de Halve Maen, Winter 2017–2018 Issue

de Halve Maen Journal of The Holland Society of New York Winter 2017–2018

Please Join Us for the 132nd Annual Meeting and Dinner

Friday, April 6, 2018 The Cornell Club of New York Members, Friends, and Guests Welcome More Information Online at www.hollandsociety.com

de Halve Maen

The Holland Society of New York 708 THIRD AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10017 President Andrew Terhune

Vice President Col. Adrian T. Bogart III Treasurer Eric E. DeLamarter

Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America Secretary R. Dean Vanderwarker III Domine Rev. Paul D. Lent

Advisory Council of Past Presidents Roland H. Bogardus W. Wells Van Pelt Jr Kenneth L. Demarest Jr. Walton Van Winkle III Robert Schenck William Van Winkle Peter Van Dyke Charles Zabriskie Jr.

VOL. XC

Edwin Outwater III Gregory M. Outwater Alexander C. Simonson Samuel K. Van Allen Frederick M. Van Sickle Stuart W. Van Winkle Trustees Emeriti

Adrian T. Bogart Jr. Ralph L. DeGroff Jr. John O. Delamater Robert G. Goelet Robert Gardiner Goelet John T. Lansing

David M. Riker Kent L. Stratt David William Voorhees John R. Voorhis III Ferdinand L. Wyckoff Jr. Stephen S. Wyckoff

Editor’s Corner

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The Governor and the Militiaman

Connecticut-Westchester R. Dean Vanderwarker III Dutchess and Ulster County George E. Banta James S. Lansing Florida International Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr. Jersey Shore Stuart W. Van Winkle Long Island Eric E. DeLamarter Mid-West Gary Louis Sprong New Amsterdam Eric E. DeLamarter New England Charles Zabriskie Jr. Niagara David S. Quackenbush Old Bergen-Central New Jersey Gregory M. Outwater Old South Henry N. Staats IV Pacific Northwest Edwin Outwater III Pacific Southwest (North) Kenneth G. Winans Pacific Southwest (South) Paul H. Davis Patroons Robert E. Van Vranken Potomac Christopher M. Cortright Rocky Mountain Col. Adrian T. Bogart III South River Walton Van Winkle III Texas James J. Middaugh Virginia and the Carolinas James R. Van Blarcom United States Air Force Col. Laurence C. Vliet, USAF (Ret) Col. Adrian T. Bogart III United States Army United States Coast Guard Capt. Louis K. Bragaw Jr. (Ret) United States Marines Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr., USMC (Ret) United States Navy LCDR James N. Vandenberg, CEC, USN

Production Manager Odette Fodor-Gernaert

Editor David William Voorhees

Editorial Committee Peter Van Dyke, Chair David M. Riker

Winter 2017–2018

Copy Editor Sarah Bogart

John Lansing Henry N. Staats IV

by Rudy VanVeghten

by Bill Greer

95

Book Review: Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom

by R. J. Jippe Hiemstra

Burgher Guard Captain Sarah Bogart Cooney Vice-Presidents

NUMBER 4

78

Trustees Christopher M. Cortright David W. Ditmars Philips Correll Durling Andrew A. Hendricks James J. Middaugh David D. Nostrand

Winter 2017–2018

97

Here and There in New Netherland Studies

98

Society Activities

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In Memoriam

The Holland Society of New York was organized in 1885 to collect and preserve information respecting the history and settlement of New Netherland by the Dutch, to perpetuate the memory, foster and promote the principles and virtues of the Dutch ancestors of its members, to maintain a library relating to the Dutch in America, and to prepare papers, essays, books, etc., in regard to the history and genealogy of the Dutch in America. The Society is principally organized of descendants in the direct male line of residents of the Dutch colonies in the present-day United States prior to or during the year 1675. Inquiries respecting the several criteria for membership are invited.

De Halve Maen (ISSN 0017-6834) is published quarterly by The Holland Society.

Subscriptions are $28.50 per year; international, $35.00. Back issues are available at $7.50 plus postage/handling or through PayPaltm.

POSTMASTER: send all address changes to The Holland Society of New York, 708 Third Ave., 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017. Telephone: (212) 758-1675.

Fax: (212) 758-2232.

E-mail: info@hollandsociety.org Website: www.hollandsociety.org Copyright © 2017 The Holland Society of New York. All rights reserved.

Cover: Detail from Hendrick Avercamp, “Winter Scene on a Canal,” c. 1615, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio.

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Editor’s Corner

I

N A WELL-KNOWN ancient Indian parable, six blind men who have never previously come across an elephant attempt to conceptualize what it is by touching it. Each man feels a different part of the animal’s body, resulting in very different conclusions of what an elephant is. The parable of the six blind men and an elephant serves as a metaphor for why there are so many interpretations of past events.

Cultural attitudes undoubtedly play a role in perceptions.

This is evident in the two excellent articles and the book review in this issue of de Halve Maen. In the issue’s first essay, “The Governor and The Militiaman,” Rudy VanVeghten explores the life of an ancestor, Gerrit Teunisse Van Vechten; in the issue’s second essay, “Who Wears the Trousers?,” Bill Greer takes a humorous look at the battle for dominance between the sexes in the Dutch Republic and New Netherland; and in a book review of Russell Shorto’s masterful new work, Revolution Songs, Jippe Hiemstra surveys the generation of America’s defining event.

Gerrit Teunisse was the youngest of ten children raised in a crowded Rensselaerswijck’s tenant farmhouse with limited opportunities. Moreover, Rudy VanVeghten notes, his ancestor’s stature as a community member was far from exemplary.

“Records also indicate he was involved in the beaver trade with Indians and English settlers to the east” and “not the Mohawks preferred by the majority of Albany-area traders,” VanVeghten writes, “likely to avoid paying duty on them at the New York customs house.” Yet, VanVeghten suggests, such unorthodox connections came in handy when Edmund Andros arrived to serve as the Duke of York’s governor following the 1674 Treaty of Westminster’s restoration of New Netherland to English rule.

As VanVeghten notes, Andros immediately set about to improve New York’s economic base in furs and agricultural exports. To secure a steady supply of furs, he strengthened relations with the Five Nations of the Iroquois. But the English governor’s arrival also coincided with the outbreak of the bloody 1675 Indian uprising in New England known as King Philip’s War. Andros, instead of expelling, enslaving, or exterminating the Algonquin Natives as did the neighboring Puritans, sought to strengthen ties with them, much as he had with the Iroquois. Here, VanVeghten suggests, Andros’s policies conjoined with Gerrit Teunisse’s shady trade practices.

VanVeghten then takes us on a fascinating journey into the world of 1670s domestic diplomacy between Dutch, English, and Natives, in which Gerrit Teunnise plays a role.

Bill Greer’ essay opens with a popular early-modern Dutch cautionary tale about Jan de Wasscher, a love-struck man who too quickly finds himself trapped in a marriage with a domineering wife. “But no sooner does the happy couple get home then Griet whips off her apron and exchanges it for Jan’s trousers.” Jan rapidly becomes a servant to his wife, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and managing child-care.

While the Dutch debate over who wears the trousers is a bit tongue-in-cheek, Greer suggests that underlying it is an apparent independent streak in Dutch women. “Dutch women

were not going to be pushed around by any man, husbands or otherwise,” he writes. “And the women who crossed the Atlantic to New Netherland carried that attitude with them.”

Greer’s essay segues into Jippe Hiemstra’s review of Russell Shorto’s newest book, Revolution Song. Hiemstra writes, “The American Revolution was fundamentally a promise of individual freedom as defined by the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (cogito ergo sum) and the Dutch Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza.” Yet, here we see the dilemma, and failure, of the Dutch Republic and the promise of Revolutionary American society. Freedom defined by an elite patriarchy was exclusive to themselves.

Conflict over interpretation is most evident in light of the twenty-first century’s cultural upheaval, as women and minorities increasingly demand their voices also be heard.

In VanVeghten’s essay, social mobility and landownership was exclusively an option for European men. Women and minorities are scarcely present except as footnotes; yet, they undoubtedly bore a lion’s share in shaping of events.

Greer demonstrates that seventeenth-century Dutch culture was firmly patriarchal. Household manuals institutionalized women’s roles. Women who defied the convention of being “happy homemakers” by acting no differently than male counterparts become “hookers,” “adulteresses,” or dysfunctional “jilted women.” The issue over “Who Wears the Trousers?” was perhaps in reality not a battle between sexes but a cautionary tale used to keep women suppressed. For Shorto, the Revolutionary generation failed many in fulfilling its profession “that all men are created equal.” As Hiemstra notes in this review, Abraham Yates of Albany, a champion of the common man, became an adversary of the United States Constitution, convinced it “was written for the privileged few.”

On the other hand, it was in the Dutch Republic that discussions over relations between the elite and others were first broached, and it was the ideals in the Revolutionary generation that became the foundation for ever expanding human rights.

For this reason, we can take great pride in our ancestors and their vision, no matter how myopic it now seems. They opened up the potential for which humankind continues to strive. In this vein, few stand out greater than the so-called Fathers of their respective nations, William the Silent and George Washington. Undoubtedly flawed as products of their time, few leaders have had the moral nobility and self-control to lead that resulted in their nations becoming shining beacons to rest of the world. Yes, we indeed have much to be proud of in our past, no matter how we interpret it. And, thank goodness, our perceptions will continue to change, which is what makes studying the past so exciting and dynamic.

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David William Voorhees Editor’s Corner

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The Governor and the Militiaman

by Rudy VanVeghten

G

ERRIT TEUNISSE HAD four different birthdates, depending on which record you want to

believe.

The standard version comes from a family genealogy, which incorrectly lists Gerrit’s birth in 1640 as the third surviving child of Teunis Dirckse Van Vechten and his wife.1 Gerrit himself counters that supposition twice, oddly using two different dates. In the summer of 1684, Gerrit testified on two different court sessions as a witness. Court minutes from July 1, 1684, read “Gerrit Teunise, aged 38 years, being sworn. . . .”2 A month later, Gerrit testified again, this time reporting his age as thirty-seven years old, as though he was one year younger than he himself had previously reported.3 Taken together, they place the range of years in which he was born to between 1645 and 1647, making him the youngest of his parents’ five living children.

A more definitive source of vital information comes from the Bible of Gerrit’s brother Dirck Teunisse. This resource clearly shows Gerrit born last among his siblings.

“Gerret Teunisz in de Colonie Renselaers Wyck anno 1647 den 16 a 17 September nieu styl.” (Gerrit Teunisse [was born] in Rensselaerswijck Colony in the year 1647 on the 16th or 17th of September, new style.)4 He was most likely born at home on the Van Vechten farm below Greenbush village (the present-day city of Rensselaer) on the east side of the Hudson River.

Gerrit was less than a year old when neighboring farmer Cornelis Maasen Van Buren and his wife, Catalyntje, died in March or April 1648 and their children became members of the Van Vechten household. He grew up as the youngest of ten children in a crowded farmhouse.

Rudy VanVeghten, descended from upper Hudson River Valley Dutch settlers, is a frequent contributor to de Halve Maen. A former newspaper editor, he has combined his love of history and journalism to research and “report” on the world in which his seventeenth-century forebearers lived.

Winter 2017–2018

As with the other male Van Vechten and Van Buren children, his opportunities for formal schooling were largely limited to training in husbandry from his father. During these years, another traumatic event in Gerrit Teunisse’s life was the death of his mother in 1664, when Gerrit was still an impressionable teenager of about sixteen or seventeen. His father subsequently remarried “Deaf Hester” Douwse Fonda in 1669 or early 1670.5 Gerrit’s brother Cornelis married in 1668 and left the Van Vechten farm to take over management of the neighboring upper Papscanee farm once managed by the Van Buren parents.6 This left Gerrit, now in his early twenties, as his father’s last available family assistant in managing the three-decade-old Van Vechten tenant farm.

Also sometime in the late 1660s, Gerrit took over management of the lower portion of his father’s large farm. This was the land to which Teunis Dirckse was first assigned upon arrival in Rensselaerswijck Colony in 1638.7 It was located opposite the creek from two farms along the northern end of Papscanee Island: the one where his brother Cornelis had recently moved, and just south of that, one shared by Volkert Jansen Douw and Jan Thomasse Witbeck.

Untranslated colony ledger books show Gerrit Teunisse was a rent-paying Rensse-

laerswijck farmer by 1669, with a payment of ƒ96 for that year’s toepacht, or tax, and in 1670, with his first annual rental payment of ƒ450 per year.8 From 1659 to 1666, his father Teunis Dirckse had paid ƒ550 per year total rental on his large farm, but starting in 1666 that dropped to ƒ450, likely due to the bad flood that spring.9 Gerrit enters the ledger in 1670, the same year his father stopped paying rent, so the logical conclusion is that Gerrit took over management 1 James Brown Van Vechten, Van Vechten Genealogy, 2 vols. (Detroit: privately published, 1954), 1:40 [hereafter VVG].

A. J. F. Van Laer,, trans. and ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck and Schenectady, 3 vols. (Albany, 1928), 3:469 [hereafter MCARS].

2

3

Ibid., 473.

Jeannie F-J Robinson and Henrietta C. Bartlett, ed., Genealogical Records: Manuscript Entries of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Taken from Family Bibles 1581–1917 (New York: 1917; repr. Baltimore: 1972), 268.

4

MCARS, 1:141–42; Mrs. John Spell, “A Career Woman in 17th Century New York,” in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (July 1964), 136.

5

6

MCARS, 1:112.

Teunis Dirckse greatly enlarged the farm in 1640 when he placed the winning bid to also lease a parcel situated between his farm and the Greynen Bosch to the north. A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., The Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908), 412, 493, 563.

7

Van Rensselaer Manor Papers, New York State Library Manuscripts and Special Collections, Box 31 Folder 2C, Accounts 1652–1675 part 3.

8

Gerrit Teunisse Rent. The preserved ledger books of the Rensselaerswijck patroonship show the first debits charged to Gerrit Teunisse as a tenant of the colony.

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Rensselaerswijck Inventory: A 1674 inventory of the colony’s property shows separate entries (highlighted) for the aging Teunis Dirckse Van Vechten and his three sons, Dirck Teunisse on the Crailo farm of Jeremias Van Rensselaer, Cornelis Teunisse on Papscanee Island, and Gerrit Teunisse located opposite the Papscanee Kill from his brother’s farm.

of his father’s farm. An inventory of colony property from 1674, however, lists property under both Teunis Dirckse, valued at ƒ3,553, and for Gerrit Teunisse, valued at ƒ1,193.10 It appears that even though Gerrit was paying rent on the whole farm, his father remained in residence in the main homestead on the northern end, just below the edge of the original wooded area known as the Greynen Bosch (pine woods). Gerrit, as shown by later developments, resided in a separate farmhouse at the original southern end of the farm.

Gerrit’s move onto the lower Van Vechten farm might have been prompted by his marriage to Annetje Janse. According to genealogical resources, Gerrit and Annetje’s first (and only) child, Johannes, was born in 1677.11 However, there is good reason to believe Johannes was born earlier than that.

In 1689, with the Albany area threatened by French and Indians, Johannes was named in the roster of a militia unit led by his father.12 Assuming Gerrit, then a militia captain, would prevent his own son from joining the ranks at the age of twelve, it is reasonable to conclude Johannes was born somewhat earlier. A birth year of about 1671 to 1673 would have made him sixteen to eighteen years old in 1689, a more convincing young age for militia service. This in turn would indicate Gerrit’s marriage to Annetje Janse occurred in the late 1660s or early 1670s, which aligns with the period in which he began operating the lower end of his father’s farm.

The identity of Annetje Janse has been previously undocumented other than her

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given and patronymic names. Following a spat between Gerrit and Cornelis Van Vechten and the neighboring household of Jan Thomasse Witbeck, the court suggested the litigants work the matter out among themselves, as “the parties concerned are closely allied by blood relationship and by marriage.”13 By process of elimination, the only possible combination of blood and marriage relationships was that Annetje Janse was the daughter of Jan Thomasse Witbeck. Taking all of this into account, it appears that Gerrit married Annetje about 1670 or 1671, that about the same time Gerrit established his residence at the lower Van Vechten farm, and that about a year later, the couple’s son Johannes was born.

Gerrit Teunisse’s stature as a farmer and a community member were far from exemplary. Court records beginning in 1668 find Gerrit Teunisse featured frequently in the minutes. Records also indicate he was involved in the beaver trade with Indians and English settlers to the east. In a matter from April 1671, Gerrit Teunisse accused Richard Pretty of reneging on his agreement to be security for “13 heavy beavers to be delivered” to “an Englishman of the north.”14 Today we would interpret “the north” as the area following the Hudson River and/ or Lake Champlain up into Canada. But to seventeenth-century New York colonists, “the north” more often meant the direction toward the English colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay to the east.

There are a couple of possible identities for this “Englishman.” Gerrit’s later militia assignments during King Philip’s war involved him traveling repeatedly into Connecticut. One of the responding delegates from Hartford was Major John Pynchon, who was among that colony’s leading fur traders.15 Another possibility is

that the Englishman was fur trader Timothy Cooper of Springfield, an associate of Pynchon who relocated to Albany about this time.16 Cooper’s later association with Gerrit Teunisse is discussed below.

April was plowing time for the upper Hudson farmers, and Gerrit Teunisse was no exception. A court matter that surfaced early the following year concerns a situation from the previous spring that demonstrates Gerrit Teunisse worked not only as a tenant farmer, but also as a trader in furs. The difference is that his trading partners were not the Mohawks preferred by the majority of Albany-area traders, but the Algonquin tribes to the east (i.e., “the north”). At the January 5, 1676, court session, Gerrit Teunisse brought suit seeking “200 gl. in seawan for a horse, saddle and bridle” from Jan Conell, “which he took with him to the north.” Conell responded that Gerrit Teunisse “asked him to undertake this journey to settle his affairs there, as it was plowing time.”17 This all tends to show that Gerrit was moving beaver pelts into Connecticut, likely to avoid paying duty on them at the New York customs house. These connections in that easterly (or northerly) direction came in handy for the young farmer/trader a few years later.

Militia Officer. Jan Thomasse Witbeck’s partner in ownership of the Papscanee Island farm was Albany trader and brewer Volkert Jansen Douw. Douw was also the leader of an east-side militia company.

Captain Douw at some point selected as second in command his neighbor Gerrit Teunisse. According to family genealogist James Brown Van Vechten, “He [Gerrit] became an ensign in 1669 and was made a lieutenant shortly afterward.”18 Records from May 1672 show Volkert Jansen listed 9

Ibid.; also Folder 2B, part 2.

10

Ibid., Box 37, Folder 2A #26.

VVG 1:239; Stefen Belinski, “The People of Colonial Albany” website, http://exhibitions.nysm.nysed.gov//albany/ bios/vv/jovvechten2527.html, retrieved 6/7/2016.

11

12 E. B. O’Callaghan, trans., Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, 1849–1851), 2:91.

13

MCARS 2:421.

14

MCARS 1:235.

Dietland Muller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun, The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 140. He was the son of Springfield, Mass., founder William Pynchon.

15

Bielinski, http://exhibitions.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/ bios/c/ticooper514.html, retrieved 7-10-2016.

16

17

MCARS 3:62, 81.

18

VVG 2:322.

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as a lieutenant in the Albany County militia with Gerrit Teunisse as an ensign. But by December of that year and February of 1673, records begin showing Douw as “Captain Volkert Jansz.”19 Gerrit Teunisse at that time still holds the rank of ensign.

His commission as lieutenant came sometime between then and 1676.

Edmund Andros replaced Francis Lovelace as governor, arriving in New York on October 22, 1674. Andros quickly set about to improve New York’s two principal economic foundations: beaver pelts and farm produce. “Being possessed of New York,” Prince James instructed Andros to see to “ye encouragement of Planters and Plantations and ye improvement of trade and commerce.”20 It became another of Governor Andros’s goals to strengthen relationships with Native tribes. When he received a letter from Albany officials in April 1675 asking his intent regarding Indian affairs, he responded, “You may further let the Maquas [Mohawk] Indyans know, and assure them, that if they bee not wanting themselves, I shall on my part, in continuance of the ffriendship, hath been hitherto with them, and also interposing with the ffrench, or any other Neighbour, in any just matter.”21 Although Andros planned to make his first visit to Albany in June 1675, that visit was delayed due to the outbreak of King Philip’s War in New England.22 It wasn’t until August that he finally journeyed up the Hudson, remaining there for about

five weeks.23 While upriver, he traveled to Mohawk country for a face-to-face meeting with “the most warrlike Indyans.” He later reported the Mohawk tribes “submitted in an Extraordinary manner, with reitterated promises accordingly after which all things being settled, for the Magistracy, Militia and defense if occasion.”24 According to nineteenth-century New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead, the Indians were so impressed with Andros, they paid him a particular honor. “At Tionnontoguen, the third castle of the Mohawks, he accepted the name of ‘Corlear,’ who, they told him, was ‘a man that was of good dispositions and esteemed deare amongst us.’”25 Brodhead also notes that during that same upriver visit, Andros appointed a “board of commissioners for Indian affairs” that included the ambitious Robert Livingston as secretary. “This agency’s purpose,” explains Livingston biographer Lawrence Leder, “was to bring some order into the conduct of the all-important Iroquois negotiations at the same time that they were brought under the authority, if not the control, of the governor and Council.”26 “By binding the Iroquois firmly to him with promises to protect them and a guarantee of a steady market for their furs, Andros ensured their loyalty to the English,” adds Andros biographer Mary-Lou Lustig.27 Names of other members of the Indian commission have been lost.28 They possibly included Peter Schuyler and Dirck Wessels ten Broeck, both of whom would be

included within Andros’ term “Magistracy” above and became long-time emissaries to the Native Americans in the decades to come. Andros also used the term “Militia” in his 1675 edicts. Lustig notes that Andros, a military officer in his younger days, used the Albany visit to insure the adequacy of the local militia.29 At this time he would have been introduced to the east-side unit led by Capt. Volkert Douw and his lieutenant Gerrit Teunisse.

Andros’ early administration of New York also filtered down to the personal level for Gerrit Teunisse Van Vechten. Barely two months into his office, the governor found before him the following petition forwarded by the Albany magistrates: Juriaen Theunisz, Herman van Gansevoort and Gerrit Theunisz reverently show how they, the petitioners, are very desirous to buy some land in Katskill, for which they already have a promise from the Indians, who are very much inclined and desirous thereto; and having noticed that all trades are becoming slack they would settle themselves and more families there in order to cultivate, till, and plant the aforesaid land.

Therefore, they, the petitioners, humbly request and petition for permission to be allowed to purchase the aforesaid land for a promise of residency according to such orders drawn up thereto. Whereupon they rely, awaiting a favorable recommendation.

Andros approved the request, “Provided MCARS 1:322, 326; Jonathan Pearson, trans., and A. J. F. van Laer, rev. and ed., Early Records of the City and County of Albany, 1654–1678, 4 vols. (Albany,1916–1919), 3:324 [hereafter ERA].

19

New English Governor Edmund Andros arrived at Manhattan in October 1674, replacing Francis Lovelace as governor of New York province. His early meetings with Mohawk Indian sachems provided New York colonists with a valuable ally against the encroachment of King Philip’s Algonquin Indians from New England.

20 E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, trans., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York. 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–1887), 3:216 [hereafter DRCHNY].

21

Ibid., 13:483.

Peter R. Christoph and Florence A. Christoph, eds., The Andros Papers, 3 vols. (Syracuse, 1989–1991), 1:180–184.

22

23

DRCHNY 13:485–86; MCARS, 2:9, 16.

24

DRCHNY 3:254.

John Romeyn Brodhead, History of the State of New York, 2 vols. (New York, 1853, 1871), 2:287; DRCHNY 3:559. Arent van Curler drowned in 1667 while traveling to Canada on Lake Champlain.

25

26 Lawrence H. Leder, Robert Livingston 1654–1728 and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 15.

27 Mary-Lou Lustig, The Imperial Executive in America: Edmund Andros 1637–1714 (Madison, N.J., 2002), 73.

Winter 2017–2018

28

Brodhead, 2:287n.

29

Lustig, 72–73.

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Indian Allies: Mohawk and other tribes of the Iroquois Nation, portrayed here by artist Len Tantillo, had a particular fondness for Gov. Edmund Andros, bestowing on him the title “Corlear” in honor of their earlier close trade and diplomatic relationship with Arent van Curler in the 1640s–1660s.

the Purchasers doe forthwith settle it as they ought and not hinder others by having greater Quantityes than they can improve.”30 King Philip’s War. Governor Andros’ delay in visiting Albany and the Mohawk Valley in 1675 was due largely to the outbreak of King Philip’s War in the New England colonies. When he received word from Connecticut officials of Indian attacks, Andros sailed up Long Island Sound ostensibly to offer assistance to his neighboring province. Governor John Winthrop, however, saw it as an attempt by the New York leader to strengthen his claim that the Fresh (Connecticut) River was New York’s intended eastern border, as originally claimed by Dutch New Netherland.

Understandably, when Andros anchored at the mouth of that river at Saybrook, he wasn’t particularly welcomed. Feeling more threatened by Andros than by Philip, Winthrop rebuffed his neighboring governor’s offer of assistance.31 When Andros subsequently met with the Mohawk sachems in August, discussion included strategies involving the bloody war in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay. As the New England Algonquins were bitter enemies of the Iroquois west of the Hudson, Andros had no trouble convincing the Mohawks to help protect the New York settlements

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should Chief Metacom [King Philip] ever dare encroach into their colonies. In a letter several weeks after his return, Andros included “an accot of my return from Albany” in a letter to the governor of Maryland. He explained “of my Engaging Maques & Sinnekes, not anyways to injure any Christians to the Eastward.”32 Connecticut’s bravado and decline of Andros’ support left them more vulnerable.

Attacks by Indians loyal to King Philip continued, causing growing concern in the Hudson Valley. “It is at present a bad time here on account of the war with the Indians to the north,” wrote Maria van Rensselaer in November 1675. “We are daily sitting in great peril, as it is to be feared that the Maquas and the Mahicans will again become involved in war.”33 A month later she reported to her brother-in-law Richard, “[W]e live here in great fear on account of the great war between the English and the Indians around the north and of New England, although, thank God, we do not yet hear of any [local] calamities. The Indians have plundered many villages and killed many [people?].”34 As the days shortened with the approach of the winter solstice, concerns deepened considerably along the Hudson River communities when rumors filtered in that Philip had set up camp along the Hoosic River.

“In November and December,” Andros recalled a few years later, “Phillip and other

Indyans, about a thousand in two partys armed, went up into the country, and came within about forty miles of Albany.”35 Especially concerned were residents of nearby Albany County. Albany magistrates on December 6, 1675, instructed interpreter Arnout Cornelisse Viele and Robert Sanders “to go directly to Hosick, where the Northern Indians are, and address their sachems.” If possible, they would attempt to ransom any European prisoners “for duffels, clothing, or seawan, but not for powder, lead, or provisions.” They would also “find out what their intention or design is.”36 Fearing the worst, officials prohibited residents from bartering guns or ammunition with the Natives.37 Meanwhile, Andros had received word “by our Indyans” of the threat from the amassed warriors. He “imediately dispatched reiterated orders to ye Commander 30

Andros Papers 1:58–59; DRCHNY 13:481.

Andros Papers 1:183. Winthrop was the son of early Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop of “City on the Hill” fame.

31

32

DRCHNY 13:491.

A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Correspondence of Maria Van Rensselaer 1669–1689 (Albany, 1935), 15–16. The two Indian nations had fought a bitter war in the 1620s leading to the abandonment of much of the upper Hudson River Valley land that became the Rensselaerswijck patroonship.

33

34

Ibid., 17.

35

DRCHNY 3:255.

36

MCARS 2:48–49.

37

Ibid., 56; DRCHNY 3:254.

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[Capt. Anthony Brockholes at Albany] for said Phillip’s &c remove.”38 It wasn’t government and militia troops at Albany that effected the “remove” of King Philip and his minions, however. It was the Algonquin nation’s bitter enemies, the Mohawks. Exactly how these Iroquois warriors took it upon themselves to do the fighting is unclear. In a later explanation, Andros said Brockholes “had furnished the whole party with stores of Amunicon, and all sorts of arms and necessarys they wanted.”39 Perhaps the best account of the attack was given a few years later by the Mohawk sachems themselves.

“Brethren You had wars with the Indian Enemys before we,” they told representatives from Massachusetts Bay Colony, “for wen diverse of your towns were burnt doun, then our Governor General did Incourage us, and told how his frindes in N: England were Involv’d in a great war with Indians, and that some of your Enemys were fled to hosack, Incouraging us to goe out against them, and we and our Governor generall being as it Were on[e] body, went out, upon his desire against them, and killd some and Putt the Rest to the flight.”40 Whatever the sequence and the rationale, it was the Mohawks who took charge of the operation. In late February 1676, they attacked King Philip’s camp, mercilessly killing many, taking a few prisoners, and chasing the remnant back to Massachusetts.

New England military leader Benjamin Church, in his diary, briefly describes the outcome on Philip’s collected force: “the

Moohags made a descent upon him and killed many of his men, which moved him from thence.”41 “The Iroquois,” concludes Lustig, “used King Philip’s War as an excuse to rid themselves of a persistent problem and an old enemy.” But the benefits were not to the Indians alone, she explained. “New England, and possibly New York, might very well have been ‘ruined’ by King Philip’s War if the Five Nations of the Iroquois had allied with the Wampanoag chief. That the Iroquois did not do so is due in large measure to the efforts of Edmund Andros.”42 Ice-out on the Hudson River came early that year, and Governor Andros quickly took advantage by sailing a small fleet of six sloops up the Hudson with what troops he could spare up to Albany, arriving in early March. Andros, as he recounted the event, “found att his arrivall aboutt three hundred Maquaas Souldiers in towne, returned ye Evening afore from ye pursuite of Philip and a party of five hundred with him, whome they had beaten, having some prisoners & the crownes, or hayre and skinne of the head, of others they had killed.”43 Here was proof right in front of him that Indians as allies were preferable to Indians as enemies.

Gerrit Teunisse’s Assignment. Gov. Andros, instead of expelling, enslaving or at worst exterminating the Algonquin Natives as did the neighboring Puritans, sought to strengthen ties with them, much as he had with the Iroquois nation. His first step was to convince King Philip’s followers to abandon their hostilities and release any colonists held hostage, and secondly to offer the tribes sanctuary within New York

King Philip by Paul Revere: Revere’s engraving certainly bears little resemblance to the actual Indian called Metacom by his fellow tribesmen and King Philip by the Europeans. Nonetheless it has become the most familiar image of the figurehead of that bloody colonial war.

province. As an emissary to set this strategy into motion, Andros delegated local militia Lieutenant Gerrit Teunisse, “Left. To Capt.

Volkert,” to follow King Philip into western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

You are hereby authorized, and required with the Indian guide orderd with you, forthwith to goe eastward, to the furthest pairt of the Government, or as farr as Coneticut river, to finde out Phillip or other north Indians, lately within this Government, and lett him or other Sachems or Commanders in Chief know that haveing heard of there being in Warr-li[ke] Posture, intruded, and brought some Christian Prisoners, brought by them into this Government, and to Command and forewarne them, from, or returning unto any Pairt, of the government, or Confines.

If they should be divided, into severall partyes or Parts You are then as you see cause, and have opportunity, to goe to each, but to make no longer stay, in any, then to deliver your message, and receive such Prisoners as they shall deliver, and refresh and rest your self, and without delay to return and make the best of your way to me, given under my hand and seall in albany the 4th march 1675/76.44 Twice in later years Andros reported on the success of Gerrit Teunisse’s mission.

In a report from 1678, he wrote “Att said time sent an officer through ye woods to see, and if any strange Indyans to demand all Christian captives and command such Indyans out of ye Government without delay, said officer mett with five nations together, being about four hundred men in arms, which readily obeyed.”45 In 1681, Andros recorded in a legal deposition to the English court, “Noe disaster happened in any part of the Governmt during my command there [New York], 38

DRCHNY 3:255.

39

Ibid.

40

Andros Papers 2:458.

Benjamin Church and Henry Martyn Dexter, The History

41

of King Philip’s War (Boston. 1865), 64–65.

42

Lustig, 77.

DRCHNY 3:255. Andros erroneously states that the ice-out was at the “beginning of ffebruary 1675/6,” but other documents make it clear that it was more likely the beginning of March (MCARS, 76–77).

43

44

Andros Papers 1:337; DRCHNY 13:494. See also

DRCHNY 3:255; Lustig 77-78.

45

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DRCHNY 3:255.

83

tho’ constantly serviceable to our English Neighbors both East & West who suffered much by the Indian Warr. In the composeing whereof I was a principall instrumt and also freed nearly one hundred of their Captives.”46 There is no direct information regarding the route taken by Lt. Gerrit Teunisse’s to track down the Indians. Since about 1640 there had been a path stretching from Fort Orange to the old Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut River (present-day Hartford) used by Dutch fur traders.47 But Philip didn’t go that way. Andros’ orders required the officer to track down, or “finde out,” King Philip. It follows then that the militiaman’s starting point was at the Hoosic River camp where the Mohawks had attacked them. Although some have concluded this camp was located in present-day Schaghticoke,48 about twenty miles north of Albany, source documents indicate the camp was somewhat further away, more likely in the vicinity of present-day Hoosic, New York.49 Either way, Gerrit Teunisse likely followed the Indian trail along the Hoosic River into the Berkshire Mountains.

From there, some assumptions can be made based on geography. It is known that Philip headed toward a refuge along the Connecticut River at Northfield, Massachusetts, known as Squawteag. He likely followed the path of the Hoosic and Deerfield Rivers, roughly the Route 2 corridor known today as the Mohawk Trail.50 Two branches of the Hoosic River merge at today’s North Adams, Massachusetts.

One branch continues upstream into the hills to the east, known as the Hoosac range of the Berkshires, with one feeder stream originating less than a half mile from another stream that feeds into the Deerfield River. The other branch of the Hoosic River bends south, where it originates in the valley east of Mount Greylock and below the Cheshire Reservoir. That area also serves as the headwaters for another river. About a half-mile portage from the tip of the Hoosic brings you to the source of Walker Brook, which drains into the Housatonic River’s east branch at Dalton, Mass. This meets with the river’s west branch at Pittsfield and flows south through Massachusetts and Connecticut, draining into Long Island Sound at Stratford.51 Subsequent sources indicate that Gerrit Teunisse followed this southern route along the Housatonic, as representatives

84

from some of the tribes in western Connecticut soon began visiting Governor Andros in New York responding to his invitation for refuge and protection. The first such recorded visit was on March 29 by the Wickers Creek tribe. “They deny to have said or thought of joyning or treating with North Indians or others not friends with this government, under whose protection they desire to live, according to their Engagement with ye Gov.”52 Governor Andros had not yet returned from his sojourn to the north, but the Wickers Creek sachems returned on April 14, after the governor’s return.53 “The Gov. tells them that when hee came up [to Albany] he found the Maques returned from following ye North Indyans, that the Mahicanders were fled, but hee sent to them to come backe, and that one of the Mahicanders prisoners being taken by the Maques hee demanded him and being delivered sett him free, that some of them were come backe upon the Go: promising the protection if they should come, and if any of them wanted land that hee would supply them.”54 Although the Wickers Creek tribe inhabited an area along the east side of the Hudson near present-day Dobb’s Ferry, they brought with them representatives from a couple of tribes further east. These Indians “say they belong to a place called Wayattano, at the head of Stratford River, with them were some of the Wickerscreeke and some Stamford Indyans.” The “Stratford River” is the same river now known as the Housatonic, and as noted above, the river’s headwaters were in the mountains of western Massachusetts. “They declare themselves to bee good friends,” observed Gov. Andros during their meeting. “The Governor accepts of it, and promises protection to them within this Government.”55 Judging by this visit, Lt. Gerrit Teunisse’s route from the source of the Hoosic River bent south down the Housatonic rather than to the northeast along the Deerfield and Connecticut Rivers. Today, a portion of that same area between the Housatonic and the New York/Connecticut border is set aside as a reservation for a tribe of Indians who call themselves the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation.56 About one year later, when Gov. Andros set aside land at the junction of the Hoosic with the Hudson River for his gathering of mixed tribal Mahicans, they named that place Schaghticoke also. Prior historic

interpretations judged it was a coincidence that the common Algonquin word schaghticoke (“meeting of the waters”) was attached both to the new village about twenty miles north of Albany as well as the separate Indian tribe of western Connecticut. But if some of the refugees who assimilated into the new Indian village called themselves Schaghticokes, it seems possible they brought the name with them.

Researcher Ann Hunter cautions, however, that the fact of similar names does not necessarily mean the two Schaghticokes “were related politically, or whether they just had similar names because they were similar in geographic features.”

Additional evidence that Gerrit Teunisse followed a Housatonic route comes from interest by Gerrit Teunisse in a land parcel known as Westenhoek (meaning western point or western bend). There seems to be little definitive information on the location of this tract. “Westenhoek is Dutch,” advises Indian historian Edward Manning Ruttenber, “It means ‘west corner.’ It was given by the Dutch to a tract lying in a bend of the Housatonuk river [sic], long in dispute between New York and Massachusetts called by the Indians W-nagh-tak46

Ibid., 3:313.

A. J. F. Van Laer, Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswyck (Albany, 1922), 34. Michiel Jansen, the individual mentioned in this citation, later became the father-in-law of Gerrit’s brother Dirck Teunisse.

47

48 R. Beth Kloppet, “The History of the Town of Schaghticoke, New York 1676–1855” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Albany, 1981), 11; Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (Woodstock, Vt., 1999), 184.

Gerrit Teunisse later became one of the principal grantees of the original Hoosic Patent. Grace Greylock Niles, The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and Its History (New York, 1912), 72–74; ERA 4:147,177.

49

50 Mary Rowlandson, captured by Nipmuk Indians during the raid on Lancaster in Massachusetts Bay Colony on February 10, 1676, recounted in her captivity narrative encountering King Philip at the Northfield castle about March 10, six days after Gerrit Teunisse received his orders.

Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 133–35.

51 Another river in this network is the Westfield River, which forms near Savoy, Massachusetts, a few miles east of the Hoosic’s headwaters. The east-flowing Westfield connected this multi-river intersection with the Fresh (Connecticut) River and the trading outposts of Springfield and Hartford.

52

DRCHNY 13:494.

He was present at Esopus (Kingston) on April 10 on his way south back to New York City. Ibid., 495.

53

54

Andros Papers 1:352; DRCHNY 13:495–96.

55

Andros Papers 1: 358; DRCHNY 13:496.

“History,” Schaghticoke Tribal Nation website, http:// schaghticoke.com/history/, retrieved 6-20-16.

56

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ook.”57 There is a major westward bend in the Housatonic in the area of Stockbridge and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, lying roughly east of Kinderhook in New York.

On June 12, 1677, Jacob Vosburgh asked the Albany court to order Gerrit Teunisse to pay him for assistance he gave the militia officer during his expedition of March the previous year. “The plaintiff demands of the defendant payment for this trip with him to Westenhoock, as he received payment from the governor.” Gerrit Teunisse responded that Vosburgh “went with him only for company” and he was promised no payment.

Magistrates deferred action on the matter “until the arrival of the governor to whom the plaintiff may address himself.”58 It was two years later when the militia lieutenant invested in the Westenhoek land.

“On this 1st of October 1679, Mr. Dirk Wessells and Mr. Gerrit Teunise have bought a certain parcel of land lying at Kinderhoek,

in presence of the honorable magistrates of Albany, colony of Renselaerswyck and Schaenhectaedy.” Listed as sellers of the tract are five “Indian owners,” identified as “all Westenhoek Indians.” The land is described as lying north and east of Kinderhook Kill.59 Eighteenth-century historian William Douglass explains that Westenhoek, Stratford and Housatonic are synonymous names for the same stream. “The colony of New-York (as I am informed) insist that Housatonick, alias Westenhoek, alias Stratford river, shall be the boundary with Massachusetts Bay.”60 Lt. Gerrit Teunisse’s mission took about three or four weeks from the March 4 issuing of his orders. His presence was recorded at a session of the Albany court exactly a month later, on April 4.61 Andros, whose presence at Albany was recorded in the minutes of previous sessions, had departed

Westenhoek River Source: On a Mission for the Governor, sources indicate Lt. Gerrit Teunisse followed a southerly route during his 1676 assignment to invite western New England Indian tribes into New York’s Hudson Valley. This nineteenth-century map by Frank L. Pope shows the proximity of the Hoosic and Housatonic (Westenhoek) River headwaters, possibly the route followed by the Albany militiaman.

Albany by that time. The governor’s first recorded presence back at Manhattan was on April 14.62 It is a reasonable estimate, therefore, that the lieutenant arrived back to report to Andros about the end of March or the first of April, doing his best to follow his orders “without delay to return and make the best of your way to me.”

Invitation Becomes Policy. Encouraged by his rapid success in attracting Indian refugees from war-ravaged New England, Andros and his council set the invitation into official policy during their May 29, 1676, meeting at New York. “Ordered, That all North Indyans, that will come in may be protected & a stop to be put to the Maques farther prosecuting sd North Indyans.”63 The next day, Andros noted that he “intended for Albany” and sent an invitation to representatives from both Mohawk and Mahican tribes to meet him there. “Also to send word by some good Mahicander Eastward,” the Council minutes record, “that all Indyans, who will come in & submitt, shall be received to live under the protection of the Government.”64 Andros’ presence was recorded at Albany from June 20 through July 10, during which time he put his new Indian strategy in motion.65 His first order of business was to address continuing attacks by warring tribes along the Connecticut and Nashua River watersheds in Massachusetts. Although they had rejected his offer of assistance the previous summer, the New England colonies were now desperate for help from Andros and the Mohawk warriors he seemed to have under his command. “Having unask’t, acted beyoun Expectatcion, in your Indyan Warre, though all friendly proffers slighted by nearest Neighbors, However out of 57 E. M. Ruttenber, “Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson’s River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: Their Location and the Probable Meaning of Some of Them,” in Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association (Newburgh, N.Y., 1906), 45n.

58

MCARS 2:236.

ERA 2:63–4. Dirck Wessels was the husband of Christina van Buren, one of the orphans who grew up on the Van Vechten farm along with Gerrit Teunisse.

59

60 William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America (London, 1760), 16, 455–56; see also, Charles J. Taylor, History of Great Barrington, Massachusetts (Great Barrington, Mass., 1882), 1–13.

61

MCARS 2:86.

62

Andros Papers 1:352.

63

DRCHNY 13:496; Andros Papers 1:376.

64

DRCHNY 13:496–97.

65

MCARS 2:121, 123, 131.

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85

Commiseration, and upon Account of your Letter of the 5th past, I shall not bee wanting in any thing fit for mee,” he wrote to the Massachusetts governor on May 22.

He responded to another letter, this one from officials from Connecticut, during his June 1676 visit to Albany. He once again called on Lt. Gerrit Teunisse, this time to travel to Hartford and deliver the missive. Connecticut’s governing council at their July 5, 1676, session, acknowledged receipt of this letter that advised them of ongoing raids by bands of Mohawks. “This is by Lift Gerret Tunesen & Cornelisen Stevensen sent Expresse, on occasion of a party of neare 300 Maquas &c. now going out.” Minutes of the meeting note that the Connecticut councilors drafted a response and “delivered the same to Lnt. Jarrad [Gerrit] Tuneson.” In that response, they write, “Yours by Lnt Jarrad Tuneson we have this day reced, & are thankefull that you are pleased to take such notice of your neighboures in this time of war, & hope now your Honr is in those parts will fully hasten the Maquase (who if reports be true) are naturally inclined to persue the enemie.”66 Following up on the Andros letter, the Connecticut Council advised river communities such as Northampton, Hadley and Hatfield that Andros “signifyed that there were about 300 Maquaes ready to goe out against the enemie.”67 Contrary to family lore, there is no indication Gerrit Teunisse ever led an attack at the head of an army of 300 Mohawks.68 His mission this time was entirely diplomatic in nature.

Sources indicate the Indians proceeded toward Massachusetts and Maine, while Gerrit Teunisse, after delivering Andros’s letter and waiting for Connecticut’s reply, returned quickly to Albany. He was back

by July 10, prior to Andros’s return trip downriver.69 For the second time that year, the young Dutch militia officer had grown in the esteem of his English governor.

Governor Andros’ June visit upriver had a more significant agenda in mind than sending raiding parties after the Indians still waging war. He also took action in regards to his Indian resettlement design. Brodhead in his History maintains the governor’s visit upriver ended up somewhat north of Albany. “On this occasion Andros went up to Schaghticoke, a pleasant place, in the present county of Rensselaer, near the confluence of the Hoosic with the Husdon River, where he ‘planted a tree of welfare,’ and invited all the Northern and River In-

dians to come and live.”70 That the tree had particular significance to the Indians is apparent from a report from the Schaghticoke Indians to later New York Governor Richard Bellomont from August 31, 1700: “It is now six and twenty yeares ago since wee were allmost dead when wee left New England and were first received into this government,” they said. “[T]hen it was that a Tree was planted at Schakkook whose branches is spread that there is a comfortable shade under the leaves of it; wee are unanimously resolved to live & dye under the shadow of that Tree and pray our Father to nourish and have a favourable aspect towards that Tree, for you need not apprehend that tho’ any of our people goe out a hunting they will look out for another Country, since they like that place call’d Schakkook so well.”71 Later on, the tree took on the name Witenagemot, an English term meaning “assembly of the wise.”72 According to research

by Ann Hunter, the name was first used

by Grace Greylock Niles.73 “Niles mixed a lot of things together in a rather confused account,” Hunter told me. “I am pretty sure she added the Old English name.” Hunter also suggests the possibility that the tree might have been purely symbolic in nature and not an actual tree planted by Andros and the Indians. “I have not found clear evidence that Andros actually planted it, although I think it is possible,” she said. In the early eighteenth century, the property on which the supposed tree was planted came into the possession of Johannes

Knickerbocker. An oak tree on the property believed to be the peace tree later became an image variously representing the town of Schaghticoke and the Knickerbocker Historical Society.74 Given a choice between Massachusetts’ vengeance and New York’s clemency, it is not surprising that many Natives chose the latter and accepted Andros’ invitation.

Once the New England Puritans learned of Andros’ strategy, however, they erupted in objections. Connecticut officials on August 19, 1676, drafted a letter to Gov. Andros reporting that “upon the persuit of a considerable number of the enemie, about 150, whoe were now makeing that way but James Hammond Trumbull and C. J. Hoadly, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut 1636–1676, 15 vols.

(Hartford, Conn., 1852–1890), 2:461.

66

67

Ibid., 462.

68

VVG 2:16.

MCARS 2:128. There is an irregularity in the court records, with no notation as to when the minutes of the July 4 session end and the July 10 session begin. If Gerrit Teunisse was present at Hartford on July 5, 1676, he clearly did not attend the court session in Albany on July 4.

69

70

Brodhead 2:294–95.

DRCHNY 4:743–44. Their calendar math is a little suspect. This conference, as were many others, was recorded for posterity by Robert Livingston, secretary for Indian affairs.

71

72 I have Schaghticoke Town Historian Christina Kelly to thank for disabusing me of the belief that Witenagamot was an Indian word.

73

Hoosac Valley, inside front.

Christina Kelly, “Native Americans in Schaghticoke, refugees from King Philip’s War invited,” blog post from History of the Town of Schaghticoke, https://schaghticokehistory.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/native-americans-inschaghticoke-part-2/, retrieved 6/25/16.

74

Schaghticoke Peace Tree: This photograph of the supposed Schaghticoke Peace Tree appears in the opening pages of Grace Greylock Niles’ 1912 book The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and Its History. It was likely Niles who added the name Witenagemot to the legendary tree, under which Gov. Edmund Andros established a community for Indian refugees escaping King Philip’s War.

86

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Symbol of Schaghticoke: In modern times, the so-called Witenagemot Peace Tree has become an icon for both the Town of Schaghticoke (left) and the Knickerbocker Historical Society (right). This latter group over the past thirty years has restored the Knickerbocker Mansion on the property once shaded by the famed oak tree. were overtaken & fought by a party of ors near unto [H]Ousatunick; whereof ours slue 40 & took 15 captives; some others allso were taken neare the same road, who informe that the enemies designe was to goe over Hudson’s River to a place called Paguiage, where it is sayd there is a forte, & complices ready to receive and shelter them.” They asked Andros to “either grant us liberty to pass up your river with some vessells from hence & the Bay, with men and provission, to persue and destroy those of the enemies that are in those parts; or doe something effectuall yourselfe, for the utter suppression of the enemie in those parts.”75 Part of their intelligence regarding the Indian movement into New York was from the interrogation of one of the captives named Menowniett. When asked by the Connecticut officials, “Wt Indians be at Housetanuck?,” the captive answered, “None. They are all gon to Paquiag ye West side of Hudson’s River.”76 The location of Paquiag is unclear, particularly whether or not it was on the “west” bank of the Hudson. According to a directory of Indian Geographical Names compiled by the N.Y. Historical Association, it is “the name of a flat ‘in the Great Imbocht’ ” or “bend,” and the word itself translates as “clear land, open country.”77 Not long after Connecticut drafted its objection, officials of Massachusetts Bay joined in the clamor. In early September, Andros’ Council received a letter from the war-torn Puritans expressing their desire, as recorded in council minutes, “that severall North Indyans, now in this Governmt, who have been their Enemyes may be secured and sent to be delivered into their hands.”

Andros’ refusal to extradite the tribes to whom he had promised refuge didn’t sway his resolve to assist his neighboring colonies from battling the Philip-aligned Indians, extending his support of Mohawk raiding bands against their old Algonquin foes.78 With Philip’s demise in August of

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1676, his disheartened followers retreated to the frontiers of Maine, where they prolonged King Philip’s War through 1677.

“Hundreds of Indians fled New England and the wrath of the Puritans,” writes Schaghticoke researcher Beth Kloppot. She notes that some migrated north to Canada, eventually settling as far north as St. Francis.79 Others were absorbed into Hudson Valley communities south of Albany, including Claverack and Catskill. “The rest of the refugees came to Schaghticoke to settle near the Mahicans.” These refugees included members of the Pennacook, Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Narragansett and Pocumtuc tribes.80 “About two hundred of these Indians seem to have settled here within the next year or two,” estimates professor Allen Trelease, “and were known henceforth as the Scaticook Indians. Apart from the fact that they were New England refugees, their precise origin and previous tribal affiliation are unknown. They may have belonged to eastern Mahican bands; certainly the New York Mahican were primarily responsible for getting them to accept Andros’ invitation.”81 Kloppot concludes the name Schaghticoke predated the King Philip’s War refugees. She bases that conclusion, however, on a statement from Indian fighter Benjamin Church written decades after Schaghticoke was firmly established, and his use of the name was likely anachronistic.82 Was the name specific to the refugee village near the Hudson/Hoosic River confluence? Or, as suggested above, did Indians invited to New York from the Housatonic area of western Connecticut bring the name Schaghticoke with them?

The Lieutenant’s Third Assignment.

Governor Andros planned another trip to Albany the following spring for continued discussion regarding his amnesty policy. “I am (God willing) hastening up to Albany,” he wrote to Massachusetts Governor John Leverett on April 3, 1677. He explained that

his purpose in the visit was to check “that our said [Mohawk] Indyans doe effectually prosecute those in wars Eastward.”83 He also sent notice the next day to Hartford inviting Connecticut to send representatives to Albany to participate in the discussion. “In expectation of meeting with your honour there, we have desired the Honrd Major John Pynchon and James Richards to undertake a journey to Albany,” record the minutes of the April 10 meeting of the Connecticut Council. They authorized these two delegates “to advise and conclude with you whatever may be necessary to be attended for the publique good peace & welfare of his Maties subjects in these parts.”84 They were late in arriving. Andros himself arrived in Albany on April 11 and waited impatiently for several days for the Connecticut delegates. They still had not appeared on April 16, when Andros drafted another letter to the Connecticut Governor and Council. “The fourth instant I lett you know by a Dispatch from Yorke, my comeing to this place on the publique accompt, (particularly as to the Indians),” he wrote from Albany, “where I desired to have seen 75

Public Records of Connecticut, 2:469–70.

76

Ibid, 472.

77

Ruttenber, 173.

78

DRCHNY 13:501.

St. Francis de Sales Indian mission was begun in 1683 near the Chaudiere River basin opposite Quebec city (J. Mooney, “Saint Francis Mission,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia [New York, 1912], retrieved December 1, 2012 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13348a. htm); DRCHNY 9:440.

79

80 Klopott, 11–12. One of the Pocumtuc refugees was the young Indian boy Wawanolewat, who grew up to be the feared Indian warrior Grey Lock. Gordon M. Day, “Gray Lock,” from Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol.

3, (Toronto, 2003– ), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ gray_lock_3E.html, retrieved September 24, 2016.

81 Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln, Nebr., 1960, reprint 1997), 235.

82

Church, 64.

83

Andros Papers 2:53.

84

Public Records of Connecticut 2:494.

87

some[one] from you who might have been present or spoke to our Indians Maquaes &c.”85 Andros once again looked to militia officer Gerrit Teunisse, along with Timothy Cooper, a soldier at the newly completed Fort Frederick, to deliver the letter, which read, in part: Hearing some North Indians are not only fled to Canada, but furthest Seneques & most other Nations have got some, and also some fled from you and Uncas; and that your friend Indians are much startled, afraid & wavering, wch though but a reporte, I thought necessary to offer to your serious consideration the consequences & remedyes; thinking it of importe. And therefore dispatch Expresse Mr. Timothy Cooper & Mr. Gerritte Tuneson (who know and cann informe you of these parts;) praying you will well weigh the same and returne me an answer by some fitt person of your owne.86 As luck would have it, Connecticut delegates Pynchon and Richards arrived in

Albany the day after New York delegates Timothy Cooper and Lt. Gerrit Teunisse departed for Hartford. The Connecticut gentlemen explained their concerns about supposedly hostile Indians “whoe we understand are upon your River,” initially demanding “them to be delivered to justice.”

They soon changed their opinion, however.

“Weighing what your Honr hath presented, together with our owne observations, [we] doe not apprehend it convenient at this time to insist farther upon it,” they wrote in response to Andros, promising to pass that opinion on to their government back home.87 Gerrit Teunisse’s Reward. As summer approached, ongoing hostilities by the warring New England tribes resulted in Andros once again sailing up the Hudson in August 1677. There are two extant reports of this visit, and neither one gives a full breakdown of the goals or accomplishments of the upriver trip. One account comes from Andros’ general review of his tenure written in the winter of 1678. “The latter end of August [1677],” reports the document, “the Gover-

nor went also to Albany.” Although he used the document to address successful Indian negotiations in the Susquehana-Chesapeake area, he records nothing regarding the situation to the east.88 More informative, Connecticut records include a letter from Andros to Connecticut, written at Albany August 28, 1677, that addresses ongoing tensions in New England.89 There is no indication whether Andros employed Lt. Gerrit Teunisse once again to deliver his correspondence to Connecticut.

It was during this August visit, however, that the governor arranged a reward for the militiaman’s continued service, a reward that was recorded down in New York on September 29. Andros granted him a patent of land “in consideracon of his severall Services with ye Indians, & p’ticularly being Imployed and sent out During ye late troubles.” In the patent, the land is described as “A piece of upland and Swamp lying to ye Southward of Albany, which by my order hath beene layd out for Lieutent Garritt Tunniss.” Additionally, the patent states that the land lies “to ye Southward of ye Plantacon ye said Garrit Tunnisse now lives upon.”90 There was only one problem—the land was not Andros’ to give. It lay within the bounds of the Rensselaerswijck colony.

Van Laer notes, “The granting by Governor Andros of land within the colony of Rensselaerswyck at a time when the Van Rensselaers were striving hard to obtain a manored grant from the Duke of York is interesting.”91 It is not only interesting, but as with other patents whittled off the colony, it was disturbing to the Van Rensselaers.

The complex relationship between Edmund Andros, Gerrit Teunisse, and the Van Rensselaers will be explored in part 2, “The Governor, the Militiaman and the Domine.”

85 Ibid., 495. Andros’ presence in Albany is noted at the April 17, 20 and 27 court sessions. MCARS 2:223-5.

86

Ibid.

Ibid., 494. An interesting postscript to this exchange of delegates between New York and Connecticut comes from Peter Christoph: “In 1678 Timothy Cooper, a soldier at Albany, was discovered to be corresponding with, and acting as factor for, John Pyncheon, the leading fur trader in the Connecticut River valley . . . Cooper was removed from Albany and Pyncheon cut off from the western trade.”

(Andros Papers, 1:xviii.)

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A Curious Gift: As a reward for services performed during King Philip’s War in 1676–1677, Gov. Edmund Andros awarded a patent to Lt. Gerrit Teunisse of about 150–200 acres located south of his rented farm. It was a curious gift as the patent was for land legally purchased and owned by the Van Rensselaers. Here, approximate locations have been superimposed over a detail of the 1767 Bleeker map of Rensselaerswijck.

88

88 During the negotiations between the Iroquois and the Susquehanna Indians, Andros extended the famous Covenant Chain treaty to the mid-Atlantic provinces. Andros Papers 2:94–97.

89

Public Records of Connecticut, 2:502.

90

ERA 2: 79–80. 80n.

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ERA 3:516n.

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WHO WEARS THE TROUSERS?

by Bill Greer

W

HO WEARS THE TROUSERS? This has been a burning question in Dutch culture through the centuries. One illustration is the story of Jan de Wasscher. Jan first made his appearance in a seventeenthcentury broadsheet, really a prototype cartoon. Jan has lived into the age of color printing.1 When his story opens, Jan has put on his best trousers and is standing handin-hand and exchanging vows with his bride Griet. Then they are off to the wedding feast. But no sooner does the happy couple get home than Griet whips off her apron and exchanges it for Jan’s trousers.

Next thing he knows, he’s cooking dinner under Griet’s watchful eye, serving the meal while she sits at table and washing up afterwards. If those aren’t enough wifely duties for the young man in the apron, he’s soon washing the windows, scrubbing the floor and bending over the laundry tub.

Jan and Griet are soon blessed with a child. Griet is not the motherly type, however, and Jan finds himself nursing and feeding, playing with dolls, buying the sweets. And when the child misbehaves, it falls to Jan to paddle its bottom.

At last, Griet’s motherly instincts kick in. She grabs up her whip and chases Jan around the house. He flees, and his apron flapping gives a pretty clear answer to “Who’s Wearing the Trousers” now.

By the time Jan appears in the seventeenth century, the Dutch had been pondering this question on trousers for a couple centuries already. In the midBill Greer is the author of The Mevrouw Who Saved Manhattan, a novel of New Amsterdam, and a former trustee of the New Netherland Institute. This article was originally presented as a paper, “Who Wears the Trousers? Dutch Folk Tradition and the Battle of the Sexes in New Netherland,” at the New Netherland Institute Annual Conference in Albany on September 22, 2017.

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Anonymous, “De Vernieuwde Jan de Wasscher,” a seventeenth-century broadsheet cartoon about Jan de Wasscher and his bride Griet. Kolm Kinderprint c. 1700. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam. sixteenth century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Dulle Griet. Griet was a disparaging name frequently given to shrewish women. Dulle Griet appears outfitted in a man’s armor and military gear, plus a few wifely weapons like an iron skillet. She is looking into the mouth of hell. Meanwhile, a close-up of the mayhem in the center of the painting shows her female followers stripping

the trousers off quite a number of not-somanly victims.2 Another version of the trousers question

1 Simon Shama, The Embarrassment of Riches : An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley and London, 1987), 448. David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (Berkeley, 1973), 240–43.

2 Louise S. Milne, “Dreams and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet,” in William Z. Shetter and Inge Van der Cruysse, eds., Contemporary Explorations in the Culture of the Low Countries (University Press of America, 1995), 207.

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Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Bruegel’s Dulle Griet stares into the mouth of hell.

is the Biegt der Getrouwde [The Marriage Trap], a seventeenth-century satire in which a wife gradually mounts an insurrection against her husband through extravagant shopping, constantly filling the house with her friends, and demanding his presence at her soirees. He eventually loses any capacity to resist and slowly sinks into lethargy and drink. She then demands control of the family budget and ultimately takes over his draper’s business.

Midway through, the Chapter 6 header delivers the verdict “De vrou heft de broek aan” [“The woman has the pants on”].3 While the Dutch debate over who wears

the trousers is a bit tongue-in-cheek, underlying it is a true independent streak in Dutch women dating back centuries.

Household manuals virtually institutionalized the role of women, as if not fully equal partners in marriage, certainly not subservient. One example is Jacob Cats’s Houwelick. Cats wrote, “In our Netherlands, God be praised, there are no yokes for the wife, nor slaves’ shackles or fetters on her legs.”4 A second example is The Experienced and Sensible Dutch Housekeeper, which states, “If the man is the head, then the woman is the neck on which it rests.”5 This

reflects a wife’s role as the privy counselor of the family, the person to whom the husband turns for advice and help on anything of importance, both domestically and worldly.

English men had a less sanguine interpretation of Dutch women’s independent streak. An English traveler named Fynes Hieronymus Sweerts, De Biegt der Getrouwde (Amsterdam, 1679). Shama, 448.

3

Jacob Cats, Houwelick, 1648. Quote translated in Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cornell University Press, 1995), 137.

4

De Ervarene en Verstandige Hollandsche Huyshoudster, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1743), in Schama, 422.

5

Detail of Dulle Griet’s followers stripping trousers off not-so-manly victims.

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Moryson had the following to say about Dutch women in his Itinerary describing a ten years’ journey: “The women of these parts, are above all other truly taxed with this unnatural domineering over their husbands.” 6 Moryson attributed their behavior to, as young girls, bossing their older brothers around and treating them as oafs. Accustomed to this behavior when they reached marriageable age, they chose simple-minded husbands so as to arrange domestic matters to their liking.

An English play of 1619, The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, embraced the same attitude, putting these words in a Dutch woman’s mouth as she spoke to an English lady: We are ourselves, our own disposers, masters, And those that you call husbands, are our servants.7 A French man observed this attitude around a Dutch dinner table. The mistress and her maidservant seated themselves first and took the choicest portions. The master and his manservant settled into vacant chairs and served up the leftovers.

When the master foolishly asked the maidservant to fetch something, the mistress said “get it yourself” and let fly, and the maidservant jumped into the fray. Under his wife’s glare, the master backed down and apologized.8 So the bottom line: The battle over who wears the trousers was symbolic that Dutch women were not going to be pushed around by any man, husbands or otherwise. And the women who crossed the Atlantic to New Netherland carried that attitude with them. Below are four such women who pushed back.

Above: Biegt de Getrouwde.

Cover of Hieronymus Sweerts’s seventeenth-century satire, The Marriage Trap.

Right top: Jacob Cats, Houwelick.

Cover of this popular seventeenthcentury household manual.

Right bottom: De Ervarene en Verstandige Hollandsche Huyshoudster. Another popular seventeemth-century household manual.

W

oman on the Prowl. The first happens to be named Griet, and that disparaging name fit her perfectly. I like to think of Griet Reyniers as Manhattan’s first woman on the prowl. The first man she tangled with in New Netherland was Wouter van Twiller, the newly appointed Director of New Netherland and the twenty-seven-year old nephew of a high official in the West India Company, Kiliaen van Rensselaer. Van Twiller seems awfully young for the weighty responsibility of ruling such a distant outpost. But as Uncle Kiliaen liked to say, “one cannot accomplish as much by doing well as by having friends in the game.”9

It is not clear when Van Twiller hooked up with Griet. It could have been in an Amsterdam tavern, where she was known for hoisting her petticoats in the back room, or possibly aboard ship, where she entertained herself pulling sailors’ shirts out of their breeches. Whichever, he seems to have tried a taste of Griet himself and to have liked it. He took her for his mistress, making Griet New York’s first high class hooker.

Within five years, van Twiller ran afoul

of his Amsterdam masters and was recalled 6 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland (Glasgow, James MacLehose and Sons, 1908), 4: 469.

John Fletcher, The Tragedy of John Van Olden Barnavelt (’S-Gravenhage, 1884), 23.

7

Paul Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, Simon Watson Taylor, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 136.

8

Killiaen van Rensselaer to Wouter van Twiller, April 23, 1634, in Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, A. J. F. van Laer, trans. (Albany, NY, 1908), 268.

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to Holland. He broke things off with Griet.

Having his own personal whore in the wilderness was one thing, it was quite another to traipse into his Uncle Kiliaen’s Amsterdam drawing room with Griet on his arm.

If anyone questioned her character, she would likely turn around, lift her skirt and tell them to have a good lick on the bare rump she was slapping. That’s what she’d done on Pearl Street when sailors called out, “Whore, whore, two pounds butter whore!”

Getting thrown over by her sweetheart did not slow Griet down. She marched into the fort by present-day Bowling Green and declared, “I have long enough been the whore of the nobility, now I want to be the whore of the rabble.”

At some point Griet tired of her philandering ways and married—or maybe not so tired as her philandering continued after the wedding. Her husband was Anthony Jansen van Salee, better known as “the Turk.” The Van Salee surname came from the African port his Dutch father sailed from as an admiral of a Sultan’s fleet. His nickname the Turk came from the Moroccan woman the admiral bedded. Anthony’s mother gave her son his swarthy skin, but he behaved more like the pirate his father had turned into. As a cantankerous troublemaker, he was a good match for Griet.

Serious trouble began when the couple got into a dispute with the Reverend Everardus Bogardus, a Dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church. Dominie or not, Bogardus was no saint. For starters, he shared with many Dutchmen a fondness for drink.

More than once he was accused of stumbling over his feet getting into the pulpit or over his words when he got there. While the drink might lead to a good tonguelashing for his congregation, it also led him to abuse his companions over dinner, in the tavern, during weddings and at most other occasions. In one sermon, he accused Director Willem Kieft, who succeeded Van Twiller, of being a child of the devil, no better than a buck goat. Bogardus could understand how such a monster might be produced in Africa, where, as myth had it, on account of the great heat, wild animals of different types copulated together and produced abominable offspring. But he couldn’t understand it in the temperate clime of New Amsterdam.10 Reverend Bogardus grew a bit riled when Griet called his wife Annake a whore. The insults started flying when the court ordered the Turk to pay 319 guilders

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Dominie Everardus Bogardus and his wife Annake Jans who tangled with Griet Reyniers. he owed the Dominie. Van Salee refused, or rather he countersued that Bogardus owed him seven guilders. Bogardus denied it in court but finally owned up to a debt of seven guilders. Griet was incensed. The holy man Bogardus swore a false oath over those seven guilders, she charged.

Questioning a man’s honor in that way was a serious accusation. To top it off, Bogardus’s wife Annake lifted her skirt in public like a common whore, Griet and Anthony claimed. Imagine such immoral behavior by a preacher’s wife.11 But other witnesses testified that Annake merely raised her hem while she was crossing a rough and muddy road. Griet and Van Salee had gone too far. The court ordered Griet to swear under oath that Bogardus was no perjurer and to beg his forgiveness.

Van Salee had to acknowledge that Annake was an honorable and virtuous woman.

That punishment didn’t stop Griet or the Turk from raising hell, however. After a couple more incidents, Director Kieft banished the couple from New Netherland. Griet and Van Salee had six months to wrap up affairs and depart. But before six months were out, a child was on the way. To support the baby, Director Kieft granted the Turk two hundred acres of Long Island waterfront. New York’s first whore moved to Brooklyn, finishing out her life as a respectable farmer’s wife in Gravesend.

Well, not quite so respectable. When she bore her child, Griet begged the midwife to say who the child resembled, her husband the mulatto Turk or Andries Hudde. “If

you do not know who the father is,” the midwife said, “how should I?”11

T

he Adulteress: Nanne Beech is the next woman who wouldn’t get pushed around. Nanne didn’t let much get in the way of her fun, least of all her husband. In 1638, a gentleman observed her at a neighbor’s house “appearing merry.” Strong drink making her frisky, Nanne spent the evening fumbling at the breeches of all the men present. Her husband Thomas begged her to come home, but she was not to be persuaded.

That particular evening was a relatively innocent one for Nanne. Not so another night when Nanne opened her home to two guests, Edward Wilson and Francis Lastley. According to Wilson, Nanne offered a little too much hospitality to Lastley. Proclaiming her innocence, Nanne, or perhaps her husband Thomas, sued Wilson for slander. Wilson testified he was sick abed while staying at the Beeches. Thomas was out hunting. Feeling lonely, or taking advantage of a good situation, Nanne cosied up to Lastley. As their affections progressed, Nanne called out three times to make sure Wilson was asleep. He pretended to be. But he kept 10 E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, trans., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York. 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–1887), 14: 69–73.

Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1683–1642, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volume 1, translated and annotated by Arnold J. F. Van Laer, 71, 107. Council Minutes, 1638–1649, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volume 4, translated and annotated by Arnold J. F. Van Laer, 13, 25–29, 46–48.

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one eye cocked open as Nanne lay upon the bed with Lastley, manipulating his “male member” and engaging in “carnal conversation.”

No word survived on how the court decided the slander case. But Thomas took his wife’s adulterous ways hard. In a very depressed state a year later, Thomas declared he should not live another fortnight, or a month at the longest. His prophecy proved true. Within a year, Nanne captured a second husband.12

T

he Jilted Woman: Next is Grietjen Westercamp. Grietjen was a good girl—really she was. She loved Pieter Jacobsen, but she wasn’t throwing her virginity away until she received his marriage commitment. ‟Say you’ll marry me, then you can enjoy my pleasures,” she told him. He promised, and eight days before Christmas 1661, they lay together in Pieter’s millhouse. Grietjen soon found herself pregnant. On the first of October the next year, her newborn son was baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church near present-day Kingston.

The father, however, in no way acknowledged any connection with the boy. Later that month, Grietjen hauled him into the Court of Wildwyck, which recorded the proceedings in nearly illegible scribble which some miracle worker managed to decipher and to illuminate what played out in court over the next four months.

Grietjen demanded to know why Pieter denied his child. “I have my doubts about it,” Pieter told the court. Grietjen insisted.

Pieter had given his promise. Now he had ruined her. The court must order him to restore her honor and marry. The judges looked at Pieter. “A promise of marriage made in the Eyes of God shall remain in force,” they ruled. “But I never promised,” Pieter swore. “Grietjen Westercamp is a loose woman. She lay under the blanket with Jan van Breeman, and with his daughter in bed beside them.” Another man and his wife backed up Pieter’s story, in return for a few coins, Grietjen believed.

The judges pressed Pieter. “Did you not enjoy her pleasures? Did you not promise to marry the girl?” Pieter finally broke under the interrogation. He had lain with the plaintiff but he had not promised marriage, nor had he given her any money for it either. And if he was the father, he wanted to know how the woman could have been pregnant for thirteen months and four days. No, he wasn’t the father

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and he hadn’t promised. Where was her proof? “Proof?” the judges asked. Did Grietjen have her promise in writing? Or could she bring witnesses who had heard Pieter say it, and had the couple exchanged gifts? Those would be binding.

Poor Grietjen had neither paper, gifts, nor witnesses. The court could not force the marriage. The case wrapped up on February 6, 1663. In court, Pieter affirmed upon oath, “I am not the father of the child; so truly help me God Almighty!” The judges ruled he was free to marry any other person he pleased. But wait a moment, they continued. As Pieter acknowledged lying with the girl, he was bound to pay her for that service, two hundred guilders.13 The outcome wasn’t very pleasant for either party, but Grietjen found happier times. Two years later she married Jan Gerritson. Together they had four more sons. Today Grietjen Westercamp has many proud descendants.14

B

rother and Sister: By now this must seem all about sex. But the next example is a sister butting heads with

her brother, and his head was probably the hardest one in New Netherland. The woman is Anna Stuyvesant. In 1657 she was in New Amsterdam when her brother Petrus caught himself in a test of wills with an equally obstinate Quaker, Roger Hodgson. Hodgson was proselytizing on Long Island. Stuyvesant probably didn’t care much about Hodgson’s religious views but quaking in public violated the law.

After the local magistrate proved unable to stop it, Stuyvesant dispatched two officers and twelve musketeers to cart Hodgson to New Amsterdam in chains, where he was Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volume 1, translated and annotated by Arnold J. F. Van Laer (Baltimore, 1974), 54–56, 167–68, 288–89, 313–16. Council Minutes, 1638–1649, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volume 4, Translated and annotated by Arnold J. F. Van Laer (Baltimore, 1974), 49.

12

The Dutch Records of Kingston, Ulster County, New York (Esopus, Wildwyck, Swanenburgh, Kingston), 1658-1664 With Some Later Dates, Part 1, May 31, 1658–November 18, 1664, Esopus-Wildwyck, Revised translation by Samuel Oppenheim (1912), 35–40, 52–58.

13

On Grietjen’s second marriage to John Gerritsen, see “Jan Gerritsen (Decker) and Grietjen Hendricks Westercamp,” at http://www.boydhouse.com/michelle/quick/ jangerritsendecker/jangerritsendecker.html.

14

Wiltwijck Court Records Sample, where Grietjen Westercamp’s suit against the father of her child is recorded.

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Anna Stuyvesant and her husband Samuel Bayard in front of their home at Alphen-on-Rhine, Holland (c. 1644), by an unidentified artist, Bequest of Cora Van Rensselaer Catlin, Luce Center, New-York Historical Society.

thrown into a vermin-infested dungeon.

Stuyvesant sentenced Hodgson to two years work at a wheelbarrow, or payment of a 600 guilder fine, the prisoner’s choice.

Hodgson said thank you very much, neither one. Chained to a wheelbarrow, Hodgson refused to repair the walls. Under orders, a slave beat him with a tarred rope, knocked him down, picked him up and beat him more. He would either work or get a beating every day, Stuyvesant told him. Still Hodgson refused. Stuyvesant ordered him stripped to the waist, hung up by his hands with weights on his legs and beaten with rods. After a couple of such beatings, several days chained to a

wheelbarrow or locked in the dungeon, and with little to eat but bread and water, Hodgson was near death.

The English living in New Netherland were outraged, as was just about everyone witnessing events in New Amsterdam. But if there was one thing Stuyvesant could not stand above all others, it was defiance of his authority. He would never let anyone see him back down. For his part, Hodgson refused even to allow others to pay the fine. The Lord would see him through.

Anna Stuyvesant had the good common sense to see that this standoff could not end well. Her brother needed a way to save himself from himself, a way to end the im-

Petrus Stuyvesant, attributed to Henri Couturier, c. 1660, and his bride, Judith Bayard, by an unidentified artist. New-York Historical Society.

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passe without relinquishing his authority.

She pleaded with her brother about how sad she was over the prisoner’s suffering.

Could not he end the torture now and banish Hodgson from New Netherland, couldn’t he do it for her sake? It was the excuse Stuyvesant needed. He acceded to his sister’s plea for mercy and released the prisoner on condition he depart on the next ship out. Hodgson sailed for Rhode Island.15 It is unlikely that Anna would ever admit to stealing her brother’s trousers, but then they were missing a leg anyway. One of Stuyvesant’s closest friends, however, did question Stuyvesant’s manliness. When John Farret learned of Stuyvesant’s betrothal to Judith Bayard, the woman who nursed him as he recuperated from losing his leg, he wrote, “Priapus has died in you, my friend,” referring to a Greek God of fertility. “If wed, you will never consummate the relationship.”16 Nonetheless Stuyvesant and his bride married before setting sail for New Amsterdam. Farret had to eat his words. When the couple stepped onto the Manhattan shore, Stuyvesant was sporting a new wooden leg and Judith was four months pregnant with their first of two sons.

15 Reverends Megapolensis and Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 25, 1657, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664 (New York, 1937), 399–402. George Bishop, New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord, First Part, 1659, 163–67. James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America, 2 vols. (London, 1850–1854), 1: 313–16.

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, 2004), 154.

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Book Review Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017).

I

N THE INTRODUCTION to his latest work, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, Russell Shorto points out that most historians look upon and imagine the past from the present.

Shorto, however, sees America’s Revolutionary period as a continuation and extension of the seventeenth-century Dutch colonial period, so expertly and aptly described in his The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (2004).

The American Revolution was fundamentally a promise of individual freedom as defined by the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (cogito ergo sum) and the Dutch Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza. With this in mind, Shorto writes about six individuals, all of whom lived during the Revolutionary era. Although their paths never or only incidentally crossed, he artfully weaves their stories together into a single narrative that provides a fresh way of seeing their era. “I have tried not to preach or even to teach,” Shorto writes in the preface.

The colonial Dutch period of New Netherland ended in 1664, with a brief resurrection in 1673/74, while Revolution Song covers the years 1740–1783. Only two of the six protagonists have a connection with the Dutch period. The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) had a Dutch settler father, John Abeel, and a Seneca mother Gah-hon-noneh. Abraham Yates of Albany, New York, married a Dutch farmer’s daughter Antje de Ridder. They worshiped at the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany.

The most complete story is that of Venture Smith, a West African boy (Broteer Furro) brought to New England as a slave.

Broteer grew up in the village of Dukandarra, Guinea, in the West African savannas. His family was wealthy; his father a prince and head of the village. Broteer was captured, tortured, and marched to Anomabo (Ghana), the center of the slave trade, from where he was shipped to Rhode Island. As his teen years went by, he grew into a formidable man, over six feet tall,

300 pounds, and amazingly strong. His first owner, the ship’s steward, named him Venture. He was a valuable asset for his wealthy Connecticut farm owners, allowed to marry and to make money on the side.

Money became his anchor. He bought himself out of slavery, as well as later his wife and three children. As a free man, he settled in rural Connecticut, where he built a three-level home, a barn, and a forge.

Smith’s pursuit was freedom for himself and his family. He did not participate in the Revolution, although his son served in Washington’s army. Venture Smith could not write but he could speak, and his words were taken down by a local abolitionist friend, and published. He became sadder in his final years grumbling and complaining about the racial injustice that he had endured. Still, “my freedom,” he said, “is a privilege which nothing else can equal.”

He died in his late eighties in 1805.

Cornplanter’s story is tragic. The war devastated the Senecas and, as they lost territory, hostility to white culture increased. Allied with the English, Iroquois warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians including children. Initially, leaders of the American cause had asked the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy to remain neutral in the conflict with Great Britain, a position supported by Cornplanter. Persuaded by a large volume of gifts, however, the Iroquois agreed to fight with the British. At the war’s end, Cornplanter and other Iroquois leaders “conducted a lengthy series of negotiations with American officials, at the end of which they agreed to sell large swaths of lands for cash and United States government bonds.” The remaining Iroquois territories would forever be preserved and henceforth called reservations.

The lone woman among Shorto’s characters is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, daughter of a British officer assigned to New York. Her father forced her at age fourteen to marry a fellow officer who mistreated her badly. Speculation is that her father wished to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr, but he may have wanted relief from her care. She ran away and ended up in London’s high society. A string of wealthy and high placed lovers supported her passion for gambling and fine things. She wrote a “delightfully

scandalous memoir” and faked her own death. She fled London to avoid debtors’ prison and reappeared in Paris, where the pattern of lovers and debtors’ prison resumed. Her quest for freedom was not inspired by suffrage or modern feminism, but by self-preservation in a hostile male dominated world. She used her beauty and sexual attraction to advance in a society that offered independent women few options.

Abraham Yates, like Cornplanter, was close to the Revolution but in an entirely different way. Born in poverty, he was a shoemaker who studied law and became an influential politician. Albany was his home base throughout his life. He was a champion of the common man and successfully fought the New York ruling elite.

During the war he served in New York’s Provincial Congress and helped write New York State’s constitution. He corresponded frequently with George Washington during the Revolution. He ended up being an adversary of the United States Constitution and tried to defeat its ratification, convinced the Constitution “was written for the privileged few.” In the last years of his life, he kept defending the rights of the common man.

Central to Shorto’s work is George Washington. His counterpart is Lord George Germain, England’s secretary of state for the American colonies. Born into an illustrious and wealthy family, Germain developed into an avid political military man to become the highest-ranking man in the British army. In the global war with France, he dodged several invitations to be charged with the forces in the Americas.

He preferred to fight the French in Europe in an alliance with Prussia. In the battle at Minden, he ignored an order to charge with his cavalry at the retreating French army.

He was court-martialed, found guilty, and barely escaped execution. His political life did not end but his reputation remained tarnished in the public opinion. Responsible for the Americas, he developed a strategy to divide the enemy by taking possession of the Hudson River. British General John Burgoyne’s defeat and surrender at Saratoga in 1777 and General William Howe’s reluctance to move his fleet north to New York was the turning point in the war. It was Germain’s duty to deliver news of

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the 1781 American victory at Yorktown to the British prime minister, Lord North, who cried out, “Oh God, it is all over!”

All characters, with the exception of Venture Smith, directly connect with the central character George Washington— even Margaret Coghlan, who attended a dinner at which he was present. She attracted his attention when she refused

to toast the American victory. Shorto writes wonderfully about Washington’s life, though several reviewers claim he has difficulty describing his inner life. I disagree. While living in New York as the new President of the United States, Washington felt like a “bumpkin.” Does that need further explanation?

The book deserved to be on the New

York Times list of fifty best nonfiction books. That is an omission. On the website of the New Netherland Institute is a nice podcast of an interview with Shorto about the book.

—R. J. Jippe Hiemstra

President,

New Netherland Institute

Here and There in New Netherland Studies Jacob Leisler Institute Lecture Series

Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize

The Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History in Hudson, New York, has inaugurated a running lecture series with talks in February, April, and June. The series is being cosponsored by the Hudson Area Library in Hudson, New York, and the Gotham History Center in Manhattan.

Leisler Institute Director Dr. David William Voorhees inaugurates the series on February 22 with a PowerPoint presentation on the Jacob Leisler Institute: what it is, what it covers, and what type of materials are available in our library and manuscripts collections. The title for his presentation is: “Libelers, Monsters, and Rebels: The Jacob Leisler Institute and Research into New York’s Neglected English Colonial Period.” Leisler Institute Trustee Dr. William A. Starna, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, State University of New York at Oneonta, is speaking on Thursday, April 19. The topic of his talk is “Natives on the Land: American Indians in the Mid-Hudson Valley.” The final lecture in the Spring series will be by food historian Peter G. Rose on June 21. Her topic is “A Taste of Change: Hand-Written Cookbooks as Documents of Social and Family History.”

All three lectures will be followed with question and answer sessions and refreshments, and will take place at 6 p.m. in the Community Room of the Hudson Area Library, 51 N 5th St, Hudson, NY. For further information, contact the Jacob Leisler Institute at info@jacobleislerinstitute.org or visit our website http://jacobleislerinstitute.org/

The New Netherland Institute offers an annual $1,000 prize for the best published article relating to the Dutch colonial experience in the Atlantic world, with a special sensitivity to New Netherland or its legacy. A committee of scholars will consider entries in the fields of history, archaeology, literature, language, geography, biography, and the arts. Entries must be based upon original research. Articles must be written in English and be published for the first time no earlier than two calendar years before the deadline, e.g. no earlier than 2016 for the 2018 prize. Chapters from a monograph, works of fiction, and encyclopedia entries will not be considered. Only one submission per author will be accepted. Articles previously submitted for consideration may not be resubmitted. Both academic and independent scholars are invited to participate.

Articles for consideration must be submitted by the author, editor, colleague, or other interested party by April 1, 2018, to nyslfnn@nysed.gov. Please include your email address and mailing address with your submission. The winner will be notified by August and the prize will be presented at the Institute’s Annual Conference.

Alice P. Kenny Memorial Award The New Netherland Institute is the recipient of an annual grant from the Alice P. Kenney Memorial Trust Fund. This grant enables the Institute to award an annual prize of $5,000 to an individual or group that has made a significant contribution to colonial Dutch studies

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and/or has encouraged understanding of the significance of the Dutch colonial experience in North America by research, teaching, writing, speaking, or in other ways. Reasonable travel expenses will be reimbursed. Persons or groups to be considered for this award can be involved in any pursuit of any aspect of Dutch colonial life in North America. Emphasis is on those activities that reach a broad, popular audience in the same way that Alice Kenney's activities did.The deadline for nominations is April 1, 2018.

Candidates for the award can be nominated by members of the New Netherland Institute, by historical organizations, or by the general public. Nominations should be in the form of a nominating letter or statement (1–2 pages long) detailing how the nominator became aware of the nominee, which of the nominee’s activities led to the nomination, how those activities qualify for the award, and what the perceived impact is of the nominee’s activities. Nominations may also include illustrative materials that demonstrate the nominee’s activities, such as maps, brochures, and photographs of exhibits. Nominations may also include up to three one-page letters of support from other persons. Three copies of all material must be submitted.

The winner shall be selected by a threeperson committee consisting of two members of the New Netherland Institute and a representative of the Alice P. Kenney Memorial Trust Fund. The Kenney Award is presented each year at the Annual General Meeting of the New Netherland Institute.

Send nominations to: The Alice P. Kenney Award Selection Committee New Netherland Institute, P.O.Box 2536, Empire State Plaza Station, Albany, NY 122200536 or email: nyslfnn@nysed.gov.

de Halve Maen

Society Activities Headquarters Update: Bringing The Holland Society into the Digital Age

by Sarah Bogart Cooney

F

OR SOME TIME now, The Holland Society of New York has focused on expanding its digital and social media presence. In this rapidly changing technological world, so vastly different from the world when the Society was founded in 1885, we now have the ability to communicate with Members, Friends, and those interested in the mission of the Holland Society across the globe with just a click of a button.

In the past twelve months, The Holland Society has significantly increased our online presence, particularly on social media. From forty-six “likes” on our Facebook page in April 2017 to 347 “likes” in March 2018, we have been able to share the Society and its activities with many prospective members and cur-

Right: Holland Society of New York Member and Burgher Guard Captain Sarah Bogart Cooney is the leading force behind the Holland Society’s digitization efforts and online presence.

rent members. Facebook is a wonderful tool to engage with people interested in the history of New Netherland and the genealogy of families who settled in the area. In addition to Facebook, the Society also has a presence on Twitter, Instagram, and, of course, on our website.

One of The Society’s most notable achievements in the past year has been digitizing valuable genealogical files for public use. In the process of our of-

The Holland Society’s collection of genealogical materials found in colonial Dutch Statenbijbel (States Bible) that Members have donated over a 134-year period is now available in a digitized format online, providing a wealth of information to historians and genealogists alike on New Netherland’s early families.

Winter 2017–2018

fice move from West 44th Street to our current temporary headquarters at 708 3rd Avenue, we discovered archival files of family Bible records. These records, ranging from typed transcripts of genealogical information found written in the frontispieces of Bibles to the actual frontispieces themselves, are incredibly rare and valuable for both their historic and genealogical value. In an effort to encourage researchers, the Office has worked hard to digitize these records and make them available on our website.

These records, found at www.hollandsociety.org/library/family-bible-records, are constantly being updated. We have received incredible feedback on this initiative, and we are thrilled to be able to provide access to specific family Bible records online.

Another significant initiative in expanding our outreach to the Membership is the reintroduction of the monthly newsletter. Originally published by the Office and the newsletter’s editor, Adrian Bogart Jr., the newsletter was revived in May 2017 and is published digitally every month. Back issues of the newsletter can also be found on the website in the “Members Only” section: www.hollandsociety.

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A sample of the visual materials now available online. A song sheet from a Society banquet and Society Members on the 1888 trip to the Netherlands. org/members-only/newsletters. These newsletters focus on events hosted by the Society, its Branches, and individuals, as well as sharing current events of interest to our readers. We are always looking for more personal stories—if you have an exciting life event coming up, have been honored by an award, or are welcoming a new child or grandchild, we hope that you will send your news to the Office.

Newsletter submissions can be sent to

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the ability to upload these scholarly works on our website would allow those without access to the original copies or to the New York State Library in Albany, where our library was donated, to use and cite these works in their own research.

Particularly notable in these publications are a large number of genealogies, which were commissioned by families and submitted to the Society for the basis of proving genealogy for membership applications. In addition to these genealogical texts, the digitization of the applications of notable members is also of interest. Our Membership included several United States presidents, numerous scholars, judges, and actors, as well as many others of prominence.

We also discovered digitized photographs of the Society’s first trip to the Netherlands in 1888, an intriguing look at both the early days of the Society and the Netherlands in the 1880s. Other ephemera from the early days of the Society’s me, Sarah Bogart Cooney, at website@ history include several songs written hollandsociety.org. specifically for the Annual Banquet, phoFinally, we are working on digitizing tographs, sketches, and pamphlets written our Society’s archives for inclusion on the for specific events. website in the “Members Only” section.

The Holland Society is always looking While back issues of de Halve Maen are for better ways to engage our Memberalready accessible to Society Members ship and provide access to records and and de Halve Maen subscribers, the So- publications you are interested in! Let ciety has published in pamphlet and book us know what you would like to see next format many notable works of scholarship by contacting me at website@hollandsoduring its history. Being able to provide ciety.org.

de Halve Maen

In Memoriam Roger Alan Van Tassel Holland Society of New York Life Member Roger Alan Van Tassel passed away peacefully at his home in Mint Hill, North Carolina, on December 28, 2016, at the age of eighty. Mr. Van Tassel had been battling cancer for more than twenty years. Mr. Van Tassel was born on October 19, 1936, in Hillsdale, New Jersey, son of William Francis Van Tassel and Marie Simso. He claimed descent from Cornelis Jansen van Texel form the Island of Texel, Holland, the Netherlands, who came to New Netherland between 1624 and 1628 and settled on the central part of Long Island between present-day Huntington and Smithtown. Mr. Van Tassel became a Life Member of the Holland Society in 1979.

Mr. Van Tassel studied at Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts, and Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He received a M.S. and Ph.D. from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated in quantum chemistry.

He worked as a civilian research scientist at Hanscom Field Air Force Base, Bedford, Massachusetts, for thirty-five years, rising to become director of his division.

Mr. Van Tassel had two sons, Zachary Van Tassel, born on February 8, 1961, and Joshua Stuart Van Tassel, born on October 28, 1964. Mr. Van Tassel married his second wife, Judy Love, on April 17, 2015.

Mr. Van Tassel was an avid motorcyclist, sailor, choral singer, and champion of social justice.

Mr. Van Tassel is survived by his wife, Judy, sons Zachary Van Tassel of Columbus, Ohio, and Joshua S. Van Tassel of Charlotte, North Carolina, and six grandchildren. A service to celebrate his life was held on Saturday, January 28, 2017, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Arthur DeWitt Ackerman Holland Society of New York Life Member and former Virginia and the Carolinas Branch President Arthur (“Terry”) DeWitt Ackerman passed away December 26, 2017. Mr. Ackerman was born in Summit,

New Jersey on August 28, 1941, son of Dr. Arthur Fowler Ackerman, a Member of The Holland Society, and Barbara Lintner.

Mr. Ackerman joined The Holland Society in 1977 and became a Life Member in 2007. He claimed descent from David Ackerman, who arrived in New Amsterdam from Oss, North Brabant, in 1662.

Mr. Ackerman attended the Pingry School in Hillside, New Jersey, graduating in 1959 cum laude. He received a B.A. degree in Psychology from Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, in 1963. Following his graduation, he served in the United States Army Reserves from 1963 to 1969.

In his professional career, he was involved with entrepreneurial endeavors and sales for most of his life. From 1967–1980, he had a successful career with Home Life Insurance Company in Manhattan and was a sales executive for the National Association of Life Underwriters. He was a member of the Home Life Hall of Fame, Life and qualifying member of the Million Dollar Round Table, and a charter member of both the Top of the Round Table and the Five Million Dollar Forum.

Mr. Ackerman married Martha Haynes Denton at Liberty Corner, New Jersey, on August 17, 1968. The couple had two sons, Gregory deWitt Ackerman, born on February 12, 1970, and Peter Denton Ackerman, born on March 29, 1972, both in New Jersey. The couple subsequently divorced.

In 1982 Mr. Ackerman was co-founder of a Wall Street based gold exploration and money management group. Since 1980, he was an investment banker for resource and technology companies, raising over $50,000,000 for early stage companies.

Mr. Ackerman is also an angel investor in resource technology and renewable energy companies, and was involved in a LEEDS community in the Mohave Desert. He was on the board of The Mohave National Preserve Conservancy, was a Director of Beech Tree Labs, Inc., and served on the board of CooperRiis, American International Ventures, Inc., AIVN de Mexico, and Atmospheric Plasma Solutions, Inc. Following his retirement, he moved to Tryon, North Carolina, Mr. Ackerman was a member of the Beacon Hill Club in Summit, New Jersey,

and Black River Fish and Game Club of Potterville, New Jersey. In North Carolina he served on the Tryon Parks Commission and championed local non-profits like Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Polk County, and Tryon Little Theater. He loved singing, enjoyed camping and fishing with his buddies and sons, was an avid gardener who grew mammoth broccoli and the sweetest radishes. When he was on form, he placed a killer serve on the tennis court.

He was also a founder member of the “Men Without Jobs Breakfast Club.” He was a former member of the Central Presbyterian Church of Summit, New Jersey. He was Republican in his politics.

Mr. Ackerman is survived by his partner of over twenty-five years, Monica Jones, and sons Gregory Ackerman and Peter Ackerman, both of New Jersey. His generosity and unconditional love will be missed by all. A celebration of his life was held at a later date.

Hendrik Booraem V Holland Society of New York Member Dr. Hendrik Booraem V passed away in Knoxville, Tennessee, on October 1, 2017.

Dr. Booraem was born on Manhattan on May 11, 1939, son to Hendrik Booraem IV, a Member of the Holland Society, and Dorothy Allen Carr. He claimed descent from Willem Jacobszen van Boerun from Burum, Friesland, may have lived in Amsteerdam before coming to New Netherland in 1649. Dr. Booraem joined the Holland Society in 1965.

In 1944, his parents divorced and Dr. Booraemmoved with his mother to South Carolina, first to Gaffney and then to Greenville. He attended Greenville City public schools from 1945 to 1956. He received a National Merit Scholarship and studied at the University of Virginia, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1961. While at the University of Virginia, he was a member of the Jefferson Society. Following graduation, he returned to Greenville and taught Spanish for six years at the Greenville Senior High School. Dr. Booraem became the head of the Foreign Languages Department. In 1967, he entered The Johns Hopkins Uni-

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versity and studied history under David Herbert Donald, receiving his Ph.D. in 1977. In addition, he received the DAR History Medal twice, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

Dr. Booraem married Lynn Francis Allen in Aiken, South Carolina, on October 7, 1967. The couple had three children: Dorothy Allen Booraem, born on July 6, 1968, in Aiken, South Carolina; Hendrick Booraem VI, born on May 10, 1972, in White Plains, New York; and Anna Hollingsorth Booraem, born on January 4, 1974, in White Plains, New York. Dr. Booraem’s marriage ended in divorce.

In 2009, he married his life partner of seventeen years, Dr. Richard D. Bullock of Newtown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Bullock died in 2015.

During his academic career, Dr. Booraem taught at several institutions, including the State University of New York at Purchase from 1971 to 1979, the University of South Carolina at Aiken, Lehigh University, Delaware Valley College, and

as an associate professor at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, from 1992. He also taught for thirteen years at the Strom Thurmond High School in Edgefield, South Carolina, from 1979–1992.

During his academic career Dr. Booraem authored numerous books on American history, including The Formation of the Republican Party in New York: Politics and the Conscience in the Antebellum North (1983) and The Early History of Johnston, South Carolina: The Founding and Development of a Railroad Depot Town (1993). His primary academic interest, however, was the education and character formation of United States presidents. His published studies on that topic include The Road to Respectability: James A. Garfield and His World, 1844–1852 (1988), The Provincial: Calvin Coolidge and His World, 1885–1895 (1994), Young Hickory: The Making of Andrew Jackson (2001), A Child of the Revolution: William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–1798 (2011), and Young Jerry Ford:

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Athlete and Citizen (2013). At the time of his death he was working on a study of Grover Cleveland entitled Stubborn Independence.

For thirty years Dr. Booraem was an active member of the Nature Conservancy.

His interest in astronomy and space exploration led him to be a long-term member of the Planetary Society. He was also a member of the South Carolina Education Association. In addition, he enjoyed hiking, tennis, chess, singing, and opera. He was a member of the Authors Guild in Manhattan, the Newtown, Pennsylvania, Historical Society, and the New Jersey Gay Men’s Chorus. He was a former Methodist in his religion and a Libertarian in his politics.

Dr. Booraem is survived by his ex-wife, Lynn, and his children Dorothy Allen Booraem of Lincoln, Nebraska, Hendrik Booraem VI of Hodges, South Carolina, and Anna Hollingsworth Booraem of Weaverville, North Carolina, as well as seven grandchildren.

de Halve Maen

New Website Updates! www.hollandsociety.org

Don't miss the new updates to our online presence! You can find digitized family Bible records, reports of Branch meetings, back issues of de Halve Maen, and genealogical resources!

All upcoming Society events, and other events of interest to Members, are also found on the website.