Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations. While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck.
Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned.
Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter. He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did.
He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to the lord of Rensselaerwyck.
Van Rensselaer also made it clear that company as well as private fur traders were to keep off his property. This caused much bitterness. Fort Orange, about which the patroon had established his domain, was the official post of the Dutch West India Company, the emporium where their traders traditionally bartered for beaver with the Iroquois. After Rensselaerwyck was established Fort Orange continued to be the commercial center of this profitable trade, so much so that the flourishing little trading village which sprang up there under the very cannon of the fort, and which was to grow into the strategically important city of Albany, was originally christened Beverwyck. Kiliaen van Rensselaer of course had no jurisdiction over Fort Orange, the company’s private precinct, but he considered Beverwyck within his domain. The resulting rivalry between his traders and the company’s representatives, with guns for the savages as bait for beaver, was anything but neighborly.
The company’s management at Manhattan only quickened the tension when on occasion the authorities there confiscated firearms en route to the patroon of Rensselaerwyck. In one case, in 1644, a ship out of Holland for Rensselaerwyck was discovered to be carrying 4,000 pounds of powder and 700 guns intended for the Indian trade, and these munitions were seized with considerable show of propriety. But what then happened to them is not stated, although one well-informed old chronicler suggests that they got along probably in due course to the Iroquois as usual in return for their precious beaver. In any event, the confiscation represented only one slight interruption in the continuous flow of these murderous trade goods to the lake-country Indians.
The feud between the company and the patroonship on the upper Hudson really settled down to cases in 1648 after Kiliaen van Rensselaer died and his young son’s contumacious new commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, took over the management of Rensselaerwyck. For, in the meantime, that little snappish captain, Peter Stuyvesant, had arrived in New Netherland as the West India Company’s Director General.
Stuyvesant was by way of being a reformer, so long as the reforms were in the company’s trade interests. One of his first acts to attract more settlers was to permit the popular election of “Nine Men” who, when called upon, were to assist the governor and the council in matters concerning the general welfare. But when the “Nine Men” proposed to serve the general welfare without being called upon by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant proceeded to knock them down. And when the right of appeal to the home government was suggested, the governor stamped about arrogantly on his pegleg and dared anyone to try it. He said he would make the appealer “a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland, and let him appeal in that way!”
Brutally dictatorial though he may have been, the new governor was earnest nevertheless in all things, reforms included. He took very effective steps, for instance, to check the smuggling of beaver into New England where it could be traded tax-free for European goods. And, while setting up tighter export controls, he also increased the tax on furs. Furthermore, he not only forbade the sale of liquor to the natives but he tried his best to enforce the contraband on firearms for use as trade goods.
Naturally, such policies were obnoxious at Rensselaerwyck, where gun-running was popular and company taxes were not. There too the commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, headstrong in pretensions to complete independence of the company, was itching to prove his insubordination.