Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [63]
Before the so-called Peach War sputtered out a month or so later, several dozen of the invaders and fifty whites lay dead. More than a hundred whites, mostly women and children, had been taken captive. Twenty-eight bouweries were destroyed, along with six hundred head of cattle and twelve thousand bushels of grain. Stuyvesant, who hurried back from the Delaware to marshal the colony’s defenses, was shocked at the extent of the destruction. New Netherland has “gone backward so much,” he wrote pessimistically to the States-General, “that it will not be in the same flourishing state for several years.” The burgomasters complained to the company that Stuyvesant and Secretary Van Tienhoven had failed to protect New Amsterdam and again demanded their immediate recall. Stuyvesant survived, but the company sacked Van Tienhoven. (He later vanished, and his hat and cane were found floating in the river. Suicide? Murder? No one knew.)
Despite Stuyvesant’s initially dismal assessment of its impact, the Peach War marked the end of Lenape resistance to European expansion on western Long Island. Not long after the fighting ended, a Massapequa sachem named Tackapousha pleaded with Stuyvesant not to exact revenge on his people. They had done no harm to the Dutch, he said, “even to the value of a dog.” In 1656, on behalf of a half-dozen Lenape groups, including the Canarsees and Rockaways, Tackapousha signed a treaty with Stuyvesant accepting the governor of New Netherland as their “protector” and vowing to live in peace with settlers.
After Tackapousha’s treaty, the pace of Dutch settlement on the island picked up noticeably. Stuyvesant approved the “purchases” of at least a half-dozen large tracts of land from Lenape groups during the later 1650s and early 1660s. As colonists moved in, many of the Lenapes drifted away, often merging with Algonkian-speaking peoples in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and further west; those who remained fell prey to one or more epidemics of smallpox. By the mid-1660s, less than fifty years after Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, virtually all of modern Kings and Queens counties lay in European hands.
The pacification of Tackapousha’s followers didn’t necessarily strengthen Stuyvesant’s authority in the villages around New Amsterdam, however, least of all in Nieuw Utrecht. Situated on the headlands of western Long Island overlooking the Narrows—including also what are now the Bay Ridge and Fort Hamilton sections of Brooklyn—Nieuw Utrecht originally belonged to the inhabitants of a Lenape campsite called Nayack. In 1652 Cornelis van Werckhoven, a sometime magistrate of Utrecht and major shareholder in the West India Company, persuaded two Nayack chiefs to sell him the entire area, a thousand or more acres in all, for “six shirts, two pairs of shoes, six pairs of socks, six axes, six hatchets, six knives, two scissors, [and] two combs.” (When the Nayack realized that Van Werckhoven expected them to leave, they asked for, and got, a second payment of “six coats, six kettles, six axes, six hatchets, six small looking glasses, twelve knives and twelve combs” before decamping to Staten Island.) Van Werckhoven himself died shortly thereafter, but the project went ahead under the leadership of Jacques Cortelyou, Nicasius de Sille, and others, who received an official charter from Stuyvesant in 1657.2
By the terms of the charter, twenty initial settlers would each receive fifty acres, divided between small house lots in a central village and elongated out-lots behind it. Despite repeated warnings, though, many grantees failed to build on or enclose their land, and three years later Nieuw Utrecht consisted of only eleven houses and one barn. Its inhabitants were bitterly divided by allegations of fence stealing and by disputes over use of the common meadows, the organization of a watch, and the construction of a palisade.