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THE PATROONSHIPS in NEW NETHERLAND Jaap Jacobs

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THE PATROONSHIPS in NEW NETHERLAND Jaap Jacobs CHAPTER TEN DUTCH PROPRIETARY MANORS IN AMERICA: THE PATROONSHIPS IN NEW NETHERLAND Jaap Jacobs On February 8, 1652, Johannes Dijckman, a Dutch West India Company official, marched out of Fort Orange, a small Dutch out- post on the Hudson River. He was accompanied by “three soldiers, who were fully armed, namely, with their side arms, two carrying muskets with lighted fuses and one carrying a snaphance.”1 Dijckman was clearly prepared to use force, if necessary. In this case his adver- saries were not Indians or Englishmen, but fellow Dutchmen. His enemy was Brant Aertsz. van Slichtenhorst, director of the Rensse- laerswijck patroonship. Dutchmen were preparing to fight other Dutchmen, in a remote outpost of the Dutch colonial empire, sur- rounded by all kinds of enemies, heathen and Christian. It is a bizarre scene, which Washington Irving would have enjoyed, if these sources had been available to him. The conflict in question of course went beyond the two main char- acters, Dijckman and Van Slichtenhorst. It even went beyond the government of New Netherland and the director of Rensselaerswijck. At the root of Dijckman’s march on Rensselaerswijck lay a conflict started twenty-five years earlier within the Dutch West India Company, back in Amsterdam. A temporary solution to that disagreement was the creation of patroonships. The patroonships in New Netherland have been much criticized by historians. Ever since Edmund B. O’Callaghan, the first historian to devote attention to the Dutch colony, in 1846 asserted that the patroonship system “transplanted to the free soil of America the feu- dal tenure and feudal burdens of continental Europe”,2 the label of 1 Court proceedings of Rensselaerswyck, 29 February 1652, MCR, p. 189. 2 O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1, p. 120. O’Callaghan may have been the one to introduce the word “patroonship.” The usual designation in the Dutch records is colonie [colony], with the owners being called patronen [patroons]. As the 302 jaap jacobs feudalism has stuck to the patroonships. Indeed, in a recent CD- ROM encyclopedia the patroons are described as “a kind of feudal lord who controlled all aspects of the settlers’ lives, including their right to move, go into business, or even marry.”3 Such condemnation evokes the question what these infamous patroonships really comprised. What were the motives of the Dutch West India Company in granting manors and what were the aims of the men who received them? What conditions were attached to obtaining manorial rights and what role did they play in the devel- opment of New Netherland? To answer these questions, we need to contextualize the New Netherland patroonship system, examining its origin and character, as well as the history of its development. The West India Company and the 1629 patroonship plan Dutch involvement with New Netherland started in 1609 with the well-known voyage of Henry Hudson. Soon afterwards, Dutch mer- chants in Amsterdam and Hoorn sent out ships to follow up on the trading prospects reported by Hudson. Within a couple of years, sev- eral trading companies combined their efforts in the New Netherland Company, which in 1614 received a charter from the States General, giving it a monopoly to the trade. The New Netherland Company carried out numerous voyages in the following years, but despite requests, its monopoly was not prolonged. The reason for this was the expected foundation of the Dutch West India Company, which would receive a monopoly over all Dutch Atlantic trade. This even- tually happened in 1621, after the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain had ended and hostilities were resumed.4 use of ‘colony’ may cause confusion, I prefer to use to the word “patroonship.” Other examples of the feudal perspective on patroonships are Condon, New York Beginnings, p. 125 and Nissenson, The Patroon’s Domain, passim. The perceived dis- crepancy between a feudal patroonship system and the supposedly non-feudal situ- ation in the Dutch Republic led Condon to call the patroonship system anachronistic. This assessment however is based solely on a single remark in the correspondence of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, who does not seem to have had a thorough grasp of feudalism. See Condon, New York Beginnings, p. 125. 3 World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia, Macintosh Edition, Version 1.0 (1998), s.v. “patroonship system.” 4 Jacobs, New Netherland, pp. 30–37..
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