The Story of New Netherland/Chapter 13

“I N Netherlands’ story the people is ever the true hero,” wrote Motley, who told one part of the patriots’ story in Patria. Yet no less true is this in the story of Dutch America. The pompous corporation officials have attracted attention, even to caricature or transfiguration, but it was the plain people who made New Netherland. Theirs were the heroic figures, and the best things in the Empire State are inheritances from them. Like most office-holders, the Company’s servants succumbed to the intoxication of authority, but, the people sanely and soberly laid the foundations and reared the enduring structure. On Long Island, at Esopus and New Paltz, and especially at Schenectady, — places outside of feudalism and only in part subject to “John Company,” — was this truth most manifest.

Arendt van Curler was a true people’s man. There was a number of farmers with their families at Rensselaerwijk, who, preferring freedom to immediate prosperity, wished to settle outside the Patroon’s manor. They would rather take the risks of living on the frontier, and thus own their homes, than be semi-serfs under feudalism.

The “Patroon was always present in his courtroom,” theoretically at least, and the colonists of the manor were subject to such laws as the Patroon or his deputies might establish. The colonists of the manor also promised that they would not appeal from the manorial court to the Director-General and Council at Fort Amsterdam. From this galling restraint, the free farmers, led by van Curler, would be free under the liberal provisions of the act of the States-General of 1640. In name and theory, New Netherland was past and gone when Schenectady was settled, but was Dutch to the core, and remained so until the Revolution, when its people became intensely American and loyal to the Continental Congress.

Schenectady was not the only free village organized before the fall of New Netherland. In 1652 some free farmers, who chafed under manorial rule and wanted to be owners of the soil they tilled and not semi-serfs, came and settled at Esopus. Receiving the soil as a free gift from the Indians, the settlement was named Wiltwijk; that is, the Place of the Willing Gift, or the Town of Good Will. Stuyvesant, in the name of the Company, bestowed also a charter, giving the people the powers possessed by other incorporated towns, including the idea of rotation in office. Roeloff Swartwout was appointed the first schout or sheriff, taking rank above the burgomasters and schepens. There were Indian wars and troubles which can not be here noted. After the English conquest, the place was named Kingston.

As was natural for a people coming from a land rescued from the ocean, whose highways were canals, the Dutchman settled at the mouth of or along streams which flow into the river.

The Dutchman had an eye for good land, making such excellent choice that, unlike the New Englanders, who lived for the most part on poor soil, the débris of glaciers, and who abandoned their holdings, the farms of the Hudson River region passed down from father to son through successive generations. This is probably the reason why the Dutch of the river counties of New York contributed so much smaller a proportion of emigrants to the fertile fields of the West than New England or any other part of the East; although the Germans in Pennsylvania were very much like the Dutch in New York in this respect.

In the Netherlands, a country of city republics, even from feudal times, almost every important town or city was fortified, usually with geometric fortifications, or many-sided ramparts and moats. At the junction or corner between the walls and uniting them, was a little round sconce or fort, which being of circular shape was called a ronduit. In 1614 men of the United New Netherland Company built one of these small fortifications at the mouth of the creek; hence the name “Rondout,” — now part of the city of Kingston. Here was the first capital of New York State, here its constitution was adopted, here yet stands the Senate House, rich in relics of earlier days, and here rises the grand edifice of the old Reformed Dutch Church, organized in 1659, the present superb structure dating from early in the last century. It enshrines the records of the congregation, complete and unbroken from 1660. As illustrating the common idea of associating the Church with the school, provision was early made for education, and here, in 1773, the Kingston Academy, one of the earliest and possibly the first school of a high grade in the state, was founded, being in 1864 merged into the free school system. The year 1908 saw the reinterment, with military and civil honors, of the first governor of New York, George Clinton.

There were several places named the “New Dorp,” one being on Staten Island. One was made in 1662 by settlers who moved back from Wiltwijk, although all new villages, Schenectady, for example, did not retain this descriptive name. New Dorp, near Wiltwijk, was named Hurley, after the English governor’s paternal estate. Louis du Bois, the Walloon (hence the Walkill or Walloon’s stream), settled at New Dorp, and afterwards led the pioneer band at New Paltz. Here was measured off, as in other Dutch villages, a common “for woods, pasturage and drifts of cattle,” — the word drift in Dutch meaning course or run. At New Dorp they excluded from the proprietorship all who were not, inhabitants of the town, for each dweller owned his house, and the adjacent plot was private property, while the rest of the territory was collective property. New Paltz showed many of the peculiar characteristics of early village community life more distinctly, and for a longer time, than any other town along the Hudson River.

The “Duke’s laws,” of which we shall hear more, recognized the village customs, that is, the voters were the freeholders, and suffrage was based on ownership of land. “Fence-viewers” were to be appointed, and every hog and cow to must be marked with the public brand of the town and the private mark of the owner, or else be liable to be put into the penfold, or the “pound.” The people made circular or ring fences many miles long, each owner of the land building, in proportion to his valuation, his part of the ring fence, while the fence-viewer must inspect all. The separate holdings were not, for many years, fenced off in severalty, nor, till near the nineteenth century, was any considerable proportion of the common tract divided by partition and allotment to individual proprietors. The same customs of land-holding prevailed in Dutchess County, in which was the waterfall called Poogkepesingh, or Poughkeepsie, and in which the first courthouse was constructed of wood furnished chiefly from the common.

In the Wallkill valley, the name of the water suggests the presence of a foreigner or Walloon. The Wallkill, flowing between the Hudson and the Delaware, rising in Sussex County, New Jersey, passes northeast into New York, intersecting Orange and Ulster counties, uniting with the Rondout River. Thus it flows northward through picturesque scenery for about sixscore miles, while its three great neighbors, the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna, flow southward. Here the Huguenots from the Paltz, or the Rhine Palatinate, came to find a home and peace in 1678. The first settlers purchased the land of the Indians, and most of the homesteads have been handed down in families ever since the first payment of wampum or the first deed of parchment.

Like oil poured from vessel to vessel were these people, — first hounded from their native land, France, and then dragooned from the Rhine Valley. Their initial habitations were of logs, but these in time gave way to stone. The struggle with languages was not merely from French (used until 1733) to Dutch (spoken until 1800), but also from Dutch to English, so that many a New Paltzer enjoyed or wrestled with three vernaculars in his one lifetime. Hence the polyglot records of Ulster County. In the evolution of government, transit was made from a simple regulation of public affairs by the heads of families to government by the Dusina or Twelve Men chosen annually. This dozen of dignitaries had supervision of the land titles, but most of the public questions as they emerged were decided by the body of voters. The name New Paltz, or New Palatinate, recalls the place of their temporary sojourn when driven out of France, and between the Rhine of Europe and the Rhine of America there was “a bond of union formed by the institutional relationship of the village community.” New Paltz was the typical village community of the Hudson River. To-day their house of worship is among the noblest specimens of early nineteenth-century architecture.

In the long struggle between the people and the corporation directed by Kieft and Stuyvesunt, the Dutch spirit was ever manifest, until in 1652, the people succeeded in getting municipal government for New Amsterdam. Then also Beverwijk, made independent of the Patroon’s colony, was released from feudal jurisdiction. Brooklyn and the adjacent towns on Long Island secured an increase of local authority. Then followed the great influx of Walloons, Huguenots, and Waldenses from Europe and Puritans from New England, seeking through ownership in land to obtain the rights, which elsewhere were denied them, in the name of God. From this time forth, the agricultural settlements increased, and under freer government, villages and towns grew up on lands granted directly to those who were to cultivate the soil.

In all the early villages in New Netherland, Brooklyn, New Amsterdam, Wiltwijk, the Long Island towns, etc., there were common lands and a common pasture. The City Hall Park in New Yuck still remains as the survival of a village common, on which the cows grazed every day, returning every night, under the guidance of the hornmen, as in ancient Patria. The “Bowery” meant not only the land inclosed, but the dwelling-house on it. “Bowery” was equivalent to the English expression “house and home.” Every Dutchman who owned land, or had rights to the common timber or pasture, felt that he had a right to vote, and he cursed both Company and patroon that dared to deprive him of his ancestral rights, which, since the days of the Moot and the Mark and the lifting up of the chief on the shield, amid popular acclamation, he had not forgotten.

Even in the days of Kieft, before he was a degenerate monopolist, his patent given to the town of Gravesend in the year 1645 to the settlers from New England is a charter of Dutch civil and religious freedom, unlike anything known in England, giving the people the right to nominate and elect three of their ablest approved honest men to act as a local court, with the usual jurisdiction in all matters of local government. The gift of land, which secured with the ownership liberty of conscience and the selection of their own ministers, was the great encouragement to settle new regions. No writer has presented these facts more clearly than Mr. Irving Elting in his monograph, “Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River.”