The Dutch, Deal-Making, and The Defeat of the Delaware

 

If the North was about reforming humankind and the South was about preserving a perceived natural order, New York is about making the best bargain whoever comes out on top. The pile hadn’t even cooled on 9-11 and there were guys out there going “Fridge Magnets! Get your Twin Tower Fridge Magnets. Buy one, get one free”. Which, come to think of it, was probably the very thing the real estate dealer said when he was selling the twin towers in the first place. A two for one sale on towers. Act now, and I’ll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge!   When I first moved to New York I would get mad at those guys who come out of the ground like earthworms when it rains to sell overpriced disposable umbrellas. In time, I came to see the light, a parting of the clouds, if you will. Those guys ARE New York. That is what you bought, man! And it’s not like they didn’t mention this in the brochures.

Why is New York America’s financial capitol? One could argue that it is because it was originally a Dutch Colony, and so they established the culture. At one time, half of Europe’s shipping was Dutch. The Dutch gave the world its first publicly traded company, its first stock exchange, its first multinational corporation, its first central bank. So New Netherland, which became New York following a hostile takeover, is founded on the art and science and culture of trade. Yet let us not forget that Wall Street was named after a literal wall, which had been erected to keep certain people out.

There were several other quote-unquote “sales” after Peter Minuit’s original one and the Lenape (also known as the Delaware)  were increasingly marginalized in their own land over time. In 1664 the English seized control of the colony from the Dutch and it was renamed for its new proprietor, the Duke of York. Who was a Stuart, by the way, James II, the younger brother of Charles I, and so, yes, I am literally related to the York in New York, though I try not to let it go to my head. (That’s a little decapitation humor).

At any rate, as Bob Dylan sang, some men rob you with a fountain pen. The Natives of New York were finally subdued around the same time as those of New England and the Chesapeake region, but not by the same amount of bloody warfare. New York did not participate in King Philip’s war. Instead, when it flared up, the government here took pre-emptive steps, disarming all the local Lenape, keeping them under guard, and then making an alliance with the Five Iroquois Nations, rivals of the Lenape, who were situated on the other side of them, boxing them in. In other words, New York made a characteristically tricky deal.  Then in the 1750s in the French and Indian War, the Lenape and other Algonquian tribes had the bad judgment to side with the French; whereas the Iroquois stuck with the English. The French lost; thus the Lenape lost. Over time, the Lenape dwindled in number, they merged with other tribes, and moved to other regions. Legends has it that the last true New York area Lenape, a guy nicknamed Bill the Wild Man, died in Canarsie in 1803.

Bill was a Munsee, which is what the local Lenape were called. The Lenape, a.k.a. the Delaware, occupied a huge area, including also parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and, naturally, Delaware. They were part of a larger group called the Algonquians, not be confused with the Algonquins, who sat around drinking martinis and making ribald witticisms that were reprinted in the New Yorker. The Algonquian tribe just North of the Lenape, in the Lower Hudson Valley, were the Mahicans, better known though erroneously so as the Mohicans, and I hope you’ve heard of the last of those. In James Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel, set in the French and Indian war, the Mahicans had been nearly wiped out by the Iroquois tribe the Mohawks and fought against an Iroquois speaking tribe called the Huron.

But it’s not like Iroquois won anything in the long term either. For they had the bad judgment to side with the British in the Revolutionary War. When the British lost, the Iroquois were up a creek without a paddle. The various Iroquois tribes also dispersed and moved and wound up on reservations. Some Lenape and Iroquois wound up as far away as Oklahoma and Canada. 

One important member of the Lenape continued to have a lingering presence in New York City however, well after his death. His name was Tamenend and he was a Chief who had signed a major peace treaty with the Quaker founder Willian Penn in 1683. In time Tamanend was considered by many to be a kind of patron saint of America, St Tammany. There were Tammany festivals. A Tammany society was formed in Philadelphia in 1772, and soon they sprang up over the country. The New York chapter was founded in 1786. Tammany Hall became the heart and soul of New York’s Democratic Party machine. It was also a lot like those themed fraternal lodges. Local chapters were known as wigwams. The administrators were known as sachems and sagamores. Through their mother, my two sons are descended from one of those Tammany Hall sachems. At any rate, I find towering irony in the fact that a major New York politican Martin Van Buren worked that Democratic machine, largely through an organization named after Native Americans to get Andrew Jackson to get elected -- who then proceeded to exterminate Native Americans.