Pieter (Peter) Stuyvesant

                There is no “Peter Stuyvesant” found in historical records.  The man known as Peter was actually Pieter Stuyvesant.  Pieter was born around 1612 in Peperga, Friesland in the Netherlands and grew up in Scherpenzeel.  His parents were Balthazar Johannes Stuyvesant (a minister) and Margaretha Hardenstein. 

                Pieter Stuyvesant studied languages and philosophy in Franeker and received a good education; he also served in the Dutch military.  He joined the West India Company about 1635 and was the director of Curacao, the Dutch West India Company’s colony from 1642 to 1644.  Pieter lost the lower part of his right leg to a cannonball when he attacked the Spanish-held island of Saint Martin in April 1644.  His right leg was amputated and replaced with a wooden peg upon his return to the Netherlands.  He supposedly used a “stick of wood driven full of silver bands as a prosthetic limb” and was given the nickname “Old Silver Leg.”

                In May 1645 Pieter was named the Director-General of the new Netherlands colony and arrive in New Amsterdam on May 11, 1647.  He made friends with the Native Americans but apparently punished them severely for intruding.  When his people complained of his treatment of the Native Americans, he imprisoned them.  He was appointed as one of nine men to sit on an advisory council as representatives of the colonists on New Amsterdam.

                Stuyvesant married Judith Bayard (c. 1610-1687) in 1645, and Judith nursed him back to health from the loss of his leg.  Her brother Samuel Bayard was married to Pieter’s sister Anna.  Pieter and Judith had a daughter named Judith who married Benjamin Winthrop, the son of John Still Winthrop and his second wife Elizabeth Shirreff; they also had a son, Nicolaes Willem Stuyvesant (1648-1698) who married Maria Beeckman, daughter of Willem Beeckman. 

                Pieter Stuyvesant and Theophilus Eaton, the governor of New Haven Colony, disputed over the border of the two colonies.  Another conflict started in 1648 between Stuyvesant and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck.  In 1649 Stuyvesant marched to Fort Orange with a military escort and ordered the burning of houses to better defend the fort in case Native Americans attacked.  Van Slechtenhorst refused, and Stuyvesant sent soldiers to enforce his orders.  The result of this controversy was the founding of Beverwijck.

                Commissioners met in Hartford, Connecticut, in September 1650 to determine boundaries.  The council of nine men was dissatisfied with the border arrangements who thought “the governor had ceded away enough territory to found fifty colonies each fifty miles square.”  The discord was settled in the Netherlands, and the area was named “New Amsterdam” on February 2, 1653.

                In 1655, Stuyvesant sailed into the Delaware River with a fleet of seven vessels and about 700 men; he captured all New Sweden, which included lands in what are now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania.  The area was renamed “New Amstel.”  While Stuyvesant was away, Native Americans attacked New Amsterdam.

                Stuyvesant did not tolerate full religious freedom in the colony.  Being strongly committed to the supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church, he refused Lutherans the right to organize a church and passed an ordinance that forbid them to worship in their own homes.  The directors of the Dutch West Indies Company (some were Lutherans) told him to rescind the order and allow private gatherings of Lutherans.

                Stuyvesant refused to allow Jews from Northern Brazil to settle permanently in New Amsterdam (without passports) and told them to join the existing community of Jews who came from Amsterdam with passports.  He encouraged Jews “in a friendly way” to leave the colony.  In a 1654 letter to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, Stuyvesant referred to the Jews as “the deceitful race, -- such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” and suggested that they “be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.”  Called the Jews a “repugnant race” and “usurers;” he was concerned that “Jewish settlers should not be granted the same liberties enjoyed by Jews in Holland, lest members of other persecuted minority groups, such as Roman Catholics, be attracted to the colony.”

                The directors of the Company pressured Stuyvesant to rescind his decision.  He “allowed Jewish immigrants to stay in the colony as long as their community was self-supporting, but – with the support of the company – would not allow them to build a synagogue, forcing them to worship instead in a private house.”

                Stuyvesant continued to fight against freedom of religion when Quakers arrived in the colony in 1657.  Under his orders, Robert Hodgson, a 23-year-old Quaker convert and influential preacher, was tortured publicly.  He then made an ordinance against anyone found guilty of harboring Quakers and made it punishable by fine and imprisonment.  The citizens of Flushing, Queens, protested, and their action became known as the Flushing Remonstrance.  Some people believe the Flushing Remonstrance was a precursor to the United States Constitution’s provision on freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights.

                Stuyvesant’s rule came to an end in 1664 when King Charles II of England ceded a large tract of land that included New Netherland to his brother, the Duke of York (later King James II).  Under the command of Richard Nicholls, four English ships bearing 450 men seized the Dutch colony.  On August 1664, George Cartwright sent Stuyvesant a letter demanding surrender.  The letter also promised “life, estate, and liberty to all who would submit to the king’s authority.”  On September 9, 1664, Stuyvesant signed a treaty at his Bouwerij house, and Nichols was declared governor.  The city was renamed New York City, and Stuyvesant was a major figure in the early history of the city.

                Stuyvesant was able to obtain civil rights and freedom of religion in the Articles of Capitulation.  The Dutch settlers mostly belonged to the Dutch Reformed church, a strict Calvinist denomination while the English settlers were Anglican, theologically closer to the Roman Catholic Church. 

                Stuyvesant went to the Netherlands in 1665 to report on his term as governor and returned to New York to spend the remainder of his life on his sixty-two acre farm – the Great Bouwerie – located outside the city.  Beyond his farm the woods and swamps of the village of Haarlem stretched.  He supposedly brought a pear tree from the Netherlands and planted it in 1647; it remained at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue until 1867 and bore fruit nearly to the end of its days.  His house burned in 1777.

                Governor Stuyvesant died in August 1672, and his body was entombed in the east wall of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in New York City at the site of the Stuyvesant’s family chapel on their former farm.  Augustus van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr. was the last direct descendant of Stuyvesant to bear his name; Augustus died a bachelor in 1953 at the age of 83 in his mansion at 2 East 79^th Street.   The 19^th century New York developer Rutherford Stuyvesant and his descendants are also descended from Pieter Stuyvesant; however Rutherford Stuyvesant changed his name from Stuyvesant Rutherford in 1863 to satisfy the terms of a will.