to impose a certain political and spatial order upon their colonial inhabitants. Instead, this colonial constitution emerged through the spatial practices that colonists and Native peoples brought into existence as they drew one another into their orbits of exchange by drawing them into their landscapes and buildings. But like the fort, the homes and other village buildings seem to have exerted a pull of their own: an affective presence that helped to spark the violence with which the Colonists reasserted themselves against their Indigenous neighbors, and the vehemence with which they demanded a voice in their still young polity. As the conflict between Munsees and colonists escalated, the houses of the village burned. Fires, especially those ignited by Indigenous hands, had long been a concern of those living in New Amsterdam. Many of the leases contained specific provisions for such occasion, like that of the Jacobsens, which protected them from financing repairs “should the house be burned, either by hostile Indians or others.” 141 But in the wake of Smits’ murder, references to fires and burnt homes took on a greater immediacy. Dutch colonists complained that Natives [barbarische wilden] threatened them daily with “fire and sword,” and bemoaned the houses which Munsees had burnt to the ground or stood in danger of being burnt down still. Their preoccupations bled over into symbolism, suffusing the metaphors they used to characterize the turbulence: “the fire of an Indian war,” they called it. 142 Even as late as 1663, the predikant Henricus Selijns began a 141 “Lease from Barent Dircksen to Cornelis Jacobson, the elder, and Cornelis Jacobson, the younger,” RPS, 1638- 1642: 16. 142 Nationaal Archief, Archives of the States General, West India File, inv. No. 5757, II, D 754-755; Nat. Arch., SG, Loketkas, WIC Inv. No. 12564.25, ‘Stucken raeckende den staet van Nieu Nederlandt’ Letter B. 81 marriage poem by lamenting that the “fire of love” had been long extinguished by the “fire of war…House after House, with Indian [wildt] Monsters posted…” 143 Homes and buildings engulfed in flames thus gave shape to a powerful emotional landscape: a visceral fear spurred by the images of houses in flames; a mounting frustration with the Director and Council’s response to the Indigenous threat; and assumptions about Native behavior which seem to have crystalized European suspicions of and hostility towards their neighbors. More so, this emotional landscape reveals a European self-consciousness about their presence upon American soil. The sustained attention that the villagers paid to the threat of burning throughout their time in New Amsterdam speaks to an underlying awareness of their outsider position, even if the villagers chose not to voice their feelings in such specific terms. The speed with which they assumed house fires to have been caused by Native hands reveals not just a set of cultural assumptions, but more subtly, an uncomfortable relationship with their occupation. Such feelings, for example, suffused the deposition that Cornelis Cornelisz, a twenty-two- year-old sentry, gave before the Provincial Secretary about the events that took place as he stood watch outside of a house belonging to Jochem Pitersen (or Jochim Pietersz) on the night of March 9, 1644. Cornelisz claimed that just before daybreak, he saw a flaming arrow fall upon the thatched roof of Pietersen’s house which sent the structure instantly into a roaring blaze. Cornelisz then claimed to have heard the report of a gun towards the same direction from which the arrow had come. The deposition itself is less about the cause of the fire than the fact that a group of English soldiers who had been sleeping in a nearby cellar refused to lend assistance. 144 143 New-York Historical Society, Henricus Selyns, Poems [16--], unpaginated manuscript. 144 “Declaration of Cornelis Cornelissen and other soldiers regarding the destruction of Jochem Pitersen Kuyter’s house by the Indians”, RPS, 1642-1647: 201. 82 But on March 7 th of the following year, Jan Everts Bout and Claes Jansen, both respected members of the community, testified that they had heard from a native man named “Ponkes” that Munsees had not burned Pitersen’s house, but that the Dutch had accidentally sparked the blaze themselves and fled in fear of being killed. Ponkes, probably a Rechgawawanck, appeared before Kieft and council to offer testimony. 145 Secretary Tienhoven began the transcript: “Before me…appeared Ponkes, an Indian of Marechkawick, who has been among the Indians, our enemies during the war.” With the assistance of Bout, who claimed to understand the man in his own tongue, Ponkes explained that after inquiring amongst other Indigenous, he could not find anyone willing to claim responsibility for the act. For Ponkes, the silence alone offered enough proof, for the “Indians when they commit any outrage boast of it and then they have done a good and great thing.” Ponkes left New Amsterdam after snubbing the Council, refusing to sign the record in their presence. Like the murder of Smits, this episode contains multiple layers of meaning. To begin with, it shows just how closely the villagers of new Amsterdam remained tethered to their neighbors even as they fought a series of increasingly violent skirmishes against one another. Then there is Ponkes’ refusal to sign his deposition. One could read this choice in a number of different ways, perhaps as evidence of Ponkes’ suspicion of European documents that required signatures. It is clear, however, that Ponkes dictated the terms under which he would offer his assistance, if he even saw his testimony as assistance at all. There is, after all, a slight mocking undertone to his testimony, even as mediated by Bout’s translation. Ponkes wrote off this particular incident as 145 Secretary Tienhoven actually referred to Ponkes as a “Marechwakick,” but I have followed the work of Robert Grumet on Indigenous Place names in New York and read that designation as probably referring to the former coastal dwelling place belonging to the Rechgawawanck Indians. See especially Robert S. Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); Idem., Manhattan to Minisink: American Indian Place Names in Greater New York and Vicinity (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). 83 having nothing to do with Munsees, but readily acknowledged the Indigenous tactic of burning European houses as an act of justice of which they would gladly boast and celebrate. 146 Regardless of the cause of each incident, visions of wooden-framed houses engulfed in flames spurred visceral, emotional responses, as an atmosphere of fear and anxiety overtook New Amsterdam. 147 The sight of burning homes—those spaces through which they had constructed their very identities and claims to personhood—etched scenes upon the villagers’ minds that prompted them to demand a more concerted response from Kieft and Council, especially as the murder of Smits and other grievances continued to be met with silence rather than justice. Kieft solicited the advice of the village’s leading heads of households, convening the Twaalf Maan [Twelve Men] as early as 1641. But the Twelve Men, who submitted a petition to Kieft on January 21, 1642, did not distinguish between demands specific to the conflict with the Natives and those of a more general nature. Instead, the increasing hostility with Munsees and their dissatisfaction with Kieft’s response prompted Dutch colonists to assess their polity in broader terms and to claim for themselves a greater share in its sovereignty. 146 “Declaration of Jan Evertsen Bout and Claes Jansen regarding the burning of Jochem Pitersen Kuyter’s house,” RPS, 1642-1647: 297; “Declaration of Ponkes, an Indian of Marechkawick, regarding the burning of Jochem Pitersen Kuyter’s house,” RPS, 1642-1647”: 298. 147 Much work has been done on the history of emotions, and Tobias Green offers an excellent account of the power that fear played in shaping the physical character of Atlantic colonial settlements. See Tobias Green, “Fear and Atlantic History: Some Observations Derived from the Cape Verde Islands and the African Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 3:1 (April 2006): 25-42. For broader discussions of the history of emotions, see especially William R. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2011); Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions? (London, UK: Polity Press, 2018). There are important points of overlap between the history of emotions and cognitive cultural studies, particularly in terms of a willingness to borrow concepts from cognitive psychology for the analysis of historical subjects. For an excellent overview of this field, see Lisa Zunshine, ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). In understanding the role that vision plays in the construction of subjectivity, I am particularly indebted to the work of Maurice Merleau-Pointy. See idem., Phenomenology of Perception (NY: Routledge Press, 2013). For two excellent historical accounts of vision as a practice and philosophies of vision, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Stuart Clarke, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). 84 The Twelve demanded of Kieft a range of concessions, including a regular muster to increase preparedness for attack, freedom of trade for all living upon and visiting Manhattan Island, and an increase in the value of money. More importantly, the colonists demanded that the director’s council make space for five or seven schepenen (local magistrates) who would participate in criminal trials and consent to all future taxes. 148 Significantly, the term the men used in referring to the community they purported to represent was the very same term that Dutch writers had invoked in the context of their Revolt, gemeente, a flexible term which translated roughly to community, commonalty, or people. Amidst their sixteenth-century revolt, Dutch writers had time and again deployed this word as they increasingly grounded their demands for sovereignty and transformation into a republic in the ever-present and prior authority of “the people” or the gemeente, though neither the proponents of the Dutch Revolt nor the leading residents of New Amsterdam envisioned the establishment of anything like a democracy. 149 Kieft’s war and its aftermath thus marked the first point in New Amsterdam’s still young history when members of the village demanded that sovereignty flow not from top down, but from bottom up. 150 Irritated that they had far exceeded their mandate, Kieft dissolved the Twelve Men, arguing that he had called them only to offer advice on the war. The Twelve Men would no longer be permitted to meet, and any villagers who ignored the order would be “punished as disobedient.” 151 Kieft’s concluding phrase reinforced the boundaries between those who could 148 NYCD, I: 201-203. 149 For some crucial examples, see the 1565 request to the town government of Antwerp “presented by the common citizenry [gemeyne]: Requeste aen de Eerweerdgighe, Wijse en seer voorsienighe heeren… (1565); the Third Warning and admonition of the good, faithful rulers and community [gemeinte] of the country of Brabant: Derde waerschouwinge ende vermaninghe aende goede…(1566), fol. A2; and especially, the 1579 Remonstrance to the States General published on behalf of the inhabitants and community [ghemeynte] of Antwerp: Remonstratie oft vertooch in manière van beclach aen mijne Heeren…(1579). 150 “Petition of the Twelve Men” NYCD, I: 201-203. 151 Nationaal Archief, Archives of the States General, Loketkas WIC, inv. No: 12564.25, Letter N. 85 wield legitimate authority, and those who were simply subject to it. 152 Following this meeting, Kieft only exacerbated the situation in a series of ill-advised attacks against against Hackensacks, Tappans, and Rockaways at Pavonia and Corlaer’s Hook on the night between the 25 th and 26 th of February 1643. David de Vries, one of the Twelve Men, recalled survivors who “came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms, and others had such horrible cuts and gashes, the worse than they were could never happen.” 153 In the aftermath of this massacre, at least eleven local groups of Munsees banded together and launched a full-scale war against the colonists. As panic mounted, Kieft had no choice but to permit the input of the villagers once more, who this time formed a council of eight. 154 Once again, however, the villagers exceeded their mandate, sending their grievances directly to the States General and West India Company, though managing to convince Kieft to sign on. On October 24, 1643, the Eight Men sent to the Assembly of XIX, the Company’s governing board, a plea for help. This time, they crafted their plea in decidedly material terms, writing both of the houses that had been burnt to the ground and the fort which resembled more a “molehill than a fort against the enemy,” and of the remaining two hundred Dutch villagers who “skulked” in makeshift huts outside the fort, a sentiment which they repeated again in November. 155 And in that second letter, the Eight combined their critique of a defunct landscape with demands for “delegates” who could “issue their vote along [with] the director and councilors on matters of state, so that in future the whole state of the country cannot be placed in peril again through a 152 NYCD, I: 203. 153 Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 227-228. 154 NYCD, I: 192-93. 155 Nat. Arch., SG, Loketkas, WIC Inv. No. 12564.25, ‘Stucken raeckende den staet van Nieu Nederlandt’ Letter B; Letter Q. 86 single man’s discretion.” 156 The villagers’ demands for a share in sovereignty could not be formulated outside of their experience of place. The villagers managed to rouse enough alarm in the States General and West India Company to take action. They removed Kieft in 1644 from his position as Director. In his place, they sent the man who would leave an even greater mark upon New Amsterdam’s landscape, Peter Stuyvesant, though they did not approve his commission until July 1646. 157 It was under Stuyvesant that the many points of entanglement between political language and the politics of place coalesced into an explosion of images that fractured New Amsterdam into a series of contested pictures of the townscape, and then reemerged in the physical embodiment of the villager’s demands for a share in sovereignty. Alongside the fort, the churches, the taverns and the homes, would be a town hall. But even as the villagers achieved a greater share of sovereignty and place within which to bring their sovereignty into being, they began to construct ever more rigid categories of belonging that juxtaposed not only clarified gradients of belonging within the citizenry, but began to juxtapose white against black, and European against Indigenous. This later example, in particular, had its own set of material consequences. For almost as soon as the villagers achieved their town hall, they built their wall. *** Petrus Stuyvesant found New Amsterdam in political and physical shambles. 158 Within months of his arrival, he received two letters. Willem Kieft had written the first to clear his 156 Nat. Arch., SG, Loketkas, WIC Inv. No. 12564.25, ‘Stucken raeckende den staet van Nieu Nederlandt’ Letter Q. 157 “Commission of Peter Stuyvesant as Director general of New Netherland” NYCD, I: 178. 158 For a particularly interesting biographical account of Peter Stuyvesant, see Donna Merwick, Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For an account of 87 name. He claimed all of what the Eight had written in their petition libelous and demanded that Stuyvesant direct the Fiscal to “prosecute them according to the heinousness of their crimes.” 159 Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, two prominent villagers and members of the Eight, had penned the second letter two days later to refute Kieft’s charges. They began with a familiar trope: “The piles of ashes from the burnt houses, barns, barracks and other buildings, and the bones of the cattle, more than sufficiently demonstrate the ordinary care that was bestowed on the country.” The villagers tied Kieft to an incinerated landscape. Even more so, they had begun to question the Director’s authority, recalling a conversation that took place in a tavern during which a villager had openly complained, “Mr. Kieft’s power in this country was greater and more extensive…than was that of his Highness of Orange in the Netherlands.” 160 Kieft had only further enraged the members of the Eight by using the spaces of authority as symbolic staging grounds to reassert his power. Melyn and Kuyter recalled how Kieft had requested that the villagers meet with him on a June morning in 1644, but left them waiting in a room inside of the fort for over three hours until showing up. “Was not this, now, mocking and scoffing them” asked the two men. Melyn and Kuyter invoked the language of contractual political thought to make their final argument: “the sovereign is bound by justice to care for their subject, no less than the subject to obey.” 161 But the more they assessed the problems that troubled their village, the less content the villagers remained with the current relationship between sovereign and subject. By virtue of convening deliberative bodies from the Commonalty and far exceeding their mandate, the villagers had in fact claimed for themselves a share of that Stuyvesant’s earlier years, see Jaap Jacobs, “Like Father Like Son? The Early Years of Petrus Stuyvesant,” in Joyce D. Goodfriend, Willem Frijhoff, and Jaap Jacobs, Revisiting New Netherland: Perspective on Early Dutch America (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Press, 2005): 205-242, pp. 219-221. 159 “Ex-Director Kieft to Director Stuyvesant” NYCD, I: 203-204. 160 “Messrs. Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn to Director Stuyvesant” NYCD, I: 206-208. 161 “Messrs. Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn to Director Stuyvesant” NYCD, I: 206-208. 88 sovereignty. They had begun to assert themselves as sovereign members of the political community. Stuyvesant thus arrived not to a trading post with compliant subjects of the West India Company, but a village amid its political coming of age. Moreover, that process of politicization had been tied not only to disintegrating relationships between the European village and its Indigenous neighbors, but to the villagers’ affective relationships to the spaces they inhabited, many of which the war had brought to the ground. It is not surprising, then, that Stuyvesant’s approach to governing New Amsterdam reflected both of these realities. On July 25, Stuyvesant ushered through an ordinance regulating the construction of new buildings. The order addressed a history of irregular building practices: inhabitants had extended their lots beyond the survey line, put up hog pens and privies on public roads, or simply neglected to build on the lot granted to them altogether. To impose regularity and order over the village landscape, Stuyvesant appointed three street surveyors—Lubber van Dincklage, the naval store keeper Paulus Leendersen, and Secretary Tienhoven, whom he authorized and empowered “to condemn and in the future to prevent the erection of all unsightly and irregular buildings, fences, palisades, posts, rails…within or near the city of New Amsterdam.” 162 A slew of regulations of similar intent followed: an ordinance to repair and finally complete Fort Amsterdam, an ordinance prohibiting wooden chimneys and appointing fire wardens, an ordinance for the speedier erection of buildings, an ordinance against obstructing highways and another regulating the driving of wagons and carts upon them. Perhaps Stuyvesant hoped to restore order to New Amsterdam by re-ordering its material existence. 163 162 Council Minutes, 1638-1649, 423-424. 163 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 79; 82-83; 105; 128-129. 89 Other laws, though not specifically aimed at regulating the landscape, still reflected a deeply ingrained correlation between the languages of political thought and of building and space. For example, Stuyvesant passed a series of ordinances in March of 1648 regulating merchant and trading activities in the village. He shared with many prominent villagers an anxiety over trade carried out by non-residents, with “little or no interest in this new growing Province and…little concern and care for its prosperity and welfare, and therefore, do not benefit it either by Boweries or Buildings.” The language is like that employed by seventeenth-century men and women who subscribed to a kind of republicanism, seeking to ensure that the interests of private individuals would not interfere with the greater good of the community. The language itself is not surprising. What is less familiar, however, is the attachment of common republican tropes to the material life of the village. 164 Sustaining the good of a community—the commonwealth—was not simply a matter of virtuous behavior, but an attachment to the village as a particular physical space. And so the ordinance continued: “That no person shall henceforward be allowed to keep a public or private Shop on shore…except our good and dear inhabitants who, before they have taken the Oath of Allegiance, own real estate at least to the amount of two to three thousand guilders and have promised to reside, or at least to keep fire and light in their own House, here in the land within this Province during four consecutive years. Similarly, those wishing to trade from the Hudson 164 For a broad account of the languages of Republicanism in early modern Europe, see Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and David Wooten ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). For the interrelationship between Republicanism and commerce, see J.G.A Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103:3 (June 1988): 705-736. For the Dutch context of Republicanism, see especially Peter Burke, Venice & Amsterdam (London, UK: Polity Press, 1994); Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (2002). 90 and East rivers would have “to adorn this place with a decent and burgherlike building and invest in the Country according to their rank and means.” 165 Only those who had fully ingrained themselves within the texture of the village—sustaining and living within its buildings—could be trusted to hold the true interest of the commonwealth in heart. It would seem that for Stuyvesant and his Council, the development of Republican virtue was as much a material and affective process as it was a moral or political one. And indeed, such distinctions broke down entirely in sentences that blended them into a singular vision of political responsibility that tied republican membership to the moral vision of self-denial and the material status of the community. Yet Stuyvesant also recognized that he would not be able to assert his or the Company’s sovereign authority without the voice of the community in the newly politicized village to which he had arrived. In September 1647 he established the Board of Nine Men. Significantly, the board would be permitted only to nominate eighteen candidates, from whom Stuyvesant would select nine to serve. Each week three of the nine would sit with Stuyvesant and Council on court days to assist with settling legal disputes. Stuyvesant made clear, however, that the Nine were under no circumstances permitted to meet on their own, in private, without the knowledge or advice of the Director General. Furthermore, Stuyvesant sought to clarify the meaning of that politically charged term gemeente, reminding the community that the Nine Men remained “vassals and subjects [vassalen ende onderdanen].” 166 Thus, while Stuyvesant offered a conciliatory nod towards his politically charged subjects, he tried to retain control over where and under what circumstances the representatives of the gemeente would meet and deliberate and to reinforce a descending model of political authority. Stuyvesant thus seems to have recognized 165 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 86-91. 166 New York State Archives, New York Colonial Manuscripts, vol. 4, Dutch Transcriptions, p. 538. 91 that his ability to retain authority over the community’s subjects hinged upon controlling the spatial parameters of their political lives. Stuyvesant’s actions diffused the immediate tensions and colonial life in New Amsterdam settled to a lull. But on October 13, 1649, the States General received yet another letter, this time from the Nine. Relations between the Director and Commonality had once again soured, and the Nine had dispatched three of their members to bring complaints against Stuyvesant directly to the States General. After nearly two and a half months at sea, Jan Everts Bout, Jacob van Couwenhaven, and Adriaen Van der Donck arrived at the Hague in the province of Holland, carrying a petition, a remonstrance, and a watercolor painting. A notary named D. V. Schelluyne entered the documents into the governing body’s record. 167 Adriaen Van der Donck, a lawyer from the town of Breda in the southern Netherlands, had first sailed to New Netherland in 1641 as a legal agent for the Patroonship of Rensselaerswyck. Van der Donck had probably arrived in New Amsterdam sometime during Kieft’s War and involved himself in mediations between Kieft and various Munsee sachems. He also enmeshed himself in the increasingly contentious politics of village life, but his name does not appear in an official capacity until the 1649 letter which he carried with him back to the Netherlands. In fact, Van der Donck acted as the chief architect of both the petition and the longer remonstrance. 168 In their petition, the Nine called for a series of reforms to their village and broader colony: an improved system of governance, greater privileges and exemptions, fewer imposts and duties, an increase in colonists, and a final end to hostilities between the villagers and their Indigenous 167 “The Nine Men of New Netherland to the States General” NYCD, I: 258. 168 There is, to date, no complete biographical account of Van der Donck’s life, but Russell Shorto discusses him in depth in his narrative history of Dutch Manhattan. See Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). For biographical details, see especially pp. 94-102; 104-112. 92 neighbors. Specifically, the villagers requested that the States General take the colony directly under their control, removing the “tyrannical government of the Company.” 169 Under the oversight of the States General, the Nine called for the establishment of a municipal government. While they specified wishing for something “resembling the laudable Government of our Fatherland,” they made clear in an appended comment that in fact, they hoped to establish something more akin to the form of government which they observed amongst their English neighbors in Connecticut and on Long Island—a form of municipal government in which the space of the town was tied to a set of civic institutions: “Each town, no matter how small, hath its own court and jurisdiction, also a voice in the Capital, and elects its own officers. Few taxes are imposed, and these only by general consent.” The Nine also sought the introduction of English style “Magistrates” or “Selectmen,” and annual elections through which the villagers could choose their governor and deputies. In other words, they requested a representative form of government in which the execution of law and order would hinge upon the consent of the governed, with whom sovereignty would ultimately lie. 170 A lengthy remonstrance accompanied the petition. Authored by Van der Donck, the Remonstrance cast the specific demands of the petition within a broader narrative that was part local history, part natural history, and part invective against the government of New Amsterdam in general, and Kieft and Stuyvesant in particular. The Remonstrance articulated a vision of politics as simultaneously a conceptual and material endeavor—both a matter of government and the spaces within and through which that government was realized. It was also an account of tragic missteps and roads not taken towards cultivating friendship with Indigenous neighbors, 169 “Petition of the Commonalty of New Netherland to the States General”, NYCD, I: 260. The quotation itself is from a series of additional observations that the Nine appended to the petition: NYCD, I: 264, comment 7. 170 “Additional Observations on the Preceding Petition,” NYCD, I: 266, “Nota Bene”. 93 friendships that could have set the development of New Amsterdam on a more prosperous and harmonious path. Van der Donck began with a history of settlement and building: The Dutch had settled New Netherland by purchasing land from Native peoples, affixing the State’s arms and constructing forts, each framing the boundaries of a landscape under Dutch sovereignty and jurisdiction. They had built trading houses, bouweries, and plantations all to benefit the West India Company in exchange for certain freedoms and exemptions. And all the while, they had done so because the Indigenous had permitted their presence—Munsees who “not only surrendered this rich and fertile country…but did, over and above, also enrich us with their valuable and mutual trade.” The Dutch, Van der Donck argued, should have acknowledged these benefits and shared the profits “in return for what the Indians had shared with us of their substance.” 171 But the villagers had failed to do so. What then had caused New Netherland’s “low and ruinous condition”? Van der Donck answered in two words: bad government, the true “foundation stone” [gront-steen] of the colony’s ruin.” 172 The language informed the deeper implications of the remonstrance. Bad government was not just a matter of personnel—it inhered in the polity’s material foundations. A well-ordered government was a well-ordered place. Of the directors, Van der Donck had little positive to say. Both Kieft and Stuyvesant had comported themselves as if they were “sovereign.” 173 Yet Kieft had failed not just in his diplomatic tactics, but also in looking after the village’s public spaces. Against the wishes of the gemeente, for example, Kieft had ordered that the Church be built inside of the fort, a location as 171 “Remonstrance of new Netherland to the States-General”, NYCD, I: 275-290; Quotations on p. 294-295. 172 Adriaen Van der donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Neder-Land, Wegens de Geleghentheydt, Vruchtbaerheydt en Soberen Staet desselfs (s’ Gravenhage: Michiel Stael, 1650): 18-22; 25. 173 Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 28. 94 suitable, as “a fifth wheel to a wagon.” 174 Likewise, Kieft never realized the creation of a common school, even after the gemeente had provided the funds for its construction. Nor had he followed through on his promises to build a hospital or an asylum for orphans and the elderly. 175 Unlike Kieft, Stuyvesant had begun to build almost as soon as he arrived in New Amsterdam. But most of these building projects benefited the Company, and not the Dutch villagers: they hardly counted as “public works.” Thus even as Native peoples reduced New Amsterdam’s landscape to piles of incinerated rubble where houses had once stood, Kieft and Stuyvesant failed to address the reasons for the war and fell short “in the protection that they owe to the country.” 176 As Adriaen Van der Donck laid his case before the magistrates of the States General, he unfurled before them a watercolor he had painted to accompany his written account (Fig. 5). Van der Donck had glued together two sheets of paper to create a canvass that measured roughly twenty-one by twelve and a half inches. On this composite canvas, Van der Donck presented for the States General a vision of New Amsterdam that was both an index of its material progress and a pictorial argument of its fundamental instability as well as its shifting balance of sovereignty. Van der Donck’s depiction departed in dramatic ways from New Amsterdam’s previous iconographic history. Whereas Hartgers had rendered the village in stark subordination to the fort, here the village dominates the landscape. In fact, apart from the stone and wooden church and the barracks that stood within its walls, the fort is hardly visible. Its bushy and pluming wall resembles more a mound of earth and grass than it does a fort, reflecting language 174 Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 29. 175 Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 29-30. 176 Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 44. 95 that appeared both in Van der Donck’s remonstrance and earlier petitions, likening the fort to a “mole hill” as well as the authority that supposedly flowed from it. Fig. 5: Van der Donck’s New Netherland, 1649-50 [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek] The only public work for which Van der Donck had credited Stuyvesant, the wooden wharf, is rendered colorless in gangly, wispy lines, like the afterthought it had apparently been. Company structures are segregated by color, and they share in the defunct authority that flows from the fort, overgrown with its mossy palette: the barracks inside the fort, the row of Company warehouses, and the Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern that Kieft had commissioned as an orderly alternative to house-run grog shops. Instability plagues the structural integrity of these places. If one focuses in on the warehouses (Fig. 6), the outlines of the buildings waver and threaten to dissipate with the wind. While likely intended to capture the typical Dutch architectural style of the gabled roof, the wavy, almost serpentine lines evoke the way that air flutters and undulates before the eyes when licked by flame. It is tempting to tie the resulting effect to the war and its 96 scenes of carnage and burning homes, which had incinerated the authority of the Director and Council and set aflame the political passions of the village. Fig. 6: Detail of Van der Donck’s New Netherland, 1649-50 [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek] Then there are the places that belonged to the villagers: the houses, which Van der Donck rendered in watery blue and white hues and encircle the fort and isolate the Company structures from one another. The sameness and equal stature of these places lend to them a democratic sensibility and threaten to overwhelm the fort’s walls, like the sea from which they borrow their color. 177 Van der Donck had in fact paid special attention to these spaces, explaining in his Representation that when Stuyvesant refused to convene the gemeente to hear their complaints, 177 Merwick does an excellent job exploring the iconographical implications of the sea in Dutch travel drawings and townscapes: Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow (2013), Chapter 1. 97 and in light of his prohibition upon meeting together in private, Van der Donck and fellow members of the Nine walked through the village entering each house, one by one, to speak with the people who lived there. 178 Those very places that official accounts of the trading post had passed over in silence when Kieft deposed Stoffelson and Van der Gow, that gathered material possessions, stories, and memories as the villagers crafted lives for themselves outside of the control of the Director and Council, that threatened time and again to undermine the type of trading post that the Company sought to create, sheltering private interactions between Native peoples and European colonists. These were the places to which Van der Donck and fellow members of the Commonalty turned, and into which they walked when they could take no more of their present circumstances. Through the intimate conversations that took place in those private dwelling places, small interiors hugged by wooden walls, an accumulation of emotions ranging from frustration to anger, to fear finally constituted a full-fledged civic sphere constructed of words, objects and buildings, pushing the villagers into action. In spite of Van der Donck’s impassioned written remonstrance, printed “Representation,” and painted image, the Magistrates at the Hague were slow to act. They spent the next four years passing back and forth extracts of the petition and remonstrance along with a series of proposed solutions through bureaucratic channels to the West India Company’s many departments. Their correspondence generated a mountainous paper trail but few decisions. In the meantime, Van der Donck remained all but hostage in the Netherlands. As he waited, however, Van der Donck’s watercolor solicited in turn various responses that reflected desires to reorient the politics of place back towards a model of descending political authority. To begin with, Van der Donck’s 178 Van der Donck, Vertoogh, 45. 98 watercolor spurred the creation of a visual counter argument, a scene that would become one of the most influential and widely dispersed images of New Amsterdam: the “Visscher View.” The name hides a complex history of circulation, embedded within a series of representations of New Netherland produced by an unknown painter and multiple mapmakers in the Netherlands. Much of this history remains unknown. What is certain, however, is that Nicolaes Visscher, the Dutch printer, engraver, and cartographer, is most likely responsible for the engraved view, and that he based his engraving off a painting that had been produced by someone who had seen Van der Donck’s watercolor and had made a number of subtle but significant alterations. 179 This first image, a pen and watercolor rendering, is called the “prototype view” (Fig. 7). The overall cast of the landscape and the placement of individual buildings are near identical to Van der Donck’s rendition. Only now, the outlines of each building, including those belonging to the company, have solidified into clean distinct lines and sharp corners. Order has replaced instability. The company buildings’ mossy greens have been softened into a cleaner beige and off-white that portrays the recent stonework that Kieft and Stuyvesant had introduced to the village’s Company structures. The Prototype view further departs from Van der Donck’s in its introduction of people to a previously barren landscape. The absence of humans on the land in Van der Donk’s rendering, which had evoked a vital silence in the wake of warfare with an enormous death toll, has been filled in by several groups of people who, though difficult to identify, gather and socialize along the water’s edge and further into the village. 179 Thanks to the painstaking efforts of Joep M. J. de Konig, we now know that Van der Donck’s watercolor preceded the Visscher view. Scholars once believed that the Visscher view was in fact the “original” representation of the village. See Joep M. J. de Koning, “Dating the Visscher, or Prototype, View of New Amsterdam,” De Halve Maen 72 (1999): 47-56. For a dense but ultimately helpful account of this history of engravings and circulations, see Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, Vol. 1, 143-152. 99 Fig. 7: “Prototype View”, 1650-1653, Unknown Artist, [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] This is a village filled with life and well-ordered—even beautiful—buildings, not at all a place in which people would have “huddled” or “skulked” in fear. Then there are the company ships that sail through the harbor. Some of these ships speak to a commercial vibrancy—New Amsterdam is still a place of trade and merchant activity, a place of wealth. The largest belches a mass of smoke from a cannonball shot, tying Dutch commercialism to the Company’s military strength. Native peoples float in the harbor, too, and their canoes point towards the largest of the ship, suggesting both a relation of dependency upon Dutch strength and amicable interactions meant to undercut the violence which Van der Donck had portrayed in his own account. 180 180 For the provenance and circulation of this view, see Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, Vol. 1, 119-121. 100 The Dutch printer Nicolaes Visscher then produced an engraving based upon the “prototype” view, which condensed the frame of vision into one that focuses more closely upon the village itself, but which retains the most significant alterations that the prototype’s creator had made from Van der Donck’s (fig. 4, top). The homes and buildings are still rendered in clean orderly lines, people still mill about along the shore and between the structures, and the water still contains signs of the Company’s presences as well as continuing relations between Europeans and native peoples. Yet given the way in which Visscher condensed the landscape from the prototype to his own engraving, the Visscher view contributes even more to an image of civic vibrancy. It contains a density that neither Van der Donck nor the prototype had portrayed. The buildings are clustered so tightly together that open space is replaced entirely by a series of Dutch places that bespeak a density of human existence on the tip of Manhattan Island—a density that future engravers would draw and expand upon as they crafted a narrative of urban progress that paved over the village’s tragic history of conflict. Such was the case, for example, in the “Restitutio view”, an inset on a map of New Amsterdam produced after the Dutch briefly retook New Netherland from the English on August 24, 1673, just thirty or so years after Visscher’s engraving (Fig. 8, bottom). 181 181 Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, Vol. 1, 152-153. For an excellent account of the “townscape” or “city view” in a North American context, see Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2017), Chapter 1: “Imprinting the Civil,” 31-98. 101 Fig. 8. Top: “Visscher View,” Nicolaes Visscher, 1651-53. Bottom: Restitutio View, Unknown Engraver, 1673. [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] The Visscher view achieved a recognition that Van Der Donck’s watercolor never did, for it circulated the Atlantic as an insert on maps of New Amsterdam, contextualizing the village within visions of Dutch sovereignty over North American lands that spoke not just to a reassertion of regional power, but a newly crafted vision of North America in which Native peoples existed only on the margins of the landscape, and no longer as neighbors. Visscher himself produced the first of these maps, sometime between 1651 and 1655, as part of an Atlas of which no complete copies have survived (Fig. 9). 182 The view of New Amsterdam rests in the bottom right corner of the map, anchoring the broader depiction of European sovereignty over the landscape to the physical locus of New Amsterdam as a Dutch place. A Native man and 182 Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, Vol. 1, 147-148. 102 woman frame the view on each side. They stand with relaxed postures and drape their arms over the top edge of the frame. While the man carries with him a bow and arrows, both figures seem resigned to the presence of this collection of buildings upon the north American landscape. They lock eyes and share knowing glances, perhaps destabilizing the image from within, but their overall stance lends an almost natural quality to this village scape—they appear to assent to this burgeoning village in their midst. 183 And indeed, Visscher’s map is striking in that while Indigenous place names remain, the iconography of Native presences have been pushed to the upper left margins of the frame. Native people, too, could have their towns and villages, but only on the far outskirts of what had now explicitly become European land. This is the image that travelled the Atlantic, setting the terms through which non-residents of New Amsterdam could imagine what Dutch, and more broadly, European occupations of the American landscape looked like in practice. Both the Prototype and Visscher views thus captured Van der Donck’s argument and transmogrified it into something else entirely: a series of images that constructed visions of Dutch power in North America, power to which Native peoples evidently assented even as their physical presence moved evermore to the edges of European territory. This is a far cry from Van der Donck’s insistence upon the deeply mistaken path the Directors of New Netherland had travelled in failing to cultivate the friendship and good will of their Indigenous neighbors, and it was a far cry from his picture of the shifting balance of sovereignty which had begun to write itself upon the New Amsterdam landscape. 183 For representations of Indigenous as part of an early modern cartographic iconography, see especially Mancall, Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018). For a broader and important account of representations of Indigenous, see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 103 Fig. 9: “Visscher Map,” Nicolaes Visscher, 1650-53 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] As these images moved across the Atlantic, the States General formulated a plan by which they would seek to institute in New Amsterdam a municipal government, granting the Commonality a voice in the governing process. As early as May 1650, they circulated a draft of a new set of freedoms and exemptions for the colony in general, and village in particular, by which the governing body would be comprised not only of a Director and “officers and other ministers of justice,” but “competent councilors” as well. This newly constituted governing body, furthermore, was not only to ensure the freedom, dignity, and rights of the West India Company, but also to hear and address “complaints which any one, as well strangers, neighbors of the 104 aforesaid countries as inhabitants thereof, may make in case of privilege, innovation or desuetude of customs, uses, statutes or descents.” 184 The exact parameters of this government remained murky, but the States General gestured towards the consolidation of a community of rights bearing individuals on the tip of Manhattan Island which would extend far beyond the concerns of the Company, and which would balance the dictates of the Company’s Director with the input of citizens. Meanwhile, the Nine Men continued to send petitions to the States General, each successive document deepening their civic consciousness and cohesion as a small representative body of citizens. 185 A group of Dutch and English colonists from Manhattan and the outlying villages insisted in 1653 that they lived in New Amsterdam “on a mutual covenant and contract.” As such, the villagers were dismayed by the establishment of “arbitrary government” among them. “Tis contrary to the first intentions and genuine principles of every well-regulated government,” the colonists insisted, “that one or more men should arrogate themselves by exclusive power to dispose, at will, of the life and property of any individual, and this, by virtue or under pretense of a low or order he, or they, might enact, without consent, knowledge or election of the whole Body, or its agents or representatives.” 186 Law and order could not be enacted without the consent of the whole body politic, or the representatives to whom they had delegated sovereignty. The specific demands that the villagers put forth collided with the States General’s desire to enact a series of changes in New Amsterdam, an older structure of legitimate authority dissolved 184 “Draft of Freedoms and Exemptions for New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 401-405. 185 See, for example, a petition sent in February of 1650, a series of resolutions in August of the same year, again in 1651, and another in December of 1653. NYCD, I: 448; 448-449; 452; 550-552. 186 NYCD, I: 550-552. 105 and a new locus of sovereignty crystalized in a deliberative body, the Burgemeesters and Schepenen, and a space within which they would meet: the Stadt Huys. And so on February 6, 1653, Martin Kriger, Aarent van Hattem, Poulus Leendersen van die Grift, Maximilyanus van Gheel, Allard Anthony, Willem Beeckman and Pieter Wolfertsen all gathered around a table on the second floor of that stone structure which Kieft had commissioned to function as a tavern, a structure whose downstairs wooden supports still bore the hacked indentations of John Underhill’s sword, each but a single index of histories of behaviors that exceeded the practical ability of the Director and Council to control the actions of its residents even within spaces of their own design and management. They sat around that table and announced themselves as a deliberative body: “Their Honors, the Burgomasters and Schepens of this City of New Amsterdam, herewith inform everybody, that they shall hold their regular meetings in the house hitherto called the City tavern, henceforth the City Hall, on Monday mornings from 9 o.c., to hear there all questions of difference between litigants and decide them as best as they can. Let everybody take notice thereof.” 187 And yet, the celebratory moment came with a price. Boosted by their civic awareness and capitalizing upon the heightened identity of New Amsterdam as a place of politics, the villagers and council added one more structure to their landscape: they built a wall. At the very moment that the villagers came into their own as political beings and solidified for themselves a constitution by which they would share in their polity’s sovereignty and power, they sought to define the boundaries of belonging against a backdrop of other peoples who would, from this point forward, be physically barred from entering New Amsterdam except under specific circumstances. The wall would separate the villagers from the threat of “sudden 187 Edmund O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 anno Domini, (from here abbreviated as RNA) Vol. 1 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1897), 49. 106 attack,” a code for both English colonists and Native peoples. Warfare with the Indigenous had not only pushed the villagers to reassess the nature of their government, those villagers had also reassessed their relationship to the Native peoples with whom they shared the landscape. And in spite of voices like that of Van der Donck, who continued to insist upon the construction of peaceful ties with Munsees, the Burgemeesters and Director Stuyvesant attempted to cordon themselves off and erect clearer categories of difference. In the aftermath of the creation of the Court of Burgomasters, Stuyvesant and villagers together passed further ordinances regulating the spatial relationships between villagers and native peoples. First they prohibited the villagers from “holding any manner of intercourse or conversations with the Indians” on the west side of the Hudson River. Then they prohibited the villagers from lodging any Indigenous overnight without the express permission of Director and the council. 188 The building of the wall was to be a collective drama through which all residents of New Amsterdam performed not just their belonging and membership, but their particular station within the community. All residents would be required to offer their labor, either in person or through a suitable delegate. Appended to this ordinance was a new phrase that signaled in no uncertain terms that the location of sovereignty had indeed moved: “Thus resolved and enacted by the Director General and Council in conjunction with the Burgomasters and Schepens in New Amsterdam.” 189 But the ordinance also separated the residents into categories: “Burghers and Inhabitants, together with the Mechanics and Laborers.” The preposition “with” is misleading, for rather than implying equivalence through collaboration, it demarcated degrees of belonging. Only some could claim themselves as “Burghers”, while others found themselves confined to the categories 188 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 200; 228. 189 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 144-145. 107 of mechanic or laborer. The villagers presented two further categories: “the Inferior officers of the Hon company without any exception and the Free Negroes.” The officers were excluded from full belonging by virtue of their position as agents of the West India Company rather than subjects of New Amsterdam; free Blacks were excluded by virtue of their bodies and their skin. And indeed, as the villagers began to clarify the internal and external limits to their citizenry, they, along with Director Stuyvesant, sought to tether the movement of enslaved peoples across the Atlantic to their shores ever more tightly. Together with the West India Company and States General, Stuyvesant and Counicl decided in 1652 that the villagers would be “at liberty to bring in their own ships from the coast of Africa, as many Negroes as they shall have need of.” 190 As the villagers came together and defined themselves as a civic body, they did so against the backdrop of people who would be pushed increasingly to the spatial and political margins of the polity. Black men and women, free and enslaved, would still be kept in a position of movement—across the Atlantic, from one dwelling site to another, between various owners, between degrees of freedom and enslavement. Native people would be prevented from entering New Amsterdam except under specific conditions. In one sense, the category of “Burgher” had begun to coalesce against those of “African” and “Indian.” And yet centering space and material culture permits us to problematize and cast doubt upon those categories, to steal glimpses of paths not taken, and to recapture the contingencies of a process which, in hindsight, can slam into our interpretations of the past with the inevitability of an ocean wave. The mediating power of material culture can disclose to us a world of alternative outcomes that suggest that the construction of such categories of difference between “Europeans” and “Indians” was never inevitable, but fraught and contingent. For even amidst the 190 Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, 127. 108 budding conflict between neighboring indigenous people and the villagers, a group Wiechquaeskecks who had lived further up the Hudson river, arrived at New Amsterdam in the dead of winter, 1641. Mahicans living just below Fort Orange had waged an attack upon them, killing at least seventeen and taking others into captivity. The survivors who had managed to escape fled south through a deep snow and arrived at New Amsterdam embattled, exhausted, and starved. In their state of desperation, they lodged in the villager’s homes for two weeks before setting out to reconstitute their community elsewhere. 191 Those very spaces that, when set aflame, sparked the violent retribution and pushed the villagers to rethink their relationship to their neighbors—those spaces within which the villagers had developed into full political subjects that demanded a voice in the governing of their community, a politicization which ended not simply with the creation of a town hall and a representative body, but with the building of a wall—had in fact housed moments of deep humanity and compassion between these peoples, moments that allow partial glimpses of alternative possibilities in Dutch-Indigenous history. 191 “A Short Account of New Netherland” NYCD, I: 148. 109 III. BOUNDARIES AND EDGES, 1653-1664 Fig. 10 “The Castello Plan,” [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] An image titled Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt, more commonly known as the “Castello Plan,” depicts New Amsterdam in the Summer of 1660 (Fig. 10). The printed version was the final product of an unknown engraver but was based upon an earlier set of drawings made by New Amsterdam surveyor general Jacques Cortelyou (1625-1693). Looking at the print, the first thing that might strike one’s eye is the town’s well-defined boundaries and edges, which lend to the image a stark geometric quality. Each house—there are about three hundred in total—sits atop its own rectangular lot. The edges of the lots demarcate 110 lines of possession and tie together rows, like beads on a string. They frame each block, wreathing well-kept gardens. Clearly defined streets and passageways split the blocks apart even as they tie them into a broader navigable space. The northerly passageways halt at an undisputable border, a great wall that severs the town from the farmland just beyond. The fort, decorated with four ramparts and twelve cannons, leads the eyes down a great roadway towards the upper left part of the Island. This is the town’s main artery: De Breede Wegh at its widest, and De Heere Wegh as it narrows a bit. Both terms designate the road as the broad or grand highway (today’s Broadway). Inside of it stand the church, the Director’s house, the barracks, a storage shed, and a prison. A breeze ripples through the flag of the States General high above the fort’s southwestern bastion and spins the windmill just to its west. A plaza called the Markvelt, or marketplace opens off the fort’s eastern wall (if imaging the image as placed correctly on a map). To the fort’s east, houses rise above Heere Gracht, a canal canopied by three wooden bridges and named after the Heere or Heeren Gracht of Amsterdam. The West India Company’s garden grows on the Island’s southern tip, just above a small strip of land called the “Strand.” Stuyvesant lived in the large stately home on the southeastern corner of that block, next to his brother-in-law, Nicolaes Verlett, and two doors down from his first councilor, Nicasius de Sille. It was just a short walk for Stuyvesant from his home to the fort, where he spent much of his time meeting with his councilors. If instead of continuing north to the fort he followed the water’s edge around to the east, Stuyvesant instead would have reached a strip of buildings just across from the small wooden wharf that began with a home belonging to the Company physician Hans Kierstede and his wife, Sara Kierstede. In the later years of his 111 administration, Sara became a key interpreter for the Hackensack sachem Oratam and a central figure in Stuyvesant’s negotiations with Indigenous peoples. 192 Next to their home stood two buildings owned by the merchant, schepen, and later burgomaster Cornelis Steenwyck, though he lived in a large house at the corner of Bridge and Whitehall, just to the north of the Kierstedes. Next came a warehouse owned by the magistrate Paulus Leendersen van der Grift, the WIC’s Pack House, and another warehouse owned by the merchant and mapmaker Augustine Heermans. If Stuyvesant were to continue his walk along the water’s edge, he would have passed buildings owned by Cornelis van Tienhoven as well as the “Old Church,” which had housed religious services before Kieft commissioned the newer stone structure inside of the fort. The Burgomaster Allard Antony had since made the old church into his home. 193 Finally, if he rounded the corner, took the small wooden bridge over the canal and walked to the edge of the block, he would have found himself standing directly in front of the Stadt Huys. 194 It was here that the Burgomasters and Schepenen met for the first time on a Thursday— February 16, 1653. They sat together and bowed their heads in prayer. After their adorations and thanksgivings, they begged a supplication: “Let Thy law be the light upon our paths and a lantern for our footsteps, that we may never leave the path of justice.” 195 That path of justice now crisscrossed the Island of Manhattan. Authority in New Amsterdam now emanated from two governing bodies and two physical structures: a Director General and his council, who met in the fort, and the Burgomasters and Schepenen, who gathered each week inside of the Stadt Huys. 192 For an extensive discussion of the buildings displayed on the Castello Plan, see Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, II: 209-348. Romney discusses the relationship between Oratam and Sarah Kierstede in detail in New Netherland Connections, 249-269. 193 See Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, II: 263-269 for detailed descriptions of all of the buildings on this block. 194 Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, II: 318-319. 195 RNA, I: 48-49. 112 This particular constitution had emerged from and through the relationships between individual people and the spaces they built and inhabited as they rooted their community and politics in place. Two separate structures now anchored visions of sovereignty to the landscape that were reminiscent of the Netherlands’ decentralized political system. 196 The fort continued its ode to a company town peopled with obedient subjects of the WIC and States General, while the Statd Huys asserted the participation of New Amsterdam’s Burgher citizens, from whom political legitimacy, at least in part, now flowed. The constitutional settlement of 1653 did not put to rest questions of municipal authority and political belonging on Manhattan, but rather inflamed and added to them a new deliberative element and a new political structure upon the island’s landscape. While there is reason enough to trust the “Castello Plan” as a source, it obscures almost a decade of political strife and negotiation between New Amsterdam’s municipal government and Director Stuyvesant, both of whom debated the distribution of political power and authority as they molded their town’s buildings, gardens, and streets. Each neatly ordered block, manicured garden and well-kept road hides a political contest. Yet debates over the physical arrangement of the town were always more than just that, for they raised questions about the multitude of boundaries that New Amsterdam’s burghers sought to erect and contest as they defined the rights and responsibilities 196 For scholarship on the diversified and decentralized political institutions of the Dutch Republic, see especially Marjolein ‘t Hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State: War, Politics, and Finance during the Dutch Revolt ( Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993); J.L Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994); Frijhoff and Marijke Spies eds, Dutch Culture in European Perspective: Hard-Won Unity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): Chapter 2: “The Dutch State and its Political Culture,” 69-138; Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Maarten Prak, Catherina Lis, Jan Lucassen, and Hugo Soly eds., Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2006); Geert H. Janssen, Princely Power in the Dutch Republic: Patronage and William Frederick of Nassau, 1613-64, J.C. Grayson Trans. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008); James D. Tracy, The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572-1588 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). 113 of its residents. These boundaries in particular clarified the relationships that existed within the physical space of New Amsterdam between the categories of citizen and foreigner, free and enslaved, licit and illicit conduct. Meanwhile, the Castello Plan’s great northern palisade signals a different though related set of boundaries: those that protected the Dutch from their English imperial adversaries and tried to keep at a distance the fraught categories of European and Native. These external boundaries defined New Amsterdam as a place amongst places: a distinct geographical and juridical entity recognized by the many groups of people who jockeyed for territorial sovereignty over the North American landscape. Reconstructing the efforts that colonists made to create and police these boundaries as well as the journeys Europeans and Native peoples took in order to build a mutually legible and shared landscape makes clear three things. First, despite their many points of disagreement over the internal working of their community, the white colonists of New Amsterdam found quick common ground on the developing borders between free and unfree, white and nonwhite. Even as they argued over who had the authority to raise funds for municipal works, who counted as a citizen and who had the right to trade on Manhattan Island, all agreed that the brunt of manual labor itself would be carried out by enslaved Africans. These enslaved peoples would decidedly be excluded from the benefits of municipal citizenship. Second, the process of making Manhattan into a viable and well-ordered community and part of a coherent Dutch colony in North America continued to require a degree of collaboration with Native peoples that belied European hostile rhetoric towards the Indigenous “other”. And third, each negotiation over a border or a boundary, internal and external alike, relied upon material and aesthetic practices. Colonists and Natives drew upon material-dependent metaphors and realized shared physical 114 spaces as they negotiated their relationship to one another. In other words, sovereignty, both imperium and dominium, continued to emerge at the intersection of political ideas and aesthetic practices, and through the cooperation of European and Indigenous communities. Taken together, these three points suggest the need to begin to re-think the concept of the sovereign boundary itself in the context of seventeenth-century New Netherland in particular, and colonial North America in general. 197 The external boundaries and borders that colonists erected remained porous, often by design, and demand a more nuanced way of understanding the emotionally and politically complex relationships that Natives and newcomers sustained with one another as they did their best to coinhabit the region that Dutch colonists referred to as New Netherland, and many Natives as Lenapehoking. Perhaps it may be more useful to think of a boundary as a kind of “edge.” We often think that boundaries enclose and separate, “edges act to give shape to things yet also to relate them to their surroundings,” as the philosopher Edward Casey put it. But edges are paradoxical. For all the labor they perform in marking the border between one thing and another, they constitute a space of continuous transition and transformation. They tie together the very things the purport to separate and mark as distinct. They evoke anxiety of the uncertain or fragile. Humans flee from edges for the comforting center of things—inside the fortified village, so to speak. Yet edges are what give centers their defining 197 For boundary disputes in New Netherland in particular, see Sabine Klein, “‘They Have Invaded the Whole River’: Boundary Negotiations in Anglo-Dutch Colonial Discourse,” Early American Studies, 9:2 (2011): 324-347; Jaap Jacobs, “Competing Claims: International Law, Diplomacy, and Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century North America,” in David Ormrod and Gijs Rommelse eds., War, Trade and the State: Anglo-Dutch Conflict, 1652- 89 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2020): 203-229. For scholarship on the concept of the boundary in early America and the Atlantic World, see especially Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: “Empires, Nation States, and the People In Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1994): 815-841; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press: 2000); Herman L. Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” African Studies Review 43 (2000): 101-124; Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions: Challenge Nations of Race and Slavery Between the Boundaries of Land and Sea,” Journal of Social History 47:1 (Fall 2013): 71-100; Alejandra B. Osorio, “Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies: A New Radical History of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire,” Radical History Review 30 (2018): 100-130. 115 characteristics and are therefore essential to the experience of space. While colonists did their best to conduct their lives within the centers of their community, in reality, all of New Netherland constituted something closer to an edge-land that both Natives and Europeans inhabited as they negotiated the contours and equilibrium of their sovereignties over the North American landscape. 198 *** From the outset, Dutch plans to enclose Manhattan Island along a northern border inflamed tensions between New Amsterdam’s two governing bodies. On Monday March 10, 1653, the Burgomasters and Schepens received news from the Directors of the WIC that New Englanders (the report did not specific precisely who or where) were building defensive works and preparing to launch a possible attack. The Burgomasters began their own preparations in turn: they posted guards in “full squads” throughout the town overnight, decided (not for the first, nor last time) to repair and strengthen Fort Amsterdam, and finally, to surround the northern edge of New Amsterdam with a wall, “to draw in time of need all inhabitants behind it and defend as much as possible their persons and goods against attacks.” 199 198 For the concept of the “Edge,” see Edward S. Casey, The World on the Edge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). The quotation is on page xvi. Casey investigates boundaries and borders as types of edges, but I am more inclined to distinguish slightly between the boundary and the edge, as common understanding of the boundary is less flexible than is his own definition. For his discussion of borders and boundaries, see pages 7-25. As I see it, it’s not that the two need to be distinguished from one another completely, or that we should eschew the concept of the boundary entirely for that of the edge. Rather, drawing from the many valences of the “edge” allows us to consider boundaries in a more dynamic and nuanced manner. Hence, the chapter is called “Boundaries and Edges,” rather than “Boundaries or Edges.” 199 RNA, I: 65-66. 116 The following Thursday, the magistrates held a special meeting of the municipal government at the fort. They presented Stuyvesant with a list of townspeople who had pledged contributions towards the defensive effort. 200 It is unclear how they had assembled the list, but one can imagine the town magistrates pulling men aside—one by one or in groups—in taverns, in warehouses, or even calling upon their homes. The assembled men agreed to contribute money, each performing his civic duty to the community, and creating in the process the first extant list of the town’s most affluent residents. Forty-three men in total promised a contribution, amongst whose names can be found some of the families that would continue to shape the history of New Amsterdam and later, New York: Cornelis van Steenwyck, Olof Stevensen, and Wilhelm Beekman contributed 200, 150, and 100 florins respectively. Also on the list was the Dutch poet Jacob Steendam, who had moved to New Amsterdam with his wife Sara around 1650. In total the magistrates had accrued around 5,000 florins. 201 The Burgomasters reassembled the next day to prepare a document requesting formal permission from Stuyvesant and Council to carry out their proposed plan, which called for work to begin first on the palisades, and then to move on to repairing the fort once they had finished the wall. The planned order of projects made clear that the good of the community superseded the Company. Not wanting to take any chances, they also asked Stuyvesant to send delegates to the neighboring New England colonies to attend an upcoming meeting scheduled for the first of April, and to seek assurance of continued good relationships despite the conflict over trade that had broken out between the Dutch Republic and England in 1652. 202 200 For convenience, I will use the word “magistrates” to refer to the Burgomasters and Schepenen of the municipal government. 201 RNA, I: 66-67. For work on Steendam’s New Netherland Poetry, see Danny L. Noorlander, “The Lost Poems of Jacob Steendam,” New York History 100:1 (2019): 75-88. 202 RNA, I: 67-68. The conflict later became known as the First Anglo-Dutch War. For more on this war, see chapter 4. 117 Stuyvesant agreed to send delegates to New England but approved the plan to erect new fortifications only if it commenced “under the supervision and directions of the Director General and Council or their agents.” He appointed “first Councillor Monsieur la Montagne” to oversee with “the deputies from the Commonwealth, that the work is properly carried out.” 203 Within a month of the magistrates’ first meeting, fault lines had emerged between New Amsterdam’s two political bodies. It was in Stuyvesant’s interest to protect the company’s colony: he supported the colonists’ desire to erect new fortifications and to assure continued peaceful relations with their English neighbors to the North. Nonetheless, he maneuvered to uphold his own authority in relation to the commonalty’s chosen representatives, making clear that any proposed work needed to be carried out under his direct oversight. The question of external boundaries intersected with the competition over internal authority from the start. For their own part, the magistrates elected the Schepenens Pieter Wolfertsen van Couwenhoven and Willem Beeckman to supervise the work with La Montagne. 204 Two days later (March 17), the three men sketched out the wall’s specifications: twelve-foot-long palisades, each 18 inches in circumference and sharpened at the top, would mark New Amsterdam’s northern border. Four-foot-high wooden supports would hold the beams in place from behind the wall, and a three-foot-wide ditch would pose an additional impediment for anyone seeking to breach it. The wall required around 180 wooden beams. 205 But the committee soon realized that they would not be able to find anyone willing to carry out their work for less than 40 or 50 florins per beam, a sum that far exceeded the amount of money the city’s residents had pledged. For the time being, they settled on a less costly, though temporary, solution: an 203 RNA, I: 68. 204 RNA, I: 69. 205 RNA, I: 72. 118 oaken fence built from three hundred posts and rails, which the Englishman Thomas Baxter agreed to supply at the price of 20 stivers per post and rail, paid in wampum. Baxter was to deliver the materials to the side of Govert Loockerman’s house within 14 days. 206 As the committee pushed forward, however, Stuyvesant refused to drop the fort’s repair from the agenda and used the occasion to jab at the town’s municipal authorities. He saw his opening with New Amsterdam’s pigs. The fort’s foundations weakened each day, he argued, because pigs rooted around its wooden beams. Yet the fault lied with the magistrates rather than the director— authority over the matter had been “transferred” to the magistrates with the creation of the municipal government (Stuyvesant did not specify by whom). The present state of the fort displayed the municipal government’s failure to uphold their own responsibilities. The Magistrates’ records offer little insight into their reaction to the accusation, but they did hire a herdsman to keep the pigs away from the fort and agreed to build a fence around it as quickly as possible with wooden posts that Stuyvesant promised to provide. 207 By July of 1653, a palisade of sorts stood along the northern side of New Amsterdam. Posts along the Strand, off the East river, joined the fortification to the north. But the fort remained unaddressed. Stuyvesant again requested that the magistrates fulfill their own end of the bargain, both in terms of completing repairs of the fort, and payment of the money they had promised to contribute to the fortifications. But the Magistrates insisted that they had in fact already spent the four to five thousand florins they had promised on the existing fortifications. Furthermore, with the village’s citizenry “exhausted” from completing the previous public works, the magistrates could do little more for the time being. 208 206 RNA, I: 73-74. 207 RNA, I: 78-79. 208 RNA, I: 90. 119 In an initial attempt to meet him halfway, the Burgemeesters requested permission from Stuyvesant to raise money from the citizenry as occasion offered to put towards future improvement of the town’s fortifications. 209 But they had spoken too soon. At a meeting several days later, the magistrates and a handful of specially invited citizens decided that they would not contribute any more money until Stuyvesant removed his excise on wine and beer, which had long remained a point of friction between the Director and the commonalty, who believed they should hold the power to tax themselves as they saw fit. Stuyvesant refused this demand, and the magistrates vowed to contribute no further funds. They washed their hands of blame for any misfortune that might occur due to a lack of adequate defenses. 210 Throughout the initial stages of fortifying New Amsterdam, efforts to demarcate and protect the outer boundaries of the town intersected with and exacerbated unresolved questions about the town’s boundaries of jurisdiction and balance of political authority. In fact, Stuyvesant would continue to use the politics of place to make known his lingering annoyance with the town’s municipal government. As late as March 1655, the Burgomasters and Schepenens of New Amsterdam were hard pressed to enter and leave their own city hall. A large quantity of salt belonging to Cornelis Schut remained there in storage, as it had prior to the building’s assignment to the municipal government. The magistrates issued several warnings to Schut, demanding that he move his salt or pay the city to move it for him. By August 23, the salt still blocked the building. 211 Exasperated with the magistrates’ repeated demands, Schut appealed to the Director General and Council, who fobbed off his request: “since the honorable lords 209 RNA, I: 91. 210 RNA, I: 92-93. Not long after the creation of the municipal government, the magistrates specifically requested that Stuyvesant hand over to them full control over the wine and beer excise. See RNA, I: 145; RNA, I: 93. 211 For more protests, see RNA, Vol. I: 302; 340; 348. 120 directors of the West India Company…have granted the city hall to the burgomasters of this city,” Stuyvesant grumbled, “the high councilors of New Netherland are unable to administer over it.” One cannot but detect a hint of passive-aggression in Stuyvesant’s riposte. 212 But efforts to fortify New Amsterdam and clarify its boundaries also further revealed and entrenched the darkening line between free and enslaved. For all their points of disagreement, Stuyvesant and Council found common ground with the magistrates over who would carry out the majority of manual labor in fortifying the city. Despite the magistrates’ insistence on the commonalty having reached a point of exhaustion, enslaved Africans, rather than Europeans colonists, bore the brunt of the physical burden in a colonial space perpetually short of labor. Both political bodies would return to the question of fortifications several years later when their initial works finally proved unsatisfactory. As they decided how best fix them, they would chart a course that further ensconced the line between free and enslaved, creating a system of punishment that legally and visually enforced associations between Black workers and criminal behavior. 213 By 1656, the northern wall remained in a sad state—a fraction of the great palisade which the town’s inhabitants had originally envisioned. On September 4, Stuyvesant appeared before the Burgomasters and Schepenens to formally request, once again, assistance in encircling the town with a stronger wall. From Stuyvesant’s point of view, the magistrates and the commonalty they 212 Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 32. 213 For the construction of racial hierarchies in the early modern Atlantic that attend in various ways to the intersection of law, government, and the racialized body, see especially Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London, UK: Verso Press, 1994); Sue Peabody, “There are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); Joyce. E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Morgan, Laboring Women (2004); Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Harra eds., Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 121 purported to represent had yet to provide enough support to build adequate defenses. For their own part, Stuyvesant and his Council proposed several means for raising funds, but the magistrates held to their recalcitrance, refusing to approve any new taxes or excises. As with the fort, however, Stuyvesant thus took the opportunity to level a different, though related, complaint. 214 The West India Company had ceded to the Burgomasters and Schepenen in 1653 the right to convey lots within the city. 215 But many of these lots remained too large. Well-to-do burghers had held on to more space than they required either for the pleasure of having a garden or in hopes that the property’s value would increase over time, at which point they would sell it off. Now that New Amsterdam butted up against a northern palisade, underused lots threatened to stall New Amsterdam’s population growth. Stuyvesant argued that he and his council had previously recommended to the magistrates that they conduct a survey of the lots within the town and levy a “reasonable assessment.” This would encourage residents to sell excess land to avoid the added cost of tax, or if they chose to hold on to it, at least to add to the town’s municipal coffers and provide more funds for the construction of defenses and other building projects for the good of the community. 216 Later that week, the Magistrates met to assemble a report explaining to Stuyvesant why they had not enforced the newest imposts, and to resolve to impose “subsidies, which are least burdensome,” to assist with the necessary repairs, on the condition that Stuyvesant formally declare that the funds raised would belong to the city and be dispersed by the Burgomasters. The Magistrates sought to shift the burden, turning to their homeland for the support of historical 214 RNA, I: 145. 215 RNA, I: 145. 216 RNA, II: 161-162. 122 precedent. “And whereas it is the custom in our Fatherland,” wrote the burgomasters, “that the frontier place such as this, whereon the whole country depends, be fortified and strengthened, not at the expense of this city, (since many even like this are unable to defray such ), but from the general revenue; Therefore Burgomasters and Schepens request that you would be pleased to excuse this Commonalty, (in consideration of their extraordinary services and onerous labours expended at their own cost,) from said incurred debts; so that equality may once be obtained and these inhabitants may be encouraged to the greater prosperity of the Commonalty.” 217 Stuyvesant fobbed off the Magistrate’s first demand, arguing that the Burgomasters could offer no evidence of the Director General taking money from their treasury. As for the other, he ignored it completely. All he offered by way of a concession was his “general consent” to any of the magistrates’ efforts to introduce ways of raising revenue from the commonalty. Even so, he was careful to embed a clause within his sentence that rendered the magistrate both grammatically and politically dependent upon the “previous knowledge and consent of the director general and councilors.” 218 Stuyvesant and the magistrates did find some common ground on the matter of housing lots, for they shared a concern over the orderly arrangement and appearance of the community they sought to govern. They hoped to bring about the orderly appearance that the Castello Plan would later depict, but of which their town still fell short. As early as 1647, Stuyvesant and his Council had complained of the many buildings and houses whose lots extended far beyond the survey lines that the WIC’s administrators had set. New Amsterdam’s residents had erected hog pens, fences, and even privies that obstructed the already difficult to navigate streets. In response, Stuyvesant had appointed Lubbert van Dincklage, Paulus Leendersen, and company secretary 217 RNA, II: 163-164. 218 “Reply of Stuyvesant and Councilors to Above Petition,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 117. 123 Tienhoven as street surveyors to “condemn and in future to stop all unsightly and irregular Buildings, Fences, Palisades, Posts, Rails, etc.” 219 Prior to the creation of the town’s municipal government, such surveys might have appeared to pit the authority of the West India Company against the individual initiative of the town’s residents. But the reality was more complex. Within the first two years of their establishment, the Burgomasters and Schepenen began to receive petitions from people who wished to take up residence within New Amsterdam, but who were hard pressed to find available land. The magistrates and Director General easily agreed on the need to conduct a full survey of the town. 220 On November 10, 1655, Stuyvesant approved a formal survey of New Amsterdam to be overseen by one representative of each municipal body: councilor La Montaigne for the Director General, and Allard Antony for the burgomasters. The two men carried out the survey after the new year, and submitted their work to Stuyvesant and his Council in late February, 1656. 221 After voting to approve the survey, Stuyvesant handed over the responsibility of laying out the lots (in other words, implementing the survey and formally requesting town residents to draw in their lots in accordance with the survey lines) to the Magistrates, who would take charge of its execution. 222 219 Laws and Ordinances, 74. For some useful scholarship on the history of urban property mapping and surveying in the early modern world, see Naomi Miller, Mapping the City: The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance (London and New York: Continuum, 2003); Miguel Aguilar-Robledo, “Contested Terrain: The Rise and Decline of Surveying in New Spain, 1500-1800,” Journal of Latin American Geography 8:2 (2009): 23-47; Maïka de Keyser, Iason Jongepier, and Tim Soens, “Consuming Maps and Producing Space: Explaining Regional Variations in the Reception and Agency of Mapmaking in the Low Countries during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” Continuity and Change 29:2 (2014): 209-240; Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 220 RNA, I: 394. 221 RNA, I: 394; “Appointment of Surveyors for New Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 129. For confirmation of the survey, see “Ordinance Confirming the Street Survey of New Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 242. 222 RNA, II: 43. 124 Yet executing the survey proved more challenging than expected and revealed that the commonalty was no less inclined to question the municipal government’s authority and power than they were the Director and Council. New Amsterdam’s property owners were not enthusiastic about adjusting their lots to conform to the boundaries of the survey, and in many cases, continued to build houses, fences, and gates without first consulting the surveyors and street inspectors. 223 Nor were those town dwellers who were fortunate enough to own large lots willing to build homes on the several hundred vacant lots that the survey had turned up. 224 The creation of a municipal government had, in many ways, done little to make New Amsterdam a more governable place. The town’s property-owning class, for all their participation in the formal mechanisms of governance, remained intransigent. The extent to which their lackluster adherence to municipal law reflected their sense of self as political subjects is difficult to assess. Even so, New Amsterdam’s material existence—its roads, lots, and buildings—fed directly into negotiations between those who sought to govern Manhattan Island, and those who sought to build lives for themselves that extended beyond the limitations set by colonial and municipal authorities. Buildings remained a matter of politics, and politics a matter of building. Even as New Amsterdam’s leaders sought to impose clearer boundaries between the edges of lots and streets, Stuyvesant and his Council continued to fret over Manhattan’s physical borders and fortifications. By this point, demarcating New Amsterdam’s boundaries had evolved into a multifaceted problem. On the one hand, defense against imperial and Native enemies or “outsiders” remained a central preoccupation. 225 “The entire world,” bemoaned superintendent of 223 See for example RNA, II: 170-171; 179. 224 RNA, II: 301-303; Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 345-346. 225 For his commission, see “Commission of Jan De Decker as Superintendent of Finances,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 410-411. 125 finances Johan de Deckere in May 1656, “can see and judge that presently the fortress has no defense, and that it can easily be attacked by surprise, and invaded by a dozen men who are aware of its state and condition.” Deckere recommended that the council take inventory of the Company’s fluid assets, especially money, war munitions, and warehouse provisions, as well as assets that might be made available, such as unpaid leases and tenths. Yet on the other hand, the question of physical borders had also begun to take a new direction: marking the boundary between licit and illicit economic freedom, a line that was no-less important to draw in pursuit of creating a well-ordered space. Stuyvesant thus wished to erect another wall along the water not only to protect New Amsterdam “against a jealous or malicious neighbor or Indian,” but to prevent smuggling, marking the border between legal and illegal commerce. 226 He called for the city to be fenced off by a double row of wooden beams, leaving no more than two or three openings that could be closed off at night and monitored throughout the day. 227 Stuyvesant’s primary aim in policing Manhattan’s waterfront was to protect New Amsterdam’s status as the Stapel Recht, a concession steeped in Dutch history that required all ships sailing back to the Netherlands to first anchor and unload their goods for inspection at Manhattan Island. 228 But the question then became who within New Amsterdam would enjoy the benefits of living in New Netherland’s staple town? 226 For work on the history of smuggling in the Atlantic world, see especially Matson, Merchants and Empire (1998); Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003); Kenneth J. Banks, “Official Duplicity: The Illicit Slave Trade in Martinique, 1713-1763,” in Coclanis, The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2005); Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Wim Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600-1800,” in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault eds, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009): 141-180; Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680-1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Koot, Empire at the Periphery (2011). 227 “Resolution to Enclose the City of New Amsterdam with Palisades,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 476. 228 See especially Dennis J. Maika, “Securing the Burgher Right in New Amsterdam: The Struggle for Municipal Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,”. Goodfriend, Revisiting New Netherland (2005): 93-128. 126 Negotiations over New Amsterdam’s physical borders soon collided with the emerging question of municipal citizenship. In late January 1657, the Burgomasters and Schepenen submitted to Stuyvesant and his council a petition to establish a “Burgher Right.” In their petition, the magistrates complained of the many schotsen (small scale transient peddlers) who had taken to practicing a kind of “hit and run” capitalism. Arriving from the Netherlands, they refused to sell their wares in Manhattan, heading directly to Fort Orange and other Dutch colonial outposts and returning as soon as possible to their homeland to sell whatever merchandise they had collected. Not only did these traders ignore Manhattan’s position as New Netherland’s staple market, as article 12 of the Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions had established, but they offered nothing to the community’s common good. The situation had become so absurd, argued the magistrates, that the residents of Manhattan had to purchase goods from Fort Orange that had first come from the Netherlands but were never offered to retailers and residents in New Amsterdam. Given the contributions that New Amsterdam’s burgher class had made to the colony’s growth and defensive efforts against their imperial competitors, the magistrates felt these men had earned the concession of new privileges. “And whereas the burgher right is one of the most foremost privileges of a well-governed city,” they argued, “the petitioners humbly request your honors to be pleased to grant the privilege that no one shall be allowed to keep a store here unless they are known as burghers here in the city,” that “persons who are not settled residents here in the country shall not be allowed to trade at any district hereabout outside this place,” and finally, that “those who come from patria or any other places shall give to this city to reside and carry on a trade here to purchase their citizenship.” 229 229 “Petition for the Establishment of the Burgher Right,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 218-219. 127 Stuyvesant agreed with the petitioners’ logic and suggested that the burgher right be required of all who wished to keep a public shop. Furthermore, he opined, all traders should be required to request the burgher right from the Burgomasters and Schepenen, pay a pre-determined sum, swear an oath of loyalty to the Director General, and “keep fire and light” in their own or rented house as a public shop. Stuyvesant also suggested that such traders lose their burgher right if they left New Amsterdam for any considerable amount of time and be required to purchase it anew once they returned, unless they kept “fire and light” at the place of their residence during their absence. Stuyvesant’s objective was clear: any person who wished to conduct trade in New Amsterdam had to maintain residence and contribute to the town’s material progress. 230 In other words, municipal citizenship had a material dimension. Physical presence in a place of residence grounded residents’ claims to the exercise of the rights that citizenship conferred. 231 Councilor Nicasius De Sille agreed with Stuyvesant and added that the staple right and residency requirement should apply specifically, and only, to the island of Manhattan. But he raised a question, too: whether the staple right itself should belong to the West India Company, or the city of New Amsterdam? De Sille pointed out that the 9 th article of Dordrecht, had granted the first staple right in 1299 specifically to the city. He further added that the schotsen should not be allowed to trade to the north or south of Manhattan before they had held a shop on the Island for at least one month. 232 230 “Opinion of the Director General on the Foregoing Petition,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 219-221. 231 For the concept of citizenship in the early modern Atlantic, see in particular James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Keechang Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Andrew Gordon and Trevor Stuck, “Citizenship Beyond the State: Thinking with Early Modern Citizenship in the Contemporary World,” Citizenship Studies 11:2 (2007): 117-133; Maarten Prak, Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000-1789 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 232 “Opinion of Councilor De Sille on the Foregoing Petition,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 221-222. 128 Stuyvesant and Council posted the ordinance on January 30, 1657. The burghers of New Amsterdam had fulfilled their civic obligations, supporting and sustaining the town’s defense amidst their conflict with their English neighbors, and in the “sad and unexpected encounters with the naturellen,” and as the “principal frontier and capital,” were subject to greater burdens than those living elsewhere in New Netherland. Furthermore, the town’s inhabitants had been repeatedly troubled by the schotsen who took “the bread out of the mouths of the good burghers and resident inhabitants, without being subject, like the burghers and settled inhabitants, in time of peace or war, to any trouble, expenses, labor, guard duty or watches.” The burghers deserved to be differentiated in their privileges by virtue of their status as citizens. From this point forward, any traders who came to New Netherland would need to keep an open store within a rented or owned house or room “within [emphasis added] the gates and walls of this city before transporting and selling their merchandise elsewhere, throughout New Netherland. The walls of New Amsterdam, realized or still in planning, thus became something more than a defensive barrier. They marked the borders of belonging and citizenship of a bounded and protected community of rights-bearing individuals. By taking an oath of loyalty and performing civic obligations like paying taxes and performing guard and watch duty, traders would “bound themselves by subscription or promise of oath to the supreme government of the director general and councilors.” 233 The order also established two levels of citizenship within New Amsterdam, as was customary in the old city of Amsterdam. The great burgher right would require payment of 50 guilders and qualify its admitted members to hold civic office and be exempt from guard duty for one year and six weeks. Furthermore, those who held the great burgher right could only be tried 233 “Ordinance Establishing a Small and Great Burgher Right in New Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 223-224. 129 in court by their peers. 234 The second was the lesser, or common burgher right, though Stuyvesant offered few details as to what this meant. The Burgomasters and Schepenen thanked Stuyvesant for acquiescing to their request, but asked that he elaborate further on who, exactly, would belong to the two classes of citizenship, and requested that he confer on the office of schout, burgomaster, and schepenen [both those individuals who formerly and presently filled these positions] as well as their descendants the privilege of the great burgher right. 235 Stuyvesant clarified that all those who had served or currently did serve in the higher or upper administration of the colony and their male descendants would automatically hold the great burgher right. Furthermore, such men would not lose their citizenship status by an extended absence or failing to keep fire and light within the city. All others who wished to enjoy the great burgher right would have to petition the Burgomasters and Schepenen and pay a fee of fifty guilders. All born within the city or who had resided and kept fire and light within it for one year and six weeks, or had married or would thereafter marry a native-born daughter of a burgher, would be eligible to apply for the small burgher right and pay a fee of 20 guilders. Furthermore, this lower tier of citizenship would be required of any person who wished to keep a shop or carry out business within the town or jurisdiction of New Amsterdam. Servants of the West India Company would remain exempt from the requirement to carry out their crafts. Finally, the Burgomasters and Schepenen would manage the money raised by the payment of these admission fees for the good of the city. 236 In establishing these levels, Stuyvesant and Council 234 “Ordinance Establishing a Small and Great Burgher Right in New Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 223-224. 235 “Petition Relating to the Foregoing Ordinance,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 229. 236 “Ordinance Concerning Eligibility for the Small and Great Burgher Right,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 226- 228. 130 helped to differentiate an already developing hierarchy of belonging based upon one’s economic and gendered status. Racial status was omitted, though implied, nonetheless. But not even the Burgher Right put to rest negotiations over the balance of power between the WIC and New Amsterdam’s citizens. Animosity between the two bodies remained, and both the Director General and Municipal government continued to wage their competition by invoking the politics of place. In January of 1658, for example, as was by now a regular occurrence, the Burgomasters and Schepenen gathered in the Stadt Huys to nominate in double their members for the following year. But when he received the list of nominated individuals, Stuyvesant vetoed the entire process because it had not taken place “in the presence of the schout,” the Director’s representative on “the bench.” 237 The Magistrates would have to redo their nomination procedure under the WIC’s watchful gaze. Stuyvesant sought to undercut the total independence of the municipal government that their building embodied by ensuring that his physical and legal presence would be felt through his representative. The Burgomasters carried out the nomination once more as requested, but Stuyvesant this time took issue with a report he received from his schout that the magistrates had openly refused to nominate any Company employees, an attitude that, in Stuyvesant’s view, “nullifies and opposes [his] favor of the great burgher right.” The magistrates treaded lightly, insisting that the Company’s servants were already sufficiently busy with their own responsibilities that they had no time to oversee the city’s affairs. 238 237 “Nomination of the Burgomasters and Schepenen of New Amsterdam for the Ensuing Year,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658, 380-381. “Veto of the Foregoing Nomination,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658, 381-382. 238 “Order for the Burgomasters and Schepenen to Explain why they had not Nominated a Company Servant,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658, 384-385; “Answer to the Foregoing Order,” “Order for the Burgomasters and Schepenen to Explain why they had not Nominated a Company Servant,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658, 385. 131 Furthermore, New Amsterdam’s burgher-merchants sought greater concessions from Stuyvesant for freedom of domestic and foreign trade. They couched their plea in terms no less material in nature. In September, thirty merchants submitted a petition to the Director, which began almost opposite to the remonstrance that van der Donck had written on their behalf just five years earlier. Instead of critiquing New Amsterdam’s sad physical state, the merchants opened their petition by admiring the “laudable” direction in which Stuyvesant had since led the community, evidenced by the “prestigious buildings…admired by anyone who frequented this place during that short time, and who still frequents it.” They praised the Director’s willingness to allow the English tobacco trade to continue with the Dutch, despite the global conflict in which the two nations had become entangled. 239 This trade had “stimulated and still encourages many to decorate this city with lofty and elegant buildings, even such that surpass the neighboring place.” As such, the merchants asked Stuyvesant to permit them to trade domestically produced clapboards, pipes, staves, boards, planks and grains for foreign goods from “places as are in alliance with the high and mighty lords States General and the United Netherlands.” In their final plea, they maintained that they sought only the flourishing of their community, a “just-now-budding place” in which town residents “engaged with family and honorable dwelling, each according to his situation.” 240 The Burgomasters approved the merchants’ petition, and passed it along to Stuyvesant with a note indicating their own support, as well. 241 Ever the good company representative, Stuyvesant promised to pass the petition up the chain of authority for the WIC to review and decide further upon. In the meantime, however, 239 See chapter 4. 240 “Petition of Merchants of New Amsterdam for Permission to Trade with Foreign Countries within the Limits of the Company’s Charter,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 540-543. 241 “Petition of the Burgomasters and Schepenen of New Amsterdam in Support of the Merchants’ Request,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 543. 132 he promised to support any endeavors the merchants wished to undertake along the lines they laid out in their petition, so long as they fell within the boundaries of the Company’s charter. 242 In practice, however, the Burgher Right and Stuyvesant’s attempts to accommodate the city’s merchants failed to curb illicit trading. Administrative and juridical procedures required material reinforcement. On August 15, 1658, Stuyvesant once again raised the issue of enclosing New Amsterdam at the riverside and at last completing the stone wall around the fort. Along with funds which he expected to obtain from the burgomasters, Stuyvesant proposed that the government contract out the work to whoever proved willing to carry it out for the least amount of money. He also suggested that work commence on both the wall and fort simultaneously. Councilor De Sille agreed with Stuyvesant, adding that the Company’s enslaved Africans could carry out the necessary work on the Fort. Deckere, however, held off on voicing his opinion, and promised to deliver his recommendations at the following council meeting. 243 In Deckere’s view, the question was not whether the work was necessary, but how best to see it done. He disagreed with Stuyvesant on contracting the work out to the lowest bidder, not least because of the “meagerness of the treasury.” Rather, the government should hire laborers only to carry out whatever work cannot be done by the company’s enslaved peoples. In his opinion, “to contract out the cutting, felling, and placing of some thousands of palisades, which fits the Negroes as the sword fits the soldier, is in my opinion improper.” If the government did not wish to make use of their enslaved workers, why did they hire people at 30 florins per month to supervise them? Deckere further suggested that the work commence one project at a time, but if Stuyvesant and the other council members insisted on working on both the palisade and the fort 242 “Order Referring Said Petitioners to the Directors at Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 544. 243 “Proposal of the Director General to Enclose the City at the Riverside and to Complete the Stone Wall of the Fort,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 521-522. 133 at the same time, then the “Negroes could be divided: the 8 needed for the fort, the rest used for cutting the palisades.” Deckere concluded his recommendations with a warning: the burghers of New Amsterdam would quickly anger if they saw “that the Negroes are spared and [they are] burdened.” 244 Deckere’s comment illuminates Stuyvesant’s own complaints over the inability to “find a worker for a reasonable daily wage” upon the “dissolute or fancied or persuaded freedom in a (as some claim) new and free land.” 245 These comments highlight that New Amsterdam’s residents had by this point come to construct their identity as burghers on the backs of enslaved peoples. The comments recalled the anonymous 1643 engraving that depicted enslaved Africans physically supporting the foundations of New Amsterdam. 246 A decade and a half after the image had begun to circulate, New Amsterdam’s residents had called for and established a system of municipal citizenship that stood directly in contradistinction to and took shape in no small part through visual reference to its polar opposite. The definition of free citizenship hinged upon the visual display of unfreedom. In fact, the very act of colonization depended upon the labor of enslaved Africans, without whom the material progress to which the merchants had referred in their petition would never have been possible. When, for example, the Director and Council determined to establish a new village in March of 1658 on the northern part of Manhattan Island, they promised to assist the village inhabitants with the company’s enslaved Africans, who would be tasked with building a wagon road connecting the new community to New Amsterdam. 247 Similarly, New Amsterdam’s elites would turn to and rely upon the service of Africans as they 244 “Remarks by Councilor De Deckere on the Proposals Submitted by the Director General,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 525-528. 245 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 136. 246 See chapter 2, FN 111-113. 247 “Privileges Granted to Colonists Willing to Settle in a New Village on Manhattan,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 402-404. 134 sought to protect their territory from the resistance of Native peoples who pushed back against the increasing presence of Europeans in their ancestral homeland. 248 But even as they relied upon enslaved labor, New Amsterdam’s elite employed visual strategies that overtime reinforced the association of Africans and criminal behavior. The Director General and Burgomasters made a habit of punishing recalcitrant employees by assigning them to work alongside the company’s enslaved peoples without pay. To this they added the practice of first branding criminals. On April 15, 1658, for example, Stuyvesant and Council sentenced a Company soldier who had fled from the garrison to two years of labor alongside the “Company’s Negroes.” First, however, they decided that he “have a hole cut in each ear with a glowing awl.” Likewise, On July 13, 1658, Stuyvesant’s council sentenced a sailor named Claes Michielsen to be whipped and marked by puncturing his ear with an awl, before laboring “with the Company’s Negroes” for two years (though councilor Tonneman argued that one year would suffice). 249 By doing so, New Amsterdam’s elite shaped a visual landscape that made legible criminal behavior through marked bodies. More so, the continual attachment of marked bodies to the labor of enslaved Africans pushed African peoples ever more towards the margins of belonging on Manhattan Island. These visual strategies supported Deckere’s warning that New Amsterdam’s residents would not tolerate being forced to work if they witnessed enslaved peoples sitting idle. Both speak to the deep entanglement of visual practice and the construction of belonging and exclusion within New Amsterdam. By 1660, the residents of New Amsterdam had probably made Manhattan Island into something akin to the well-ordered place that the Castello Plan depicted. They had erected 248 See section three, bellow. 249 “Sentence of Nicolaes Albertsen,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 447-448; “Votes of the Councilors Regarding the Punishment of Claes Michielsen, Sailor,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 501-502. 135 palisades along the northern edge of the town and enclosed Manhattan along the water’s edge. Both physical barriers signaled Stuyvesant’s desires to enforce New Amsterdam’s borders against the pretensions of Native and European enemies and to police the ever-fluid boundary between legal and illegal trading. They probably managed to clear some of the streets of refuse and unsanctioned structures, too. But reconstructing the process by which some of New Amsterdam’s residents sought to mold their community suggests that even in the summer of 1660, the Castello Plan represented more an aspiration than a reality. The image’s empty streets hid a decade of competitions over authority and jurisdiction, rights and obligations, which the town’s human inhabitants had waged against one another. Efforts to define the contours of belonging and authority did not simply run parallel to the desire to mold the town into an aesthetically rational space. The two endeavors were deeply imbricated with one another. The entanglement of politics and aesthetics ran deep enough to shape the course that Manhattan’s residents chose to take in their negotiations. Both Stuyvesant and the burgomasters used the island’s physical canvass as fodder for their complaints against one another. For all their disagreement over the precise boundary between the authority of the Director and that of the municipal government, however, Stuyvesant and the burgomasters increasingly agreed that the material and political progress of Manhattan would rest atop the backs of the enslaved. But even as they wrung their hands over the appearance and political character of their town on the tip of Manhattan island, New Amsterdam’s European residents concerned themselves no less with matters external to their burgeoning community. As their near-continuous discussion of walls and palisades suggest, Stuyvesant and the Burgomasters remained committed to protecting their 136 colony’s fragile edges from the aspirations of their most vociferous imperial competitors: the English. *** In the eyes of the Dutch West India Company, New Netherland’s territory occupied the entire region between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers. The Dutch had secured these boundaries through exploration, mapping, land purchases from Native peoples, the erection of forts, and wooden boundary markers. The forts and boundary markers formed what the WIC considered a “firm and irrefragable boundary.” 250 The forts themselves had “closed” and “appropriated” the territory’s rivers and surrounding lands while the boundary markers that bore the arms of the States General signaled to other nations that the Dutch Republic “owned and possessed” the territory. 251 But in practice these boundaries remained porous. 252 As early as 1635, English colonists broke off from Massachusetts bay and began to settle within New Netherland’s borders, first with a “trading house and plantation” above Fort Hope, which stood about 20 or 21 leagues up the Connecticut River, where present day Springfield lies. The following year, the Puritans Thomas Hooker, Samuel Jones, and the Massachusetts Bay magistrate John Haynes led roughly one hundred colonists to settle a new town just north of the Fort itself, which they initially called Newtown, but renamed Hartford (or “Hertfoort,” as the Dutch spelled it). As they moved into 250 “Description of the Boundaries of New Netherland,” NYCD, I:542-546. 251 “Memoir of the English Encroachments on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 564-567. 252 For boundaries in early America, see FN 188. 137 Dutch territory and came across a wooden boundary marker, the English colonists tore down the coat of arms affixed to it and carved “a buffoon’s face in their stead.” 253 The English may have disagreed with the Dutch over the legality of their claims, but both groups of colonists occupied a world of shared symbols. 254 As they defaced the boundary markers and moved deeper into territory that the Dutch Republic claimed as their own, sovereignty, material culture, and the politics of place bled into one another. As Stuyvesant later claimed in 1649, the English had carried out these actions “contrary to all public law.” 255 In 1650, Stuyvesant travelled to Hartford to meet with commissioners appointed on behalf of Connecticut to establish a provisional boundary between the two colonies. The group of men agreed upon a mainland boundary line somewhere between the English villages of Stamford and Greenwich, and a boundary on Long Island at Oyster Bay. These provisional agreements had to be ratified by “the principals on both sides,” meaning the States General for the Dutch and Parliament for the English. For all their disagreement over the precise extent of their respective territories, however, (and just as with New Amsterdam’s internal factions), the Dutch and English easily found common ground around the emerging boundary between European and Native “other.” After arguing over the precise borders of their colonies, the men turned to the possibility of forming a “neighborly union in form of a league or guarantee against the offensive insolence and arrogance of the Barbarians and Natives.” 256 The English were just as enthusiastic as the Dutch about the prospect of a defensive union, though the two parties could not agree on how much 253 “Memoir of the English Encroachments on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 564-567. 254 See especially Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 255 “Description of the Boundaries of New Netherland,” NYCD, I:542-546. 256 “Extract from the dispatch of Petrus Stuyvesant…,” NYCD, I: 548-549. 138 each would contribute to the shared effort, and in turn, how much of a say in the union’s policies each group would enjoy. Stuyvesant and the commissioners decided to table the matter for future discussion. All agreed, however, on the need for such a union to prevent Native peoples from “attempting anything against either the one or the other Nation,” or more specifically, “to reduce the insolence of the Mohawks,” as Stuyvesant put it. 257 Yet four years after agreeing upon their provisional boundary, the English showed little inclination to respect Dutch colonial borders. English colonists found a wealth of opportunity in England’s Civil War and Republican government, which provided fodder for misdirection. With countless moving parts in the metropole, English colonial officials could look the other way as their subjects violated the borders between supposedly Dutch and English territory and blame the delay in ratifying the 1650 boundary on their imperial administrators. These imperial functionaries must have known well that the WIC and States General would find the experience of negotiating “with their sovereigns,” as they suggested they do, just as bewildering an experience as they themselves often did. 258 257 “Extract from the dispatch of Petrus Stuyvesant…,” NYCD, I: 549. For European relations with Mohawks in particular, see Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Some of Them…Would Always Have a Minister with Them’: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683-1719,” American Indian Quarterly 16:4 (1992): 471-484; Timothy J. Shannon, “ Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53:1 (1996): 13-42; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Elbourne, “Family Politics and Anglo-Mohawk Diplomacy: The Brant Family in Imperial Context,” Journalism of Colonialism and Colonial History 6:3 (Winter 2005); Audra Simpson, “Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief,” Wicazo Sa Review 24:2 (2009): 105-129; Tom Arne Mitrød, “The Flemish Bastard and the Former Indians: Métis and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New York,” American Indian Quarterly 34:1 (Winter 2010): 83-108; Susan M. Hill, The Clay We are Made of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2017); Erin B. Kramer, “‘The Entire Trade to Themselves’: Contested Authority, Intimate Exchanges, and the Political Economy of the Upper Hudson River Region, 1626-1713,” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018). 258 “Memoir of the English Encroachments on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 564-567. Carla Pestana has demonstrated how political turmoil throughout this period in the English metropole provided colonists and colonial officials with opportunities to assert their own autonomy in North America, with little complaint from their higher ups back home. See Carla G. Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 139 In September of 1654, the States General took this course, and forwarded a general description of the boundaries, two letters from Stuyvesant, and a figurative map to Hieronymous van Beverningh, Willem Nieuport, and Allard Pieter van Jongestall, their ambassadors at Westminster. 259 At the time, the ambassadors were hard at work negotiating a peace settlement to the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654). 260 Ambassadors Beverningh and Nieuport responded the following month, assuring the States General that they would seek formal recognition of the boundary from Parliament, but urged patience, the “Lords of the Council being, either through the uncertainty of their position…or in consequence of their continual occupation in Parliament,” slow to respond. 261 In December, the ambassadors wrote once more to express their concern that despite the documentation which the States General had sent, they did not have adequate proof of their right of original possession. Nor had they been able to confirm with the English any sort of agreement between Stuyvesant and the Hartford commissioners in 1650. In other words, the ambassadors needed to more proof. 262 Crucially, in responding to their ambassadors, the States General placed the burden of proof not on Dutch-made maps or land deeds, but on Native oral history. In responding to the question of how the Dutch could prove that they had colonized New Netherland prior to the English, the States General recounted that the region had been first “discovered” by Henry Hudson, who arrived on behalf of the East India Company in 1609. “Natives or Indians,” wrote the States General, “on his first arriving there, regarded the ship with mighty wonder and looked upon it as a Sea monster, declaring that such a ship or people had never before been there.” As for the 259 “States General to the Ambassadors in England,” NYCD, I: 557. 260 See Chapter 4. 261 “Ambassadors Beverningk and Nieupoort to the States General,” NYCD, I: 557-558. 262 “Ambassadors Beverningk and Nieupoort to Secretary Ruysch,” NYCD, I: 559-560. 140 provisional boundary, Stuyvesant’s letter dated November 26, 1650, would have to suffice. 263 Even as the Dutch sought to find common ground with their English enemies to enforce the all- too-fluid boundaries between European and Indigenous, Dutch claims to the North American landscape continued to hinge upon Indigenous knowledge. By late May of 1655, the West India Company and States General had yet to receive any further news from their ambassadors. 264 The States General made several more attempts to contact them over the following months. Nieuport did not respond until the last day of 1655 (the letter arrived at the Hague on January 6, 1656), but made no mention of the provisional boundary. Instead, he wrote bearing news that had reached him by way of some Swedish soldiers travelling on a Dutch ship forced into Plymouth’s port on account of bad weather. New Netherland found itself hemmed in not only by the English Colonists to the north, but to Swedish and English colonists to the south, too. 265 The Swedes had founded their own trading company (the Swedish South Company) in 1626 with a mandate similar to the other European trading companies: to establish colonies between Florida and Newfoundland for the purpose of trade. From early on, however, the Swedes set their sights on the Delaware River, which the Dutch claimed as part of New Netherland. The connections between the Dutch West India Company and Swedish South Company were many, however: the Flemish/Dutch merchant Samuel Blommaert was both a director of the WIC and the Swedish South Company. Blommaert played a key role in outfitting Peter Minuit’s 1637 expedition to the Delaware on behalf of Queen Christina after his tenure as Director of New Netherland, an endeavor that had infuriated Willem Kieft at the time. By 1638, the Swedes had 263 “Memoir of the English Encroachments on New Netherland,” NYCD, I: 564-567. 264 “Chamber at Amsterdam to the States General,” NYCD, I: 573. 265 “Ambassador Nieupoort to the States General,” NYCD, I:578. 141 built Fort Christina near present day Wilmington, and nearly six hundred Swedes, Finns, Dutch, Germans and Danes inhabited the area in the following years. The Swedes had only further exacerbated tensions with the Dutch in 1654 when their acting Governor Johan Risingh led a contingent of soldiers to capture the Dutch Fort Casimir, which they promptly renamed Trinity (Trefaldigheten). 266 In 1655, Stuyvesant (supposedly acting on the WIC’s instructions) had ordered soldiers of the West India Company to evict Risingh and the Swedish garrisons from their two forts on the Delaware River. Stuyvesant had then sent Risingh back to Europe with a skipper who had instructions to land Risingh in either England or France. Stuyvesant incorporated the colonists of New Sweden under the sovereign authority of New Netherland, reinforcing what the Dutch understood to be prior claims to the region which the Swedes had infringed upon when taking up residence along the river. 267 This is the news that Nieuport had written to enquire about. When the States General asked the WIC about the conflict, members of the Amsterdam Chamber responded that they had indeed instructed Stuyvesant to follow this course of action, and defended their decision as a response to the Swedish crown having contravened the “laws of nations” when claiming Fort Casimir as their own in May of 1654. Though they clarified that they themselves had sent the soldiers, rather than Stuyvesant, aboard the ship the Waeg which they had chartered from the Burgomasters of the city of Amsterdam. 268 The West India Company then prepared a report to which they appended documentary evidence detailing the history of Dutch claims to the South (or Delaware) River, Swedish violations of Dutch sovereignty, and Dutch attempts to reclaim possession of their territory. 266 For Kieft’s reaction, see Chapter 1. For scholarship on New Sweden, see FN 55. 267 “Ambassador Nieupoort to the States General,” NYCD, I:578. For Stuyvesant’s account and his assistance on having carried out the WIC’s instructions, see “Ambassador Nieupoort to the States General,” NYCD, I:582. 268 “Chamber at Amsterdam to the States General,” NYCD, I: 583. 142 As with similar accounts, the report began with a history of Dutch claims told as a series of building projects. The WIC had “taken possession” in the year 1626 and built two fortresses: Fort Nassau, approximately sixteen leagues up the river on the east bank, and “Bevers reede” down river on the west bank near the Schuylkil. The company had systematically purchased the surrounding land from Native peoples so that, as “first discoverers and possessors,” they may “settle” the river more peacefully and with “greater right.” And yet the Swedes, led by former New Netherland director Peter Minuit (to add insult to injury) erected Fort Christina as a counterclaim to the territory, five or six leagues below Fort Nassau, actions that Willem Kieft had vigorously opposed during his tenure as the colony’s director. The Swedes consequently ignored Kieft’s protests and continued to build a second and third fort on the South River, the latter of which Swedish Governor Johann Printz had even acknowledged as being placed there “for the purpose of shutting up the river.” 269 The Swedes then sought to protect the landscape they claimed as their own by prohibiting any Dutch buildings or farms between the WIC’s own fort, Bevers Reede, and the Swedish forts, going so far as to destroy the houses and gardens that Dutch colonists had already built and laid out. This time they drew a rebuke from then newly appointed Director Stuyvesant. So, at the same time that Stuyvesant sought to clarify the northeastern boundary that separated Connecticut from New Netherland, he found himself entangled in a boundary dispute to the south, as well. Holding to his belief in the Dutch right of original possession and following common practice, Stuyvesant demanded evidence that the Swedes had purchased from the Dutch the lands on which they had erected buildings, or at the very least, evidence that Natives had conveyed it to them. According to Stuyvesant, the Swedish governor shot back a curt note that the deeds of 269 “Deduction or Clear and Precise Account of the Condition of the South river,” NYCD, I: 587-588. 143 purchase and conveyance were now located in Stockholm and thus inaccessible, but that he had seen them in person before they were sent home. 270 After receiving this last round of protests, the Swedish governor had apparently tried to shore up his position by purchasing the land around their settlements from a sachem named Waspangzewan. But the sachem refused to work with the Swedes who had for so long occupied the territory without reciprocating in turn. When word of the failed negotiation reached him, Stuyvesant requested the presence of all the sachems living along the South River to ask if any of them had sold land to the Swedish crown. The sachems denied having done so. The only land any of them had sold was the plot atop which Fort Christina stood, and a garden for planting tobacco. Stuyvesant ordered Fort Nassau to be razed, and a new fort (Casimir) built just one league from Fort Christina to better secure Dutch claims to the South River. This final action proved sufficient to convince Governor Printz to agree to a temporary accord with Stuyvesant, that the Swedes and Dutch would live as “good friends and allies” by maintaining “neighborly friendship and correspondence.” 271 Perhaps Stuyvesant would have felt satisfied enough to leave the matter there, had nothing further transpired. The Swedish colonists themselves, however, pressed the matter further. Feeling that they had been poorly cared for, the colonists wrote to Stuyvesant requesting that the West India Company take them under their care and guardianship, in exchange for which they would assume the identity of subjects of the Dutch Republic. Rather than accepting what was undoubtably a tempting offer, Stuyvesant followed the diplomatic path and declined. But instead of returning the civility, newly appointed Swedish Governor Risingh arrived in 1654 with more colonists, and forcibly assumed control of the Dutch fort Casimir. In the process he stripped the soldiers and 270 “Deduction or Clear and Precise Account of the Condition of the South river,” NYCD, I: 589. 271 “Deduction or Clear and Precise Account of the Condition of the South river,” NYCD, I: 589-590. 144 inhabitants of their arms and forced the residents to swear oaths of allegiance to the Swedish Governor. 272 In turn, Stuyvesant contextualized and reframed the news that Ambassador Nieupoort had received from Governor Risingh. In reclaiming Fort Casimir on September 1, 1655, the Dutch had in fact redressed a series of wrongs which the Swedes had carried out against Dutch sovereign authority. The Dutch had not committed a new injustice of their own. The question thus became what to do with the reacquired territory, now peopled with a mix of Dutch, Swedish, and other European colonists, and under the jurisdiction of the Dutch Republic. In dialogue with the Wiest India Company, on February 12, 1656, the Vroedschap of Amsterdam appointed six members of the Common Council to a committee to answer this question. 273 On the one hand, the committee’s deliberations formed one part of the broader effort to clarify the boundaries and restructure the administration of New Netherland: the States General formally ratified the Hartford Treaty on February 22, 1656. 274 At the same time, however, the decision they made reflected New Netherland’s position as just one piece of an intricate and flexible “web of empire” that Dutch officials stitched together from their territorial possessions across the globe. 275 Not only did the Dutch wish to secure their North American possessions for their own sake, but they also saw the reacquired territory as a potential solution to the disruptions in their supply chain from the Baltic amidst the Second Northern War (1655-1660), in which they also found themselves on opposite sides from the Swedish. 276 272 “Deduction or Clear and Precise Account of the Condition of the South river,” NYCD, I: 591. 273 “Resolution of the Common Council of the City of Amsterdam,” NYCD, I: 609. 274 “Ratification of the Treaty of Hartford by the States General,” NYCD, I: 611-612. 275 I am borrowing the metaphor of a “web” from Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). 276 Steward Oakley, War and Peace in the Baltic, 1590-1790 (London, UK: Routledge Press, 1992): See chapter 6-7; Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558-1772 (London, UK: Routledge Press, 2000): See chapter 7. 145 A selling point for securing the Delaware River was Amsterdam merchants’ and administrators’ hopes that “all the products that come at present from the Baltic, masts inclusive, could be found and raised in New Netherland.” Given these considerations, the Common Council of Amsterdam authorized the city’s Burgomasters to enter into negotiations with the Amsterdam chamber of the West India Company to assume direct control of the newly reacquired land along the Delaware River, in particular that which surrounded Fort Casimir. 277 The city of Amsterdam would hold the territory as a colony within New Netherland called Nieuw Amstel, though ultimate sovereignty remained vested in the West India Company by virtue of the States General. 278 The local and global thus intermingled within a fluid Atlantic space. But removing the Swedish Crown from the Delaware did little to allay their anxiety, for the Dutch increasingly felt hemmed in by English colonists. There was still the northern border to fret over, for English colonists had begun in 1654 just to the North of New Amsterdam in a “new plantation at Westchester.” 279 Stuyvesant and his Council feared not just that this English community offered safe harbor for Dutch fugitives, undercutting their efforts to uphold Dutch law across the North American landscape, but also that its chief officer, a Lieutenant named Thomas Wheeler, had allied with Munsees against New Amsterdam. 280 On March 6, 1656, Stuyvesant commissioned Captain Drederick de Conick, Lieutenant Brian Nuton, and Lord Fiscal Tienhoven to lead a party of soldiers to Westchester, which they continued to refer to as Vreedlandt, to “occupy the houses of the English who have settled there on the honorable 277 “Resolution of the Common Council of the City of Amsterdam,” NYCD, I: 614. 278 “Agreement between the West India Company and the City of Amsterdam Respecting a Colonie on the Delaware River,” NYCD, I: 629-630 279 “Paper Presented to the Council Concerning Relations with the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 205. 280 “Commission of Captain De Coninck for Operations in Westchester,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 258. 146 Company’s land, and to order them to depart with all their moveable goods and livestock.” Stuyvesant instructed the soldiers to destroy the English houses that stood on Dutch territory and to return the most prominent of the criminals who had fled there. 281 De Coninck, Nuton, and Tienhoven did as they were instructed, and imprisoned their captives aboard the ship de Waagh. Stuyvesant then ordered Tienhoven to bring legal proceedings against any captives who had previously sworn an oath of allegiance to the government of the Dutch Republic and broken their word by absconding to supposedly English territory. 282 Rather than move elsewhere, Wheeler and several other English colonists chose to submit themselves “to the government of New Netherland as good subjects,” after which Stuyvesant commissioned Wheeler to act as a Dutch commander at Vreedlant. 283 With the Swedes out of the way to the South, the Dutch turned to yet another English boundary—that of Maryland—which also threatened undermine New Netherland’s status as a discreet geographical and juridical space. 284 The issue came to a head several years after the expedition to Westchester. In May of 1659, Nieuw Amstel’s top administrator, Vice-Director Jacob Alrichs, wrote to Stuyvesant of “strange rumors that the English are claiming ownership of this river or territory.” 285 The English themselves confirmed these rumors in June 1659, when several fugitives of New Netherland fled into hiding somewhere in Maryland. Alrichs wrote to 281 “Instructions for the Expedition to Westchester,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 258-259. 282 “Order Concerning the Prisoners Taken at Westchester,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 262-263. 283 “Commission of Tomas Wheeler as Commander at Westchester,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 274. 284 For the history of colonial Maryland, see especially Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Ronald Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords of Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Debra A. Meyers, “Calvert’s Catholic Colony,” in Roper and van Ruymbeke, Constructing Early Modern (2007): 357-388; Antoinette Sutto, Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 285 “Letter from Jacob Alrichs to Petrus Stuyvesant,” New York Historical Manuscripts, Vols. XVIII-XIX, Delaware Papers (Dutch Period), Translated and Edited by Charles T. Gehring (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Col., Inc., 1981), p. 143. 147 Maryland governor Josias Fendall requesting that he find and return the criminals “for the maintenance of justice,” and promising to provide all future travelers outside of New Netherland with proof of their permission to have done so. 286 But Fendall fired back a coarse reply that the director, by virtue of his letter, seemed to “suppose” himself to be “Governor of a people seated in a part of Delaware Bay, which, I am very well informed lyeth to the south ward of the degree forty and therefore, can by no means own or acknowledge any for Governor there, but myself who am by his Lordship appointed Lieutenant of this whole province lying between the degrees of thirty eight & forty.” He warned that Alrichs should “hold me excused, if I use my utmost endeavor to reduce that part of his Lordship’s Province unto its due obedience under him.” 287 Then, on September 8, 1659, Colonel Nathaniel Utie appeared before the magistrates of Nieuw Amstel to deliver instructions from Governor Fendall, supposedly approved by Lord Baltimore, reaffirming that the town sat within the province of Maryland, and that the magistrates and townspeople needed to depart at once. He warned that in case of delay, he would be “guiltless of the vast quantity of innocent blood which may then be shed as a consequence.” Vice-Director Alrichs responded the next day by letter, demanding proof of possession, and countering Utie’s and Fendall’s claims with a document of his own: a charter from the States General and a “legal conveyance or transfer from the West India Company with due payment.” If such documents did not satisfy them, Alrichs suggested that they refer the matter to their collective superiors, the English Parliament and the States General. 288 286 “Vice-Director to Governor Fendall, of Maryland,” NYCD, II: 64. See also a letter dated July 29, 1659, in which Alrichs informed Stuyvesant of the letter to Fendall requesting the return of the fugitives, and expressing concern that the Dutch on the Delaware would be ill prepared to fend off an English incursion from Virginia or Maryland (it is unclear to what extent Alrichs distinguished between the two colonies): “Letter from Jacob Alrichs to Petrus Stuyvesant,” Delaware Papers, 147. 287 “Governor Fendall to Vice-Director Alrichs,” NYCD, II: 67. I have modernized some of the spelling from the original in these quotations. 288 “Protest of Officials on the South River Against Nathaniel Utie,” Delaware Papers, 150-151. 148 But Alrichs was just as irked by Utie’s second set of instructions, which authorized him to offer the Dutch colonists “protection” and “increased freedom,” should they wish to remain where they were as subjects of the English crown. These offers had apparently unsettled the inhabitants of Nieuw Amstel, making them “restless,” more likely to “neglect their undertakings, backslide and run away.” 289 The magistrates bought themselves some time by explaining that they would need to refer the matter back to Stuyvesant and the West India Company, “under whose government” they stood. Since Willem Beekman, who commanded the company’s garrison at Fort Christian, was also present, Utie delivered the same message to him. Beekman, however, dug his heels. If Utie had a message he wished to deliver, he should visit Beekman at his place of residence, and deliver it there. An annoyed Utie replied that having given his notice at Nieuw Amstel was sufficient. 290 He returned to Virginia to gather a contingent of some 500 men and Beekman and Alrichs requested that Stuyvesant dispatch an additional eight or ten soldiers and three or four cannons to bolster the Nieuw Amstel’s garrison. 291 Though Beekman did express reservations as to the extent of Alrichs’ fear, as he could not imagine how Maryland would pull off such a military venture. 292 For his own part, Stuyvesant was irritated by both Beeckman’s and Alrichs’ handling of the situation. He was mystified as to why either had given Utie the time of day rather than arresting him on the spot and transporting him back to New Amsterdam. Worse, their delay in formally meeting Utie had given him time to “sow the seed of sedition and mutiny among the commonality for four or five days.” 293 In that time, Utie had gone from house to house, meeting 289 “Protest of Officials on the South River Against Nathaniel Utie,” Delaware Papers, 151. 290 “Letter from Willem Beeckman to Petrus Stuyvesant,” Delaware Papers, 152-153. 291 “Letter from Willem Beeckman to Petrus Stuyvesant,” Delaware Papers, 154-155. 292 “Letter from Willem Beeckman to Petrus Stuyvesant,” Delaware Papers, 157. 293 “Letter from Petrus Stuyvesant to Willem Beeckman and Jacob Alrichs,” Delaware Papers, 158. 149 with the city’s residents to deliver word of the English intention to assume control of the town and offer them a chance to swear allegiance as English subjects. Utie accompanied the offer with threats. In the absence of a quick and voluntary submission, he would return to compel their surrender by force of arms. 294 Utie’s message carried enough weight with the town’s inhabitants that Alrichs hesitated to expel him, as Stuyvesant would have preferred. 295 Stuyvesant thus decided to send New Netherland secretary Cornelis van Ruyven and Captain Marten Crieger to oversee the matter directly from Nieuw Amstel, along with a small contingent of soldiers under Crieger’s command (though Stuyvesant bemoaned they could “hardly be spared”). At the same time, he dispatched Augustine Heermans and Resolverd Waldron directly to Maryland to settle the issue in person. 296 After arriving at Nieuw Amstel, Heermans and Waldron departed for Maryland with a few soldiers and several Native guides. They travelled first to the Southwest then veered directly to the South, crossing small streams and dried thickets before entering the hilly region on the southern side of the Delaware river. Around 9AM on October 1 st , the party reached a stream that, their Native guides explained, flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. According to the Natives, the stream was called Cimamus, meaning “Hare river.” 297 From Heerman’s point of view, the trip may have been aimed at settling yet another border dispute between the Dutch and English, but their Native guides remind us that colonial borders remained aspirational long after Europeans set up residence in North America. Colonial inhabitants relied upon indigenous knowledge of the landscape even as they sought to firm up their borders. The solid boundary between native and 294 “Vindication of the Dutch Title to the Delaware River,” NYCD, II: 81. 295 Beeckman defended himself against Stuyvesant’s disparaging note by assuring the Director General that he had indeed pressed for Utie to be sent at once to New Amsterdam, but that Alrichs had refused, not wanting to incite a “riot by the citizens who were almost totally opposed to them.” See “Letter from Willem Beeckman to Petrus Stuyvesant, Delaware Papers, 163. 296 “Letter from Petrus Stuyvesant to Willem Beeckman and Jacob Alrichs,” Delaware Papers, 158. 297 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 88. 150 newcomer that thrilled the colonial imagination remained an imprecise edge that resisted categorization as either one concrete way or another. 298 The Native guides led Heermans and Waldron to a skiff that laid ashore. There the men dismissed four of their guides and pushed off into the water with one Native man. The boat was shabby and leaked, and the men had to bilge the accumulating water as they travelled South. By October 2 nd , they arrived at the Sassafras river, where they rested at a plantation that belonged to an Englishman named John Turner. There they found a Finnish Soldier named Abraham who had previously fled from Fort Christina with a Dutch woman in the employ of the West India Company. Heermans offered the two a pardon if they returned to Nieuw Amstel within six months, or to Manhattan. The woman, who still had three months left on her contract, agreed to return. After hemming and hawing, the soldier did, too. Heermans and Waldron pushed off the next morning to continue on their journey, but were startled to find Abraham and another man pursuing them in a canoe. The two men claimed that Heermans and Waldron were taking a boat that belonged to them. Heermans promised to return the craft, but the second man drew his pistol and threatened to fire. With great tact, Heermans and Waldron diffused the situation and continued on their way. 299 The next evening, they stayed with an English captain on Kent Island. Heermans took the opportunity to ask about English military plans to evict the Dutch from Nieuw Amstel. The Captain claimed to have heard nothing of the sort, but he was eager to remind Heermans that the South River did indeed belong to the English, by right of “Lord Balthamore’s patent.” Kent 298 I am drawing on two veins of literature here. The first is the scholarship on early America that has long emphasized how Native peoples and Europeans constructed and co-inhabited what became a “new” world for all. See in particular Calloway, New Worlds for All (1997). The second is the phenomenology of place, or in particular, what Edward Casey called his peri-phenomenology of “edges.” See Casey, The World on Edge (2017). 299 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 88-89. 151 incited a sharp reply from Heermans to the contrary and a promise that the Dutch would do all they could to preserve their rightful territory. They left the matter there for the time being, and the English captain turned to news he had received from a Mr. Batement, who had in turn received the information from an Englishman and Native interpreter, Mr. Wright. Supposedly, the Indigenous and English were currently at war with one another because the Dutch at the Whorekill had incited Natives to murder an Englishman. 300 According to the rumor, an Indigenous man had told a Dutchman that he sought retribution against Europeans who had killed his father. The Dutchman had happily clarified that it was in fact an Englishman who had killed his father, and that he should seek his justice against them. The Native man took the suggestion and sparked yet another conflict between English and Native peoples. Worse though, was the fact that the Dutch had supplied guns and ammunition to the Natives to carry out the attack. Heermans asked for the name of the Dutch man in question, but the Captain could not say. No one had directly witnessed the conversation. On Kent Island, Heermans also found another woman, the wife of a Dutchman in Nieuw Amstel, who, feeling dissatisfied with life there and planning for her husband to join her later, fled the village. 301 Heermans and Waldron spent the next night on the South side of the Severn River with the father-in-law of Godtfried Harmer, a trader who had garnered a bad reputation with the officials of Nieuw Amstel for helping to transport dissatisfied residents like those Heermans had come across into Virginia and providing food and lodging along the way. But his in-laws defended Harmer’s actions, arguing that the people he had transported were starved and in poor health, suggesting that they had fled terrible living conditions. Heermans tried to argue that the rudeness and unwillingness to help with chores that many of these people had exhibited (which the hosts 300 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 89-90. 301 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 89-90. 152 themselves had admitted) proved that these individuals had fled out of laziness, not wishing to work for a living, and seeking to “gain the bread of idleness” in Virginia, and not on account of “the badness of the place.” But their English hosts, though acknowledging their frustration with their ill-mannered guests, argued that many of these people had been starved to the point that they died of hunger when others had refused to feed them along the way. Heermans was reluctant to dignify these claims, but nonetheless admitted that even if this was all true, the aggrieved subjects of the Dutch Republic should have directed their complaints to Stuyvesant and his Council, rather than fleeing to a foreign nation. 302 Finally, on Monday the sixth, Heermans and Waldron reached the Patuxent river and lodged with a Mr. Coersy, a member of Maryland’s governing council, with whom the Dutch had corresponded about the recent disputes. Coersy confirmed that Nathaniel Utie had been authorized to deliver his message to the Dutch magistrates at Nieuw Amstel but conceded that he was not meant to take quite so aggressive a tact: Coersy was baffled that Utie had taken nearly one hundred soldiers with him. Coersy also informed the New Netherland delegates that Lord Baltimore’s patent dated from the year 1634. Heermans was only too glad to inform Coersy that the Dutch patent predated the English document by almost forty years. Coersy rushed to counter: while Baltimore’s patent dated from 1634, the claim itself traced back to Walter Raleigh, in the year 1584. This made little difference, assured Heermans, for the Dutch could in fact pursue their claim back to early sixteenth century, as “vassals and subjects” of the King of Spain, the first to “find” America. Nonetheless, the men left matters there, agreeing that the best path forwards would be one that avoided violence. 303 Apparently, the by-now sacrosanct border between Dutch 302 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 90-91. 303 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 91-92. 153 and Spanish could blur for the sake of global politics no less than that between Native and newcomer. Thus commenced a series of dinners and conversations, many with Mr. Coersy and Maryland secretary Philip Calvert, beginning on the evening of October the 8 th . The first took a similar course to the conversation Heermans and Waldron had held with Coersy at his own home on the sixth. This time, though, Secretary Calvert raised the stakes by admitting that the English intended for the boundaries of New England and Virginia to touch one another. Where, then, Heermans questioned, would New Netherland exist? Calvert displayed a nonchalance as he replied: “He knew not.” Even so, however, Calvert voiced his admiration for the “cities and villages like the Manhattans” that the Dutch had built. Though Heermans clarified that “Manhattans” signified all of New Netherland, and not just the Island itself, having “preserved the ancient name of the Indian nation among whom the Dutch had first settled.” 304 Heermans recorded no further news in his travel journal for the next three days apart from his receiving word that Calvert had notified Governor Fendall of his and Waldron’s arrival. On Sunday the 12 th , Heermans and Waldron dined at Secretary Calvert’s home, an evening which the minister Mr. Doughty interrupted when he called upon Calvert. Agitated by the conversation at hand, Doughty exhibited few maps from his own collection to prove the extent of Lord Baltimore’s boundaries. It seems likely that the first map was a derivative of John Smith’s influential Map of the Chesapeake from 1612. Smith’s A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Country, The Commodities, People, Government and Religion remained the most widely 304 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 92. 154 available map of the region throughout the seventeenth century, and the source for nearly all printed maps of Virginia until Augustine Heerman published his own map in 1673. 305 This version, however, had been printed sometime between 1630 and 1640 in Amsterdam by the Dutch mapmaker Willem Janszoon Bleau. 306 The maps drew the men back to the subject of the historical right of discovery. Doughty questioned Heermans’ insistence that the Dutch derived their claim from the King of Spain, for they were not a “free and independent nation” at the time of Spanish “discovery” of the Americas. Heermans retorted that the Dutch had been as much the “vassals and subjects” to the King of Spain as the English were to the “King or Republic of England,” but that when they were obliged to take up arms against the Spanish crown, the King of Spain had conveyed to them “in full propriety, by lawful right and title, all his own and other conquered lands in Europe and America.” As the men stood around the dinner table, from which the dining cloth had long been removed, they raised their voices higher and higher as their frustration mounted. Realizing that they would make no progress that evening, though, the men decided to drop the matter for the time being and move onto other subjects, so that they could part “from one another with expressions of friendship.” 307 Four days later, Heermans and Waldron travelled back to Patuxent, about eighteen or twenty miles away, to finally meet with Governor Fendall and other members of Maryland’s political elite, including Nathaniel Utie himself. After sitting down for a meal, Heermans delivered his message both in speech and written copy. Some of the men appeared to have had no real 305 Cassandra Ferrell, “Virginia, Discovered and Described: John Smith’s Map of Virginia and its Derivatives,” The Library of Virginia Research Notes 28 (2007). 306 For more on the original version, see P.D. Burden, Mapping of North America: A List of Printed Maps, 1511- 1670 (Raleigh, NC: Raleigh Publications: 1996), 164. 307 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 93-94. 155 understanding of the events that had recently occurred, and visibly displayed their confusion or discomfort. For his part, Fendall inquired whether his own letter had been shown to Stuyvesant? It had not, replied Heermans, for it had indicated neither date nor place where written, but Stuyvesant was aware of the letter’s existence. Even so, insisted Fendall, this made little difference, for his problem was not with the government of Manhattan, but with the people who had taken up residence within the limits of Delaware, to whom he had sent Utie to deliver his instructions, sparking the conflict in the first place. Heermans rebutted that the statement made no sense. The “Governor and people” on the South River were not a separate, but “subaltern and dependent government” of that which existed at Manhattan. Whatever jurisdictional dispute Fendall had with the residents of Nieuw Amstel thus directly affected not just the government of New Amsterdam, but the “whole State of New Netherland”, and the sovereignty of the States General of the Dutch Republic. 308 To Fendall, this position seemed untenable since the government of Nieuw Amstel derived its commission from the city of Amsterdam, as a separate government. But Heermans clarified that the city of Amsterdam held the place as a colony and district within New Netherland, similar to the individual counties of Virginia or Maryland. Whatever injury was done to Nieuw Amstel therefore applied to the whole of New Netherland. Utie, meanwhile, had been quietly stewing in his seat. He could take no more. The English should not even take notice of Heermans’ protests, blurted Utie. He had directed his actions at people who had intruded into the territory of Lord Baltimore. His behavior was entirely justified and there was no argument to be had. An annoyed Heermans countered that had he or Waldron acted as Utie had, they would have lost their position as an ambassador and been treated as hostiles. An ambassador was certainly permitted to deliver a message, but not to “summon a 308 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 94-95. 156 place by fire and sword,” as would an enemy. Insulted, Utie challenged how he should have behaved any different? The magistrates of Nieuw Amstel had put him up in a tavern. Was he then not to walk around the town and chat with the people who lived there? Heermans remained unconvinced. Of course, Utie could speak to whomever he wished, but not “excite them to revolt” or threaten them if they remained loyal. By this point Heermans and Waldron were fed up, and politely as they could, requested that “no frivolous discourse be allowed.” 309 But Fendall did not soften and complained that Heermans and Waldron had not even asked Colonel Utie proper permission to visit. The two Dutchmen apologized for not being familiar enough with English social customs to have done so and promised to follow the practice in the future. Utie, however, still fumed, and barked that the emissaries should have recognized him by visiting his home first to ask permission to continue their journey further. Had he known of their travel plans, Utie insisted, he would have stopped them right there. One of the other English guests, perhaps uncomfortable with the conversation’s direction, interjected that the emissaries could have at least been provided a better boat than the leaky skiff they had been forced to travel in, in which case the two men might have been more inclined to make the trip to the island upon which Utie lived (though Heermans and Waldron had in fact consciously chosen not to visit Utie, and upon hearing his outbursts, were relieved that they had not). The unexpected aid from one of the English councilors finally steered the conversation in a lighter direction. At least both parties acknowledged their desire to avoid bloodshed before departing for the night. 310 The next morning, while Fendall and his Council held court, Heermans and Waldron spent time examining a copy of Baltimore’s patent. Heermans observed that Lord Baltimore had applied for a tract of land in America “which was neither cultivated nor planted,” but inhabited 309 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 95. 310 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 95-96. 157 only by Natives. Here was their proof, for by the time Baltimore’s patent had been issued in 1632, the Dutch had already “occupied, appropriated and purchased” the land. The patent was thus invalid in any place that it included Delaware Bay. Dutch buildings had stood on the landscape which the patent claimed “vacant.” In fact, Heermans believed, King Charles had never intended to grant any land that the States General had already claimed. 311 The emissaries presented this next argument to their English hosts that evening after yet another supper. Fendall remained doubtful, however, arguing that the King had issued the patent with “full knowledge and understanding” of the case, and a belief that the Delaware bay should belong to the English. Fendall asked to see the Dutch patent to the region to make his own examination but was dismayed to learn that neither Heermans nor Waldron had brought a copy. If he had known this, Fendall would never had allowed the emissaries to examine the English patent. The evening ended there, on yet another inconclusive note. Heermans and Waldron remained in Patuxent for two more days but fell short of an agreement with Fendall. Heermans advised Fendall that the Dutch would remain in a defensive posture for the time being, and that all parties would simply have to act as they saw best. 312 Heermans sent the journal he kept throughout his travels back to Stuyvesant along with a note advising him that his emissaries had gotten nowhere with the English. Fendall had simply justified Utie’s actions. Heermans suggested that Stuyvesant ask one of the WIC’s Directors to negotiate directly with Lord Baltimore and come to a quiet agreement. Heermans would continue to Virginia and ask the English Governor there either to actively intervene, or to at least remain neutral in the matter. In the meantime, the Dutch forts along the Delaware river needed to be strengthened in case the English decided to attack. “But, first of all,” wrote Heerman, “the South 311 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 96-97. 312 “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” NYCD, II: 96-97. 158 river and the Virginias, with the lands and kills between both, ought to be laid down on an exact scale as to longitude and latitude, in a perfect map, that the extent of country on both sides may be correctly seen, and the work afterwards proceeded with, for some maps which the English have here are utterly imperfect and prejudicial to us.” 313 Heerman thus alluded to the project to which he himself would devote a considerable amount of time over the following years. 314 He would seek to ensure that the region was mapped in such a way that properly depicted the material presence of the Dutch Republic. Heermans’ travels shone a light on the problems that the Dutch faced as they sought to build viable polities on North American soil. The WIC and States general, Stuyvesant and the Burgomasters, all sought to make not just Manhattan, but New Netherland more broadly, into a governable territory. Part of this project required them to seek recognition of that territory’s outermost borders by other colonial powers and to negotiate their way through the many impasses they encountered along the way. This was a direct result of multiple imperial entities having laid claims to geographical spaces that bled into one another. And yet in reality, the material nature of the communities they built undermined their best efforts. Just as it was inside Manhattan, European colonists continued to breed discontent within the privacy of their dwelling spaces and away from the eyes of the governors. Such was as much the case with the Swedish colonists who requested their admission as Dutch subjects within New Netherland, as it was for the colonists who Nathaniel Utie persuaded to revoke their allegiance to the States General while meeting with them inside of their homes. Furthermore, the proximity of towns, villages, and plantations to one another amidst a highly contested landscape provided opportunities for disgruntled colonists to seek the refuge of a different imperial power, even if in reality this meant 313 Messrs. Heermans and Waldron to Directory Stuyvesant,” NYCD, II: 99-100. 314 For an account of this project, see Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion (2018). 159 travelling only a few miles from their place of residence. Both of these facts reveal just how fluid the boundaries of imperial subjecthood were in early America, and the extent to which that fluidity resulted from the ambiguous and contested nature of colonial borders. Finally, Heerman’s travels reveal the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the construction of imperial boundaries. Even as he journeyed through a landscape to which the Dutch laid claim, Heerman’s Native guides asserted their sovereign presence by educating Heerman as to the region’s many topographical features, with which they had a more intimate knowledge and familiarity. For all the effort European powers expended trying to convince their imperial competitors to acknowledge and respect their borders, they still had to convince Native peoples, too. *** As the European residents of New Amsterdam, and New Netherland more broadly, sought to negotiate the boundaries of belonging and sovereignty on Manhattan and across the North American landscape, one of the most pressing issues remained the ever-fluid boundary between Native and newcomer. 315 The truce with neighboring Sachems that ended Kieft’s War in 1645 315 For scholarship on early European-Indigenous relations with a particular emphasis on the Eastern Woodlands, as well as the developing line between “European” and Native,” see especially Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian (1979); Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982); Merrell, The Indians’ New World (1989); Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992); Calloway, New Worlds for All (1997); O’Brien, Dispossession by Degree (1997); Jill Lepore, King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998); Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion & Civility: English Imperialism & Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Kupperman, Indians and English (2000); Axtell, Natives and Newcomers (2000); David Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, his Puritan Foes, and the Battle for New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 160 did little to curb the anxieties of the white colonists who lived in New Netherland. Rumors of conspiracies and impending attacks sparked the imaginations of Dutch and English colonists alike, uncomfortably aware of their continued position as outsiders in Native country. Both the English and Dutch inhabitants of the Long Island took turns holdings meetings and sending letters to Stuyvesant expressing concern over impending attacks against their own, supposedly orchestrated in coordination with their imperial competitors. In July of 1654, English colonists on Long Island gathered at Middleburgh to discuss rumors that the Dutch had hired French and Indigenous fighters to kill off the English population within New Netherland’s borders. Whereas just over a year later, in September of 1655, the Dutch residents of Gravesend sent a letter to Stuyvesant informing him of just the opposite: that “the Indians intend to pick out the Dutch from among the English in order to destroy them.” The rumor mill fed imperial anxieties about a contested landscape to such an extent that Stuyvesant had to formally prohibit Englishmen and women from hightailing it out of New Amsterdam with their possessions in tow to take up temporary residence amongst their kin. 316 The people of New Amsterdam thus pinned to their walls hopes for greater security not only against their European competitors, but against Native peoples too. Yet even New Amsterdam’s status as a multiethnic community undercut the feeling of security a wall might have offered, evidenced by how quick English residents were to flee to the admittedly less secure environs of Long Island, simply to be amongst their own. Furthermore, even as colonists “enclosed” themselves to “exclude the wild barbarians and bring them to subjection,” their economic dependance upon trade with Natives and resident’s use of domestic space to sustain trading relationships with Indigenous peoples continued to blur the neat boundaries that Stuyvesant and 316 “Anno 1654, 2 July, New Amsterdam,” Council Minutes, 1652-1654: 153-154; “Letter from Gravesande to the Council Concerning Indian Threats,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656; 85-86; Council Minutes, 1652-1654: 154-155. 161 the burgomasters sought to erect between Native and European-controlled spheres of activity. 317 The Native traders who lodged with residents overnight and engaged them in private transactions eluded direct imperial oversite. It was not just the Natives who came into European communities who concerned Stuyvesant, but colonists whom Indigenous peoples invited into their territory, or who simply trespassed on Native lands. The Director was hard pressed to stop Europeans from bringing goods to Native villages to trade for beaver skins and other commodities. In 1652, Stuyvesant and Council feared 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. 318 In other words, Stuyvesant sought to maintain the upper hand against Native peoples by confining trade and communication between European and Indigenous to spaces that he felt he could control. Three years later, Stuyvesant readily assented to an ordinance which the magistrates of Beverwijk passed to stop colonists from going into the woods to “attract Indians and take their Beavers.” 319 At the same time, Stuyvesant also sought to prevent groups of colonists from leaving New Amsterdam or their villages and travelling inland without special permission from his council, and to prohibit New Amsterdam’s residents from meeting with Native peoples on the west side of the Hudson (or outside of New Amsterdam, proper). 320 Even so, Stuyvesant’s concern was not simply for the protection of his own subjects, but for continuing the tenuous endeavor of maintaining peaceful relations with Native peoples. Stuyvesant thus also sought to curb what had become a common practice: hordes of curious onlookers swarmed to the edge of 317 RNA, II: 52. 318 Council Minutes, 1652-1654: 43. 319 “Approval of Fort Orange’s Ordinance Against Intercepting Indians in the Woods,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 66-67. 320 “Ordinance Prohibiting Excursions of Small Parties into the Countryside,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 89; “Order Prohibiting Contact with the Indians on the West Side of the Hudson River,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 101-102. 162 Manhattan any time Stuyvesant crossed the Hudson to meet with Native emissaries. The crowds tended to make the visitors wary and suspicious, and threatened to derail the delicate practice of diplomacy. 321 The rumors that fired colonists’ darker imaginations and Stuyvesant’s efforts to confine contact and trade between colonists and Natives to spaces under his watchful eyes came amidst a series of violent episodes between the two peoples. Tension and violence had persisted beyond the 1645 treaty, especially between colonists and Raritans living between Manhattan and the Delaware valley. Tired of having their trade with New Amsterdam disrupted, Susquehannocks had finally helped broker a wider peace in July of 1649 between Stuyvesant and Native sachems representing Rechgawawancks, Nayacks, Wiechquaesgecks, and Raritan, all of whom agreed from this point on to live in “mutual friendship and neighbourly intercourse.” 322 For a handful of years, violence remained confined to isolated incidents. From the perspective of the Dutch, this changed on September 15, 1655. Stuyvesant had left New Amsterdam two weeks prior with Company soldiers to evict the Swedes from the Delaware River. It was early in the morning when some sixty-four canoes landed at New Amsterdam. The residents of Manhattan experienced the chaos that ensued as an assault carried out by an unidentifiable collection of nearly two thousand Natives. 323 The group, which likely included a mixture of Wappingers and Esopus as well as Munsees living in the island’s vicinity, spread out over the city and entered colonists’ homes. They threatened the burgomaster Paulus Leendertsen 321 “Order Prohibiting Contact with the Indians on the West Side of the Hudson River,” Council Minutes, 1655- 1656: 101-102. 322 Council Minutes, 1638-1649: 607-609. For a general account of the treaty and continuing hostilities between Native peoples and Europeans, see Grumet, The Munsee Indians (2009), esp. chapter 5. For recent scholarship that addresses the effects of Indigenous Power on European stability in the absence of peaceful relations, see Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.) 323 La Montaigne placed the number at 1900: “Response of La Montaigne,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 139-141. 163 with a hatchet and shot Hendrick van Dijck, the former State attorney. They set fire to dozens of buildings in New Amsterdam and the outlying to 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 a hundred taken captive. 324 The precise order of ensuing events is difficult to reconstruct with the available evidence. The Dutch focused on three interrelated goals: retrieving the hostages, re-settling the peace, and figuring out what exactly had happened. At the time of the attack, the Natives themselves had said that they were on their way to fight a group of people they referred to as the “Northern Indians,” though later Stuyvesant came to understand this term to refer to Native peoples living on the eastern end of Long Island. The violence itself erupted when a group of warriors, claiming to search for some of these Northern Indigenous hiding in New Amsterdam, shot van Dijk with an arrow. The Dutch ultimately came to believe that the Natives had carried out the attack specifically against van Dijk in retribution for his murder of a Munsee woman he had found picking peaches from his orchard. Hence scholars have long referred to the episode as the “Peach War.” 325 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 just two weeks prior. 326 324 “Remonstrance to the States General Concerning the Recent Conduct of the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655- 1656: 120-123. The precise number of prisoners is unclear. 325 As recent as 2009, Robert Grumet offered this as on possible explanation. See Grumet, The Munsee Indians, 70- 72. 326 This interpretation was first advanced by Cynthia Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). See in particular chapter 7. More recently, Andrew Lipman followed van Zandt’s lead. See Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier (2015), 187-188. 164 As Stuyvesant and his council worked to make sense of the events, they received word that several sachems had warned the English inhabitants of the multiethnic village of Gravesend not to assist the Dutch on Manhattan with any provisions lest they wished their own houses burned to the ground. 327 They also got hold of a letter dated September 27, which the English Lieutenant Thomas Wheeler had sent from his home in Westchester (where the meeting with the sachems likely took place) to the magistrates of Gravesend suggesting that they send the Dutch to live amongst their own, for the sake of both groups’ safety. 328 The members of Stuyvesant’s council disagreed on the best course of action to take. La Montagne suggested they send twenty or twenty-five soldiers to assist the Dutch inhabitants of Gravesend. But Fiscal Tienhoven, Allard Antony, and Oloff Stevensen thought it wise to gain a better understanding of the situation before offering military aid, seeking to tread Gravesend’s already tenuous line between English and Dutch residents. Tienhoven, in particular, wished to ensure that the Dutch would stay right where they were and suggested that the council invite some of the Gravesend magistrates to explain their concerns in person, but at the same time, to “remind them of their proper honor, oath, and duty” to Stuyvesant, the WIC, and the States General, as subjects of the Dutch Republic. 329 This tense situation, precipitated by rumor and actual violence, pushed Stuyvesant to try to confine contact between Native peoples and colonists to easily regulated and surveilled spaces on Manhattan Island. He also tried to prevent colonists from dispersing beyond the Island’s center to the outlying farmland and woods. Yet the colonists themselves were not always inclined to follow these demands. In early October, Munsees took a Long Islander named Pieter 327 NYCD 13:41; Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 87-88. 328 NYCD 13:40; Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 86-87. 329 “Minute and Vote of the Council Concerning the Foregoing Letter from Gravesande,” Council Minutes, 1655- 1656, 88-90. 165 Schoorsteenveger prisoner, prompting Stuyvesant to warn Captain Brian Nuton to “be on guard” and to keep his soldiers “close together,” and to complain that the “freemen, contrary to my orders, are not staying together, but rather each is running here and there.” 330 Shortly thereafter, a man named Steven Necker appeared before Stuyvesant and Council with more information: Schoorsteenveeger had sailed with five other people to his plantation to fetch some animals. A party of some thirty Natives had attacked them and taken all six captive. Necker had come to Manhattan with their ransom demands, a list of goods that included cloth, gunpowder, lead, kettles, guns, swords, wampum, knives, shoes, stockings, axes, and tobacco pipes. 331 But Stuyvesant, for the time being, refused to pay. He feared that to do so would only encourage the other Native peoples who still held some seventy-three Dutch captives from their attack on Manhattan Island. 332 The deliberations that Stuyvesant and Council held amongst themselves and the negotiations into which they entered with Natives makes clear the extent to which 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 the advantages that Natives maintained: “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.” 333 Native peoples, he knew, dictated the course of the negotiations. The Hackensack sachem Penneckeck sent 14 prisoners to Manhattan as a gesture of good faith, but repeated the demand for gunpowder and lead. 334 By late October, the Natives had 330 “Letter to the Capt. Brian Nuton Regarding the Dangerous Situation,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 95. 331 “Minute of the Appearance of Steven Necker with Ransom Demands of the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655- 1656, 95-96. 332 “Resolution Not to Pay the Ransom Demanded by the Indians,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 97. 333 “Letter to Capt. Post Concerning the Prisoners,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 100. 334 “Minutes of the Release of Fourteen Hostages,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656, 102. 166 won. Stuyvesant and the burgomasters voted unanimously to offer to the sachems Oratam and Pennekeck the lead and gunpowder that they demanded. The Dutch lacked any viable alternative “because [the prisoners] are scattered among the Indians here and there far into the interior.” 335 Native peoples continued to employ their superior knowledge of the landscape to retain a position of dominance against Europeans. The events of September and October prompted Stuyvesant and the burgomasters to write to the States General. They argued that the WIC had failed to offer the necessary support. They requested three to four thousand soldiers who, after having helped them “subdue the aforesaid barbarous nations and to possess afterwards the country in peace and without fear from them,” would “settle in the country and increase the population.” 336 But as they waited for a response from their homeland, Stuyvesant and his councilors remained divided over whether to go to war with their Indigenous neighbors. For his own part, Stuyvesant chose to believe the Natives’ claim that when they first arrived at Manhattan, they had only intended to wage war against Indigenous peoples living on the eastern end of Long Island, and that the violence that occurred in Manhattan had only resulted from the “rashness of some intemperate individuals.” Nonetheless, the violence and ransoms demanded a response. For his own part, Stuyvesant eschewed the prospect of open warfare for “strict orders, which if violated by them…will make the punishment more legal and justifiable.” 337 Some of his councilors suggested taking Natives as prisoner and leveraging them in exchange for the remaining European captives. But Stuyvesant shot down this idea, arguing that to do so would only antagonize the Natives and compel them to kill more of their own, an unacceptable outcome given that, in his view, “the blood of one captive Christian 335 “Reply of the Indians to the Council’s Proposal,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 119. 336 “Duplicate of the Foregoing Remonstrance,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 124. 337 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 132. 167 [counted for] more than 100 Indians.” Furthermore, retrieving the remaining hostages through indelicate means remained impractical since the captives “are not held by one nation or tribe of Indians but are spread here and there…and held by nations and tribes from which few or no Indians come here.” Finally, ever the dutiful subject, Stuyvesant argued that to enter into a war after having written to the States General but not yet received a response would render the war legally dubious. 338 Instead of waging war, then, Stuyvesant offered a different path forward, a series of concentric circles that began with and moved outward from the inner sanctum of the colonial soul. First, he proposed that the Dutch begin at the source, for “general sins are the cause of general punishments.” Stuyvesant called for a greater crackdown on public drunkenness and better observance of the Sabbath, and suggested that his council support his efforts to curb the gathering of “sectarians and other disorderly groups.” 339 Moving outward one circle, Stuyvesant sought to draw the European residents of New Netherland away from the edges and towards the center, calling again for colonists to live within closer proximity to one another. The country dwellers had to be “constrained to draw together their abandoned houses and from now on not to reside in the countryside except in settlements of at least 10, 12, to 16 households, close by one another, in a form to be determined by the director general and councilors or their deputies.” Stuyvesant thus sought ever more to extend his hand over the aesthetic form of New Netherland’s communities: their design intersected with their long-term well-being. 340 Furthermore, each new village needed a protective center of its own: a “blockhouse” (or a small fortification) within which villagers could take refuge during times of war. But 338 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 132-133. 339 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 133. 340 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 134. 168 blockhouses could serve both functional and symbolic purposes. Stuyvesant proposed building several “in sight of the Indians themselves,” not just to further “displace them,” but to “better maintain their devotion.” Stuyvesant thus recognized and sought to harness the power of the visual and to mold a landscape that commanded Indigenous “devotion” through its affective presence. Finally, he again proposed a series of strict regulations to control the presence of Native peoples within European spaces; no Indigenous person could spend the night in a colonial village except in a “separate place to be determined by the situation of the village;” no Native could enter a colonial village with any weapons; no colonial establishment could sell alcohol to any Native. 341 Councilor de Sille took a more aggressive stance, suggesting that Stuyvesant forbid Native peoples from visiting the island all together and colonists from providing them with lodging. Instead, de Sill recommended that New Amsterdam build a trading post outside of Manhattan for any contact between the two peoples. 342 La Montagne, too, offered incendiary words, arguing that the Natives’ actions—gathering at Manhattan without the knowledge or consent of its governors and breaking into residents’ homes—provided just cause for war. 343 Tienhoven concurred, particularly incensed that Natives had “committed such violence and insolence on the municipality, by breaking locks and doors, hitting and kicking people, searching houses, which no Dutchman is allowed to do without orders and authorization of the magistrates.” Not only had Native peoples flaunted Dutch law, but they had crossed an inviolable boundary by violating Dutch dwelling spaces. Tienhoven lamented that the burghers of New Amsterdam “would never be able to live securely before and until the Indian nation had been subjugated and forced into 341 “Stuyvesant’s Opinion on the Foregoing Proposition,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 134. 342 “Response of Nicasius de Sille to the Foregoing Propositions,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 138. 343 “Response of La Montagne to the Foregoing Propositions,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 139-140. 169 submission.” Though, like Stuyvesant, Tienhoven thought it unwise to take any concrete military action before receiving further instructions from higher authorities back home. 344 But even as Stuyvesant’s councilors were busy writing up their recommendations, seven Massapequas travelled from Long Island with instructions from their sachem Tackapousha, the son of the influential Penhawitz, or “one eye,” to offer the Dutch “absolute friendship,” as they had enjoyed since the end of Kieft’s war. After the violence of the 1640’s, Penhawitz had instructed his son to “forget for the future what had happened” and keep the peace. And indeed, Tackapousha relayed, he had “obeyed his father” and “done no harm to the Dutch nation, not even to the value of a dog.” No Massapequas, Tackapousha’s emissaries informed Stuyvesant, had been amongst the group of Natives who had attacked Manhattan several months earlier. In fact, for nearly twelve years, his own people had been at war with the Indigenous who had attacked Manhattan. In other words, New Amsterdam had become embroiled in a conflict between Native peoples. Tackapousha thus used the fragile moment as an opportunity to reaffirm a peace settlement and to build an alliance on behalf of himself and the eastern Long Island Montauk sachem, Wyandanch, with Dutch colonists against their own adversaries. 345 At the same time that Stuyvesant and his councilors sought to further “subdue” their Indigenous neighbors, Native peoples continued to draw the colonists into their own practices of warfare and diplomacy and to shape the course of their relationship with Europeans. These negotiations were but one stage in a continuing partnership between Europeans and Long Island Natives that runs counter to the hardening boundaries between Natives and newcomers. On March 12, 1656, the residents of Hempstead entered into an agreement on behalf of Stuyvesant with Tackapousha and the Massapequas, which also included representatives of 344 “Advice on Stuyvesant’s Proposals by Cornelis van Tienhoven,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 142-143. 345 “Propositions Made by the Indians of Long Island,” Council Minutes, 1655-1656: 145. 170 Matinecock, Rockaway, Canarsie, and Merrick peoples. 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 thereby secured their position as the leading supplier of wampum to the Dutch. 346 The agreement had material implications, too, as Stuyvesant promised to “build a howse or A forte upon such place as they shall show upon the north-side, And the fort or howse shall be furnished with Indian Commodities. And the Sachem doth promise, that in this place Such people as shall thereon be placed by the Governor shall live in safety from him or any his Indians.” 347 The agreement offers a window into a world of cohabitation and cooperation that in many ways contradicts or stands opposed to the larger processes of boundary formation that Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam’s municipal government sought to enact as they attempted to Manhattan into a “Dutch” city. It is unclear whether Stuyvesant and the townspeople of Hempstead ever built the exact structure to which they referred in the treaty. But compelling archaeological evidence supports its existence, or at the very least, something that served a similar function and allows one to draw the same conclusions. The evidence comes from a site on South Oyster Bay that contemporary archeologists refer to as Fort Massapeag. The earthworks that archeologists have uncovered reveal a quadrangular building with two bastions, a formal design that speaks to European rather than Native architectural practices. Digs have unearthed a mixture of Indigenous pottery and 346 “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 Satlwater Frontier, 188-189. 347 RTH, I:41. 171 stone tools as well as Dutch pipes, glass beads, fragments of European ceramic, and a brass mouth harp. A shell midden stands near the Fort’s entrance composed mostly of quahog clams and whelks in various stages of production into wampum, as well as quartz knives for cutting the shells and sandstone abraders for shaping the beads. 348 Whether or not Fort Massapeag was the proposed building from the treaty between Stuyvesant and Tackapousha, its existence discloses a seventeenth-century material landscape that both Europeans and Natives made into a place of mutual economic and political benefit, a landscape that gave way to cross-cultural dialogue and exchange—to boundary crossing rather than erecting. In fact, it was Indigenous peoples themselves who permitted Stuyvesant and his ministers to imagine and realize New Netherland as a unified whole rather than a loose assemblage of disjointed parts. Even as European cartography remained an integral part of depicting a Dutch imperial geography, Native peoples created much of the connective tissue that strung together the region’s individual towns and villages, carrying letters and spoken messages between the colony’s various administrators. This was particularly the case for the networks of communication that tied the Island of Manhattan to the Dutch settlements in the Delaware River Valley. As Vice Director Alrichs and Stuyvesant sought to reclaim their southern boundary from Maryland, they sent their many letters to one another in the hands of Native peoples. 349 The reliance of Dutch officials upon Natives to carry crucial information speaks to a level of trust that belies the incompatibility of Natives and newcomers. These Native messengers shed a different light on Heerman’s comments to Maryland Governor Fendall, that the the “Governor and people” on the South River were not a separate, but “subaltern and dependent government” of 348 For an in-depth discussion of the site’s archeological history, see Cantwell and Wall, Unearthing Gotham (2001), 134-138. 349 For just a few of the many examples of this practice, see Delaware Papers, I: 30; 36; 111; 134; 148; 226; 229. 172 that which existed at Manhattan—together these individual settlements made up the “whole State of New Netherland.” It was the cooperation of Native peoples that underlay this “wholeness” of which Heermans had spoken. 350 So too did the maintenance of justice within New Netherland’s boundaries often hinge upon the cooperation of Dutch officials with Native peoples allied with Manhattan. On September 30, 1656, for example, twelve Natives entered the Fort Amsterdam with instructions from Tackapousha to return items that Natives “of the tribe called Sicketawagh” had stolen from “a Negro on Long Island at Joresey’s plantation,” from Jan Eversen’s house in Breuckelen, snd “Mespadt Kil”. The emissaries also informed Stuyvesant’s council that Wappingers had similarly stolen a blanket from the Kill, and that Tackapousha had sent some Massapequas to retrieve it and return it to the fort. The Dutch accepted the returned items “as a sign of sincere friendship” and sent the Natives home with a pound of gun powder. 351 In collaborating with Tackapousha in such a manner, Stuyvesant did more than rely upon Native peoples to create a space within which they could exercise Dutch law and justice. Rather, Europeans and Natives built a shared space of mutual advantage, using one another to advance their economic and political agendas within a landscape over which neither could achieve complete dominance. 352 Yet the process of building a shared landscape entailed more negotiation than agreement. The town clerk of Hempstead, for example, wrote to Stuyvesant to lament their villagers’ “suffering by the Indians, who hold us in suspence by theire delayes and wee cannot gett them to shew us 350 For Indigenous Communications Networks and European Reliance upon Indigenous Couriers, see especially Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 351 “Minute Recording Appearance of Indians of Marsepink Before the Council,” Council Minutes, 1656-1658: 136- 137. 173 the bounds of our Lands, whereby there is much difference amongst oure Selves, Concerning our proportions, for we cannot have Justice, until they have done us right And Layde out the Generall bounds.” 353 Sharing a landscape with people who held differing conceptions of the relationship between human-made communities and the land thus generated an enormous amount of anxiety for colonists who wished to achieve the kind of clear-cut boundaries to which they were accustomed by European laws of private property. 354 This context helps us to better understand the efforts that New Amsterdam’s residents made to erect fortifications around the edges of Manhattan. The common thread that tied together Dutch efforts to demarcate and protect their boundaries from other European and Native peoples and efforts to police the edges of acceptable conduct within those spaces was a deep-set desire for clarity and order. Stuyvesant, the burgomasters, and the European residents of New Netherland’s many villages sought to make not just a physical, but an emotional landscape cleared of the anxiety and fear that had characterized so much of the early colonial experience by building a well-ordered place of habitation with easily-legible boundaries and borders. And yet as their continuing experience with their Indigenous neighbors made clear, such an endeavor was monumentally difficult to bring to any kind of satisfying conclusion. 355 In May 1658, Stuyvesant received letters telling of yet another outbreak of violence between colonists and Natives, this time at Esopus, a long-contested territory on the west side of the 353 “Letter from the Town Clerk of Hemsteed on Behalf of the People, Praying for Redress,” Council Minutes, 1656- 1658: 356. 354 William Cronon provided one of the most influential discussion of the ramifications of essentially incompatible understandings of the concept of property and land use between Europeans and Native peoples. Yet his account did not go far enough as to consider the problem in phenomenological terms or seeking to understand what these incompatibilities meant in terms of daily experience. See Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983), especially chapter four. 355 For emotions in history, see FN 144. 174 Hudson, south of present day Kingston. 356 A group of intoxicated Natives had apparently shot and killed a trader named Harmen Jacopsen as he stood on his boat, and burned down a house that belonged to Jacob Adriajansen (though the colonists themselves had supplied the brandy). The residents of Esopus requested military assistance from Stuyvesant. As they waited, they confined themselves to their homes in fear of further attack. 357 Stuyvesant travelled up the Hudson with a contingent of some sixty soldiers in an attempt to settle the matter himself. Meeting with the Natives, an Indigenous spokesperson informed Stuyvesant that “many of their people had then been killed” [during Kieft’s War] and more since. Stuyvesant sought to put the past behind them, suggesting that these events had occurred before he had arrived, and asked whether such wrongs had continued beyond the peace settlement that he had helped negotiate? Stuyvesant’s own account is dubious: he portrayed the Natives as having hung their heads in silence, unable to offer much of a response. But his carefully controlled account still provides some insight; “finally one of the Sachems stood up and said in reply,” Stuyvesant recorded in his journal, “that the Dutch sold the ‘boisson,’ that is brandy, to the savages and were consequently the cause, that the savages had become cacheus, that is crazy, mad or drunk and then committed outrages; that they, the chiefs, could not keep in bounds the young men, who then were spoiling for fight.” 358 For Native peoples, and notwithstanding Stuyvesant’s efforts to crystalize the past as a matter of contemporary irrelevance, stories of violence against Natives remained embedded in the landscape, histories that Native peoples continued to transmit through the generations to their young. Even as the sachems tried to distance themselves from the perpetrators of the 356 For scholarship that focuses in particular on Dutch relations with the Esopus, see Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America (2006). 357 “Letter of Thomas Chambers to Director Stuyvesant,” NYCD, 13: 77-78; “Letter from Andries van der Sluys and Other Inhabitants of Esopus to Director Stuyvesant,” NYCD, 13:78; “Letter from Thomas Chamber and Other to the Council of New-Netherland,” NYCD, 13:78-79. 358 “Journal of Director Stuyvesant’s Visit to the Esopus,” NYCD, 13:84. 175 violence, it became apparent that the alcohol that Europeans themselves provided to the Natives had likely spurred hot-headed youth to seek redress for as yet unaddressed wrongs. 359 If Stuyvesant’s account is to be trusted, his words reveal yet another obstacle that Europeans faced in constructing a carefully controlled landscape of demarcated and separate “European” and “Native” territories. Through decades of close physical proximity and interaction, the two people’s histories had become entangled with one another. Memories of violence exceeded the control either Dutch or Native leaders, who therefore could not always guarantee peace between one another. Thus neither people could fully control the boundaries between their two groups because their narratives had become too enmeshed to fully separate. Ultimately, Stuyvesant decided that the best course of action would be to purchase land from the local sachems in order to build a new fort near present-day Kingston. The colonists of Esopus could then relocate their homes within the fort’s safety and escape an experience which they characterized as “full of anxiety to live at separate places away from each other among so faithless and mischievous tribes.” 360 By late June, Stuyvesant and his soldiers had helped the colonists build a stockade and begun to move behind its walls. Interestingly, they named the new structure Wiltwijck, or “Indian Town.” Yet tensions persisted between the colonists and the Esopus. On October 9, Stuyvesant headed back up the Hudson with fifty soldiers and several of his closest advisors, including Martyn Crieger and Augustin Heermans, just on the heels of their travels to the Delaware River Valley. Since removing themselves behind the walls of Wiltwijck, Native peoples had killed a 359 For a classic account of Indigenous Alcohol Usage, see Mancall, Deadly Medicine (1997). For a more recent account that focuses on Indigenous Alcohol use in New Netherland in particular, see Erin Kramer, “ ‘That She Shall be Forever Banished From this Country’: Alcohol, Sovereignty, and Social Segregation in New Netherland,” Early American Studies 20:1 (Winter 2022): 3-42. 360 “Resolution that the Director-General Proceed to the Esopus,” NYCD, 13: 80; “Agreement Made by the Settlers of Esopus to Remove their Dwellings and Form a Village,” NYCD, 13:81. 176 horse and a handful of hogs that belonged to a man named Jacob Harp. This time, however, Stuyvesant eschewed his collaborative approach and took a more aggressive stance. He demanded that the Esopus turn over the land in repayment for the troubles they had caused, as well as payment in wampum (almost one hundred strings in total) for each individual act they had committed. 361 But the visiting sachems balked and again reminded Stuyvesant of all they had suffered at the hands of the colonists. They had still to receive proper satisfaction. Nonetheless, they wished for their two peoples to “live in friendship.” The Natives left to deliberate overnight and countered the next day with a moderated payment of one half the requested land. Stuyvesant refused to budge. The sachems initially refused to meet Stuyvesant’s exorbitant demands, but agreed to a majority of them by the end of October. Even so, however, they continued to interpret the events through their own cultural lens, not as a unidirectional payment, but as the sealing of a friendship through reciprocity. The sachems thus closed their negotiations by suggesting now “that they had given away their land to the Dutch….they had now satisfied the General and would discover by this grand present, what the heart of our Sachem said, whether he would not make some presents to them in return, whereby they could see, that there were no more doubts or dangers for them and when this is done, they should make a present of land to him, as it is established custom with them.” 362 The Esopus held on to their land as they waited for the Dutch to show their good faith. A delegation of Natives returned the following August 1659 to remind the Wiltwijk colonists of the 361 “Minutes of the Director-General’s Departure for the Esopus,” NYCD, 13:93; “Proposals Made to the Esopus Indians and their Answers,” NYCD, 13:93-94. 362 “Proposals Made to the Esopus Indians and their Answers,” NYCD, 13:94-95; “Letter of Jacob Jansen Stoll to Director Stuyvesant; the Indians Do not Surrender the Land According to Agreement,” NYCD, 13:96; “Letter from the Same to the Same: The Indians Have Made a Conveyance of the Tract of Land, as Agreed and Ask for a Return- Present,” NYCD, 13:96-97. 177 promises they had made. In the meantime, rumors began to circulate amongst the villagers of impending attacks. 363 On September 4, a group of nearly 96 Natives comprised of several sachems, women, and children, entered Wiltwijk to ensure peace between the two peoples. The sachems told of a meeting they had held the previous night with Susquehannock, Iroquoian, and Hackensack sachems, who counseled the Esopus to reconcile themselves with the Europeans. 364 They came to the village with women and children and without arms to exhibit their peaceful intentions. They recalled the peace with which Natives and Europeans had strived to live and which they had symbolically confirmed in material terms, locking “their arms together with iron chains,” and agreeing that “who shall break first this, he shall be made war against in common.” 365 Drawing on yet another wellspring of material life, the sachems assured the colonists that “one fire” burned between them, and that both peoples “may go to sleep on either side with safety.” The sachems then questioned the colonists’ decision to withdraw their homes behind the walls of Wiltwijk, whereas they would have been better served by remaining where they were, “for we Christians would have been unable to harvest our corn better.” 366 The question reveals the extent to which fear and anxiety had become a driving factor in the choices colonists made about how and where to build their communities. The colonists had sacrificed agricultural production to an affective landscape that signaled the safety of shelter. Finally, in order to affirm their intentions, the sachems presented the wampum which Stuyvesant had originally demanded a year prior. It is apparent, however, that even their 363 “Proposals Made by the Esopus Indians and the Answers of the Dutch Thereto,” NYCD, 13:102-103; “Statement Regarding the Fears of the People at the Esopus and their Reasons for it,” NYCD, 13:104-105. 364 “Proposals made by the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:106. I am following Grumet’s identification of the sachems, as the original document refers to them as “Minquaes,” “Sinnekans,” and “southern Indians.” See Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History, 73. 365 It is possible that the Dutch had initiated the use of this metaphor, given that Mohawk sachems referred to similar language but attributed the choice to the Europeans: “The Dutch say, we are brothers and joined together with chains.” See “Propositions of the Mohawks,” NYCD, 13:108-109. 366 “Proposals made by the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:106. 178 wampum stood for more than mere payment. Instead, the sachems continued to use wampum in a manner that fit within their own cultural practices: to enhance their spoken words and to “add power to messages and speeches that constructed relationships,” as the historian Amy Schutt put it. As they handed over their final fifteen strings of wampum, the sachems explained that they delivered five for the Europeans to “declare themselves satisfied,” five “that the soldiers shall no to beat them any more,” and five “that the Dutch shall pay the savages, who have worked for them.” 367 Not only had they drawn upon language steeped in material practices, but they used physical strings of beads both to put to rest past grievances and to construct new relationships with their European neighbors. The peace was short lived. On September 20, Thomas Chambers, a villager who regularly employed Natives, gave brandy to eight Esopus at the end of their workday. The Natives sat around a fire not far from Wiltwijk’s walls and drank until around midnight. As they became more inebriated, their raised voices drew the attention of some of the Dutch villagers, who eventually fired into the drinking party. The villagers shot one of the Natives in the head, killing him instantly, and took another prisoner as the others fled. Coming upon another Native in a drunken sleep, one of the colonists lashed out with a sword gashing into the man’s head, who somehow managed to escape. 368 The next day, at least four hundred Esopus surrounded Wiltwijk and occupied a home just outside of its palisades to use as a lookout. The villagers sent a courier and a detachment of seventeen or eighteen soldiers for protection to dispatch a letter to 367 “Proposals made by the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:107. For her discussion of wampum, see Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys (2007), 10-12. 368 “Declaration of Certain Catskil Indians, as to the Origin of the Collision with the Indians at the Esopus,” NYCD, 13:119-121. 179 Stuyvesant, but the Natives took them all captive. The war party laid siege to the fortified village for well over a week. 369 Meanwhile, several Mohawk and Mahican sachems travelled to Wiltwijk to negotiate an end to the fighting. Stuyvesant prepared to travel back up the Hudson. 370 As Stuyvesant readied himself, though, news of the conflict with the Esopus reached the ears of Dutch colonists living on the western end of Long Island just a few days after Native peoples there had killed four of their own, sparking an exodus of panic-stricken villagers who abandoned their homes and carried whatever possessions they could to the protection of Manhattan. Stuyvesant rode through the Long Island villages and managed to calm the residents, who agreed to remain in place. He met the next day with the burgomasters to discuss how to muster a force of soldiers sufficient to put down the Esopus uprising. All agreed that their best chances of convincing colonists to join the military venture was to promise that the soldiers could enslave any Indigenous they managed to capture. This promise proved insufficient, however, and less than ten colonists volunteered. Stuyvesant scrounged up thirty-six soldiers from the garrisons of Manhattan and the outlying settlements, but was frustrated that most colonists remained committed to their own homes at the expense of places which felt as foreign to them as a different colony. For all his efforts to make the scattered villages into a single administrative unit, visions of New Netherland as a coherent entity failed to stir the sentiments of New Amsterdam’s residents. 371 With considerable effort and many financial promises, Stuyvesant managed to assemble a force of around one hundred soldiers, and left for Wiltwijk around noon on Monday, October 6. By the time they reached the village, the Esopus had lifted their siege, having received word of 369 For multiple accounts of these events see NYCD, 13: 112-121. 370 “Letter from Vice-Director La Montagne at Fort Orange to Ensign Smith,” NYCD, 13: 123. 371 “Extract from a Letter of Director Stuyvesant to the Directors in Holland,” NYCD, 13:124-125. 180 Stuyvesant’s journey in advance of his arrival. The Director left around half of his force to fortify the village’s meager garrison and returned to Manhattan with the rest. 372 Meanwhile, Mohawk and Mahican sachems successfully negotiated a ceasefire between the Esopus and the colonists of Wiltwijk that lasted through the winter. 373 Stuyvesant used the following months to make preparations to launch a full-scale attack against Natives. Even so, as the villagers huddled in place throughout the cold winter months, Native peoples occasionally visited Wiltwijk to supply the colonists with food—corn, deer, and turkey. 374 As the winter passed, however, Stuyvesant became ever more convinced that the time for cooperation had passed. He put before his council and the municipal magistrates his recommendation to go to war against the Esopus to “restore the ruined glory of the Dutch nation,” against the “savage barbarous tribes, not fettered by any form of government or laws or divine service.” In addition to proposing a military expedition, Stuyvesant sough to extend the same regulations that controlled the presence of Native peoples within Manhattan to all New Netherland’s settlements, drawing down the veil that severed colonists from Natives. 375 Stuyvesant’s secretary, Cornelis van Ruyven, however, cautioned against entering a war with the Esopus. Van Ruyven warned Stuyvesant that to commit their resources to settling this dispute within the boundaries of New Netherland would provide the perfect opportunity for their English enemies both to the North and South to finally enforce their overlapping claims and invade Dutch territory. If Stuyvesant nonetheless decided to move forwards with a war, however, van Ruyven offered a few suggestions. First, that he wait until the early part of the following winter. 372 “Extract from a Letter of Director Stuyvesant to the Directors in Holland,” NYCD, 13:125-126. 373 “Letter from Ensign Smith to Director Stuyvesant,” NYCD, 13: 126. 374 “Letter from Ensign Smith to Director Lamontagne on Affairs at Esopus,” NYCD, 13:131. 375 “Proposals of Director Stuyvesant Respecting the Measures to be Adopted against the Hostile Indians at the Esopus and Answers of the Council to them,” NYCD, 13:135-138. 181 Not only would this give the Dutch the opportunity to destroy Esopus cornfields ready for harvest, but also, van Ruyven argued, the Indigenous would be much easier to track and confront across the landscape once the snow preserved footprints and the frigid air deprived them of the “tangled shrubs and underwoods” which they used to render themselves “almost indiscoverable for our people.” Furthermore, van Ruyven suggested delaying an attack until New Netherland’s villages had been encircled in palisades and placed “in a state of defense.” 376 The natural and material landscape continued to shape the plans that colonial officials made as they sought to build New Netherland into a well-ordered colony. After van Ruyven had given his advice, the burgomasters offered their own. But Stuyvesant shot them down: “having been requested to [go to war] by the Director-General and Council was sufficient authority.” 377 So too, then, did efforts to police New Netherland’s external boundaries continue to intersect with and exacerbate negotiations over the inner distribution of authority and power. Amidst their preparations in February of 1660, Stuyvesant looked beyond the boundaries of New Netherland towards a broader vision of imperial integration and trade. He turned his sight to Curaçao, over which he had held on-and-off authority as Director since 1642, before eventually becoming Director-General of New Netherland and Curaçao. 378 Stuyvesant asked the Vice- Director of Curaçao to send to New Netherland enslaved Africans who would not only be put to work on Manhattan Island, but who would contribute to “the war against the wild barbarians either to pursue them, when they run away or else to carry the soldiers’ baggage.” Stuyvesant 376 “Proposals of Director Stuyvesant Respecting the Measures to be Adopted against the Hostile Indians at the Esopus and Answers of the Council to them,” NYCD, 13:139-142. 377 “Resolution to Declare War Against the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:142. 378 For Dutch colonial presence in Curaçao, see especially Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648-1795 (Netherlands: KITLV, 1998); Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Karwan Fatah-Black, “Orangism, Patriotism, and Slavery in Curaçao, 1795-1796,” International Review of Social History 58 (2013): 1- 26. 182 thus held together and sought to realize multiple visions of New Netherland, both as a well- ordered Dutch colony in North America, and as a single piece within an integrated Dutch Atlantic empire. Stuyvesant also asked the Vice-Director to send well-trained horses for a company of mounted soldiers that he sought to create. 379 In March, Wappinger sachems appeared before Stuyvesant and Council at Fort Amsterdam to negotiate a final peace settlement between the Dutch and the Esopus, but Stuyvesant refused and instead declared war. 380 Throughout April and May, Dutch troops attacked Indigenous villages, burning food and supplies, killing many and taking captives. Further strengthening the ties between North America and the Caribbean, Stuyvesant sent eleven of the thirteen captives the Dutch had taken to Curaçao to be kept there enslaved. 381 Upon receiving one final request for peace from the Esopus—having first refused or ignored a handful of others—Stuyvesant ordered for the remaining two captives to be sent to Curaçao, too, before entering into the negotiations. 382 Stuyvesant thus constructed a peace settlement through the further entrenchment of enslavement as an economic and political practice that underwrote the Dutch Atlantic. On July 15, 1660, Stuyvesant finally signed a peace agreement with the Esopus at Wiltwijk. By the treaty’s terms, the Native peoples agreed to give up all the territory surrounding Wiltwijk and to remove themselves from the region, “without ever returning again to plant,” to return all the European captives they had taken, and to provide five hundred schepels of corn. The treaty also contained language that incorporated the Natives of “Long Island” and Tackapousha into its provisions for mutual peace-keeping, though it is unclear whether Tackapousha had any 379 “Extract of a Letter of Director Stuyvesant to the Vice-Director at Curaçao,” NYCD, 13:142-143. 380 “Minute of the Appearance of Coetheos Chief Warrior of the Wappings,” NYCD, 13:150-151; “Proclamation of War against the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:152. 381 “Resolution to Transport to Curaçao all but Two or Three of the Lately Captured Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13: 169. 382 “Letter from Director Stuyvesant to Ensign Smith, Respecting Affairs at Esopus,” NYCD: 176-177. 183 involvement in drafting the language. The Dutch then agreed to return the remaining three Native captives (whom had yet to be sent to Curaçao), and pieces of cloth as gestures of good will. 383 Yet over the following year, both Esopus and Haudenosaunee continued to press Stuyvesant for the return of the eleven captives whom the Dutch had sent to Curaçao. Stuyvesant held his ground until April of 1661, when he finally ordered the Vice-Director of Curaçao to return two of the Natives, and to inform the nine who remained there enslaved that more would be released “if they behave well.” 384 But the colonists of Wiltwijk broke the “chain” that held together the Dutch-Native alliance along the northern Hudson in the Spring of 1662, when they began to build a new village just west of present-day Kingston, which they called Nieuwdorp, or “New Village.” Neighboring Indigenous peoples proved willing at first to allow the colonist to build Nieuwdorp, but warned them not to build any fortifications, for the structures would signal “evil intentions.” Furthermore, the Natives insisted that a large portion of the surrounding land had not been included in the previous peace settlement and demanded payment for the use of the land before they permitted the colonists to plough or graze their cattle. Fearing the worst in May 1663, the Nieuwdorp villagers implored Stuyvesant to send military reinforcements and to pay the Esopus for the use of the land. Stuyvesant agreed to send some gifts at the first opportunity but made no mention of soldiers. 385 The villagers notified a local sachem of their intention to supply gifts for the use of land, but it was too late. Esopus warriors attacked Nieuwdorp on June 7, killing eighteen inhabitants, capturing at least ten, and burning a majority of the homes to the ground. The Esopus cleared the Dutch presence from the landscape. 386 383 “Treaty of Peace, Concluded with the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:179-181. 384 “Extract from a Letter of Director Stuyvesant to the Vice-Director to at Curaçao,” NYCD, 13: 194. 385 “Petition of the Overseers of the New Village on the Esopus,” NYCD, 13:242-243; NYCD, 13: 243. 386 “Letter from the Magistrates at Wiltwyck to Director Stuyvesant,” NYCD, 245. 184 Stuyvesant declared war once again on the Esopus and tried to enlist both Mohawks and Mahicans to broker another peace and arrange for the return of the European captives. Stuyvesant again made his rounds through the villages that surrounded Manhattan and offered any colonists who joined the military effort the chance to enslave the Native peoples they captured along the way. He also met with the sachems near Manhattan with whom he had cultivated relationships. Oratam and Mattano assured Stuyvesant that the Lower River Indians would remain neutral throughout the conflict between the Dutch and the Esopus, and would try to gather information on the European captives. No doubt seeking to reaffirm their mutually beneficial relationship, Tackapousha offered to send Native warriors along with the Dutch soldiers who planned to travel to the Esopus. Meanwhile, the Wiechquaesgeck sachem Sewackenamo travelled to Fort Amsterdam to warn Stuyvesant that the Esopus were in fact planning to attack the villages that directly surrounded New Amsterdam, information which he claimed to have received from Wappingers. 387 After a failed attempt and with the assistance of Oratam, the Dutch managed to locate where the Esopus had set up a new fortified village, and carried out a brutal attack on September 9 in which they killed at least thirty men, women, and children. 388 While the attack upon the Esopus had crushed their resistance, it was not until May 1664 that Stuyvesant and the many Native peoples who lived in the region brokered a larger peace. The 387 “Resolution to Make War on the Esopus Indians and to Employ the Mohawks in the Recovery of the Captive Women and Children,” NYCD, 13: 251-252; Extract from a Minute of the Director General’s Visit to Hempstead,” NYCD, 13: 259; “Proclamation Calling out Volunteers for the War Against the Esopus Indians, NYCD, 13: 259-260; Letter from Councillor De Decker to Director Stuyvesant,” NYCD, 13: 260-261; “Proposals Communicated to the Sachems of Hackensack and Staten-Island with their Answers,” NYCD, 13:261-262; “Acceptance of the Offer of Eastern Indians to March Against the Esopus,” NYCD, 13:280; “Part of a Letter from Director Stuyvesant to Capt. Cregier,” NYCD, 13:284-286; “Attendance of the Chief of the Wiechquaeskeck Indians to Notify the Council of a Report, that the Esopus were Coming,” NYCD, 13: 282. 388 “Information Furnished by Oratam,” NYCD, 13:294; “Information Brought by a Hackinkesacky Indian of the Defeat of the Esopus and Recapture of Christian Prisoners,” NYCD, 13:294-295. 185 agreement was the most significant of its kind since the 1645 treaty that had formally ended Kieft’s War. 389 On May 15, representatives of almost every Indigenous nation along the Hudson and on Long Island gathered inside of Fort Amsterdam. Seweckenamo stood and spoke first, in this instance on behalf of the Esopus, whose sachem was old and blind and had been unable to attend the meeting in person. In his hand he held one large stick, which he had fused together from two smaller pieces. This stick, he proclaimed, represented the solid peace that he hoped to broker. Both peoples thereby agreed to forgive and forget all the violence they had committed against one another. All the land which the Esopus had formerly “given” to the Dutch as well as the land which they had “retaken with the sword” would remain in Dutch hands. The Esopus would be barred from entering Dutch villages, with or without weapons. The two peoples would only meet one another at specially sanctioned spaces outside of the villages and away from planting fields. In case of any new violence, the two parties agreed to hold a meeting to settle the conflict peacefully before declaring war, and to put to death collectively the perpetrator of the crime. Finally, the Esopus agreed to send representatives each year to renew the peace in person. 390 The peace between the Dutch and Native peoples once more returned the region to the precarious balance of power that it had enjoyed since the end of Kieft’s War, brokered through a series of cooperative, if not always equal, relationships between Native peoples and Europeans. Yet even as Stuyvesant met with the sachems inside of Fort Amsterdam, their English enemies 389 For an important account of Indigenous treaties, see Glover, Paper Sovereigns (2014). David J. Lehman, “The End of the Iroquois Mystique: The Oneida Land Cession Treaties of the 1780s,” William and Mary Quarterly 47:4 (1990): 523-547. See also Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy of the Seventeenth Century (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001); Paul Otto and Jaap Jacobs “Early Iroquoian-European Contacts: The Kaswentha Tradition, the Two Row Wampum Belt, and the Tawagonshi Document,” Early American Studies 3:1 (January 2013): 1-13; Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman eds., Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 390 “Articles of Peace Made with the Esopus Indians,” NYCD, 13:375-377. 186 began their own negotiations with Indigenous peoples who lived within territory that the Dutch claimed to be their own. Imperial boundaries meant little to Native peoples. Rather, Munsees read the landscape through the many networks of interdependence that they constructed as they sought to retain hold over their ancestral home. Thus whereas these negotiations spelled impending disaster for New Netherland’s Dutch administrators, they signaled continuity for the region’s Native peoples, who sought as best as they could to retain the upper hand against Europeans who, to this point, had built villages on only a small part of a landmass that remained Native lands. In the decade from the creation of New Amsterdam’s Municipal Government in 1653 to the brokering of this final peace agreement in 1664, the Dutch administrators and European colonists of New Netherland worked to clarify the nature of their colony. Internally, they sought to define the still ambiguous boundaries between resident, citizen, and foreigner, between licit and illicit economic activity, and between the authority and jurisdiction of the WIC and the local municipal government, all as they sought to make Manhattan into a rationally ordered town of well-defined streets, lots, and protective borders. In the process, the white residents found quick common ground on the deepening line between free and enslaved. Furthermore, through protecting their colonial borders against the claims of Native peoples to their own ancestral landscape, Stuyvesant and the burgomasters further entrenched this line by directly tying the practices of enslavement to the broader construction of a Dutch Atlantic space. Indeed, this connection reveals just how much efforts to make Manhattan into a well-defined community directly intersected with the desire to protect and police the town’s, and more broadly, the colony’s external boundaries from both their imperial competitors, and their Indigenous neighbors. The Dutch signaled these desires most visibly in the construction of walls 187 and palisades around Manhattan Island. Yet the defensive fortifications obscured a deeper reality, which might have been uncomfortable for European residents of New Netherland: the prospect of fully clarifying the boundaries between one colony and the next, and between European and Native, remained beyond their power. In fact, the viability of New Netherland as a place of successful living hinged upon European’s cooperation with their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, then, New Netherland’s European colonists made the region they inhabited into a landscape of boundary-crossing and cohabitation even as they employed rhetoric and passed laws that suggested their desire to wall themselves of from the Indigenous “other.” The English, when they arrived at Manhattan in 1664, found themselves no less in need of Indigenous cooperation and with a similar need to incorporate themselves into Indigenous landscapes. So too, however, did they have to incorporate themselves into a landscape mediated by almost 60 years of Dutch material presences—even as they comported themselves as conquers. 188 IV. CONQUEROS IN NAME, 1664 RECONSIDERED Despite a long history of Dutch anxieties over their land-hungry English neighbors, the English colonists who lived on and in the vicinity of Manhattan and their superiors back home were no less suspicious of Dutch claims to the region. Henry Alexander, the fourth Earl of Sterling, for example, felt the need to petition King Charles II in 1661 to confirm his rightful possession of “part of New England and an Island adjacent called Long Island,” which the Council for New England had granted to William Alexander, the second Earl of Sterling, in 1636. In Alexander’s view, Dutch colonists had continued to intrude on the parts of Long Island that the Earl claimed as his family’s rightful inheritance. The fourth Earl now requested that the King force the Dutch to “submit themselves to your Majesty’s government” in any future treaties between the two imperial powers. 391 The trader and Long Island resident John Scott expressed the situation in more dramatic language. The English colonists who lived on the western end of Long Island, Scott complained in a letter to Council undersecretary Joseph Williamson, had been “inlsaved for many years by the Dutch their cruell and rapatious neighbours.” 392 These complaints were only the latest in a longer history of imperial competition between the Dutch and English empires over sovereignty in North America. English officials and ambassadors had long denied the legitimacy of Dutch claims in North America, viewing Dutch merchants as usurpers of English lands. As early as September 1632, the English Captain John Mason had complained to Secretary Coke that the Dutch who occupied parts of the region between Delaware Bay and Cape Cod were mere “interlopers,” and had published maps speckled with Dutch place names for locales that had in fact “been formerly discovered and traded unto 391 NYCD III: 42-43. 392 NYCD III: 47-48. 189 diverse tymes by several Englishmen.” 393 English maps, by contrast, erased New Netherland entirely from the scene. Robert Dudley’s 1646 map of the Eastern seaboard, for example, offered no acknowledgement of New Netherland’s existence [Figure 1]. The only hint, recognizable to the informed viewer, is the name “R. Hudson,” placed on the western bank of the Hudson River. But Dudley’s decision to use Hudson’s name was likely a calculated one, since the Dutch called the passageway the “North River” and since Hudson was himself an Englishman. 394 Competitions over territory only heightened amidst the developing Anglo-Dutch Wars, a series of international trade and naval wars that had gradually ramped up in the decade after England passed the first of its Navigation acts in 1651. Scholars have offered different reasons for why two powers with so much in common—both were Protestant and republican at midcentury—became bitter enemies on the Atlantic stage. Explanations have ranged from commercial self-interest in an increasingly mercantilist era to English disappointment with a nation that turned out to be neither sufficiently protestant nor republican. 395 The basic facts, however, are simple enough. Between 1646 and 1648 both the Thirty (1618-1648) and Eighty (1568-1648) Years Wars ended, and with them, formal war-time hostilities between the Dutch and Spanish Empires. The Dutch took advantage of the situation to resume and bolster their rich trades in spices, sugar, silks, Mediterranean fruit and wine, and Spanish American silver to the detriment of Hanseatic, Venetian, and English traders. 396 Dutch traders also cut away from 393 “Captain Mason to Mr. Secretary Coke,” NYCD, 3: 16-17. 394 For scholarship on Hudson, see FN 6. 395 For interpretations that emphasize economic and commercial factors, see especially Charles H. Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London, UK: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1957); J.E. Farnell, “The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community,” Economic History Review, 2 nd ser., 16:3 (1963-1964), pp. 439-454; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Israel, The Dutch Republic (1995); Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560-1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the later argument, see Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 396 Israel, The Dutch Republic (1995), 310-312; 610-611. 190 England’s traditional role as carriers of Spanish wool and dyestuff exports. As they restructured their economy in the 1640s, the Dutch increasingly rivaled their English allies. In October 1651, the English Parliament passed the first Navigation Act, which prohibited the importation of fish and colonial products on Dutch ships, outlawed Dutch carrying of products from the Mediterranean to England, and banned Dutch trade with the English colonies in the Caribbean. The confluence of the Navigation act with the escalation of English naval aggression towards Dutch ships led to the formal outbreak in July 1652 of the First Anglo-Dutch War. 397 Parliament and the States General brought this conflict to a temporary conclusion with a peace treaty that the Dutch ratified in April 1654. Then, in May 1660, the English Parliament formally decreed that Charles II had been the lawful reigning monarch from the date of Charles I’s execution on January 30, 1649. It was as if, legally speaking, the English Republic had never existed. In the same month, Charles II arrived in the United Provinces, the final stop on his celebratory march back to the British Isles. According to many contemporary accounts, the citizens of the Dutch Republic feted the English Monarch. In his history of the English Civil War, for example, Edward Hyde, 1 st Earl of Clarendon, waxed fondly how the States General had offered the exiled monarch “incredibly splendid and noble” treatment and displayed a “joy so visible and real, that it could only be exceeded by that of [Charles’] own subjects.” 398 Charles II himself proclaimed his intentions “of keeping a true and firm friendship and alliance with [the Dutch], nay that he should be jealous if any other king or prince should have a more near and 397 Israel, The Dutch Republic (1995), 610-620. 398 The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, by Edward, Earl of Clarendon. Re-Edited from a Fresh Collation of the Original Ms. In the Bodleian Library, with Marginal Dates and Occasional Notes, by W. Dunn Macray, M.A., F.S.A (Oxford, 1888): VI: 228. 191 stricter friendship and alliance with them than himself.” 399 But this friendship did not materialize. In the aftermath of his restoration to the throne, Charles II hoped to consolidate royal authority. Facing resistance at home, he turned his attention to England’s colonial territories. In particular, Charles envisioned a North American coastline of contiguous English colonies. New Netherland stood as the largest impediment to that aspiration. But reasserting centralized authority over towns and villages that had long been allowed to govern themselves, at least in theory, proved a difficult task. 400 Colonial inhabitants saw the Restoration as an opportunity no less than Charles did. In their case, though, the Stuart Restoration offered colonists opportunities to pursue local interests that often diverged from the Crown’s. While many elites welcomed the Restoration with royalist enthusiasm—William Berkeley and Josiah Fendall both authored prompt apologies for having accepted the authority of Parliament—others took a more calculated approach. Rhode Islanders welcomed the Stuart Restoration but saw the moment as the right time to petition the Crown to confirm their charter, long threatened by the expansionist tendencies of the Massachusetts Bay. 401 Meanwhile, Massachusetts residents bordered on hostile towards the new regime. Many of the colony’s inhabitants proved jealous of what they understood to be their well-established liberties and bucked against Restoration imperial policies. 399 Quoted in Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (1996). 400 For general accounts of the Restoration in North America, see J.M. Sosin, English America and the Restoration Monarchy of Charles II: Transatlantic Politics, Commerce, and Kinship (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990). For more recent interpretations, see L.H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654- 1676,” The New England Quarterly 87:4 (2014): pp. 666-708; Kate Luce Mulry, An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (New York: NYU Press, 2021). For the extent to which a vacuum in imperial authority in the 1640s allowed English America to develop its own political and social institutions, largely without metropolitan oversight, see Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution (2004). 401 Bliss, Revolution and Empire (1990), 133-135. 192 In a deposition before the newly formed Council for Foreign Plantations on March 11, 1660, Captain Thomas Breedon sighed that the governors of the Massachusetts colony “look on themselves as a free state.” 402 Thus at the time of his restoration to the throne, Charles II faced two crucial problems in North America: New Netherland and Massachusetts Bay. He sought to address these problems together. 403 On September 25, 1662, Charles II proposed sending commissioners to both colonies, placing them under the oversite of his younger brother, James Duke of York. 404 James in turn appointed Colonel Richard Nicolls, an officer in his service, to take a leading role in the commission to New England. 405 The reasons for James’ involvement were manifold. In his capacity as lord High Admiral, James stood at the center of a group of Admiralty members, including Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, that advocated naval war against the Dutch. He also governed the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa and the Royal Fisheries Company, ventures aimed at capturing trading networks away from the Dutch. Yet personal considerations may have played a role as well. The Duke of York might have been in financial straits, and the parliamentary gifts (which included several Irish estates and manors in England, excise taxes, and monopolies of the revenue of the Post Office) that he had received since returning to England in 1660 failed to cover his household expenditures. The potential customs revenue from a colony in North America would thus have offered yet another attraction. 406 402 For Breedon’s deposition, see NYCD, 3: 39-41. For Massachusetts resistance to Restoration imperialism in particular, see Adrian C. Weimer, “The Resistance Petitions of 1664-1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly 92 (2019): 221-261. 403 Roy Ritchie draws a similar conclusion. See Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 11. 404 W. Noel Sainsbury, et al, eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574-1736, 42 vols., (London, 1860-1953): 5, No. 370. Further references will be abbreviated as CSP. 405 CSP, 5: No. 432. 406 For a more granular discussion of these issues, see Richie, The Duke’s Province (1977), 14-17. 193 Charles II granted a patent to James on March 12, 1664, which gave the duke control over a massive grant of land. James now owned large parts of modern Maine and Connecticut, all of New York, New Jersey, and a part of Pennsylvania, and all affiliated “lands Islands Soyles Rivers Harbours Mynes Mineralls Quarries Woods Marrishes Waters Lakes Fishings hawking hunting and fowleing and all other Royalties profits, Comodities and hereditaments.” 407 For the payment of forty beaver skins per year to the Crown, the Duke of York and his deputies held “full and absolute power and authority to Correct punish Pardon Govern an Rule all” subjects who inhabited the landscape circumscribed by the grant as he saw fit, so long as the ordinances and proceedings there did not run counter to those of England. The grant also gave James the power to “Nominate make Constitute [my italics] Ordeyne and Confirme” all governors, officers, and ministers required to establish and maintain the order of law and “ceremonies of government” within the territories encompassed by his grant, and that such governors or ministers had the power to invoke martial law in instances of rebellion or insurrection. 408 The commission that finally took shape also included Sir Robert Carre, George Cartwright, and Samuel Maverick. Charles II’s Secretary of State, Sir Henry Bennet Earl of Arlington, provided the commissioners with their instructions in April 1664. Their first task, explained Bennet, was to examine and familiarize themselves with the present state of government in Massachusetts and Connecticut: the “whole frame and constitution of ye government there, both civill and ecclesiasticall.” Bennet emphasized, indirectly though, that greater care needed to be taken with the governors and residents of Massachusetts. The commissioners needed to reassure 407 “First Grant to the Duke of York, 1664,” The Colonial Laws of New York Year 1664 to the Revolution, Including the Charters to the Duke of York, the Commissions and the Instructions to the Colonial Governors, the Duke’s Laws, the Laws of the Dongan and Leisler Assemblies, the Charters of Albany and New. York and the Acts of the Colonial Legislatures from 1691 to 1775 Inclusive, Vol 1 (Albany, James B. Lyon State Printer, 1894): 1-2. Further references to this collection will be abbreviated as NYCL. 408 “First Grant to the Duke of York, 1664,” NYCL, 1: 2-5. 194 them that “wee are soe farr from any thought of abridging or restraineing them from any priviledges or liberties granted by our Royall Father of blesses memory….that wee are very ready to enlarge those concessions or to make any other alterations, which upon their experience soe many years of that climate & country they finde necessary for the good & prosperity of the colony.” 409 Significantly, Bennet employed the terms “charter” and “constitution” in different, and telling, manners. He used constitution to refer to the entire arrangement of governing institutions—a descriptive endeavor. The charter, on the other hand, was prescriptive: to “regulate & bound all their actions.” 410 Both, however, hinged upon material metaphors: the constitution was the frame, the charter, the binding. Bennet’s instructions contained two other major components. The first required the commissioners to familiarize themselves with the neighboring Indigenous “Kings and Princes” as well as all treaties and contracts that existed between the English colonists and Native peoples. They were to ascertain whether any colonists had failed to uphold their end of the contracts and treaties into which they had entered and, if so, the commissioners were to offer reparation to the affected Native peoples. Bennet feared that “any violation in that kinde will discredit & call in question ye faith of Christianity, and disappoint or obstruct our great end of ye conversion of infidels in those parts.” But the commissioners’ task went beyond righting wrongs on behalf of the colonists themselves. More than this, the commissioners were to “let those Princes and other Indians know of ye charge wee have given in this particular & of your readynesse to redresse any thing that hath been done towards them, against ye right rules of justice and good neighborhood.” In other words, the commissioners were to incorporate the Native princes into a 409 “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to Massachusetts,” NYCD, 3: 51. 410 “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to Massachusetts,” NYCD, 3: 53. 195 new chain of authority that led directly back to Charles II. It was the crown that would guarantee reparations and uphold justice and “good neighborhood.” 411 The second directed the commissioners’ attention to the south and southwest: “to discourse att large & with confidence to [the colonists], all that we have discoursed to you, of reduceing the Dutch in or neare Long Island or any where within ye limits of our owne dominions to an entire obedience to our government.” Besides offering a “constant receptacle and sanctuary” for discontent and criminal New Englanders, the Dutch had for too long cut into English trading profits and threatened England’s standing on the international stage (Bennet recalled memories of the Amboyna massacre, now just over forty years past). The Dutch could no longer be suffered to claim territory and “raise a government of their owne” upon a landscape that was, at least in Bennet’s view, “unquestionably” English. It was time to bring them to heel as obedient English subjects. The commissioners were thus to inform the Dutch of their intentions, but to promise that no residents of the former New Netherland who swore obedience to the English crown would be deprived of their possessions or livelihood and would enjoy all the same privileges as English subjects elsewhere. 412 But Bennet issued a series of private instructions, too. While affirming the need to ingratiate themselves with the colonists of New England and to bring them back into the Royal fold, Bennet placed an even greater emphasis on the need to address the Dutch Problem, “that whole territory being in our possession before they, as private persons and without any authority from their superiors and against ye lawe of Nations and the good intelligence and alliance between us 411 “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to Massachusetts,” NYCD, 3: 53. For scholarship particularly attuned to attempts to incorporate Indigenous leaders into English chains of authority, see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 412 “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to Massachusetts,” NYCD, 3: 52. For the politics of memory surrounding the Amboyna massacre, see Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020). 196 and their superius, invaded and have since wrongfully obteyned the same, to the prejudice of our Crowne and Dignity, and therefore ought in justice to be resumed by us, except they will entirely submit to our government and live there as our good subjects under it.” 413 Private instructions aside, the Dutch were not without warning. New Netherland’s governors had long been aware of English claims to the territory they called their own. Dutch imperial functionaries had thus done their utmost to contest those claims, both locally and through international diplomatic channels. But the situation devolved in 1663. Beginning that summer, the advancing rumble of hoofbeats signaled to Dutch settlements impending changes. In July, an Englishman named Captain Talcott arrived with sixteen or eighteen riders on horseback at the village of Oostdorp [Westchester], just north of Manhattan. He managed to eject the reigning magistrates and declared the residents English subjects. 414 The Dutch finally mustered a response in October 1663, when Secretary Cornelis van Ruyven, Burgemeester Stephen van Cortlandt and a burgher named John Laurents left Manhattan to appear before the General Assembly at Hartford. They first met with members of the court on October 18 th for a brief introduction. The commissioners intended to speak at greater length the next night at the house of local miller Mr. Howard, which stood midway between their own lodgings with the town Marshal and the town hall. But the English magistrates, who were currently holding court, ran late and invited van Ruyven and van Cortlandt to dine with them that evening, at the town hall, instead. 415 After dinner, the Dutch delegates queried the Hartford Magistrates whether they had any intention of upholding the boundary agreements the two 413 “Private Instructions to Coll. R Nicolls &c.,” NYCD, 3: 57. 414 “Remonstrance of the West India Company,” NYCD, 2: 217. 415 “Journal Kept by Cornelis van Ruyven, Burgomaster Cortlandt and John Laurence, Delegates from New Netherland to the General Assembly at Hartford, in New England, in the month of October, 1663,” NYCD, 2: 385- 387. Further references will appear as “Journal Kept by…” 197 parties had come to in 1650. The Englishmen all but shrugged off the question, as well as their responsibility. All they had done, they argued, was inform the residents of Long Island of the boundaries originally set forth in their patent from the English crown. The inhabitants themselves had then “voluntarily betaken themselves under their government.” 416 The magistrates agreed to turn the matter over, once again, to their superiors in Europe for settlement, but insisted in the meantime that the English towns on Long Island as well as Westchester should remain under the government of Hartford. The suggestion raised the ire of van Ruyven and van Cortlandt, who shot back that there were no circumstances under which they could allow this to happen. But the Hartford commissioners continued to absolve themselves of blame: they could hardly stop the townspeople on Long Island or those in Westchester from “betaking themselves under the obedience of his Majesty.” 417 Van Ruyven and van Cortandt were incredulous: had Hartford not “encouraged and excited” the English residents of New Netherland to do this in the first place? The English commissioners held their ground: they had a basic responsibility to make known the King’s grant to all who lived within its boundaries. Of course, replied the Dutch, they could hold such conferences with their own subjects, but not with those of the Dutch West India Company and States General. The Englishmen scoffed, “they were subjects of his Majesty, as they dwelt according to the Patent of his Majesty’s territories.” 418 For both the Dutch and English, then, one’s place of dwelling determined their status as a subject of either the Dutch Republic or English Crown. Unfortunately, both claimed sovereignty over the same geographical space, creating an ambiguous legal landscape for the region’s multiethnic inhabitants. Languages of subjecthood 416 “Journal Kept by…” NYCD, 2: 387. 417 “Journal Kept by…” NYCD, 2: 388. 418 “Journal Kept by…” NYCD, 2: 388. 198 that emphasized dwelling and place-contingent residence intermingled with an already contested landscape to created opportunities for enterprising Englishmen and women to proactively claim themselves as English subjects, even as they lived within what was perhaps more accurately Dutch territory (at least from a European point of view). Dutch and English colonists ultimately applied what could be interpreted as equally valid claims to one space in particular: western Long Island. The October meeting settled nothing. The Burgemeesters fretted again in November 1663 over being embattled on multiple fronts, “in the one side the war with the savages and on the other side the approach of the English.” Then in December, the same John Scott who had complained of his suffering under Dutch subjugation led 150 riders to invade and occupy Gravesend, seeking to bring it under English jurisdiction by force. 419 When questioned, Scott argued that he was simply concerned that “his Majesty’s good subjects…should be deprived of their Just right.” 420 Scott returned again to western Long Island in early January 1664, this time with seventy or eighty horsemen and sixty or seventy soldiers on foot. The “soldiers” were in fact English residents of the Dutch towns there. Scott stopped first at Midwout, where he climbed to the top of the block house, and, speaking in English, declared “this land and the whole of America from Virginia unto Boston” English territory. He then continued on to New Utrecht, Amesfoort, and Brooklyn, where the group of English villagers delivered the same declaration, removed Dutch cannons from blockhouses, and hoisted English flags. 421 Then, in one of the many negotiations with Stuyvesant’s delegates, Scott delivered what he believed to be 419 “Remonstrance of the West India Company,” NYCD, 2: 217; “Director-General and Council of New Netherland to the Chamber at Amsterdam,” NYCD, 2: 231. 420 “RNA, 1662-1663, 331; “Extract from the Record of what passed between Captain John Schot in regard to the Claim to Long Island, this last December, 1663,” NYCD, 2: 393. 421 “The Dutch Towns on Long Island to the Director-General and Council of New Netherland,” NYCD, 2: 401-405. 199 a coup de grace. He told van Ruyven and Laurents that their best course of action was to try and come to an agreement with the Duke of York, “as he knew for certain that his Majesty had granted this Island to the said Duke,” who had determined “if he could not get the Island peaceably, that he should look to obtaining it by force, and for that purpose would send two or more frigates hither, in order to reduce not only the aforesaid Island but the entire of New Netherland, and that he, Captain Schott, would command said frigates, as Lieutenant- General.” 422 In reality, the Duke of York did not receive his patent until March, and whether Scott had reason to call himself “Lieutenant-General” is doubtful. But Scott’s actions signaled to the Dutch that the English invasion they had long feared was now imminent. 423 They were right. Three naval ships and a freighter carrying the Duke’s commissioners and three hundred soldiers left Portsmouth on May 15, 1664. Separated along the way by rough seas, the fleet finally anchored together just off Manhattan on August 18. 424 Outmanned, Stuyvesant sent letters north to Esopus and East to the towns of Long Island, but reinforcements never came. 425 As Nicolls amassed his troops on Long Island, Connecticut Governor John Winthrop Jr. met with Stuyvesant in a tavern to give him a letter from Nicolls that promised the Dutch continued trading and immigration privileges with their homeland if they surrendered. Stuyvesant tore the letter to pieces. But news of its contents spread throughout the town. Anxious to avoid bloodshed, a crowd of townspeople gathered in front of the Stadt Huys and forced Stuyvesant to re-piece the letter and read its contents aloud. The letter dealt the final blow to Stuyvesant’s hopes for resistance. Ninety-three prominent burghers signed a remonstrance begging Stuyvesant to “adjust matters according to 422 “Report to the Commissioners,” NYCD, 2: 400. 423 “Another Extract,” NYCD, 2: 406. 424 Ritchie, The Duke’s Province (1977), 20. 425 For the letters, see NYCD, 13: 392-93; NYCD 2: 376. 200 the conjuncture of the time.” Their final plea (and justification for surrendering): the fort still could not protect Manhattan’s residents. 426 On August 27, representatives of the English and Dutch met at Stuyvesant’s farm, where they quickly produced and agreed upon the conditions of capitulation to English rule. The stipulations were generous, designed to create as little discontent among locals as possible. Those who found the change in leadership truly unacceptable could return to the Netherlands. For those who stayed, however, life would continue much as it had—at least for a while. The residents of Manhattan would still enjoy freedom of conscience (at least nominally speaking) as well as their own customs of inheritance. The West India Company would retain their property on the Island and the current municipal government would remain in place until a new election could be held. Furthermore, the articles promised that no English soldiers would be quartered in Dutch homes without proper satisfaction, and that the town of Manhattan would be permitted to choose deputies to represent their interests in public affairs (though what this meant in practice remained unclear). Finally, Dutch residents would be accorded the status of denizens and direct commerce with the Netherlands would be permitted for six months. Two days later, Stuyvesant and his garrison marched out of the fort to beating drums and in haste boarded the Gideon. Nicolls led his own men into the still gangly fort, now re-christened James. New Amsterdam became New York. 427 The choreographed pageantry with which Stuyvesant departed and Nicolls entered New York City accompanied a series of pictorial conquests designed to subsume the former Dutch colony within the Duke of York’s imperial fold. The first of these images is perhaps best called the “Mannados Plan,” after its odd transformation of “Manhattan” into “Mannado” (Fig. 11). The 426 Ritchie, The Duke’s Province (1977), 21-22. For the remonstrance, see NYCD 2: 248-250. 427 “Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland,” NYCD 2: 250-253; RNA, 1664-1666, 114-116. 201 plan’s origins are obscure, but it may have come about from first Dutch, and later English hands. The surveyor Jacques Cortelyou might have created the original version of the plan: the Burgemeesters asked Cortelyou how much he was expecting as payment for the map he was in the process of creating. Cortelyou answered that such a map “would bring 100 ryksdaalders” back home, a sum that seems appropriate to an elaborate image such as this. 428 But whether Cortelyou painted the original version and Nicolls had it embellished, or whether Nicolls ordered the creation of a new plan based on Courtelyou’s original, remains a mystery. Despite its Dutch origins, however, the final plan, preserved in the British Museum, testified to the English occupation of New York. The “North River” now bears Hudson’s name, an act of symbolic repatriation. Whether the plan’s English artists were aware of it, the Hudson’s reclamation held further significance given the extent to which Dutch claims to the region hinged upon their right of first discovery through Hudson’s voyage, and Indigenous claims to having not seen anything akin to Hudson’s ship prior to his trip up the river. The English flag crowns the Fort while others fly above the many ships that sail through the harbor and up both of the rivers. The bricked roofs share the same hue of red as the English flags, washing the city in the colors of English imperial sovereignty. Houses and palisades line and enclose the green garden spaces like soldiers—indeed the tips of the palisades in particular stand at the ready like bayonets in the air. The result is a plan that portrays a military-like precision and captures the ordered dominion that the Duke of York’s patent imagined for his North American colony. 428 Berthold Fernow ed., Minutes of the Orphanmasters Court of New Amsterdam, 1655-1663, Minutes of the Executive Boards of the Burgomasters of New Amsterdam, and the Records of Walewyn Van Der Veen, Notary Public, 1662-1664 (New York, 1907), 2: 130. Stokes provides a lengthy but inconclusive discussion of the image’s possible provenance. He also adds Augustine Heermans, Jacob van de Water, and John Hack to the list of possible creators: Stokes, 1: 207-210. 202 Fig. 11: “Mannados Plan,” Unknown Artist, 1664 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] The image was a luxury good, painted in brilliant colors on heavy vellum and gilded with gold. Nicolls may have sent the painting back to his royal patron as both a depiction of the current state of the colonial possession that bore his name, as well as a symbolic marker of his authority. The image might have functioned as part of England’s exploding information economy through which local and metropolitan correspondents, cartographers, and imperial officers collaborated to make the empire legible to metropolitan audiences. Furthermore, the image could have functioned as an aesthetic corollary to the Duke of York’s legal claims to New York through the form of his patent and charter, again suggesting that law was never quite 203 enough. Indeed, as the historian Christian Koot recently put it, “In the early modern Atlantic, as European empires struggled to gain sovereignty over native peoples and competed with one another, maps became one of the key technologies that allowed Europeans to picture and manage empires.” 429 Shortly after the “Mannados Plan,” came the “Nicolls Map,” (Fig. 12), likely prepared for Governor Nicolls during his four-year tenure. A pen and ink drawing on paper, this second depiction was less a luxury good than an empirical document and may have fit better than the Mannados Plan into the imperial knowledge practices with which Nicolls was familiar. The Nicolls map offers a more sober view of Manhattan that registers the island’s geography and spatial relation to Long Island and the North American Mainland. This is an informational account in which text and image together construct a view of Manhattan as a constituent element of the newly expanded English empire. The thin but compressed pen strokes aggregate into the Hudson and tell of the river’s northward movement towards Albany—just 90 miles away, as the text indicates—and a place that any Imperial functionary would have understood as a central node in the Fur trade which the English had long struggled to capture from the Dutch. The current’s violent rhythm gives the island a quiescence. In combination with the thinning of trees 429 Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion (2018): 10. For scholarship on the English empire and mapmaking, see especially Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the New World (2006): Ch. 4; Matthew H. Edney, “John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Imago Mundi 60 (2008): 63-85; Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Martin Brückner, “Introduction: The Plurality of Early American Cartography,” in Brückner, Early American Cartography (2011); Robert Paulett, An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Max S. Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Alexander Johnson, The First Mapping of America: The General Survey of British North America (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763 (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 204 towards the Island’s southern tip—the nucleus of its human colonial population—Manhattan displays itself as an attractive place of settlement, a repose amidst the disorder of restless seas and other ungovernable spaces that made up large parts of the English empire. 430 Perhaps the artist intended for the inset view of New York City to add further credibility to the imagined order of England’s newest colonial possession. Unlike earlier depictions, the artist left the interior parts of the blocks empty. The resulting spaces exude transparency and beckon the gaze of an imperial administrator—empty spaces contain no secrets, no hidden designs of subversion. Furthermore, the blocks’ interiors are devoid of the property lines that demarcated the confused distribution of lots that in fact dominated Manhattan’s geography. Blank spaces thus invite not just the watchful eye of the imperial surveyor, but the imperial imagination, ready to fill in empty space with ordered settlement. Manhattan stands at the ready for Nicolls, and in turn, the Duke of York, to make of it whatever they wish. Yet the inset offers a countervailing narrative. Apart from the fort, the individual spaces rendered in clearest form and marked off by the text stacked along the north side of the palisade are in fact those most associated with the lives and political experiences of Nieuw Amsterdam— Stuyvesant’s stately house and the Stadt Huys, now anglicized as the “Towne House.” The Dutch had made this space long before the English arrived, and the landscape bore their mark in a way that the English could not escape. In fact, from this point of view, it was not the English who subsumed the Dutch through the creation of these images, but rather, the Dutch who incorporated the English into their already well-established lifeways. 430 For dating the plan, see Stokes, Iconography, 1: 210-212. 205 Fig. 12: “Nicolls Map”, Unknown Artist, 1664 [Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan] The inset and the generous terms of the Articles of Capitulation thus reveal that Nicolls, at least originally, understood that he would not be able to remake Manhattan to his or the Duke of York’s liking, no matter how centralized a vision of government the Duke’s patent portrayed. Even so, loyalties had to be assured. On Friday October 14, in the early Afternoon, Nicolls gathered with the Burgomeesters and Schepenen as well as a handful of prominent burghers inside of the Stadt Huys, including Johannes Megapolensis, Cornelis van Ruyven, and Petrus Stuyvesant. Nicolls requested that the municipal government take an oath of loyalty to the Duke of York and Charles II, effecting their transformation into both free denizens of New York and loyal subjects of the English Crown (the rest of the citizenry would follow shortly after). The 206 oath read, “I swear by the name of Almighty God that I will be a true subject to the king of great Britain and will obey all such commands as I sal [sic] receive from his majestie, his Royall Hignesse James duke of Yorck and such governours, and Offivers as from time to time are appointed over me by his Authority and none other whilst I live in any of his majesties territories. So help me God.” Megapolensis and van Ruyven saw no issues with Nicolls’ oath. But the others demurred. The gathered Burghers refused to take the oath unless Nicolls added eleven more words: “Conformable to the Articles concluded on the Surrender of this place.” They feared that taking the oath without those eleven words would nullify the concessions that Nicolls had made to them on condition of their peaceful surrender. The Dutch residents of Manhattan thus interpreted the Articles of Capitulation not as a simple treaty, but a guarantee of rights—a foundational piece of their new constitution under English rule. 431 The following Tuesday, the Burgemeesters visited Governor Nicolls and placed in his hand the charter [verbandt] which Stuyvesant had granted Nieuw Amsterdam in establishing a municipal government. The Burgemeesters again insisted that they would not take the oath unless it referred specifically to the Articles of Capitulation. Nicolls finally issued in writing a guarantee that none of the Oath’s language broke the provisions stipulated by the surrender agreement and ordered it to be read aloud to the town’s inhabitants, emphasizing once more, though, that every denizen under the new government who intended to remain there would have to take the oath. This finally proved satisfactory, and the recalcitrant burghers relented. 432 On Tuesday, November 22, the Burgemeesters and Schepenen came together as a “Common Council” and drafted a letter to King James himself, promising to conduct themselves as “good 431 RNA, 1664-1666, 142-143. 432 RNA, 1664-1666, 143-144; 144-145; For the original Dutch manuscript, see Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens, Sept. 1654-Nov., 15, 1655, p. 99. 207 subjects are bound to do,” though reiterating their requests to be afforded the same “rights and privileges” as other English subjects. But they were careful through their sentence constructions to demonstrate that any “privileges” and “prerogatives” that King James chose to grant, would necessarily be in addition to those “inserted and conditioned in the capitulations on the surrender of” Nieuw Amsterdam. In other words, the Burgemeesters took one more opportunity to emphasize their interpretation of the Articles of Capitulation as a constituting document for New York, this time to the Sovereign himself. 433 And indeed, when the time came in February 1665 to elect new magistrates for the city, the Burgemeesters referred back to the capitulation: “Whereas pursuant to the capitulation on the surrender of this City to the government of his Royal Highness the Duke of York, it is granted and given to this place that they, pursuant to the 16 th Article, shall absolutely have the selection of the new succeeding Magistrates of this City.” 434 Nicholls did not object. Of course, magistrates old and new had plenty of reason to collaborate with Nicolls if they wished to maintain their position of authority within New York City. On February 2 nd , Nicolls ordered the bell of City Hall wrung three times and announced to the “Commonalty” [gemeente], that they honor and respect the abovenamed persons, as ought to be honored such Magistrates of his Royal Majesty, the Duke of York and his Honor our Lord and Governour Richard Nicolls.” Different from the context of the debates that led up to the establishment of Nieuw Amsterdam’s Municipal government, the Burgemeesters now employed the term gemeente as a means of claiming a top-down authority by virtue of the sovereignty delegated from the Duke of York to Richard Nicolls. The “community” or “commonalty”, in this instance, was subject to 433 RNA, 1664-1666, 160-161. 434 RNA, 1664-1666, 183-184. 208 sovereignty, rather than the source of it. 435 The shifting usage of the word suggests the extent to which New Amsterdam’s Magistrates might have been content, if not eager, to collaborate with Nicholls in their effort to close ranks as part of a developing political and economic elite. 436 If English imperial administrators recognized their need to ingratiate themselves with Manhattan’s established Dutch population, so too did they understand their need to ally themselves with the region’s Indigenous powers. And in doing so, the English approached Indigenous peoples not as lesser powers or English subjects, but as sovereign equals. Their mode of encounter would be diplomacy, rather than conquest. Again, Nicolls’ instructions elaborated that he should familiarize himself and establish contact with the neighboring “Kings & Princes,” inquire as to what “treaties or contracts” English inhabitants had entered with them, and whether their own subjects had adequately observed their stipulations, offering satisfaction in any cases in which they had not. Such violations could “discredit” the English vision of a politics grounded in the tenets of Christianity. Furthermore, Nicolls would receive any “Princes” who chose to visit and make know their readiness to “redresse any thing that hath been done towards them, against ye right rules of justice and good neighborhood.” 437 In courting the good will of the region’s “Kings” and “Princes,” the English recognized the continued sway that Indigenous peoples held over a landscape of which European communities consisted of but a small part. One might even argue that the instructions demonstrate a de facto recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The 435 For the original Dutch, see Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens, Sept. 1654-Nov., 15, 1655, 153. 436 For the formation of colonial elites across the Atlantic, see especially Charles G. Steffen, From Gentlemen to Townsmen: The Gentry of Baltimore County, Maryland, 1660-1776 (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1993); H.V. Bowen, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire,1688-1775 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 1996); Simon D. Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648-1832 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Roper and van Ruymbeke, Constructing Early Modern Empires (2007); Claire Laux, François-Joseph Ruggiu, and Pierre Singaravélou eds., Au sommet de l’Empire: Les élites européennes dans les colonies XVIe-XXe siècle (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009). 437 “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to Massachusetts,” NYCD, 3: 53. 209 Dutch may have capitulated to an English conquest, ready to be incorporated as subjects of the English Empire, but Indigenous peoples had not. They remained independent sovereign entities who stood as potential allies or enemies at the intersection of global imperial designs and local political realities. The English began their diplomatic ventures with the Mohawk and other Five Nations leaders. Colonel George Cartwright met with Iroquoian sachems at the renamed Fort Albany on September 24, 1664. Mohawks used the arrival of the English as an opportunity to secure their supply networks for European-made goods and to solidify English cooperation in bringing to justice any Europeans or Algonquian River Indians who lived “under the protection of the English.” Five Nations peoples, in turn, agreed to do the same. The Mohawks also requested that the English avoid assisting any of their present enemies, and that the English help them to facilitate more peaceful relations with Munsees (“Nations down the River”). The Mohawks also requested that the English permit them to lodge in European houses “as formerly,” further indication that Stuyvesant’s incessant efforts to bring an end to practice of Indigenous sheltering had come to naught. European homes continued to facilitate and sustain networks of exchange, communication, and partnership between Native peoples and Europeans—a practice which Mohawks were eager to continue. 438 One of the treaty’s English stipulations, however, raises questions: “The Indians at Wamping [Wappingers] and Espachomy [Esopus] and all below the Manhatans, as also all those that have submitted themselves under the protection of His Majesty are included in these Articles of Agreement and Peace.” It is not clear from the available evidence that any such agreements had been made prior to this point, especially between the English and Munsees. 439 438 For the Mohawk practice of sheltering, see especially Kramer, “‘The Entire Trade to Themselves’…” (2018). 439 “Articles between Col. Cartwright and the New York Indians,” NYCD, 3: 67-68. 210 In fact, just the opposite seems to have been true. Robert Carr, whom Nicolls had dispatched to bring the Dutch and Swedish settlements along the Delaware River into the English fold, could not deliver word of his success to Nicolls at Manhattan until October because of, as he phrased it, “the falling of ye Indians from their former civillity, they abusing messengers that travel by land, since our arrival here.” “Soe strong are they,” Carr stressed, “that noe Christian yet dare venter to plant on that side [of the river]; which belonges to ye Duke of Yorke.” 440 The precise cause for these acts of Munsee and perhaps Susquehannock violence are unclear. But it is crucial to keep in mind that the Native peoples living in the Delaware valley had long collaborated with the Dutch as messengers, building through their exchange networks a well- integrated and economically vibrant (if not always peaceful) landscape. The fact that these Indigenous peoples directed their attacks specifically at newly arrived English couriers suggests that they may have hesitated to abandon their former European partners. Even as the English worked to secure Native allies at the expense of previous Dutch- Indigenous networks, Native peoples and colonists continued to collaborate beyond the oversight of both Imperial officials and local Dutch and English authorities—collaborations still mediated by the exchange, accrual, and use of material things. On March 23, 1655, Carel van Brugge and his wife Sarah filed a complaint against an Englishman named William Newman and a Native (possibly Massachusett) man named Thomas Senequam, both of whom appeared before the magistrates two days later. Some time back, Senequam used Newman to recover after his former English employer had beaten and mugged him (Senequan insisted that he was a “free Indian and was never bound to him.”). Senequam convinced Newman to take him on as an apprentice. Senequam began a seven-year apprenticeship with Newman, shortly after which the two of them 440 “Sir Robert Carr to Colonel Nicolls,” NYCD, 3:73-74. For the articles of agreement between the English, Dutch, and Swedes, to which Carr refers in his letter, see The Delaware Papers, 1664-1682: 2-3. 211 seem to have conceived a plan to defraud a Dutch couple living just north of Manhattan, near the village of Westchester. Newman sold Senequam to Carrel van Brugge (who had recently anglicized his names as Charles Bridges) and his wife Sarah. Not long after, Senequam and Newman stole shoes, cloth, garments, and a wig from Carrel and Sarah’s home. Newman instructed Senequam to cut off his hair and put on Sarah’s wig to abscond to either Boston or Virginia (where at least in Newman’s view, Manhattan’s authorities had no jurisdiction), disguised as an Englishman. 441 Newman and Senequam constructed a mutually profitable relationship mediated by the use and market value of material goods. Even more interesting, Newman seems to have thought objects and physical markers powerful enough to shape identity that Senequam could obscure his Indigenous ethnicity by simply putting on a wig. 442 Despite such illicit partnerships, however, Nicholls pressed on, turning next to the Esopus, with whom the Dutch had held such contentious relations over the preceding years. Nicolls met with representatives of the Esopus in Kingston on October 7, 1665. The parties agreed to put an end to hostilities between Europeans and Indigenous and set terms for managing isolated episodes of violence. Natives and Europeans alike, guilty of murder, would be put to death, an action that could have fulfilled both European and Indigenous definitions of justice. Yet the provisions here nonetheless suggest that Nicolls sought to weight the scale in favor of English claims of sovereignty. The treaty required sachems to bring Natives to an English officer for punishment, but did not make reciprocal demands upon the English. Other provisions supported this agenda. The treaty required the Esopus to surrender significant amounts of land surrounding Kingston and the European village of Esopus and required Natives to travel to European 441 RNA, 1664-1666, 203-206. 442 For a fascinating account of the relationship between material culture, physical markers, and identity in the early modern world, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 212 communities each year to reaffirm the treaty’s provisions, a one-sided demand upon Indigenous mobility, rather than an agreement to meet on more neutral grounds. 443 At the same time, however, the treaty hinted at the ambiguities of continued partnership and the possibilities for intimacy. The English would build a house just outside Kingston where natives would lodge and leave their weapons before entering the town to trade. On the one hand, this was but one more attempt to control the spatial parameters of Indigenous-European interactions. On the other, it evidences Nicoll’s recognition of the need to facilitate continued relationships with Munsees in addition to the Haudenosaunee, a story that has for too long dropped from view at the moment of the English arrival in 1664. Furthermore, even as the sachems agreed to the treaty’s land provisions, they delivered to the English a number of “small sticks.” Nicolls read these objects as proof for Native consent to the agreement. More likely, however, the Esopus sachems sought to initiate a partnership on equal terms through the exchange of objects, an interpretation that Nicolls himself would have confirmed when he gave to the sachems “three laced red coats” in return. Furthermore, it is entirely possible that the sachems sought also to remind and instruct Nicolls of past transgressions or promises that Europeans had made to Indigenous leaders, which Natives had long registered and represented back to Europeans as notches etched into memory sticks. 444 As Nicolls sought to address and shape future relationships between English and Indigenous, he also attended to the relationship between governors and governed within New York itself. As per the Articles of Capitulation, Nicolls at first left Manhattan’s municipal government intact, 443 Peter R. Christoph ed., Administrative Papers of Governors Richard Nicolls and Francis Lovelace, 1664-1673, New York Historical Manuscripts: English, Vol. XXII (The Holland Society of New York: 1980), 3-5. This collection will be abbreviated below as “Nicolls and Lovelace Papers.” 444 “Nicolls and Lovelace Papers,” 3. For the use of memory sticks and other Indigenous communications media, see especially Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover eds., Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 213 and elections for the offices of burgemeester and schepenen took place in the usual manner on February 2 nd , 1665. 445 But on June 13, Nicolls appeared before the burgemeesters and revoked the Dutch-style municipal government. According to Nicolls, his charter endowed him with “full and absolute power,” derived from Charles II’s royal authority, to “Constitute” a government that better matched the “Lawes and Customes of his Majesty’s Realme of England.” 446 In other words, Nicolls would try to Anglicize Manhattan’s municipal government. Manhattan’s Schout, Burgemeesters and Schepenen were to be replaced by a mayor, aldermen, and a sheriff. Nicolls also sought to generate a sense of political community that he perhaps felt was missing, declaring that the inhabitants of New York, New Harlem, and Manhattan Island were now “and shall bee forever, accounted, Nominated and Established, as one Body Politique & Corporate,” which he claimed to “Constitute and appoint” for the length of one year. 447 Nicolls selected Thomas Willet as Mayor, Thomas Delavall, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, John van Brugge, Cornelis van Ruyven, and John Laurence as Aldermen, and Allard Anthony as Sheriff, all of whom together would enjoy “full Power and authority to Rule and Governe as well as the Inhabtants of this Corporacon as any Strangers.” 448 If Nicolls sought to Anglicize Manhattan’s government, then, he did not, it would seem, depart from the municipal government’s recent insistence upon a descending model of authority. Manhattan’s municipal governors did not respond well to the news. They chastised Nicolls for contradicting the 16 th article of the surrender agreement that permitted the Burgemeesters to elect their own members, and which made no mention of any changes to the form of government. Nicolls, in turn, held to a limited reading of the article, which in his view guaranteed only that 445 RNA, 5: 183-184. 446 RNA, 5: 248. 447 RNA, 5: 249. 448 RNA, 5: 250. 214 the magistrates could select their own members for the first election after the surrender. Interestingly, there is little evidence that the magistrates objected further: they installed the new members that day. The new municipal government swore an oath and rung the bell atop the town hall three times, making their authority known to the citizenry “in order that they hold them in due respect.” 449 Rather than Manhattan, then, it was the English towns that at first proved most difficult to incorporate. In February 1665, Nicolls sent a letter to the towns announcing a general meeting at Hempstead. The English towns on Long Island, Nicolls claimed, had for too long been subjected to rule by a foreign power, a situation that had not only dampened the exercise of traditional English civil liberties, but which had stirred such animosity and opposition amongst the towns’ leaders that few could devote proper care or consideration to passing positive laws. This, above all, was why Charles II had finally “reduced the forraigne Power to his obedience” and had vested the Duke of York with “full and absolute Power, in and over all and every the Particular Tracts of Land therein mentioned,” an authority on behalf of which Nicolls now acted. For Nicolls, the time had come to solicit advice from an assembly of deputies representing the English towns in order to “Settle good and known Lawes within this government for the future.” The towns’ “freemen only”—property holding men—were to elect representatives to travel to Hemsptead for the meeting on the last day of the month. Nicolls instructed the representatives to bring with them documentation for the bounds and limits of each town along with any documents supporting their right to challenge those boundaries, if they so desired. 450 Nicolls sent letters to Long Island’s Dutch towns, too, asking them to do the same. 451 449 RNA, 5: 250-252. 450 “The Governore LRE to Ye Inhabitants of Long Island, Touching a General Meeting of Deputyes at Hempsteed,” NYCD: 14, 564. 451 “The Governor LRE to the Dutch Magistrates Touching Ye General Meeting at Hempsteed,” NYCD: 14, 565. 215 Nicolls may have phrased his announcement as though he were doing these towns a favor, but his primary concern was both to impose a kind of administrative regularity over a previously patchwork landscape and to shore up the Duke of York’s dominium over towns who held long standing ties to Connecticut. 452 But the townspeople hoped to widen the door that Nicolls had cracked for them. They wanted to use the Hempstead meeting as an opportunity to gain acknowledgement of their political liberties. The town of Southold, for example, elected William Wells and John Young to represent them, and sent with the two men demands that Nicolls legally formalize their land holdings as free and common socage, guarantee their right to freely elect their own civil officers, permit them to hold three independent court sessions each year without appeal for matters at or below the value of five pounds, and to seek the consent of a majority of representatives from the various towns to enact any new taxes. Significantly, they also requested that Nicholls release them from any obligations to financially support fortifications that stood outside of their town. 453 This last request is especially telling, as it signals Southold’s decision to tie the ever-inflammatory politics of finance and taxation to their own politics of place. As an independent political community, Southhold’s residents saw no legitimate reason to contribute financial resources to material structures outside of their formal boundaries. Their political-spatial view thus emphasized the independence of local place and stood in contradistinction to Nicoll’s desire to craft a more integrated political landscape of interpenetrating and mutually indebted spaces. Adhering to his own vision of political space, Nicolls brought with him to Hempstead a law code of his own, which has since come to be known as the Duke’s Laws. Nicolls himself likely oversaw much of the code’s compilation, but the lawyer and provincial secretary Matthias 452 Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 33. 453 J. Wickham Case ed., Southold Town Records (S.W. Green’s Son, 1882): 358-359. 216 Nicolls probably did much of the writing. 454 As Nicolls himself stated, he intended the code to serve as a matter of convenience for New York’s populace, and to help regularize legal practices across north America’s English colonies. Both Nicolls consulted legal codes from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and possibly Virginia. Crucially, the laws offered to regularize the practical application of civil and criminal justice across what had up to this point been a confused patchwork of political places distributed across too large a space (Manhattan Island, the west side of the Hudson River, Long Island, the upper Hudson Valley, and the upper Delaware Valley). 455 Given both the status of the Articles of Capitulation as an informal constitution and Nicolls’ care not to raise the ire of Manhattan’s residents, the code itself applied most overtly to the areas of English concentration: Long Island, the town of Westchester, and Staten Island. The code incorporated all three into the county of Yorkshire, subdivided into three ridings, and placed each under the jurisdiction of the court of sessions. 456 Past scholars have emphasized the centralizing and almost authoritarian tenor of the Duke’s Laws. 457 And indeed, apart from permitting individual townships to be governed by overseers elected by each town’s freeholders, the code made no provision for town meetings. Nor did it permit the creation of a broader representative assembly. The delegates to the Hempstead meeting were further vexed by the way that Nicolls delivered the code. Nicolls made clear that the delegates were there to accept the laws as a formality, rather than to provide their input or active consent. 454 Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 34. 455 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” Laws of the Colony of New York, 6-7. 456 Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 35. 457 See, for example, Kammen, Colonial New York (1975); Daniel Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2005); Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 217 But scholars have ignored some of the more subtle implications that speak to the continuing interpenetration of politics and place as well as the relationship between Manhattan Island and the adjacent towns. For example, all minor actions were to be tried within the jurisdiction of the case’s origin. But the Court of Assizes would meet in Manhattan each September. 458 This distinction established a political-spatial hierarchy that placed Manhattan as the center of the colony’s political authority and legal system. Furthermore, Clarkes of the sessions would have to bring records—in particular probates and administrative commissions—to Manhattan for a final signature and certification by the colony’s Office of Records. 459 Similarly, all records of sales and conveyances had to be filed with the Office of Records in Manhattan. 460 Yet the code also incorporated Manhattan and the outlying towns within the sovereignty of the English crown. For example, the code provided specific language for the opening of each court of sessions: “At the Court of Sessions held at _____ the _____ day of _____ by his Majesties Authority…” 461 This formula, on one level entirely unsurprising, subsumed a series of disparate spaces under the singular umbrella of the English Crown. The language implied that the place of meeting, in fact, did not matter. Rather, it was the Crown as the locus of authority that worked to endow each court of sessions with its claim to legitimacy. Other provisions spoke to some of the ways in which Nicolls, through the new English code, sought to enact his own politics of place. Parish overseers, for example, were required to visit and enter the homes of the recently deceased to gather information as to the manner of their Death and the state of their Will and Testament. 462 Witnesses subpoenaed could be fined twenty 458 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” Laws of the Colony of New York, 7; 16. 459 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 10. 460 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 62. 461 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 27. 462 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 8. 218 shillings for failing to appear when summoned to court. 463 Corpses could be buried only in officially designated places, appointed, and fenced in, for public burial, a process confirmed and checked by the overseers. 464 Cattle and Cornfields respectively needed to be enclosed within fences, and all cattle and hogs needed to be branded with the public mark of the town to which they belonged, as well as the private mark of their owner. 465 A suitable church needed to be built within each parish, capable of containing two hundred people each. A lack of suitable places of worship had for too long “discredited” the “publique Worship of God.” 466 Each of these provisions speak to a gradual increase in the government’s penetration into the lives of subjects, dictated by the control of peoples’ mobility and their relationship to both public and private space. Furthermore, the physical construction of this landscape intersected overtly with the colonial government’s authority over the lives of its subjects. Nicolls’ code made clear that to construct public works for the defense of the government or for the convenience of inhabitants, the colonial governor or their deputies were impowered to impress as many “Labourers and Artificers” as needed to complete the required construction. 467 Yet by far the two most crucial and detailed topics discussed in the law code were relations with Indigenous peoples and land usage. Regarding relations with Native peoples, the code contained some provisions that would have been familiar to anyone living in the area: restrictions on the sale of guns or gunpowder to Indigenous, requirements to obtain formal licenses to engage in the fur trade, prohibitions on the sale of alcohol to Natives, and demands on colonists to prevent European cattle from trampling Native corn fields. 468 Each of these provisions continued 463 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 11. 464 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 11. 465 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 21-22. 466 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 24. 467 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 38. 468 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 40-42. 219 the practice of regulating the particular ways that Europeans and Natives interacted with one another. Other provisions sought to control the movements and behaviors of Indigenous peoples themselves, particularly when in or near European spaces: “No Indian whatsoever shall at any time be suffered to Powaw or performe outward worship to the Devil in any Towne within this Government.” 469 Nicolls thus continued previous Dutch efforts to control the spatial lives of Indigenous peoples, but newly emphasized the spatial restriction of Indigenous cultural practices. Perhaps more unique to the code, at least when compared to previous Dutch legal practices, were provisions that fell in line with long-standing English attempts to impose European forms of construction and town planning on Indigenous settlements. Natives, for instance, would now have to fence in their own corn fields, with the assistance of European colonists (one Englishman to every three or more Indigenous, to be exact) and European-made tools. Failure to do so would render Indigenous complaints of European cattle damage to their cornfields void. 470 But the provision with by far the greatest implications for the creation of a colony was the continued restriction on the purchase of lands from the Indigenous without express permission from both the English governor and the “proper” sachem. 471 This regulation, on its own, would have rung familiar to anyone who had lived under Dutch rule. European governors of New Amsterdam had long worked to control the purchase of lands from Indigenous peoples to prevent colonists themselves from perpetrating fraud or dragging Europeans into further conflict with Natives. But Nicolls took things a step further. Not only would future land sales be subject to official approval, but all landholders would be required to bring their former grants to Nicolls and take out a new patent under the auspices of the Duke of Yorke. 472 469 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 42. 470 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 41-42. 471 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 40. 472 “The Duke of York’s Laws, 1665-75,” 44. 220 Nicolls rendered the order in plainer terms in his first set of revisions to the original code: “All persons whatsoever who have any grants or Patents of Towneshipps, Lands or Houses, within this Government shall bring in the said Grants or Patents to the Governour and shall have them renewed by Authority from his Royall Highness the Duke or Yorke before the beginning of the next Court of Assizes.” 473 But the majority of Long Island’s residents refused to comply. Nicolls reissued the order at the 1666 Assize. This time, he revealed the deeper issue. The majority of New York’s “Lands and houses,” whether in the hands of ethnically English or Dutch colonists, had been distributed to those colonists under the conditions of their having been subjects of the Dutch Republic. To continue to hold these lands and homes by virtue of the same charter thus presented a problem of allegiance. Long Islands’ residents would not truly be English subjects until they held their land and places of residence by virtue of the Duke of Yorke’s authority. 474 Several towns at first resisted Nicolls orders, but most fell into line by April 1667. The residents of Hempstead held their ground until March 1668, and the inhabitants of Southampton, Southold and Oyster Bay held out until the administration of Edmund Andros. When Nicolls inquired after the latter’s recalcitrance in October 1667, the residents responded that they saw no need for Nicolls to confirm lands that they had lawfully purchased and “Injoyed free from Molestation of any power or person” for some fourteen years already. 475 The townspeople, the letter argued, had already sent copies of their original deeds to the records office in Manhattan, as required by the laws that Nicolls himself had distributed at the Hempstead meeting. To comply with Nicolls’ latest demands would amount to King Charles II’s subjects being 473 The Laws of the Colony of New York, 80. 474 The Laws of the Colony of New York, 93. 475 John Cox Jr. ed., Oyster Bay Town Records Volume I: 1653-1690 (New York, 1916), pp. 34. 221 “overburdened, by Subordenate power.” Thus, the residents formally refused to apply for a new patent and “bind us and Our posterity forever to ye Subject of all unknown Laws with out Exception or Cation which may be Imposed upon us many Years after ye Kings and dukes Decease,” and requested that Manhattan’s clerk record their refusal “as a town act.” 476 It seems reasonable to conclude from this exchange that time had granted the residents of Oyster Bay a sense of rootedness that bolstered their conception of rights. They could refuse Nicolls’ demand because they had for so long inhabited the same space “free of molestation.” Similarly, they identified themselves as a single political unit by reference to their material identity “as a town.” Just as with Nicoll’s attempts at pictorial conquest, it would seem, once again, that the region’s inhabitants incorporated their new English governors into their own well-established life ways, as much as Nicolls drew the residents into the newly minted English fold. And just as before, place proved the crucial mediating factor. At what point, then, did things change? The aspiring land magnate Daniel Denton published his observations of the region in his promotional pamphlet, A Brief Description of New-York, in 1670. Some of Denton’s observations comported with the pictorial evidence produced under Nicoll’s administration. New York, he observed, was a town built mostly of brick and stone, roofed with black and red tiles. Fort James, rendered pictorially in such contradistinction to previous accounts that emphasized a derelict structure, struck Denton as “one of the best Pieces of Defence in the North-parts of America.” 477 Denton’s motives as a promoter render such observations suspect. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to assume that Manhattan’s material condition had continued to improve since Stuyvesant had inaugurated his ambitious infrastructure plans on the heels of Kieft’s War. 476 Oyster Bay Town Records, 1: 34-35. 477 Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, Formerly Called New-Netherlands (London, 1670), pp. 2-3. 222 Other observations seem more to reflect continuity than change. Denton devoted some of his most extensive musings to the region’s Indigenous peoples. On the one hand, Denton posited what he believed to have been a marked decline of Native populations, for which the “Hand of God” was to be “admired.” 478 Denton’s remarks parallel observations made by historians of Munsee peoples, who have tended to view the decades after Kieft’s war and, especially after the arrival of the English, as a time of rapid depletion of Indigenous peoples from a combination of death and relocation. Yet the depth of detail that Denton provided in his purportedly first-hand observations suggest a far more intimate and sustained encounter than would have been possible if his initial remarks had proved accurate. Denton offered observations on Munsee dietary practices, recreational activities, and religious rites. While he may have encountered similar descriptions in other accounts of Native life—for example, accounts of Native alcohol use— others seem more likely to have come from genuine first-hand experience. For example, Denton described the Munsee burial practice of placing the deceased in their grave seated upright in a chair, a detail he probably would not have encountered in earlier reports that typically recounted Munsees burying their dead in a fetal position. 479 Furthermore, Denton informed his readers that Native peoples built small portable tents at seasonal campsites for hunting and fishing and maintained cornfields at semi-permanent villages. Despite decades of colonial incursion and violence, Munsees thus continued to enact their own practices of semi-permanent habitation and seasonal mobility. 480 Even so, some of Denton’s remarks pointed towards a different future. Of the Delaware Valley, Denton observed that “since the reducement of it there is several Towns of a 478 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 6-7. 479 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 7-9. 480 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 7. 223 considerable greatness begun and settled by people out of New-England and every day more and more come to view and settle.” 481 Leaning again into his promotional agenda, Denton lauded the region as a place of “terrestrial happiness to be had by people of all ranks, especially of an inferior rank.” And specifically, Denton suggested that this was so because New York was a place ready for the making: “here one may furnish himself with land, and live rent-free, with such a quantity of land, that he may weary himself with walking over his fields of corn, and all sorts of Grain: and let his stock of Cattel amount to some hundreds, he needs not fear their want of pasture in the Summer, or Fodder in the Winter, the Woods affording sufficient supply.” 482 “Here,” Denton continued, “you need not trouble the Shambles for meat, nor Bakers and Brewers for Beer and Bread, nor run to a Linnen-Draper for a supply, every one making their own Linnen, and a great part of their Woollen-cloth for their ordinary wearing.” 483 Denton concluded: New York was a place “where a Waggon or Cart gives as good content as a Coach; and apiece of their home-made Cloth, better then the finest Lawns or richest Silks; and though their low-roofed houses may seem to shut their doors against pride and luxury, yet how do they stand wide open to let charity in and out, either to assist each other, or relieve a stranger, and the distance of place from other Nations, doth secure them from the envious frowns of ill-affected Neighbours, and the troubles which usually arise thence.” 484 New York, in Denton’s reckoning, was uniquely receptive to human design—but design of a particular mold. The colony was peopled by residents who were frugal but supportive, individuals who cared more for the good of their neighbor and their community than the accrual of luxury or the ostentatious display of wealth. More so, such values shaped and were sustained 481 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 15-16. 482 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 17-18. 483 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 18-19. 484 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 20. 224 by the inhabitants’ relationship to their material environment: humble dwellings, simple but effective modes of transport, homespun clothing. Together, these comments reflected tropes deployed by those who adhered to classical republican ideals and advocated citizens’ obligations to the welfare of the community over the individual pursuit of wealth and luxury, and who saw political virtue and the moral health of the polity as best evidenced by austerity—all ideals that would continue to fire the imaginations of British and North American colonial subjects. Denton offered for his readers visions of a burgeoning republican constitution built in equal measure by towns in which all “have equal priviledges to themselves” and a material environment that gave itself over to the construction of a humble but virtuous political landscape. 485 Denton thus anticipated the continued construction of a republican landscape in North America. In his rendering, there would be less and less room for Indigenous peoples at the center of habitation. In fact, prospective colonists had no reason to fear those Indigenous spaces that did remain. As Denton reassured his readers, anyone who should “chance to meet with an Indian- Town, they shall give you the best entertainment they have, and upon your desire direct you on your way.” 486 Native peoples continued to inhabit the landscape, but stood as no impediment to the creation of a European republic in North America. On the contrary, Munsees and other Indigenous, according to Denton’s plans, stood ready to aid and assist aspiring colonists—to guide them to their next destination. Denton cast Native peoples as partners in republican colonization. But Denton’s remarks just as easily speak to the continued European reliance upon Indigenous knowledges of the North American landscape, and the extent to which European claims of sovereignty continued to be mediated by Indigenous presences and material lives. 485 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 16. 486 Denton, A Brief Description of New-York, 19. 225 EPILOGUE: A TORTOISE OF ASH On a Monday morning in 1679, two Jaspers sat in front of a fireplace in New York City. The first, Jasper Danckaerts, was a fourty-one year old Labadist from Friesland on a mission to found a religious community in North America. The second was an eighty year old Munsee (possibly Hackensack), who had lived on Manhattan and the surrounding landscape his entire life. He had witnessed the arrival of the first Europeans as a boy, and as a young man he had aided the first colonists who struggled to feed themselves in an unfamiliar environment. New Amsterdam’s oldest European residents confirmed this, recalling how Jasper had brought fish to them each day. They had come to regard him as a “great friend,” and Jasper never visited the Island without joining them for a meal. 487 There was a third man, too: Another European named Peter Sluyter. The topic of conversation that morning was religion. The two Jaspers warmed themselves by the fire and debated the nature of good and evil, whether “God” was vengeful, and whether drinking alcohol constituted a sin. Amidst the conversation, the Labadist asked the Hackensack “where he believed he came from?” 488 Jasper sat in silence for a few minutes, with the expression of someone lost in deep thought. He then took a piece of charcoal from the edge of the fire and began to draw upon the floor. H drew a large circle and a small oval, and then added four feet and a tail. “This,” Jasper explained, “is a tortoise, lying in the water all around it. This was or is all water, and so at first was the world or the earth, when the tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, and the water ran off it, and thus the earth became dry.” Jasper then placed a straw in the middle of the tortoise-island: “The earth was now dry, and there grew a tree 487 Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin Jameson, eds., The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1689 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 111. 488 The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 112. 226 in the middle of the earth, and the root of this tree sent forth a sprout bedside it and there grew upon it a man, who was the first male. This man was then alone, and would have remained alone; but the tree bent over until its top touched the earth, and there shot therein another root, from which came forth another sprout, and there grew upon it the woman, and from these two are all men produced.” 489 Grateful for his time, the two Europeans gave to the Munsee four fishhooks. Jasper then asked for his companions’ full names. The men obliged, but asked why. “Because you are good people,” explained Jasper, “and in case you should come into the woods and fall into the hands of the Indians, and they should wish to kill or harm you, if I know or hear of it I might help you, for they will do you no injury when they know me.” 490 What kind of place was Manhattan? Who had made it? The island and its surrounding environs bore the physical mark of European and Indigenous communities and existed at the intersection of European and Native memories and imaginations. More than seventy years after the arrival of Europeans, Manhattan remained a hybrid creature—the product of both European and Indigenous (not to mention African) presences. On the one hand, European efforts to wrestle with the meaning of self-government and the limits of their territorial ambitions in New Amsterdam reveals a critical point of intersection between the histories of material culture and the histories of political ideas. New Amsterdam’s residents combined political languages with material objects—forts, boundary markers, maps, and images of colonial spaces—to negotiate and give structure to their claims of sovereignty at both the local and international levels. But the experience of material life itself structured the ways that the village’s residents conceived of their relationship to political authority and the languages (comprised of objects and images alike) that they deployed to offer multiple and conflicting definitions of that authority. New Amsterdam’s— 489 The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 113. 490 The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 113. 227 and later New York City’s—multiple sovereignties took shape through, across, and at the point of collision between buildings and objects that stood in place, words and images that travelled on paper, and the spatially elastic politics of place that subsumed and emerged from the residents’ interactions with and representations of their physical and natural landscapes. But centering material cultures and place also frustrates any attempt to locate the existence of a “European” sovereignty in New Amsterdam, or even a “European” New Amsterdam. The Munsees who lived on and around the Island of Manhattan set the terms upon and limits within which Europeans could realize their definitions of sovereignty. For Native peoples deployed objects of their own making to incorporate colonists into their historically contingent networks of diplomacy and clientage, making clear that Europeans were, in fact, but guests upon Native lands. Furthermore, Indigenous peoples’ incorporation of European buildings in particular casts doubts upon what the historian Daniela Bleichmar called the “ontological stability” of such places, even if they remained physically rooted in space. 491 The forts that Europeans erected as their most emblematic evidence of sovereign possession and the homes that anchored colonists’ growing demands for some form of popular sovereignty eluded specifically “European” readings. Sovereignty in New Amsterdam and across New Netherland thus emerged at the confluence of Indigenous and colonial presences and resisted the incursions of European colonial power. Ultimately, then, reading European arguments over New Amsterdam’s sovereignty (both its dominium and imperium) through the lens of material culture and the politics of place can help historians across disciplines begin to reconceive the material structures of sovereignty, more broadly. In the case of New Amsterdam, not only did Europeans deploy objects and images to 491 Daniela Bleichmar, “History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza,” Art History, 38:4 (2015), 682-701: 700. 228 give material support to their legal claims of possession, but the experience of material life structured the languages that colonists deployed in demanding a reorientation of their community’s internal sovereignty, and the ways that others chose to respond. Such a fact can spur historians to pay greater attention to the constitutive role that material life plays in the genesis and transformation of political ideas. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract "Making Manhattan: Sovereignty, Material Culture, and the Politics of Place, 1614-1664" explores the entangled nature of arguments over sovereignty, material culture, and the built environment in the daily experience of the Native peoples and European colonists who lived on and around Manhattan Island during the seventeenth century. Not only did Europeans deploy objects and images to give material support to their legal claims of possession, but the experience of material life structured the languages that colonists deployed in demanding a reorientation of their community’s internal sovereignty, and the ways that others chose to respond. Such a fact can spur historians to pay greater attention to the constitutive role that material life plays in the genesis and transformation of political ideas. Yet just as important, material culture and the politics of places reveals that European efforts to erect a convincing scaffolding of sovereignty hinged upon Indigenous knowledges, material practices, and presences. Sovereignty in New Amsterdam thus emerged not just from the interrelationship between peoples, objects, and places, but at through a combination of European and Indigenous ways of knowing, acting, and being. Sovereignty was a product of many hands, an accumulation of many things, and a project ever in the making.

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Creator Diskin, Harrison (author)

Core Title Making Manhattan: sovereignty, material culture, and the politics of place, 1614-1664

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 08/24/2024

Defense Date 08/16/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Atlantic world,Borders,Boundaries,Colonialism,Dutch Atlantic,Dutch-Munsee interactions,early America,indigenous peoples,material culture,Munsee,New Amsterdam,New Netherland,OAI-PMH Harvest,place,seventeenth-century,Sovereignty

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Mancall, Peter (committee chair), Di Palma, Vittoria (committee member), Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan (committee member), Slauter, Eric (committee member)

Creator Email harrisonmdiskin@gmail.com,hdiskin@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111379829

Unique identifier UC111379829

Legacy Identifier etd-DiskinHarr-11157

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Source 20220825-usctheses-batch-975 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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