CHAPTER FOUR

A BRAHMIN GOES DUTCH: JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY AND THE LESSONS OF DUTCH HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON

Mark A. Peterson

The nineteenth century is often viewed as the great age of nationalism, and this is certainly true within the con nes of the nascent profession of historical scholarship. The rise of modern academic study of the past was intimately connected to the nationalism and empire-building of the great powers of Europe and the United States. Many historians saw it as their task to explain and justify the rise to power and glory of their homeland. In that context, it may seem curious that some of the most popular and in uential works on Dutch history written in the nine- teenth century were produced outside the Netherlands, in a provincial American city without immediately obvious Dutch connections, by an author with no Dutch ancestry or direct ties with the Low Countries. But if we examine Boston and New England’s long historical relation- ship to the Netherlands and its colonies, as well as the equally lengthy tradition of historical writing in Boston, it will become clear why John Lothrop Motley, a Boston Brahmin, son of a family of merchants and clergymen typical of New England’s ruling elite, turned to the history of the Dutch Republic for guidance in negotiating the changes his home city faced in the turbulence of mid-nineteenth-century America. New England’s fascination with things Dutch is as old as New England itself. Most famously, the small band of Puritan separatists who became known as the “Pilgrims” of Plymouth Colony lived in exile in the Dutch city of Leiden for a dozen years before migrating to the New World. But the in uence of the Dutch on the founders of Plymouth’s neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the city of Boston was equally profound. Many of the leading lights of this larger Puritan enterprise also spent time in exile or military service in the low countries, including clergymen such as William Ames, John Davenport, Hugh Peter, and Thomas Hooker, as well as political and military leaders such as Nathaniel Ward and Capt. John Underhill. London 110 mark a. peterson and East Anglia merchants and gentry who invested in the colonizing enterprise had long been engaged in trade with the Netherlands. The Dutch experiences of these founding gures shaped their views on fundamental issues ranging from church polity and theology to repub- lican government and commercial strategies.1 In many cases, the prior experience of Dutch settlers along the Hudson Valley and Long Island Sound led the later New England colonists to “discover” elements of life in the New World vital to their survival and prosperity, such as the utility of wampum for interior trade with Native Americans, or the location of some of the best fur trading stations along the river valleys of the northeast.2 By 1653, the year that the city of New Amsterdam received a cor- porate charter, it could well be said that Boston and New Amsterdam resembled each other more than they did any other places in the Atlantic world. Both were outposts of small, commercial, Protestant republics in northwestern Europe, they occupied two of the best natural harbors on North America’s Atlantic coast, and they both struggled to keep a oat by linking the marketable goods from their hinterlands with the trade circuits of the Atlantic world.3 The major difference lay in their respec- tive relations to the home country. New Amsterdam was controlled by the Dutch West India Company, a powerful chartered corporation with strong ties to the state, and was therefore very much under the thumb

1 The most important early works in American historical scholarship to advance this argument for both academic and popular audiences were Douglass Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America: An Introduction to American History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), and William Elliot Grif s, The In uence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, & Co., 1891), followed by many other publications; see Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1998), 81–93. 2 On the Dutch development of the wampum trade, see Lynn Ceci, “Native Wam- pum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World System,” in The Pequots in Southern New England, ed. Laurence M. Hauptmann and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 48–68. As early as 1614, Adrian Block, the Dutch trader for whom Block Island is named, had explored the Connecticut River valley in search of fur trading opportunities, and during the 1620s, the Dutch were shipping an average of 10,000 beaver skins a year out of the region; see Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 5. 3 See Mark A. Peterson, “Cities on the Margins: New Amsterdam and Boston in 1653,” de Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society of New York (Summer, 2005): 32–35.