Sir William Kieft was now and had been for two years, governor of New Netherlands, but the country did not flourish under him any more than it had done under his predecessor. On all hands difficulties surrounded him, and he was not of a character to overcome them. On the north, the English were gradually and steadily advancing; they had usurped Connecticut, till the Dutch alone could claim thirty acres round their trading station; the Swedes were on the south, and even Long Island was now occupied under a grant from an English earl. In vain did Kieft remonstrate and threaten; nobody seemed either to regard him or to respect the province of which he was the ruler—nay, even on one occasion, the arms of the Dutch were overthrown, and, in a spirit of derision, a fool’s head was placed in their stead.
Meantime a tempest of another and more formidable kind was brooding and gathering strength over the fated New Netherlands. Quarrels had repeatedly occurred between unprincipled Dutch traders and intoxicated Indians. The vengeance of the Algonquins had, as we have seen, annihilated the little settlement on Staten Island, and now it was gathering its might for a feller swoop. An Indian boy of the Raritan tribe, who had witnessed the murder and robbery of his uncle by one of Peter Minuit’s people, vowed to avenge his death when he grew to man’s estate. And now he was a man grown, and thirsted to accomplish his vow. In 1641, the first onslaught was made, but with little effect; the Raritans were outlawed, and ten fathoms of wampum offered for every scalp.
Kieft summoned the people to deliberate on the public danger. Twelve men were chosen, De Vries being at their head, but recommending lenient measures, which not being in accordance with the governor’s ideas, were disregarded. At this juncture, the son of a chief having been made drunk and then robbed, shot, in revenge, the first Dutchman he met. Alarmed at this untoward incident, a deputation of chiefs immediately waited on Kieft, and offered, as a fine and indemnity, two hundred fathoms of wampum; urging with great reason, “You yourselves are the cause of this evil; you ought not to craze the young Indians with brandy. Your own people, when drunk, fight with knives and do foolish things; and you cannot prevent mischief till you cease to sell strong drink to the Indians.”
Reasonable as was the remonstrance, Kieft would not listen to it; nothing but the surrender of the young man would satisfy him, and that the chiefs refused. Whilst this question was pending, a small armed party of Mohawks, allies of the Dutch, came down from the neighbourhood of Fort Orange, and claimed the Raritans as their tributaries. At the approach of these formidable enemies, the weaker, though more numerous, Raritans threw themselves at once on the mercy of the Dutch. Kieft, considering this opportunity too favourable to be lost, spite of the remonstrances and entreaties of De Vries and many of the more influential inhabitants of New Amsterdam, determined on a general massacre.
In the dead of the night on the 25th of February, 1643, two armed parties, accompanied by an Indian guide, crossed the Hudson, and fell upon the Indian encampments, when not the slightest suspicion of the Dutch existed. Taken thus by surprise, amid the repose of night, scarcely any resistance was made; the noise of musketry and the cries of the murdered reached Manhattan. By daybreak above a hundred were slain, nor then did the slaughter cease. No mercy was shown—men, women, and children all perished alike. “Infants, bound in their bark-cradles, were flung into the icy river; and the poor frantic mothers, who had plunged into the water to their rescue, were mercilessly forced back from the shore, and both were drowned. This fearful massacre continued through the day.”
Kieft gloried in this detestable slaughter, and welcomed back his troops as from a great victory; the colonists, however, with sentiments of common humanity, held it in abhorrence, and finally deposed their governor, and sent him back to Holland. But before they performed this act of justice, the consequences of his barbarity had fallen terribly on the colony. As soon as it was perceived that the midnight slaughter was not caused by the Mohawks, but by the Dutch, every Algonquin tribe around Manhattan joined in a league of vengeance. They thronged in from all sides; and, making swamps their hiding-places, rushed forth for sudden attacks, equally remorseless and wholesale as that of the Dutch had been. Every village was destroyed; every plantation laid waste; men and women murdered, and children carried off captive. Long Island was a desert; “from the shores of the Jersey to the boundaries of Connecticut not a bowery (farm) was safe.” It was in this awful Indian war of reprisals that that noble woman, Anne Hutchinson and her family, perished. Total ruin threatened New Netherlands. Numbers fled. “Mine eyes,” says Roger Williams, “saw the flames of their towns, the frights and hurries of men, women, and children, and the present removal of all who could to Holland.”
Kieft, who was a coward as well as a ruffian, threw the blame of this Indian massacre on an old freebooter named Adriensen, and he, enraged at the accusation, drew his cutlass and would have killed the governor, but that he was disarmed and sent prisoner to Holland. The remains of the colonists were enrolled into service, and a solemn fast was appointed. Happily for them the vengeance of the tribes was satisfied, and a deputation of the Dutch, headed by De Vries, met a convention of sixteen sachems in the woods of Rockaway, on the 5th of March, to treat of peace. De Vries was led into the centre of the group, when one of the chiefs arose, and holding in one hand a bundle of sticks, thus addressed him: “When you first arrived on our shores, you were destitute of food; we gave you our beans and our corn; we fed you with oysters and fish; and now for our recompence you murder our people.” This was his first accusation, and laying down one stick he proceeded: “The traders whom your first ships left upon our shore to traffic till your return, were cherished by us as the apple of our eye; we gave them our daughters for their wives; among those whom you murdered were children of your own blood.” Here he laid down a second stick, and so continued his accusations till the whole bundle was exhausted.
A truce was finally agreed upon; but it is doubtful if this could have been arranged but for the fortunate presence of Roger Williams, then on his way to England, and who not being permitted to sail from Boston, was now at Manhattan for that purpose. Beloved and respected by all the Indian tribes, his mediation was accepted, and a covenant of peace with the Dutch was entered into by all the River Indians.
But peace was only of short duration. As the Indians saw the vacant places in their wigwams, and as one counted up his father or mother slain, and another his sons, or when but one member was left to deplore all the rest gone, an old chief spoke only the voice of a whole tribe, when he said that the price of blood had not yet been paid.
In the autumn the war broke out afresh, and John Underhill, a veteran soldier, the leader of the Massachusetts force in the Pequod war, though now a fugitive from New England, was appointed commander of the Dutch forces. But now as regards Underhill we must say a few words, though we delay the course of the narrative, as to the cause of his leaving Boston, which was so singularly characteristic of puritan manners. Underhill had not only the courage, but somewhat of the lax morality of the old soldier of those days, and this latter circumstance brought him into trouble. Spite of the good service which he had rendered to Massachusetts in his martial character, he was compelled “to make his appearance before the whole congregation of Boston on lecture day, at the close of the sermon, and standing on a form in his worst clothes—he who was so fond of brave apparel—without a band, and with a linen cap pulled over his eyes, to do penance for his wicked courses, and with sighs and tears and tokens of sorrow of heart, beseech the compassion of the congregation for one who, like him, had yielded to the temptations of Satan.” Having thus satisfied the offended morals of Boston, he removed to New Netherlands, of which, at the head of 120 men, he now became the protector. The war continued for two years, and then the Indians sued for peace, which the Dutch—who had suffered equally with themselves, and in which their European neighbours, unwilling to embroil themselves, refused to aid them—were no less willing to grant.