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By the end of Stuyvesant’s first decade in office, the people of New Amsterdam were celebrating these and other volksvermaken or “folk pleasures” with gusto. Just as in the Netherlands, they greeted Pinkster with singing and dancing while a “Queen of the Feast” or “flower bride,” dressed in white and holding a May-branch in her hand, led a procession of maidens through the streets of the town. In 1663 the tranquility of Harlem was shattered by young men “shouting, blowing horns, etc.” around a maypole. Shrove Tuesday, too, was now routinely commemorated by the traditional bacchanal of eating and drinking while, as in Europe, young men dressed up like women and paraded about the streets. Another traditional bit of Shrove Tuesday fun, likewise resurrected in New Netherland, was Pulling the Goose. In this rough country sport, a live bird, its neck smeared with oil or soap, was tied by a rope between two poles: contestants on horseback then rode at full gallop toward the tethered goose and tried to yank off its head.

THE NEGROES’ LOT

The bottom rungs of New Amsterdam society were occupied by Africans, though their lives and working condidons varied widely. Most still belonged to the West India Company and worked on important agricultural, public, and military projects. In 1660 Stuyvesant requested additional slaves be sent up from Curasao for company use: “They ought to be stout and strong fellows,” he explained, “fit for immediate employment on this fortress and other works; also, if required, in war against the wild barbarians, either to pursue them when retreating, or else to carry some of the soldiers’ baggage.” Four years later he reported that he had utilized a recent shipment of slaves to harvest food, chop wood, and repair oxcarts.

In time, because of the company’s chronic unwillingness to spend money, its slaves were also trained for more highly skilled tasks. In 1657 Stuyvesant appealed to the directors in Amsterdam to send him some ship’s carpenters, only to be told that Dutch workmen were far too expensive and that carpentry, bricklaying, and other trades “ought to be taught to the Negroes as it was formerly done in Brazil.” He appears to have followed orders, inasmuch as contemporary deeds begin referring to Negro caulkers, blacksmiths, and carpenters.

Other of New Amsterdam’s slaves worked in private households, either as domestic servants or agricultural laborers. Stuyvesant himself acquired forty slaves, far more than anyone else in the colony; some were domestics, the rest labored in the fields and orchards of his private bouwerie, a country estate lying between what are now 5th and 20th streets, east of Fourth Avenue all the way to the East River—a “place of relaxation and pleasure” (as one admiring visitor described it) that Stuyvesant acquired by taking over, either by purchase or fiat, several of the “Negro Lots” or “Negroes’ Farms” the West India Company had previously set aside for former slaves. (Nicholas Bayard, his son-in-law, combined six others into a two-hundred-acre farm nearby.) Most privately owned slaves in the colony, however, belonged to farm families in outlying villages like Flatbush, where they and their masters often slept in the same houses, ate the same food, and worked side by side in the fields. Overall, they were predominantly male—roughly 130 men for every hundred women.

The Peasant Dance, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. After 1650, such scenes of fun and frolic were becoming more common in New Amsterdam and neighboring villages. (Art Resource, Inc./ Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Some Africans were free because the company continued with its half-freedom policy of conditional manumissions. In 1662 three slave women were liberated, on condition that one of them do housework for the director-general each week. The next year Mayken, an old and sickly black woman, was granted outright freedom by the West India Company, “she having served as a slave since the year 1628.” Mayken was almost certainly one of the original three females