Peter Stuyvesant
Peter Stuyvesant was a Dutch colonial administrator who served as the director-general of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664, when the colony was provisionally ceded to the Kingdom of England. He was a major figure in the history of New York City and his name has been given to various landmarks and points of interest throughout the city.
Stuyvesant's accomplishments as director-general of New Netherland included a great expansion for the settlement of New Amsterdam beyond the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the projects built by Stuyvesant's administration were the protective wall on Wall Street, the canal that became Broad Street, and Broadway. Stuyvesant, himself a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed religious pluralism and came into conflict with Lutherans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Quakers as they attempted to build places of worship in the city and practice their faiths.
Early life
Peter Stuyvesant was born around 1610 in Peperga or Scherpenzeel, Friesland, in the Netherlands, to Balthasar Stuyvesant, a Reformed Calvinist minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein. He grew up in Peperga, Scherpenzeel, and Berlikum. There is previously an erroneous report that Stuyvesant was born in Scherpenzeel in 1592 or 1602. However, his father only became a pastor in the Frisian Scherpenzeel between 1612 and 1619 and was previously in Peperga, so Peperga is the likely birthplace of Peter.Career
At the age of 20, Stuyvesant went to the University of Franeker, where he studied languages and philosophy, but several years later he was expelled from the school after he seduced the daughter of his landlord. He was then sent to Amsterdam by his father, where Stuyvesant – now using the Latinized version of his first name, "Petrus", to indicate that he had university schooling – joined the Dutch West India Company. In 1630, the company assigned him to be their commercial agent on a small island just off of Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, and then five years later transferred him to the nearby Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In 1638, he was moved again, this time to the colony of Curaçao, the main Dutch naval base in the West Indies, where, just four years later, aged 30, he became the acting governor of that colony, as well as Aruba and Bonaire, a position he held until 1644.In April 1644, he coordinated and led an attack on the island of Saint Martin, which the Spanish had taken from the Dutch. Stuyvesant thought they had few men. When Stuyvesant raised the Dutch flag, the Spanish fired. Stuyvesant was injured in the leg, which required amputation, and the battle was lost.
Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands for convalescence, where his right leg was replaced with a wooden peg. Stuyvesant was given the nicknames "Peg Leg Pete" and "Old Silver Nails" because he used a wooden stick studded with silver nails as a prosthesis. The West India Company saw the loss of Stuyvesant's leg as a "Roman" sacrifice, while Stuyvesant himself saw the fact that he did not die from his injury as a sign that God was saving him to do great things. A year later, in May 1645, he was selected by the company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the New Netherland colony, including New Amsterdam, the site of present-day New York City.
New Netherland
Stuyvesant had to wait for his appointment to be confirmed by the Dutch States-General. During that time he married Judith Bayard, who was the daughter of a Huguenot minister and hailed from Breda. Together, they left Amsterdam in December 1646 and, after stopping at Curaçao, arrived in New Amsterdam by May 1647.Kieft's incompetence had left the colony in terrible condition. Only a small number of villages remained after the brutal wars launched by his administration, and many of their inhabitants had given up and returned to Europe, leaving only 250 to 300 men able to carry arms. Kieft himself had obtained a fortune of over 4,000 guilders without explanation and spent much of it to feed his growing alcoholism.
Certain that righting New Netherland was the work which God had saved him for, Stuyvesant told its remaining people "I shall govern you as a father his children," and began the task of rebuilding the physical and moral state of the colony.
In September 1647 he appointed the Nine Men, an advisory council composed of representatives of the colonists, to help rebuild relationships with them, temper his rule with their guidance, and restore New Netherland to the kind of well-run place that the Dutch preferred.
In 1648 a conflict began between him and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck, which surrounded Fort Orange. Stuyvesant claimed he had power over Rensselaerwijck, despite special privileges granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer in the patroonship regulations of 1629. When Van Slechtenhorst refused, Stuyvesant sent a group of soldiers to enforce his orders. The controversy that followed resulted in the founding of the new settlement, Beverwijck.
In an effort to remedy the neglect on the town, previously under Kieft's administration, Stuyvesant took measures to improve the appearance and safety of the town, with numerous regulations to achieve this end that were routinely issued by his office. Building codes were established for houses and other structures, including fences in an effort to control the widespread problem of wandering livestock about the town. As the housing and other structures in New Amsterdam were built almost entirely from wood and stood very close together the possibility of a spreading fire was very great. As governor, Stuyvensant forbid the construction of wooden chimneys, and imposed a tax of a beaver skin, or its trade equivalent, on every householder to finance the cost of two hundred and fifty leather fire buckets and hooks and ladders, which he had sent from Holland. He also established a system of fire wardens and a volunteer fire watch that patrolled the streets to keep an eye on any fire, or potential fire, from nine o'clock in the evening until the morning drum-beat. As such Stuyvesant became the organizer and head of the first volunteer firemen in America
External threats
The colony of New Netherland had severe external problems. The population was too small and contentious, and the Company provided little military support. The most serious was the economic rivalry with England regarding trade. Secondarily there were small scale military conflicts with neighboring Indian tribes, involving fights between mobile bands on the one hand, and scattered small Dutch outposts on the other. With a large area and limited population, defense was a major challenge. Stuyvesant's greatest success came in dealing with the Delaware River colony of New Sweden, which he invaded and annexed in 1655. Relations with the English Connecticut Colony were strained, with disputes over ownership of land in the Connecticut valley, and in eastern Long island. The treaty of Hartford of 1650 was advantageous to the English, as Stuyvesant gave up claims to the Connecticut Valley while gaining only a small portion of Long island. In any case, Connecticut settlers ignored the treaty and steadily poured into the Hudson Valley, where they agitated against Stuyvesant. In 1664, England sent an expeditionary force to capture New Netherland. The colony's settlers refused to fight, forcing Stuyvesant to surrender and demonstrating the dilemma of domestic dissatisfaction, small size, and overwhelming external pressures with inadequate military support from the Company that was fixated on profits.Expansion of the colony
Stuyvesant became involved in a dispute with Theophilus Eaton, the governor of English New Haven Colony, over the border of the two colonies. In September 1650, a meeting of the commissioners on boundaries took place in Hartford, Connecticut, called the Treaty of Hartford, to settle the border between New Amsterdam and the English colonies to the north and east. The border was arranged to the dissatisfaction of the Nine Men, who declared that "the governor had ceded away enough territory to found fifty colonies each fifty miles square." Stuyvesant then threatened to dissolve the council. A new plan of municipal government was arranged in the Netherlands, and the name "New Amsterdam" was officially declared on 2 February 1653. Stuyvesant made a speech for the occasion, saying that his authority would remain undiminished.Stuyvesant was then ordered to the Netherlands, but the order was soon revoked under pressure from the States of Holland and the city of Amsterdam. Stuyvesant prepared against an attack by ordering the citizens to dig a ditch from the North River to the East River and to erect a fortification.
In 1653, a convention of two deputies from each village in New Netherland demanded reforms, and Stuyvesant commanded that assembly to disperse, saying: "We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects."
In 1654, Stuyvesant signed a deed for an allotment of land that corresponds to the modern-day Financial District of lower Manhattan. It was co-signed by land grantee and secretary of the New Netherland Council Cornelis van Ruijven. The lot was given and granted to van Ruijven. The deed conveys a tract of land on Manhattan island in the Sheep Pasture. It was bounded by present-day Broad Street to William Street, and Beaver Street to Exchange Place.
In the summer of 1655, he sailed down to the Delaware River with a fleet of seven vessels and about 300 men and took possession of the colony of New Sweden, which was renamed "New Amstel." In his absence, Pavonia and Staten Island were attacked by Native Americans on 15 September 1655 in what became known as the Peach War.
Stuyvesant built an executive mansion out of stone that was later renamed Whitehall by the English. In 1660, Stuyvesant was quoted as saying that "Nothing is of greater importance than the early instruction of youth." In 1661, New Amsterdam had one grammar school, two free elementary schools, and had licensed 28 schoolmasters.
As director-general of New Netherland, Stuyvesant greatly increased the colony's involvement with slavery. During the late 1640s, authorities in the neighboring English colonies of Connecticut and Maryland encouraged New Netherland slaves to escape there, refusing to return them. In 1650, Stuyvesant threatened to offer freedom to Maryland slaves unless the colony stopped sheltering runaways from New Netherland. In 1657, the GWC's directors wrote to Stuyvesant, telling him that they were not going to be able to send him all the tradesmen that he requested and that he would have to use slaves as well. Although it is commonly thought that Stuyvesant was New Netherland's largest slaveholder, he only owned two slaves, purchasing them as part of the farm he bought from the GWC in 1651.