Peter Stuyvesant
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Peter Stuyvesant is also the name of a Dutch cigarette brand from Imperial Tobacco.
Peter Stuyvesant (circa 1600 – August 1672) served as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City.
Stuyvesant's accomplishments as director-general included a great expansion for the settlement of New Amsterdam (later renamed New York) beyond the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the projects built by Stuyvesant's administration were the protective wall on Wall Street, the canal that became Broad Street, and Broadway.
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[edit] Biography
He was born in Scherpenzeel, Peperga, in southern Friesland in the Netherlands, to Balthazar Johannes Stuyvesant, a minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein. The year of Peter's birth is not known and is given as 1592.[1], 1602[2], and 1612[3] He was the son of a minister, and he studied in Franeker, and entered military service in the West Indies about 1625, and was director of the Dutch West India Company's colony of Curaçao from 1634 to 1644.
In April 1644, he attacked the Portuguese island of Saint Martin and was wounded. He returned to the Netherlands, where his right leg was amputated and replaced with a wooden peg. In May of 1645 he was selected by the Dutch West India Company to replace William Kieft as Director-General of New Netherland. He arrived in New Amsterdam on May 11, 1647. In September 1647, he appointed a council of representatives.
He married Judith Bayard (c1610-1687) in 1645. She was born in Holland, the sister of Samuel Bayard of Amsterdam, who was married to Anna Stuyvesant. Peter and Judith had a son, Nicholas William Stuyvesant (1648-1698), who married Maria Beckman, the daughter of William Beckman.
Stuyvesant became involved in a dispute with Theophilus Eaton, the Governor of Connecticut, over the border of the two colonies. In 1648, a conflict started between him and Brant Arent Van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the fort of Rensselaerwyck. Stuyvesant claimed he had power over Rensselaerwyck despite special privileges granted to Van Slechtenhorst in the charter of 1629.
In 1649, Stuyvesant marched to Fort Orange with a military escort and ordered houses to be razed to permit a better defense of the fort in case of an attack of the Native Americans. When Van Slechtenhorst refused, Peter sent a group of soldiers to enforce his orders. The controversy that followed resulted in the commissary's maintaining his rights and the director's losing popularity. Because of the controversy with Van Slechtenhorst, the States-General of the Netherlands commanded Stuyvesant to return to Holland; but Stuyvesant refused to obey, saying, "I shall do as I please."
In September 1650, a meeting of the commissioners on boundaries took place in Hartford, Connecticut. The border was arranged to the dissatisfaction of the council, who declared that "the governor had ceded away enough territory to found fifty colonies each fifty miles square." Stuyvesant then threatened to dissolve the council. A new plan of municipal government was arranged in Holland, and the name "New Amsterdam" was officially declared on 2 February 1653. Stuyvesant made a speech for the occasion, saying that his authority would remain undiminished.
Peter was now ordered to Holland a second time, but the order was soon revoked on the declaration of war with England. Stuyvesant prepared against an attack by ordering the citizens to dig a ditch from the North River to the East River and to erect a fortification.
In 1665, he sailed into the Delaware River with a fleet of seven vessels and about 700 men and took possession of the colony of New Sweden, which he renamed "New Amstel". In his absence, New Amsterdam was attacked by Native Americans.
In 1653, a convention of two deputies from each village in New Netherlands demanded reforms, and Stuyvesant commanded this assembly to disperse, saying: "We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects."
In 1664, Charles II of England ceded to his brother, James II of England, a large tract of land that included New Netherlands. Four English ships bearing 450 men, commanded by Richard Nicolls, seized the Dutch colony. On 30 August 1664, George Cartwright sent the governor a letter demanding surrender. He promised "life, estate, and liberty to all who would submit to the king's authority." Stuyvesant signed a treaty at his Bouwerie house on 9 September 1664. Nicolls was declared governor, and the city was renamed New York City.
In 1665, Stuyvesant went to Holland to report on his term as governor. On his return, he spent the remainder of his life on his farm of sixty-two acres outside the city, called the Great Bouwerie, beyond which stretched the woods and swamps of the village of Haarlem. A pear-tree that he brought from Holland in 1647 remained at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue until 1867, bearing fruit almost to the last. The house was destroyed by fire in 1777. He also built an executive mansion of stone called Whitehall. He died in August 1672 and he was interred at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan.
[edit] Religion in New Amsterdam
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Convinced that rapid growth of non-Christian as well as non-reformed Christian churches would overrun the predominant church and endanger the stability of the young colonial society, director general and council sought to bolster the position of the Dutch Reformed Church by trying to reduce religious competition from denominations, such as Jews, Lutherans, Catholics and Quakers. However, religious plurality was already a legal-cultural tradition in New Netherland as it was in the motherland. The directors of the West India Company in Amsterdam, Stuyvesant's superiors, overruled him in all matters of intolerance by reprimanding him and requiring him to revoke intolerant rulings which the director general and his council had taken, particularly the rather harsh measures against the Quakers, who were considered anarchistic agitators and a threat to the public order due to their non-conformist and vociferously proselytizing ways.
Jews were allowed to become legal residents on the basis of "reason and equity" in 1655 under Stuyvesant's rule, despite the initial objections of some members of the Dutch Reformed Church Council of which Stuyvesant was a member.
[edit] Legacy
- Stuyvesant was a great believer in education. In 1660 he was quoted as saying that “Nothing is of greater importance than the early instruction of youth”. In 1661, New Amsterdam had one grammar school, two free elementary schools, and had licensed 28 masters of school. To honor Stuyvesant's dedication to education and New Amsterdam's legal-cultural tradition of toleration under Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan was named after him, in spite of his initial objections to the arrival, in 1654, of a large group of Sephardim from Dutch Brazil without West India Company passports. Stuyvesant High School was a predominantly Jewish school for boys at the time of its founding in 1904.
- Stuyvesant and his family were large land owners in the northeastern portion of New Amsterdam, and the Stuyvesant name is currently associated with the Stuyvesant Town housing complex and Stuyvesant High School (where he is fondly known as "Pegleg Pete" and the football team is called the Peglegs in his honor), among other locations. This farm, called the "Bouwerij" (the seventeenth-century Dutch word for farm, which was also used for other farms in New Netherland) was the source for the name of the Manhattan street Bowery, and the chapel facing Bouwerie's long approach road (now Stuyvesant Street) developed into St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Stuyvesant's grand official residence at the very tip of Manhattan was renamed "Whitehall" by the English and survives in another New York street name, Whitehall Street.
- More modestly, Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands is also named after Stuyvesant during the Dutch West India Company's administration of that Territory.
[edit] Trivia
- Prior to his appointment as Director-General of New Netherland, Stuyvesant was a Dutch West India Company director in charge of the so-called 'abc islands' of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. For the latter he had been appointed as Governor. He lost his right leg in a battle with the Spanish over the island of Saint Maarten and wore a pegleg for most of his adult life, leading the Native Americans to dub him "Father Wooden Leg".
- Stuyvesant is credited with introducing tea to the United States.
- The last direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant to bear his surname was Augustus van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr., who died a bachelor in 1953 at the age of 83 in his Cass Gilbert-designed mansion at 2 East 79th Street. Rutherford Stuyvesant, the 19th century New York developer, and his descendants are also descended from Peter Stuyvesant. However, Rutherford Stuyvesant changed his name from Stuyvesant Rutherford in 1863 to satisfy the terms of a will.[2] Other descendants of Stuyvesant include Hamilton Fish and Tom Kean, both governors of New Jersey and musician Loudon Wainwright III, and his son Rufus Wainwright. A descendant of Peter Stuyvesant's sister was Congressman James A. Bayard (elder).
- A Dutch cigarette brand is named Peter Stuyvesant after him. These are popular in Australia, Greece and South Africa, where they are known as 'Stuyvos' and 'Stuyvies' respectively.
- Stuyvesant was given the nickname "Old Silver Nails" because he used as a prosthetic limb a stick of wood driven full of silver nails.[4]
- In Sid Meier's Colonization computer game, Stuyvesant can be elected to the Continental Congress, allowing the player to build Custom Houses which automate trade with the mother country.
[edit] References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (1911). Peter Stuyvesant.
- Peabody, Michael D. (Nov/Dec 2005). "The Flushing Remonstrance". Liberty Magazine.
- Abbott, John S. C. [1898] (2004). Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
- ^ Appleton's Cyclopedia
- ^ [1] (in Dutch). The birth year is often given as 1592, but recent research of primary sources suggest 1612 to be more probable.
- ^ Peter Stuyvesant, 1646-1664. Jersey City: Past and Present Project. Retrieved on November 1, 2006.
| Preceded by Willem Kieft |
Director-General of New Netherland 1647—1664 |
Succeeded by Richard Nicolls as Governor of the Province of New York |
