New York at War Read online

  There is, of course, a simpler and more obvious reason why New Yorkers, like people in many other places, have forgotten so much of their city’s past. Memories of communal conflict, loss, and fear are painful in much the same way as traumatic individual memories. Such memories nag at us with the reminder that we can be attacked again, that we can feel vulnerable again, that once more we can become prey to anxiety and suspicion. Putting such things behind us becomes a kind of psychic insurance policy against their future recurrence. Much of this amnesia is healthy and vitally necessary for urban existence. Cities, after all, are neither museums nor mausoleums but living, breathing places. Cities (and nations) survive because their populations are able to put sorrowful pasts behind them. “Rebuild,” the finger scrawl in the dust commanded in late September 2001.

  Rebuilding, however, poses the risk of so eradicating vestiges of our history that we are unprepared when unfolding events throw new challenges—new “history”—in our way. We can find no solace or perspective for present tragedies in a past that has been erased from memory and whose landmarks are no longer visible. As long as New York City remains one of the world’s great urban centers, and as long as it persists as an open society worth living in, it will be vulnerable to attack. This is one lesson of its four centuries of survival and glory. It is a history we should face and seek to understand, rather than turn our backs on.

  CHAPTER 1

  Savages and Salty Men

  The Dutch-Lenape Encounter, 1609–1664

  Early on September 6, 1609, Henry Hudson, the English captain of the Dutch ship the Halve Maen, dispatched John Colman and four other sailors to reconnoiter an inlet to the north of their anchorage. Two days earlier, Hudson had nosed the eighty-ton vessel into what Robert Juet, one of his officers, described as “a very good harbour,” sheltered by a long grassy sandbar. Steering a small boat northward, the five men passed through the Narrows separating Staten and Long Islands into the broader expanse of Upper New York Bay and possibly Newark Bay, observing a shoreline, in Juet’s words, “pleasant with grass and flowers, and goodly trees, as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them.”1

  As the boat headed back to its mother ship, Colman and his comrades saw something that must have quickened their pulses: two Indian canoes—one carrying twelve men, the other fourteen—bearing down on them. At some point, the five sailors decided that trying to outrun their pursuers would be fruitless. As the Indians closed in, the Europeans tried frantically to ignite the fuse of the matchlock gun they had brought along, but a sudden rainstorm extinguished their match. An arrow plunged into Colman’s neck, killing him. Two of his boat mates were also wounded. Somehow, the four survivors managed to escape further pursuit, but spent an exhausting night rowing to regain the Halve Maen, which they could not find in the darkness.

  Colman’s death constitutes the first one documented in what is today the New York City region and the first recorded fatality of an act of war in the region’s history. While the Lenape people of the river estuary may well have warred among themselves and against neighboring Indians before the arrival of Europeans, scant evidence of their military history survives. Early European accounts mention instances of belligerence between the Lenape and the Mahicans and Iroquois to their north and west, but the exact nature of these conflicts, and whether they predated European arrival, remains murky. The lack of a Lenape written language and written records has consigned their “prehistory” to an obscurity that archaeologists and historians have only recently begun to illuminate.2

  John Colman was far from his home that day in 1609. In the five months since the Halve Maen had sailed from the island of Texel on the Netherlands coast under orders from the Dutch East India Company, he and his fellow seamen had first headed into the frigid arctic waters above Scandinavia in a failed search for a navigable passage to the riches of Asia, then west across the Atlantic to seek a similar channel through the New World of North America.

  On September 4, after working his way along what we now know as the New Jersey coast, Hudson had anchored his vessel in the bay behind the sandbar later called Sandy Hook. As some of his twenty-odd crew members cast nets from the beach to catch edible fish, they were joined by curious visitors. Robert Juet noted in his log that “this day the people of the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of our coming, and brought green tobacco, and gave us of it for knives and beads. They go in deer skins loose, well dressed . . . and are very civil.”3

  The next day more Lenape Indians, both men and women, came aboard the ship, some adorned with copper amulets and carrying tobacco pipes, many wearing feathers and “diverse sorts of good furs.” Although the Indians brought hemp as gifts or items of barter, Juet recorded the crew’s relief upon their guests’ departure. “At night they went on land again,” he noted, “so we rode very quiet, but durst not trust them.”4

  The Indians’ friendly overtures did little to overcome the Europeans’ engrained distrust. In the century and more since Columbus’s first voyages of discovery, European mariners had told, heard, and embellished stories of encounters with New World natives—Indians who, in some accounts, remained docile and friendly but also sometimes proved treacherous and hostile. This early lore often demonized native peoples and justified their exploitation, and it probably shaped the crew’s first encounter with Indians on the Maine coast six weeks before the Sandy Hook landfall. For reasons not fully clear, twelve of Hudson’s men, armed with muskets, had descended on a village of “savages . . . and took the spoil of them, as they would have done of us.” Hudson’s mixed crew of Dutch and English sailors slept more easily the night of September 5 knowing that the Halve Maen’s high deck and cannon stood between them and the natives who had disappeared back into the high grass and oak forests of the shore.5

  After Colman’s death and the return of his boat mates, Hudson’s crew carried their comrade’s corpse ashore and buried him at a place they named Colman’s Point, probably amidst the dunes of Sandy Hook. That night, Hudson ordered a particularly vigilant watch. On September 8, Indians returned to the ship with tobacco and corn to trade for knives and beads, with the Europeans anxious to see if “they would make any show of the death of our man.” The barterers seemed ignorant of the confrontation.6

  We know nothing about John Colman’s life except that he was one of the English seamen hired for Henry Hudson’s voyage. For that matter, we know little about the events leading to his demise, since our only account of it appears in a few brief lines in Robert Juet’s logbook. Only Europeans left written accounts justifying their interactions with Native Americans in the region Hudson claimed for the Dutch Republic—and all too often, these records offer only a brief glimpse into the area’s tumultuous past.

  Hudson would have two other violent confrontations with Indians before sailing back to Europe. On September 11 the Halve Maen began ascending the river that would one day bear the captain’s name. Hudson had taken hostage two Lenape men to ensure his ship’s safety (and probably as “gifts” to be presented to the East India Company back in Amsterdam), although they managed to escape from the ship further upriver. After determining on September 22 that the river was not the channel to Asia he had hoped it would be, Hudson sailed back downstream from the vicinity of what is now Albany toward the open Atlantic. He continued to greet and trade with Indians when he sensed it was safe to do so. But on October 1, an Indian climbed from a canoe through the cabin window at the Halve Maen’s stern and made off with Juet’s pillow, two shirts, and two belts. A sailor shot and killed the thief. When crewmen manned their small boat to retrieve Juet’s belongings, another Indian, seeking to overturn the boat from the water, had his hand severed by a sword wielded by the Halve Maen’s cook and drowned. The next day, incited by one of the escaped hostages, two canoes full of warriors pursued the ship, leading to an exchange of arrows and musket balls that left two or three of the Indians dead. A full-fledged skirmish ensued, with about one hundred Lenape on the
shore and in canoes wielding their bows against the ship. Blasts from the ship’s cannon and muskets killed six or seven more. Two days later, having passed the place “called Manna-hata,” the Halve Maen was back out to sea, headed for the Netherlands.7

  We remember that Henry Hudson explored the river and that the beaver and otter pelts he brought back with him sparked the ambition of merchants in Amsterdam and her sister city of Hoorn. We remember that his voyage led to the settlement of a Dutch colony and the genesis of the town that would one day become New York City. We don’t always remember that the process of exploration, settlement, and trade came at a price—to be sure, a price paid sporadically and at unpredictable intervals—in human life. From its very inception, the European encounter with the New York region possessed a military dimension, marked by the corpses of ten or twelve Lenape men and by the bones of John Colman, left behind to settle beneath the New Jersey sands.

  Fifteen years after Hudson’s voyage, in the summer of 1624, thirty families of Protestants from what is today Belgium arrived in the river estuary under the auspices of a new commercial entity, the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. Inspired by visions of a wilderness teeming with fur-bearing animals and Indians who could be paid to trap them, the company deployed these settlers to small outposts on the Delaware, Connecticut, and Hudson rivers and to a tiny, presumably defensible speck of land (today Governors Island) at the mouth of the strait separating the tip of Manhattan Island (Juet’s Manna-hata) from the Long Island shore. The Dutch had already christened the entire colony New Netherland.

  In the spring of 1625, as more vessels arrived carrying settlers and livestock, the Dutch set about turning Manhattan’s tip into their colonial capital. One passenger, an engineer and surveyor named Cryn Fredericks, landed with detailed instructions from the WIC, authorizing him to plan and build a proper settlement for the colonists. Working with the colony’s on-site director, Willem Verhulst, Fredericks chose the southern tip of Manhattan Island as the optimal site for the principal town and administrative headquarters. Fredericks’s choice made sense: the Hudson River estuary afforded a logical landfall for vessels completing or beginning the three-thousand-mile Atlantic crossing, and it was an equally logical port of call for vessels sailing to and from the navigable headwaters of the river 150 miles to the north, where Mohawks of the Iroquois League brought fur pelts from the northern and western wilderness to trade. New York Bay’s secondary conduit to the Atlantic through the East River and Long Island Sound seemed to clinch WIC domination of the southern New England coast and Long Island’s north shore.8

  Fredericks also appreciated the natural blessings of the site. The land masses of Staten Island and Long Island sheltered the Upper Bay from the worst ocean storms and fogs, and the bay’s navigable channels made it the best natural deepwater harbor on the East Coast. If the stiff westerly winds and winter ice floes of the lower Hudson River made Manhattan’s western side less than ideal as a place to dock ships, no such problems hampered the East River shoreline. In time the lowermost reaches of that seashell-covered shore, stretching a mile and more east and north from the island’s southern tip, would become North America’s busiest seaport.9

  In charging Fredericks and Verhulst with picking a site that would facilitate trade and communication, the West India Company’s directors had an additional goal in mind. They wanted to create a military base of formidable proportions, the first in a network of such bases they anticipated for the Americas and one that would enable them to exert Dutch military might throughout the Western Atlantic. This goal was rooted in the mission of the company from the very start.

  The Dutch colony in New Netherland, like the WIC itself, was born from the impetus of war. Dutch merchants had established the WIC in 1621 at the expiration of a twelve-year truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Since 1568, the Dutch had been in revolt against their overlords, the Catholic monarchs of Hapsburg Spain. In 1581 the northern Netherlands had declared its independence from Spain in the name of time-honored Dutch liberties, freedom of conscience, and the Reformed (Calvinist) Church. Spain, unwilling to grant the Dutch their independence, fought on; in turn, Dutch patriots—the founders of the WIC among them—extended the war to the high seas, where they intended to raid Spanish ships and overseas Spanish colonies.

  The bitter and draining war between the Dutch and the Spanish coincided with a spectacular economic boom in the Netherlands. By the time they dispatched Henry Hudson to find a new, improved route to the Orient, the merchants of the Dutch seaport cities were well on their way to creating Europe’s richest and most urban society. The traders of Amsterdam, Hoorn, Rotterdam, and Haarlem became the continent’s middlemen par excellence, carrying the raw goods and manufactures of the North Sea, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, England, Russia, and France from one end of Europe to the other and earning hefty profits in the process. Dutch traders became the master capitalists of their day, sophisticated bankers and creditors as well as buyers and sellers, always with an eye to exploiting new markets and sources of supply wherever their ships might take them. As a Dutch saying put it, “any Amsterdam skipper would trade with the devil in hell if he could avoid burning his sails.”10

  While Dutch merchants consolidated their fortunes, the war had dragged on, exhausting treasuries and armies on both sides and resulting in the twelve-year truce due to expire in 1621. Many in the Netherlands craved peace, not the least because peace amplified opportunities for lucrative trade across borders and oceans. But a war party also existed, led by hard-line Calvinists blazing with anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish fervor. As they saw it, no contradiction existed between waging war and making money; in fact, resuming war meant that Spain’s cargo ships and colonies were fair game as plunder. These merchants and civic officials had gained the political upper hand by 1621 and had resumed the military crusade against Spain. It was such men as these who envisioned, organized, and managed the Dutch West India Company.11

  From its very inception, the WIC was a military as well as a commercial organization. Even though the WIC remained a private stock company that had to raise most of its capital from individual investors, the States General of the Netherlands authorized it to wage war, maintain a private army and navy, and negotiate treaties with “foreign princes and potentates,” all in the name of Patria (the fatherland). Within the vast territory set aside for it in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, the company was free to establish outposts and colonies and to monopolize trade. The States General encouraged the WIC to carry the musket and the firebrand to the Spanish Empire, especially to the string of colonial possessions that Spain and its vassal Portugal had claimed in the Americas and the Caribbean.12

  The directors of the WIC, nineteen merchants based in Amsterdam and four other cities, needed little encouragement to wage war. While it sent Protestant families and organizers like Cryn Fredericks to the mouth of the Hudson, the company expended far more of its budget and energies dispatching armed fleets to raid prosperous Spanish settlements and ships throughout the Caribbean. It sent sailors and soldiers to seize the Spanish silver fleet off Havana and to elbow the enemy out of Curacao, Aruba, the Angola coast, and Portuguese Brazil, the last of which, with its rich resources in sugar and slave labor, ultimately engaged the attention and money-lust of the “Nineteen Gentlemen” far more than would their fur-collecting base on the Hudson.

  It was no surprise, then, that the instructions the company sent to guide Fredericks emphasized the critical importance of building a fort on Manhattan. Such a fort could prove an invaluable stronghold from which to launch and resupply privateers bent on pillaging Spanish fleets and settlements to the south. Moreover, a well-constructed fortress at the mouth of the Hudson, equipped with cannon to sweep interlopers from the watery “roads” before its walls, would secure the gateway to the northern interior of the continent, from which a treasure in fur pelts was pouring down the river.

  The WIC directors had every reason to be confident in Fredericks’
s success, for the Dutch had earned their reputation as Europe’s leading military engineers. Centuries of expertise gained erecting dikes against the ravages of the North Sea and draining marshes to create farmland proved to be of great use in wartime. By the early seventeenth century, Dutch armies and their university-trained engineers were adept at building fortifications, a skill they put to use in the Dutch overseas commercial empire. From the East Indies to South Africa to Brazil, the Dutch guarded their colonial outposts against attack from the hinterland and the sea with extensive walls, fronted on the landward side by moats or canals. Almost always, these fortified bases were positioned at the meeting point of a major river with a coastal shore. The forts thus became crossroads and secure warehouses for inland river trade and the traffic it engendered to and from the fatherland.13

  Such was the template handed by the WIC directors to Cryn Fredericks. Whoever drafted the drawings (now lost) that the engineer brought with him left little to the imagination. The company demanded a fortification with broad ramparts and five bastions to be located near the water, so “that its fire can sweep both sides of the river”; its outer walls were to be precisely laid out to enclose twenty-five house lots, a market square, a warehouse, and a school. Around the entire fort, Fredericks was supposed to dig a wide moat at a depth of at least eight feet, filled with water from the adjoining bay. This was to be done even on the seaward side, which was to be set back slightly from the shoreline. To accomplish all this, the company instructed Fredericks to enlist the “farm laborers, sailors, and colonists,” women and able-bodied children included, all of whom would be paid for their labor. Even Indians could be hired, although the WIC was careful to underscore that they would be paid a fraction of the wages of white men.14