Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time

Chapter 10. Stuyvesant Tattooed

Chapter 10 Stuyvesant Tattooed For about 350 years, Peter Stuyvesant’s career and reputation have been tied to changing cultural formations in the United States. His life history has swung on shifting trajectories of interpretation and on changing disjunctions and recombinations of philosophical and theological systems. It has been affected by movements in literary and art traditions, and fluidity in the nation’s ethical , ethnic, and political grounding. Intellectual and imaginative resources for interpretation changed and were unpredictable. It was, however, wholly predictable that when attending to Stuyvesant at all, he would stand for what we required of him. Over the past decades, modernity’s pressures have influenced how Stuyvesant would be remembered and forgotten, found to be useful, or suffered loss. American historians have been a sounding board of the culture with which modernity has come to be identified. As they have done with other earlier cultural formations , they have revealed its symptoms and contributed to its force.1 Stuyvesant’s story sits within New York’s historical tradition. Elements of modernity have pressed on that tradition and, for that reason, on interpretations of him. Broad claims have recently been made about modernity having “a particular problem with forgetting.” Our times, it is said, have slowly but inexorably lost touch with a past that was “once the inspiring and nurturing source of its own identity.”2 It is alleged that even the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment has disappeared from cultural memory, with late capitalism as the cause.3 Much in this argument is overstated. But there is a danger of our forgetting that for many decades in America, countless men and women lived out a late Reformation or premodern worldview and that it was the reality in which Stuyvesant also made sense of his life. * * * Stuyvesant Tattooed 137 Interpretively, New York has a unique historical past. The events of 1664 caused a clear break in the province’s history. However the causes are described and the outcomes debated, there were those who gained and those who lost. Something that had been was gone. Pre-1664 was another time. Out of events that made real a segmentation of time, lives, and cultures, a sense of loss has been a haunting presence in the investigations that have made up New York’s historical tradition. Stuyvesant Bound is not the first study to comment on the historical presence of loss. The dominantly Anglophile commentators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized the breadth of that disappearance. They took delight in celebrating the descent of Dutch ways of life into quaintness and the stuff of children’s folktales. Some counted the Dutch as risible and, under certain impulses, disposable.4 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century specialists on the early history of the state have disagreed about the costs of loss for New Nethelanders in the post1664 years. They have asked whether there was predominantly continuity or radical change, acquiescence or rebelliousness. To what degree was the culture of the New Netherlanders like that of the English or different from it? Was the transformation from stability and a Dutch corporate identity into Englishness speedy or slow? Was the English conquest broadly beneficial—a feather in the cap of progress? Should we not try to see the big picture?5 Looking to fellow professionals outside the field, such specialists have regularly noted a deathly silence about the significance of New Netherland in the United States story of its past. Not only was something gone but, for most authorities across the colonial field, the loss was negligible. New York’s historians have generally not denounced this silence as an injustice. Nor have they belabored the distortion of New Netherland as a failed and inconsequential colonial project. They have generally adhered to the belief that professional historians prudently write up the results of careful research. They have patiently respected the conclusions of other objective researchers, stated their contrary positions, and got on with their histories of early America’s alleged losers. Disrespect, distortion, and silence concerning a colonial enterprise is one thing. But the same distortion and silence in regard to an individual is an injustice. Stuyvesant, in my opinion, has suffered such an injustice. In the narratives of New York, he is a presence alongside that of failure. Sometimes he is installed directly as its symbol. What he wrought in his administration is taken to have been the obverse of the slow but sure progress into nationhood that the rest of the American colonial world managed...