The statue of Peter Stuyvesant in New York’s Stuyvesant Square was erected on the grounds of his old bowery. In the 17th century the bowery (bouwerij) was a compact village described by its resident minister as “a place of relaxation and pleasure, whither people go from the Manhattans, for the evening service.” It was also a place of work and enslavement for “forty negroes, from the region of the negro coast” who toiled there. [1] Like all such monuments, Stuyvesant’s statue and the ground beneath it tells a story of settlement and belonging that purposely ignores conquest. In the wake of the removal of statues that valorize slaveholders and invaders, calls have been made to remove this statue of Peter Stuyvesant. Yet the uniqueness of the space offers an opportunity to tell a different story and to excavate the lives of those bondspeople who toiled on the site for over 120 years.
Peter Stuyvesant, known during his lifetime as “Petrus,” was the colony’s last Dutch Director-General and the progenitor of a family marked by wealth, political power, and influence. Although Petrus arrived in the Americas nearly 400 years ago, his bronze likeness only started to proliferate in places claiming connections to him within the past 100 years. In the early 19th century, his descendant Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, then President of the New-York Historical Society, donated the land for the park, and by the turn of the 20th it had become a popular gathering place. The statue was created by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and installed in the park in 1941. The land and the statue are intended to be read together as lasting memorials to the Stuyvesant family. The New York City parks department website describes the statue as representing “the spirit of a great leader, the last governor-general of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam” and “preserving the legacy of both men of the Stuyvesant family.”[2]
But what legacies should the park embrace? Petrus Stuyvesant has been described in many ways, portrayed in early works as a brash, autocratic leader, whose disability leant an ableist physicality to English narratives that emphasized his threatening “foreignness.” In others he was a keenly political, cosmopolitan, deeply pious man of his time, who weathered the fall of the colony.[3] Petrus was, as many critics have pointed out, stridently anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, even when allowing for the prejudices of his own day. He was also a slaveholder, who was deeply committed to the expansion of slavery. His bowery’s estimated 40-person enslaved workforce was the largest population of bondspeople in New Amsterdam under the control of a private person.[4] Although Petrus did grant full freedom to some petitioners during his tenure, including a group of “half-free” enslaved people who had been owned by the Dutch West India Company and petitioned for their freedom during the siege of the colony by the English, he remained a slaveholder.[5] On October 6, 1664, in the wake of the colony’s surrender to the English and his own tenuous position, Petrus made time to issue a “hue and cry” for the re-capture of “4 Negroes” who had escaped his grasp.[6]
Stuyvesant’s bowery included his immediate family — wife Judith, and sons Balthazaar and Nicholas — who lived in daily contact with a multiracial free and enslaved population. A village of enslaved and free Africans and African-descended people were settled near Stuyvesant’s bowery along the wagon road.[7] Such people, created a community bound together through friendship, marriage, and ties of godparantage. People, like Franz Bastiaensz secured land from the Stuyvesants and built connections across lines of freedom and enslavement that served as lifelines out of bondage.[8] Such ties were, nonetheless, tenuous. Several enslaved children who had been baptized on the bowery, were traded down to the island of Curaçao where they were then auctioned off to plantations in South America.[9] Even those who managed to secure freedom, understood that it came with a lifelong pledge of continued service. Three elderly black women identified in the court record as Mayken Van Angola, Lucretia Albiecke van Angola, and the wife of Peter Tamboer, received their freedom from the Dutch West India Company after 34 years of enslavement with the stipulation that they must “take turns doing the housework of the Lord General Peter Stuyvesant one day every week,” or be re-enslaved.[10]
By the turn of the 18th century, the Stuyvesants retained and expanded their bowery property, sometimes leasing it to tenants, and offering the services of enslaved people, as was the case with “John and Samson” who were leased along with the property on October 24, 1704.[11] Such enslaved suffered whippings, hard labor and forced separations. [12] By the middle of the 18th century, the Stuyvesants were members of the New York Corporation and oversaw the implementation of strict slave codes, strengthened in the wake of the 1712 slave revolt and 1741 slave conspiracy, which featured the brutal torture and deaths of enslaved people.[13] Their prodigious wealth was due to a diversified portfolio that included slavery and they utilized local papers to advertise the sale of enslaved men, women and children and chase down runaways.[14] They remained slaveholders into the 19th century. Indeed, Peter Gerard grew up in a household that included 14 enslaved people.[15]
Another statue stands in Stuyvesant Square, that of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák who, as a result of his friendship with African American musician and composer Harry T. Burleigh, argued that: “The future of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.” Public spaces like Stuyvesant Square offer unique opportunities to widen the audience for exploring the lives of African descended people in three dimensions, honoring different “melodies” of commemoration. Names such as Mayken van Angola, Frans Bastiaensz, John, and Samson, should be as associated with the space as much as that of Stuyvesant. The stories of bonded and free people of color whose labor built the bowery should be memorialized at the site where they lived, labored, loved and suffered.
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[1] Rev. Samuel Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, 5 August 1664, in Hugh Hastings, et al, eds., Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon, 1901), 1: 555.
[2] Stuyvesant Square, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/stuyvesant-square/monuments/1516, accessed August 17, 2020.
[3] For an overview of the different perspectives to Stuyvesant see the introduction to Donna Merwick, Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
[4] P.C. Emmer, The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 27; Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)56; Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Boston: Brill, 2005), 381-382
[5] Certificate that the half slaves who petitioned for manumission had been fully emancipated and made free, 21 December 1664, NYSA_A1809-78_V10_pt3_0327. Internet. Available from http://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/55730
[6] Petrus Stuyvesant’s Hue and Cry, 6 October 1664, in “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey, eds. Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 324.
[7] Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 205
[8] Two years after her husband’s death in 1672, Judith conveyed land to a free black man named Frans. He was the son of one of New Netherland’s first free blacks, Sebastiane de Britto, who was also known as the “captain of the Negros.” Conveyance of Judith Stuyvesant to Frans Bastiaensz, 24 September 1674, New York City Deeds, MS 1972, 23, New-York Historical Society, http://www.nyhistory.org/community/library-blog?page=8 (accessed November 11, 2012). For an English translation of the record, see Original Book of New York Deeds, January 1st 1672 to October 19th 1675 in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1913: The John Watts De Peyster Publication Fund (New York: Printed for the Society, 1914) 46: 42-43.
[9] Peter Stuyvesant to Vice-Director Beck, 30 January 1664, in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Elizabeth Donnan, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930)2: 431.
[10] Freedom Petition of Mayken Van Angola, Lucretia Albiecke van Angola and the wife of Peter Tamboer, December 28, 1662. New York State Archives. Translation by Eric Ruijssenaars, https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/dutch-colonies/fighting-for-freedom-in-new-amsterdam/.
[11] George and Elizabeth Sydenham (Elizabeth was Petrus youngest son Nicholas’ widow) leased the property to Christopher Rousby for a nine-year period agreeing to an annual rent of £102 2. They two man were listed as part of the included rent alongside “10 milch cows, 8 working horses, 10 young cattle, 170 sheep, 1 sow & her pigs, 16 geese & other fows, 2 waggons, 1 plow, 1 harrow, 1 wood sleigh,” as part of the rent. NY Co., NY Deeds on Microfilm, Hall of Records, N.Y.C., 25: 250, quoted in Evelyn Sidman Wachter, Sidnam-Sidnam Families of Upstate New York (Baltimore, Gateway Press, Inc, 1981), 49.
[12] Peter Stuyvesant frequently requested more enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean and had no qualms about trading children. He clearly articulated his vision for the future of the colony to the directors in Amsterdam, writing: “We shall take care, that [in future] a greater number of negroes be taken there.” Letter from the Directors in Amsterdam to the council of New Netherland, 26 June 1647, in Correspondence 1654-1658, trans. and ed. Charles T. Gehring (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 5. Three enslaved children sent up from the island of Curaçao — one girl and two little boys — had been set aside specifically for Petrus Stuyvesant by the slave trader, Franck Bryn. The children were assessed coldly by the ship’s skipper, Jan Pietersen van Dockum who judged them ‘all dry and in good condition,’ their skin ‘marked with this distinguishing mark.’ Jan Pietersen van Dockum, 24 August 1659, in Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Curaçao Papers, 1640-1665: Translation (Albany, NY: New Netherland Institute, 2011), 150. In a court testimony given against her husband, Elizabeth recalled abuse at the hands of George Sydenham who threatened her, withheld food and “tied the negroes up and whipped them for nothing.” Undated “Memoranda van Klaverack” signed by Elis [Elizabeth] Stuyvesant.” New-York Historical Society. Mss Collection AHMC – Stuyvesant Family Non-circulating. A printed version can be found in Wachter, Sidnam-Sidnam, 52.
[13] Charles Alexander Nelson, Austin Baxter Keep, and Herbert L. Osgood, eds., Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675-1776, (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905), 2: 402-404, 429-430, 4: 150, 185, 497-498, 5: 16-18, 7: 314, 401-02.
[14] Advertisement, New York Gazette, page 3, 1 April 1765, Advertisement, New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 19 December 1768, Advertisement, New York Gazette and Wekkley Mercury, 11 Oct 1777, Reprinted on Oct 27. Advertisement, Loudons New York Packet, Page 3, 03 July 1786, reprinted on 10 July (page 4) and 13 July (page 4). Advertisement, Daily Advertiser, Page 3, 4 September 1789, reprinted on 17 December (page 4).
[15] “United States Census, 1790,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GYB6-7LL?cc=1803959&wc=3XT9-92F%3A1584070828%2C1584071633%2C1584071639: 14 May 2015), New York > New York > New York City Out Ward > image 11 of 12; citing NARA microfilm publication M637, (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).