Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time

Chapter 4. "The General"

Chapter 4 “The General” Every general on active duty operates in a liminal physical and mental space. By the nature of his responsibilities, he occupies a place between his people’s homeland and daily experiences, and those of the enemy. It is that place, with all its multiple meanings, that Jeremias van Rensselaer shorthanded by calling Stuyvesant “the General.” In Stuyvesant’s case, this place in-between was shaped by the policy of deterrence. It was also given form by the constraints put on him as a military leader by the company’s blundering tactics in applying that policy. Stuyvesant was never at the head of a standing army or even companies of men. This was not unusual for a military officer in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. In the United Provinces, for example, the States General relied on calling up troops as necessity required. The same men, or most of them, were then dismissed when their services were no longer needed. In 1654, the States held only about 33,000 men in reserve, a buffer against the possible renewal of war with Spain. In relation to northeastern North America , Europeans had learned well before Stuyvesant’s time that massing men in formations anything like an army would have been useless against native fighters, even if it were feasible. Stuyvesant’s soldiers were men in the pay of the West India Company. Their loyalty to him was, therefore, tied to the company’s loyalty to them. They were quasi-mercenaries. Their numbers never exceeded 250 and generally fell far short of that. The numbers are best understood by disaggregating them. The best estimate of their presence comes by considering their overstretched geographical dispersal across the province and their continually changing profile as new men entered the ranks and others left. In the very dangerous year 1659, Stuyvesant recorded the “scatter[ing]” of his men: 50 at Esopus; 15 or 16 at Altena along the Delaware River and the same number "The General" 47 at Beverwijck; 8 or 10 at Haarlem; 5 or 6 on Staten Island; and only 50 others on Manhattan Island.1 The deployed men were like movable figures on a chessboard. They were subject to Stuyvesant’s need to relocate them to places of unanticipated native insurgency.2 There they took orders from a company appointee. They looked to a vice-director or commissary, who was expected to run a trading post but also required to act in a military capacity if necessary . Only rarely was a long-serving officer within their own ranks head of command. Stuyvesant could count on a small number of skilled and loyal men to lead the soldiers, officers such as Marten Kregier and Dirck Smit. There was, however, no permanent chain of command reaching down, as it were, from Stuyvesant through the ranks to an officer permanently stationed in a distant garrison. When Stuyvesant went upriver to Beverwijck, he might seek accommodation at Jeremias van Rensselaer’s home, not necessarily Fort Orange.3 The soldiers under Stuyvesant’s command were not in New Netherland to bring honor to Stuyvesant’s reputation as a commander. Neither he nor they—nor the populace—would have expected it to be so. From the company ’s perspective, they were simply objects whose wages were a costly drain on its treasury. This was in keeping with the directors’ tight oversight of expenditure on its military establishment as its test of the quality of its overseas administrators. In 1660, for example, Stuyvesant received a directive at a time when the settlement at Esopus was under native attack, the makeshift forts along the Delaware River were threatened by both the English and natives, and tribes around Manhattan Island were uneasy as well. It read in part: “It is utterly unnecessary to keep 250 soldiers in the service. . . . We charge you, get rid of as many soldiers as possible.” Furthermore, don’t tell us that we have to pay remittances to the men. They’ve been paid. Besides, the “indolent” use their wages on riotous living. You are indulging them. “The more you indulge the soldiers, the more indolent they grow.”4 Earlier, the directors had taken the opportunity to congratulate themselves on their military decisions and forward planning. We have sent twentyfive to thirty soldiers, they wrote Stuyvesant in 1658. “You see therefore that nothing is left undone by us, but that we contribute as much as we can, so that it only and principally depends...