Kieft's War - Background

Background

Appointed director by the Dutch West India Company, Willem Kieft arrived in New Netherland in April 4. Without obvious experience or qualifications for the job, Kieft may have been appointed through family political connections. The year before, the English colonies Massachusetts Bay, Providence Plantation, and Windsor, Connecticut, allied with the Mohegan and Narragansett nations, had annihilated the Dutch-allied Pequot Nation. (see: Pequot War and Mystic Massacre) The Pequot defeat eased the way for an English takeover of the northern reaches of New Netherland, along what is now called the Connecticut River. Two weeks before Kieft's arrival, Peter Minuit, a former director-general of New Netherland, established a rogue Swedish settlement (New Sweden) in the poorly developed southern reaches of the colony, along what is now called the Delaware Valley.

Along the Hudson, New Netherland had begun to flourish; the West India Company ran the settlement chiefly for trading, with the director-general exercising unchecked corporate fiat backed by soldiers. New Amsterdam and the other settlements of the Hudson Valley had developed beyond company towns into a growing colony. In 1640, the Company finally surrendered its trade monopoly on the colony and declared New Netherlands a free-trade zone. Suddenly Kieft was governor of a booming economy.

The directors of the Dutch West India Company were unhappy. Largely due to their mismanagement, the New Netherlands project had never been profitable. The company's efforts elsewhere, by contrast, had paid handsome returns. The directors were anxious to reduce administrative costs, chief among which was providing for defense of the colonies. Within this category were land "purchase" agreements with the Native American nations who historically inhabited the lands. (These were payments for recognition of common rights to use of the land, in return for friendly relations and mutual defense.)

Kieft's first plan to reduce costs was to solicit tribute payments from the tribes living in the region. Long-time colonists warned him against this course, but he pursued it, to outright rejection by the local sachems, or chiefs. Determined to force deference, Kieft seized on the pretext of pigs stolen from the farm of David de Vries to send soldiers to raid a Raritan village on Staten Island, killing several. When the band retaliated by burning down de Vries' farmhouse and killing four of his employees, Kieft "put a price on their heads". He offered bounty payment to rival Native American tribes for the heads of Raritan. (Later, settlers determined that de Vries' pigs had been stolen by other Dutch colonists.)

In August 1641, Claes Swits, an elderly Swiss immigrant, was killed by a Weckquaesgeek of his long acquaintance. Swits ran a popular public house, frequented by Europeans and Native Americans in what is today Turtle Bay, Manhattan. The murder was said to be a matter of the native's paying a "blood debt" for the murder of his uncle. He had been the sole survivor of an ambush of Weckquaesgeek traders by Europeans 15 years before. Kieft was determined to use the event as a pretext for a war of extermination against the tribe.

Another incident raising tensions occurred at Achter Kol along the banks of the Hackensack River. Settlers to the new factorij, after having plied local Hackensack with alcohol, engaged in a small but fatal conflict over the loss of a missing coat, and the foreman was killed by the Hackensack.