Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [34]
About the only thing they had in common was that nearly everyone was an employee of the West India Company. First among them—making up what might be called New Amsterdam’s official establishment—were the director, the provincial secretary, and the schout-fiscall (a combination sheriff and prosecutor). The director made rules and regulations for the colony by outright fiat; the director and his appointed council sat as a court to hear both civil and criminal cases brought by the schout. Others were a marshal or constable who acted as court messenger, a few commissaries and their assistants who ran the “public store” and kept track of company property, and a labor foreman. Dominie Everardus Bogardus was on the company payroll too, as were Catarina or “Tryn” Jonas, the official midwife, and New Amsterdam’s first schoolmaster, Adam Roelantsen.
Also in the company’s employ were fifty or sixty soldiers and officers stationed in the fort, various sailors who manned harbor lighters and North River sloops, and at least one mason, blacksmith, armorer, cooper, house carpenter, ship carpenter, shoemaker, hatter, brewer, baker, surgeon, wheelwright, tailor, locksmith, sailmaker, and miller. Often these artisans pursued more than one line of work to supplement their meager wages. Schoolmaster Roelantsen took in washing. Other employees worked company land as tenants, producing small crops of maize, beans, barley, and tobacco. They occupied the lowest level of New Amsterdam’s corporate hierarchy—except, that is, for the company’s slaves.
Slavery had most likely existed in New Amsterdam from the outset, although the details are sparse and ambiguous. In 1625 or 1626 the company imported eleven bondsmen, among them Paulo d’Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, and John Francisco. It acquired three female slaves from Angola in 1628. Handfuls of others followed, women as well as men, and in 1635 Jacob Stoffelsen was hired as “overseer over the negroes belonging to the Company.” Stoffelsen used the men on a variety of official projects, from repairing the fort and cutting wood to “splitting palisades, clearing land, burning lime, and helping to bring in the grain in harvest time.” In 1641 he had them remove dead hogs from the streets of New Amsterdam, “to prevent the stench, which proceeds therefrom.” The women appear to have been employed as domestic labor, although an irate Dominie Michaelius said that as maidservants “the Angola slaves are thievish, lazy and useless trash.” By 1639 slave quarters were reportedly established on the East River shore across from Hog (now Roosevelt) Island, well outside of town.
None of this meant that the West India Company was ready to invest heavily in slave labor for New Netherland. Dutch opinion remained divided about the morality of owning and selling human beings, and the company (which consulted theologians on the matter) had shied away from the slave trade before 1637, when it captured the Portuguese station at Elmina on the west coast of Africa and began to take over the key sources of supply. Not indeed until 1640, when Portugal broke away from Spain and lost the asiento, the license to supply slaves to Spanish colonies, did the company become systematically involved in the trade. And despite occasional promises to import slaves for use on the bouweries and plantations of New Netherland, it did so only twice before the mid-1650s. As a result, there were never more than a few dozen or so slaves at a time throughout the colony, most of them contraband seized from the Spanish or Portuguese or purchased from the occasional visiting privateer (Virginia settlers bought their first slaves in 1619 from a West India Company warship). Not all were Africans, either: some may have been Indians or even captured Spanish or Portuguese sailors. Few if any were privately owned.
Nor was slavery in New Netherland the system of absolute racial subjugation it would later become. The West India Company never tried to formalize