Reason and Liberty: Adriaen van der Donck
The Dutch Colonies
Perhaps the most neglected piece of essential American history is A Description of New Netherland by Dutch lawyer and American pioneer, Adriaen van der Donck. Originally published in 1655, it is considered the best original source history of the Dutch colonies in the New World - and here is a sample,
New Netherland, thus named by the Dutch for reasons we shall give hereafter, is a very beautiful, pleasant, healthy, and delightful land, where all manner of men can more easily earn a good living and make their way in the world than in the Netherlands or any other part of the globe that I know.
However, the first English translation by former Brooklyn mayor Jeremiah Johnson in 1841 was flawed, the full manuscript was not properly treated until 1991 by Diederik Willem Goedhuys, and the work not republished until 2008 by Charles T. Gehring. Here is a sample of the missing narrative,
Having briefly spoken of the attributes of the land as far as needful, it will also be worthwhile to treat in the following the nature of its original natives, so that when the Christians shall have multiplied there, and the Indians melted away, we may not suffer the regret that their manners and customs have likewise passed from memory.
And when combined with other legal documents including the 1649 Remonstrance of the Commonality of New Netherland, historian Russell Shorto gives us well earned perspective on this exponent of political liberty and economic freedom in America,
These writings fill out a picture of Van der Donck as the pivotal figure in the history of the colony, the man who, more than any other, and in ways that have gone unnoticed, mortared together the foundation stones of a great city.
Reason
Born in the city of Breda, Van der Donck enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1638 at the age of twenty. Not only was Leiden a pristine city – even by the neatness of Dutch standards, but its jubilant sense of life - as illustrated in the paintings of Dutch master Jan Steen, was in stark contrast to the grim Puritanism that dominated other European provinces.
It is worth noting that another graduate of the University of Leiden was the physician Johan van Beverwijck who studied philosophy and medicine – class of 1611. As the author of the bestseller Treasure of Health, he wrote, “Children should not be kept on too tight a rein, but allowed to exercise their childishness, so that we do not burden their fragile nature with heavy things.” Their fragile nature is not because their desire for knowledge and independence, but their lack of context for its full development.
Not surprisingly, Leiden became the premier academic center in the Netherlands - one that rivaled the major European centers for learning. And because the Dutch spirit of tolerance was well known throughout Europe, the country was also the publishing capital of the world. Naturally, the cost for printing books was lowest, the quality was highest, and as Shorto implies in his 2005 book, The Island at the Center of the World, the very existence of capitalism benefits everyone,
Indeed, no statistic gives a better indication of the Dutch role in the intellectual life of the time than the estimate that over the course of the seventeenth century the Netherlands produced one-half of all books published worldwide.
Individualism
From 1638–1641, Van der Donck studied law, but it is also worth noting he studied during a crucial and pivotal time in history. Rene Descartes was a man about town who based reasoning on the mind – not “higher authority.” And several prominent physicians who conducted public dissections, or used microscopes, or maintained botanical gardens for advancements in chemistry and botany, ironically gave rise to the infamous Dutch tulip bulb mania that collapsed in 1637.
Just as significant, it was by Dutch jurist Hugo de Groot, aka Hugo Grotius, that Shorto tells us would have influenced young Adriaen the most,
Van der Donck would have been drawn to Grotius because he, like Decartes, based his arguments not on biblical citations, but “natural law,” the idea that right and wrong could be determined by applying human reason – or, as Grotius put it, that an act could be judged from its conformity with rational nature itself.
That is radical. Grotius was teaching that each of us can, and should, judge the behavior of others according to principles proven by reality, in the context of choices that are available, and should expect to be judged by the same standard.
In that spirit of external and internal judgment, Van der Donck learned of an opportunity in a New World colony that was free of the career limiting bureaucracy of the East and West India companies. Adriaen applied to diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer who needed some form of government for his large and successful development north of New Amsterdam.
After a background check, Van der Donck was offered the job of Schrout: sheriff and prosecutor to administer justice and judge to settle legal disputes. Apparently, separation of powers was not a big deal yet. Besides, Adriaen was the only lawyer in New Netherland - and he was 23 years old,
To a young man who education had come more from books than the real world, it must have seemed like a utopian adventure: to march into raw land and create a system of justice, to be the lawbringer for a whole new community.
Capitalism
The New World was raw land, it was remote, and this “whole new community” was comprised of Europe’s most desperate people, aboriginal tribes, land speculators, fur traders, farmers and all sorts of merchants and saloon keepers. But New Netherland was different than New England. It had the tolerance of the Dutch - not the intolerance of the Puritans - and by Shorto’s account a man with great vision, Adriaen van der Donck,
Manhattan and its surrounding region will grow exponentially, he assures his listener, and not so much because the Dutch people will leave their homes for it but because the Netherlands has had a long tradition of welcoming refugees from elsewhere in Europe.
During his tenure as magistrate of the patroonship of Rensselaerwyck, Van der Donck also spent considerable time learning the languages and customs of Indian tribes in the Catskill Mountains. As summarized by Shorto,
These two dominant tribal groups spoke different languages and had very different cultures – the Mohawks were more settled, living in palisaded villages around agriculture, while the Mahicans tended to move with the hunting season – which to Van der Donck helped explain why they were so often at war with one another.
Ultimately, he became frustrated that Van Rensselaer intended to run his colony as a medieval fiefdom, turned his attention southward to New Amsterdam, and Shorto discovered gross political mismanagement.
Governor Kieft had demanded tribute from the Indian tribes, ordered arbitrary attacks, and incited raids and massacres from both sides. With a treasury bankrupted by war and new taxes imposed by whim, the colonists needed new talent for new letters and petitions to the West India Company and The Hague,
And here they all were, the merchants and traders of the colony, grieving over dead children, wives, and comrades, bitter at the burning of the homes and acreage in which they had invested their savings, wanting to express their outrage but not quite sure how. Van der Donck knew how.
Independence
Prior to October 1644, the protests over heavy-handed government had been written by farmers and traders and sounded like groveling before all-powerful authority. In contrast and retrospect, Shorto describes the Van der Donck crafted petition smuggled across the Atlantic as,
The first Americans to exercise a right that would achieve near-hollowed status in the colonies and later in the nation: the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
But for Adriaen van der Donck, it was for naught. Dutch corporate cronyism cracked down, Calvinist Peter Stuyvesant assumed control, Adriaen continued his defense of rights in the new administration, was eventually banished to the Netherlands for five years, allowed to return to his farm in what became Yonkers, and was killed at the age of 37 - most likely from an Indian raid.
But the legacy of his leadership grew exponentially, “humble artisans rose to heights, and a muscular strain of American upward mobility was born.”
The English, meanwhile, especially those in America, would begin experimenting ornately and obsessively with the ideas of liberty, unfettered reason, the rights of man. Put elements of the two together – seventeenth century Dutch tolerance and free-trade principles and eighteenth-century English ideas about self-government – and you have a recipe for a new kind of society.