A Thanksgiving for American Democracy

This past winter was the 375th anniversary of my family’s first run-in with an American authoritarian, the Director-General Willem Kieft of the New Netherland Colony. As a consequence of the aptly named Kieft’s War, they huddled in makeshift straw huts inside Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, and watched as all their worldly possessions burned to the ground.

“Refugees in their own homeland now, they huddled in the open courtyard, exposed, at the mercy of their several gods, wondering what would happen to them, but not wondering who to blame,” writes Russell Shorto in his book, Island at the Center of the World.

The city of New Amsterdam, which became New York City, was the capital of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. It is depicted here with the Castello Plan of the 1660s.

Kieft’s War was almost single-handedly stoked and conducted by Kieft and the soldiers under his command. But it was almost universally opposed by the colonists themselves. In fact, one of my earliest ancestors, Joris Rapalje, made his disagreement clear as a member of the Council of Twelve of New Netherland, along with ten of the other members.

But Kieft was set on a course of extermination, and would not be deterred. After first demanding protection payments from local tribes, he then attempted to stoke tensions between these tribes.

“A manager of a business is essentially an autocrat, and Kieft proved to be that. Since the inhabitants expected more freedom and influence in how the colony, and especially how New Amsterdam was governed, the autocratic nature of Kieft immediately put him at odds with the population,” according to this article by the New Netherland Institute.

And if that sounds familiar, it’s because as Americans, living on the knife’s edge of authoritarian disaster through diversity and sheer force of will is just another Tuesday. But the possible comparisons between Kieft and Donald Trump don’t stop there.

“He had arrived in 1638, when the province was in disorder, determined to exert the iron authority he believed was necessary to turn the settlement around,” writes Shorto.

Kieft even had a history of bankrupting investors, and profiting from government funds.

“He had been born and raised in Amsterdam, the son of a merchant and a politician’s daughter. He had excellent family connections,” writes Shorto. “But Kieft was something of a black sheep. He had pursued a business opportunity in France, and had failed at it so decisively, with such financial loss to its backers, that a picture of him was tacked over the gallows.”

Following this failure, he ended up in the Ottoman Empire, ransoming Christian prisoners. However, according to a pamphlet published in Antwerp, he began to buy the release of only the least valuable prisoners, leaving others to languish and pocketing the balance. According to Shorto, he most likely gained his position at New Netherland through mostly family connections.

Kieft was on a collision course with history. After tackling a few internal issues, he set about stoking local tribes into conflict. In response to the theft of several hogs from a Dutch farm, he sent a posse to a local Raritan village where the thieves supposedly lived. Several Indians were killed.

But Kieft was far from done. With tensions subsiding, he was “exhilarated” by the murder of the colonist Claes Switz by a Wickquasgeck Indian, and would later use it to justify his slaughter. First, however, he tried to legitimize his war by appointing a representative council, on the 29th of August, 1641. He was sure they would endorse his slaughter.

“To Kieft’s annoyance, the twelve did not council war. They agreed that ‘by all means the murderer according to the proposition of the honorable director should be punished,’ but insisted that ‘two or three times more a sloop be sent by the honorable director to make a friendly request without threats, for the surrender of the murderer,’” writes to Shorto.

Failing this, they insisted that Kieft, who tended to cower in Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan, would lead any expedition personally.

“The Twelve Men further wanted the director and council to appoint four colonists who would be given access to council meetings, ‘so that the land may not be burdened without calling together the Twelve,” writes Jaap Jacobs in his book, New Netherlands, A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth Century America.

But, having no real power, the Twelve and the other colonists were forced to wait years for a response from Amsterdam that Kieft could not ignore. Meanwhile, Kieft’s War took off, ending in the meaningless slaughter of thousands of Native Americans between the years of 1643 and 1645. Local tribes united against Kieft, and while the war went on, the colonists lost all they’d worked for since landing in what is now New York in 1624.

“The ruthlessness of Kieft and the other merchant warriors masks the fact that the farmers and traders who made up the colony learned Indian languages, adopted Indian farming techniques, embraced the wampum trade, and, for a time and in a great many ways, tried to coexist,” writes Shorto. “It made better sense to get along than to fight.”

Over the intervening years of 1643 and 1647, legal arguments and petitions by the lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, Cornelis Melyn, Joachim Pietersen Kuyter, and others, changed the tide. Kieft was fired, and died in the shipwreck of the Princess Amelia on September 27, 1647, on his way back to the Netherlands to answer for his crimes.

It took until January 1649, and two years of a more capable Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, for the colonists to receive an answer. But, returning from the old world with an answer from the States General of the Netherlands, and their head of state, Willem, Prince of Orange, Melyn and Kuyter made an entrance with a dramatic pair of documents. The first was from the States General:

“In its tone and language it was an utter vindication of their position. It decried ‘the war that Director Kieft illegally and contrary to all public Law, had commenced against the Indians’ and the atrocities ‘which must startle the Christian heart that hears of them.’ It approved of the fact that popular representatives had been chosen to ensure that such calamities didn’t happen again,” writes Shorto.

The second was from the Prince of Orange himself, having felt strongly enough about the issue to write the colonists personally and reinforce the message of the States General:

“To Petrus Stuyvesant, Director of New Netherland, the 19th of May 1648
Honorable, prudent, and discreet, specially dear.

You will receive by the bearers hereof, Joachim Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, the commands which the High and Mighty Lords States General have resolved to communicate to you, to the end that you allow these people to enjoy their property free and unmolested there … we are disposed earnestly to admonish you hereby, in addition, expressly notifying that you shall have to allow said petitioners, peaceably and without objection to enjoy the effect of their High Mightinesses aforesaid resolution.

And herewith, 
Honorable, 
Willem, 
Prince d’Orange”

It may sound like an egotistical platitude these days to say that early Americans invented modern democracy and championed liberty, but it was not so for the colonists who ensured their own survival by building functional democracies on a globe beset by monarchs.

So this holiday, I’m going to give thanks for American democracy, no matter how badly damaged it might be. Because whether we’re stuck in the intransigent Dutch bureaucracies of the 17th century, demanding democratic rights during the American Revolution, or fighting Nazis in everyone’s favorite war, Americans have — many times over and again — overcome impossible odds, economic exploitation, and incompetent authoritarians, to bring the future screaming into the present.