How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [6]
Augustine Herman (ca. 1621-1686) (photo credit 2.1)
Even though Delaware was claimed by both Holland and England, no Europeans lived there, with the brief exception of a failed Dutch settlement in 1631. Not until 1638 did Europeans settle permanently in Delaware, and they were Swedes. In time the Swedes branched out, and Dutch settlements were established. As in Bohemia, the two primary groups were gradually joined by minority populations of other groups.
Dutch New Netherlands
For twenty years Delaware’s settlements prospered and grew, their conflicts confined to fighting local Indians and each other. But in 1659 all the settlements were threatened by the larger colony of Maryland. In August of that year, Maryland sent word to the Dutch along Delaware Bay that they must depart from the colony. The danger resulted in a response from Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the entire New Netherlands. Stuyvesant dispatched two emissaries from Manhattan: a native-born Dutchman named Resolved Waldron and a Bohemian-born immigrant, Augustine Herman. In selecting Herman, Stuyvesant made an astute choice. Herman’s efforts—commencing here but enduring for the remainder of his life, and then continued by his son—displayed insights and instincts that were likely connected to the similarities Delaware shared with Bohemia.
Herman had been born in Prague in 1621, a critical time in Bohemian history. One year earlier, German Catholics had regained ruling power in the region. In the wake of this event, 36,000 Bohemian Protestants emigrated, many of them to Holland. Herman’s family was among those emigrants.
Herman’s parents oversaw an education that endowed their son with skills that would be of value both regardless and because of borders. He became a businessman in the import-export trade and a highly skilled cartographer and surveyor. As an adult he relocated to Manhattan, where his skills led to his becoming a member of the Board of Nine, assisting Governor Stuyvesant in his decisions and actions.
Herman’s relations with Stuyvesant were bumpy. Herman had, at one time, written to Stuyvesant’s superiors in Holland complaining of the governor’s high-handedness, vengefulness, and morals: “The basket maker’s daughter, whom he seduced in Holland on a promise of marriage, coming and finding that he was already married, hath exposed his conduct even in public court.”2
While the two apparently patched things up sufficiently for Stuyvesant to appoint Herman as an emissary to Maryland, here too the younger man’s approach differed markedly (or more aptly perhaps, “Bohemianly”) from the governor’s instructions. Stuyvesant had told Herman and Waldron to assert that Lord Baltimore’s demands were “contrary to the 2nd, 3rd, and 16th articles of the confederation of peace made between the Republic of England and the Netherlands in 1654.” They were then to demand that Maryland, by virtue of that treaty, pay reparations and damages caused by its “frivolous demands and bloody threatenings.”
Herman’s report of his and Waldron’s meetings with Maryland governor Josiah Fendall and the colony’s proprietor, Phillip Calvert (the Maryland-based younger brother of Lord Baltimore), reveals that such demands and counterthreats were virtually absent from their discussions.3 The two emissaries did reference the 1654 treaty, but Herman’s efforts were far more focused on documents issued by England itself, which supported the view that England had long recognized the right of the Dutch to their settlements along the Delaware Bay. Most effectively, Herman cited the English charter that had created Maryland, which stated that it was to be a British colony “in a country hitherto uncultivated in the parts of America, and partly occupied by savages having no knowledge of the Divine Being.” Herman argued that the land had been hitherto cultivated by people with knowledge of the Divine Being—namely, the Dutch who had