Death in New Amsterdam
Investing time and effort in New York City, even for those who have anchored in its waters momentarily, can be defined by the handheld pairing of bloodshed and ambition that have skipped and kicked through the city’s history. The first wave of European settlers of New Amsterdam, nudged aboard vessels by the Dutch West India Company, whose goal was to populate the promising outpost born of Henry Hudson’s discovery, were hardly sacrificial lambs. The company, which traded in far-flung goods and people, while wading in piracy and uncharted territory, was focused on profit, not the religious dogma or oppressive domesticity that was prevalent in so much of Europe.
The seventeenth-century settlers of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, which would soon become the commercial and social hub of the spread-eagling Dutch colony of New Netherland, sunned themselves in free trade, social diversity, slang and patois from the heady mix of nationalities and languages, stunning scenery, brothels, taverns and a fresh set of freedoms and ideas that grew out of the extraordinary new playground of their remote and fertile land. It is apt, then, that Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of repentant thieves and prostitutes (among other less egregious job descriptions), the blueprint for Santa Claus and the namesake of New Amsterdam’s “Church in the Fort,” is also the patron saint of New York City.
Life in the colony was marred too by the presence of slavery, pestilence, isolation and the perpetual fear of how the warring factions of Europe and the tit-for-tat massacres with the indigenous people of the surrounding lands could affect them at any moment. The narrow thirteen-mile-long island of Manhattan jutted out of a behemoth wilderness. The full-scale perimeters and landscapes of the North American continent were still unknown. From day to day, the colony was surrounded by immeasurable danger. The possibility of dying from any number of untreatable diseases, accidents, execution or murder was a hefty and carnivorous fact of everyday life.
It isn’t hard to imagine that the growing number of patroons, burghers and self-made merchants cultivated their Manhattan farmsteads to include family burial grounds, the remains of which would be submerged in the years to come beneath the gleaming towers of the Manhattan skyline and the subterranean networks of sewers and train tunnels. There are numerous colonial and Early Republic–era family cemeteries acknowledged by the twenty-first century with mostly long-gone headstones in the outer boroughs such as the Bedell-Decker (Staten Island), Brinckerhoff, Remsen, Cornell, Pullis Farm, Thorne-Wilkins and Wyckoff-Snedike (Queens), Barkaloo (Brooklyn), and Ferris (Bronx) burial grounds.
Proportionate to the developing New Amsterdam population and for the duration of its forty years, just one official cemetery within the city walls was sufficient—or made the best of at any rate. Communal worship was towed toward Saint Nicholas Church, the Dutch Reformed Church at Fort Amsterdam, erected in 1642. Most other religions were begrudgingly tolerated due to the 1579 Union of Utrecht, signed by the United Provinces of the Netherlands during their fight for independence from Spain in the Eighty Years’ War. One condition of the treaty—that “no other Province shall be permitted to interfere or make difficulties, provided that each person shall remain free in his religion and that no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion”—etched the critical specification of modernity into the Dutch Republic and the American Republic two centuries later. Furthermore, the Holland-based officials behind the company town of New Amsterdam were understandably cautious about offending any religious faction that may have invested in the Dutch West India enterprise.
Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s last and longest-standing leader (albeit on one leg, his right having been amputated after getting crushed by a cannonball during a Dutch attack on the Spanish at Saint Martin in 1644), who was the son of a Calvinist minister and singular in both his managerial efficiency and narrow-mindedness, would have banished all religions but his had he not had to surrender to the will of his superiors in Amsterdam. He did, however, manage to provisionally succeed in kicking out the Quakers, who, having set down roots in neighboring Long Island, presented him with the Flushing Remonstrance, a forerunner of the First Amendment, in protest to his religious prohibition.
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