Theresa Rembert entertained the Six and Twenty Club recently at her office on West Main Street. Leader for the day, Karen Buckley, discussed both a fictional and a nonfictional young woman in Colonial America.
She is passing the book “Out Front The Following Sea,” a novel by Leah Angstman, about an orphaned young woman who must craft a new life in a difficult time and place with a war looming. Buckley spent most of her discussion on the early history of Dutch settlement in what became New York city and state. The Dutch had a largely unrecognized effect on the establishment of the culture that became “American.”
The experiences of Margaret Hardenbroecke, a Dutch “she-merchant” who arrived, age 22, in New Amsterdam in the spring of 1659, illustrate how and why many “Dutch” ideals and practices became so important. Dutch women had a much better situation than English or other European women in this period whether in Europe or in the colonies. They got a grammar school education the same as the boys; they could own property and businesses in their own names; they could contract in their own name; they could sue and be sued in their own name and appear in court. They did not lose all legal identity once they married as did English women did under the laws of “coverture.”
And, they were entitled by law to much better inheritance rights. Under the English rule of primogeniture, the eldest male relative (son, brother, nephew or cousin) of the deceased got almost everything. That did not apply in the Netherlands or the New Amsterdam colony. Widows or divorcees got half of a husband’s assets outright. Female children got the same share as their brothers after their parents’ deaths. English widows got only some of the husband’s personal property and the right to occupy one third of the real estate for life.
In New Amsterdam, Hardenbroecke made the use of these opportunities. She started as an agent for her merchant cousin back in the Netherlands. She and her two husbands built a mercantile network into the largest fortune in New York. They owned rental properties, grist mills, the toll bridge across the Hudson and they traded in furs, tools, guns and liquor with Native Americans. They accumulated 60,000 acres in land in Manhattan and Westchester County. They had a plantation in Barbados. They owned 12 merchant ships. They also traded in slaves and kept around 20 slaves working their farms and mills in New York.
Margaret was “hands on” throughout. She bought the furs from the Indians and traveled on her ships to see that contracts were fulfilled and goods and passengers delivered. When the English seized the colony in 1664, Margaret and her second husband Frederick Philipse carried on operations in the Dutch manner for many years. Margaret moved her activities to Albany and Europe and used Frederick’s power of attorney to conduct business with the English.
Margaret’s descendants did well, but became more Anglicized through the generations. The Revolutionary era Philipses were staunch Tories and left for England in 1783 when the New York State government confiscated all their property. Their family story and that of New Amsterdam was lost for many years until late in the 20th century when the early records of New Amsterdam were found stored in a warehouse in Albany.
Nelson Rockefeller and retired General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler (whose name memorializes three other powerful Dutch families) sponsored the translation and study of those records. We now know a bit more about how New York began as a company town of the Dutch West Indies Company and welcomed all comers as long as they contributed to the business of the city. It was a raucous place with many bars and other services and had a rather liberal approach to religious tolerance and social mores. It was a different place from the rock-ribbed Puritans of New England or the want-to-be aristocrats of the Tidewater, but it was a prototypical American place and city.
