Liquid Soul
Alcohol and Community in New Amsterdam, 1624-1664
Bas Teunissen S2331985
University of Groningen
Research Master Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies Master Thesis
Supervisor: dr. M.K. Williams July 30, 2019
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Table of Contents
Introduction ... 2
The Sources of New Netherland ... 14
1. Theoretical Framework ... 18
1.1 Community, Identity, and Emotions ... 21
1.2 Network Theory ... 27
1.3 Drinking Culture ... 30
2. Alcohol in New Amsterdam: Regulation of Production, Trade, and Consumption ... 35
2.1 Alcohol’s Journey and its Regulation ... 35
2.2. The Carriers, the Farmer, and the Brander ... 45
2.3 Providing Alcohol: Brewing and importing ... 51
2.4 Tappers and Tapsters ... 53
Conclusion ... 56
3. Follow the Alcohol: New Amsterdam Taverns ... 58
3.1 Africans and Native Americans in New Amsterdam ... 68
3.2 The New Amsterdam Social Network ... 74
Conclusion ... 78
Conclusion ... 80
Appendix A: Known Brewers, Tappers, and Tax-farmers of New Amsterdam ... 83
Abbreviations ... 85
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Introduction
On Wednesday September 23, 1641, the inhabitants of the town of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan were startled by the sound of a cannon being fired. The noise of an iron cannon ball hitting a building came next. Borger Jorissen’s house was damaged. The local law-enforcer, Fiscal Cornelis vander Hoykens, set out to find out who had fired the cannon. He went to the yacht Reael, lying at anchor in the natural bay of the Hudson River. On board, he found skipper Jan Symonsen and his gunner, who were both drunk. Through carelessness (perhaps for fun) they had fired the fully loaded cannon towards the colony.1
This anecdote is one of the cases described in the Council Minutes and the Court Records of New Amsterdam involving drunk people.2 It perfectly fits the image of a drunken society that was subject to laziness and chaos, as put forth in nineteenth-century New York writer Washington Irving’s widely acclaimed (and influential) satirical novel A History of New York
from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker
(first published in 1809, the final version, after three major revisions, was published in 18483) and his short story Rip Van Winkle (1819).4 The stories were published in a time when questions about alcohol consumption in general started to rise and the concept of American moral idealism took shape with the Puritan Pilgrims of New England at its core.5 Drunkenness became
1CM4, 121-122. On Thursday 24th September, the fiscal was ordered to put the two men in irons. The next day,
the defendants were ordered to settle the matter with Vander Hoykens. Borger Jorissen initially did not claim indemnification for the damage done to his house. Only 9 days later, he sued for indemnification, but that was probably refused to him because of his earlier waiving of the claim.
2 The inhabitants of New Amsterdam usually called their town “Amsterdam.” Amsterdam in Holland, they
referred to as Amsterdam in the Old World or in the Fatherland. For the sake of clarity, I will use the name of New Amsterdam to refer to the settlement on Manhattan and Amsterdam to refer to the city in the Dutch Republic.
3 J. McGann, “Washington Irving, “A History of New York”, and American History” in Early American
Literature, vol. 47, no. 2 (2012), 350.
4 J. Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij
Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999), 18. Even though Irving’s A History of New York is quite accurate when it comes to historical events, Elizabeth L. Bradley of the New York Public Library refers to him as “the first purveyor of fake news” in an interview about Irving’s A History of New York (when asked about his
Salmagundi magazine, which was a satirical magazine). A History of New York is a combination of real facts
and fake news. https://www.wnyc.org/story/57674-diedrich-knickerbockers-history-of-new-york/, retrieved 03-26-2019. P. Lopate, “The Days of the Patriarchs: Washington Irving’s A History of New York” in Dutch
New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. R. Panetta (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum/Fordham
University Press, 2009), 214-215. Irving used the satirical story of Diedrich Knickerbocker to criticize post-Revolution America, his own time. See McGann for more information. The story of Rip Van Winkle takes place around the American Revolution, but since the fictional character Van Winkle is of Dutch descent, his lazy disposition became associated with the Dutch of New Netherland.
5 J. Chrzan, Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context (New York: Routledge, 2013), 68. M.L. Sargent, “The
Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,” in The New England
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a more widespread phenomenon (mostly due to the increase of consumption of whiskey and other spirits) and started to become a problem for American society; physician and politician Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) even went as far as to link the intake of strong liquors with burglary and murder.6 A true crusade against alcohol consumption, the temperance movement, took place in the early nineteenth century, aroused by economic, social, religious and moral changes.7 These ideas are likely to have influenced how people read Irving’s “fake” history. Irving, on his part, must have observed the new way of thinking of his fellow Americans as his stories were influenced by the politics and social developments of his own time.8 Irving’s books, especially The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, of which Rip Van Winkle is one of the better known stories, found
their way to a broad audience, and The Sketch
Book found its place in the
spheres of “moral
decency,” the ideal
American home as
portrayed by the
temperance movement.9 Painter John Quidor (1801-1881), who has been called “one of the key eccentrics and visionaries in American painting,” drew his inspiration from the
stories of Irving, often depicting the Dutch as slovenly, drunken, and lazy (Antony Van Corlear
Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant (1839) and Rip Van Winkle and His Companions
6 B. Rush, An inquiry into the effects of spirituous liquors on the human body. : To which is added, a moral and
physical thermometer (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790), 12.
7 Chrzan, 69-79. The temperance movement was a movement that consisted of different organizations (in which
women were frequently the dominant group) who were opposed to the consumption of alcohol. Eric Burns provides a well-written overview of this movement in the fourth chapter of his book The Spirits of America:
A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 97-110.
8 W.L. Hedges, “Irving, Washington,” in American National Biography (February, 2000), https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1600829, retrieved 03-26-2019.
9 Hedges (February, 2000).
Fig. 1. John Quidor, Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at
the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder, 1839. Oil on canvas.
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at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839)), sometimes even greedy and corrupt (The Money Diggers (1856) and Wolfert’s Will (1856)).10
While Irving wrote his stories, the colonial history of the American continent was revisited. The Pilgrims, who had come to America on the Mayflower, had always been a footnote in American history, but the rediscovery of the Mayflower Compact by James Wilson (1742-1798) and John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) put them right in the center of American myth.11 The Puritan Pilgrims became symbols of the American ideal: they were people who had come to the New World to escape religious persecution. Here, they sought to establish a new Jerusalem: a place where they could be free and build their own society according to their ecclesiastical beliefs.12 They were portrayed as everything the Dutch of New Netherland were not: sober, moral, diligent, and careful, unlike the drunken skipper Jan Symonsen and his gunner. The Pilgrims were good Christians; they were morality itself. It is an image that still holds today in popular culture.13
Recent discoveries, however, have shown that the myth of the Mayflower Pilgrims has to be taken with a pinch of salt when it comes to their alcohol consumption.14 For example, the
Pilgrims were not destined to go ashore at Plymouth; it was only due to severe weather that had blown them in the wrong direction and a shortage of beer – that caused the sailors to refuse to sail further because they were afraid that they would not have enough of the alcoholic beverage for the journey back to Europe – that the Pilgrims went ashore where the Mayflower had brought
10 B.F. Bland, “Imagining Dutch New York: John Quidor and the Romantic Tradition” in Dutch New York: The
Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. R. Panetta (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum/Fordham University Press,
2009), 225, 234-239. The image of the ‘drunken Dutch’ dates from as early as the sixteenth century, when travelers were staggered by the amount of alcohol the people of Amsterdam drank. English cartoons depicted the Archetypical Hollander as “rond als een ton, stomdronken en kettingrokend” (round as a barrel, roaring drunk, and chain-smoking). M. Hell, De Amsterdamse herberg 1450-1800: Geestrijk centrum van het
openbare leven (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2017), 113.
11 Sargent (1988). Wilson and Adams used the Mayflower Compact for the benefit of their own political ideas,
propagating their view on American democracy and what it should look like.
12 Chrzan, 58. M. McGiffert, “Bradford, William,” in American National Biography (February, 2000), https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0100095, retrieved 03-26-2019.
13 In 2015, the drama television miniseries Saints & Strangers aired on the National Geographic Channel,
supposedly depicting the “real” story of the Mayflower Pilgrims. Even though the show was not all sunshine, rainbows and such, it still showed the alleged moral superiority of the Pilgrims, as opposed to the Strangers (who were not part of the group of Puritans). Especially William Bradford is depicted as a saint in the truest sense of the word. Another reason for this image could be that in the sixteenth century, the English Puritans had “railed against the evils of excessive drinking and identified the tavern as the main problem.” R. Phillips,
Alcohol: A History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 89.
14 There are some historians, like George F. Wilson, who tend to say that the whole “saga” (as he called it) is
nonsense made up in the nineteenth century because the original manuscript by William Bradford (Of
Plymouth Plantation) was lost for some time, but such a statement cannot be true since published parts of the
manuscript were widely circulating. S.E. Morison, “Introduction,” in Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, ed. S.E.Morison (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), xxvi-ff.
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them.15 Stephen Hopkins, one of the passengers onboard the Mayflower and one of the persons to have signed the Mayflower Compact had developed ideas such as those written down in the
Compact prior to his voyage with the Pilgrims, leaving scholars like Joseph Kelly wondering if
the Compact was perhaps not designed by the Saints, but by Hopkins and his fellow “Strangers,” to protect them from a bunch of religious fanatics.16 William Bradford, one of the
most prominent Pilgrims and author of the work on which the Pilgrims’ myth is based, even documents that it was the Strangers coming forth with the “mutinous” argument that would form the basis of the Compact.17 The anti-alcohol values of nineteenth-century Americans were bestowed upon the moral Pilgrims, but they were false: the Pilgrims were people of their time, consuming alcohol and using beer and wine to describe the New World’s water’s taste.18 When
Bradford, a man of “more than ordinary piety,” died in 1657, an inventory of his belongings listed a great beer bowl and two smaller ones.19 One prominent Mayflower Pilgrim, Isaac
Allerton (1586-1659), who was one of the four Pilgrims to plan the voyage to the New World, can even be found in New Amsterdam, where he was part of a judicial case on September 1, 1654, about the trading of English malt which was not reported to the official, and thus the trading was fraudulent.20 Alcohol was part of the Pilgrims’ way of life; they both produced and consumed it.21
Alcohol has often been described in a negative connotation; scholars tended to focus on the struggle of the church and the state to regulate alcohol consumption and to contain excesses
15 Chrzan, 58-59. In his popular history about the Mayflower Pilgrims, Nathaniel Philbrick mentions that the ship
was running low on water and, “of even greater concern”, low on beer, but he fails to mention this when he discusses for what reasons the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod. N. Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage,
Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006), 3, 35-47.
16 Hopkins had been marooned on an island in the Mid-Atlantic prior to his voyage to what would become
Plymouth. On the uninhabited island, he had been one of the persons to draw up a document similar to the
Mayflower Compact. J. Kelly, “The Thanksgiving Story You’ve Probably Never Heard,” in The New York Times (November 21, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/opinion/thanksgiving-pilgrims-puritans-democracy-.html, retrieved 03-26-2019. This idea questions a popular belief that the so-called “Strangers” were a group of troublemakers, as is still put forth in recent popular publications about the story of the
Mayflower Pilgrims like Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, 25-26, 39-42. See also the television miniseries Saints & Strangers.
17 W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, ed. S.E. Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 75.
This edition is a modern (not modernized) reprint of the full original manuscript as written by Bradford in the first half of the seventeenth century. Morison gives an explanation of how he went about it in his added preface: vii-x.
18 Bradford, 65. 19 Morison, xxiv-xxv. 20CM5, 182-183.
21 The Puritans thought drinking alcohol for nutritious purposes was as normal as eating bread. However, they
did think drunkenness was sinful, “but it was compounded when it resulted in blasphemy, immorality, and violence. This was a mainstream attitude common to all Christian denominations”. R. Phillips, Alcohol: A
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and the nuisance that arose from it.22 This is also the case for New Amsterdam in the Dutch period (1624-1664). The availability of sources on laws, ordinances, and other legal matters like court cases has led to a judicial perspective on the drinking culture of the settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s efforts and campaigns to restrict the use of alcohol are especially abundantly present in the literature.23 For centuries, the seventeenth-century Dutch have been perceived as excessive drinkers.24
This perception shifted at the end of the nineteenth century, when “Holland Mania” took place: a period during which the Dutch of New Netherland were romanticized and perceived as upright citizens with virtues like cleanliness, soberness and industry. This image was instilled by the bourgeois elite of the Progressive Era, people who would today be called the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite, as an “acceptable alternative to an aristocratic British past.”25 However, this idea has reversed since then. In 1998, social historian Willem Frijhoff
wrote an article urging scholars to apply new theories, frames, and views to the sources of New Netherland, to read between the lines for symbolism.26 In that article, he wrote that the New
Amsterdam society should not be idealized as a cozy Dutch village or a wealthy town where people knew each other and were on friendly footing with each other. Instead, drawing from the judicial sources, he describes a rough society compiled of individuals who could not stand each other and where “conflicts had to be settled almost weekly, and some were very hard to settle indeed.”27 Frijhoff returns to the early nineteenth-century view of New Netherland: seeing
only tension, disagreement, and quarrels in the judicial sources. Looking at Jan Symonsen and his gunner through Fijhoff’s eyes would probably generate a description of two people who excessively drank alcohol and were being lazy and careless. Besides perceiving the anecdote about how the two sailors damaged the house of Borger Jorissen by firing a fully loaded cannon within a frame of drunkenness and stupidity (maybe even hatred if one is to assume that the two
22 M. Hailwood, “‘It Puts Good Reason into Brains’: Popular Understandings of the Effects of Alcohol in
Seventeenth-Century England,” in Brewery History, no. 150 (2013), 39-40.
23 M. Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (White Plains: KTO Press, 1987), 55-56. Jacobs (1999), 211-214.
S.V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 27-28. This specific part in Salinger’s book deals with restrictions on the sale of alcohol to the natives in the Hudson Valley, however, every time in her book when she refers to New Netherland, it is through a judicial perspective.
24 E.R. Dursteler, “Bad Bread and the “Outrageous Drunkenness of the Turks”: Food and Identity in the
Accounts of Early Modern European Travelers to the Ottoman Empire” in Journal of World History, vol. 25, no. 2/3 (June/September 2014), 221. Salinger, 9-11. See note 10 for a description of the archetypical
Hollander.
25 Bland, 225, 239.
26 W. Frijhoff, “New Views on the Dutch Period of New York,” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the
Dutch Colonial Period in America, vol. 71, no. 2 (1998), 23-24.
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fired the cannon on purpose towards that specific building), there is another way to look at the sources. Something else that stands out in the event, besides accidental gunfire and Jorissen initially not pressing charges, is the fact that a skipper and his gunner, two men of different social ranks, the second being a subordinate to the first, were apparently drinking together as if they were friends.
Perceiving the consumption of alcohol in terms of sociability and as a means of social interaction is relatively new in the field of historical research. Rather than emphasizing campaigns against intoxication (because no causal connection between alcohol, criminality and violence can be proven28), scholars recently began to shift their focus towards the actual consumption of alcohol and the context in which that happened because they were interested in why early modern people were drinking so much that the church and state instituted actions against alcohol consumption. Instead of perceiving drinking as a goal for, say, the poor to get drunk and to forget their misery (narcotic escapism), as was posed in early literature, intoxication is now placed in a frame of social exchange rather than in a judicial frame.29
Beverly Ann Tlusty poses that in the early modern period getting drunk became more and more a side effect rather than the primary goal of drinking. According to her, the primary goal became social exchange.30 Phil Withington thinks that intoxication needs to be seen in its context: what is consumed, how and in what quantities is it consumed, what is a person’s intellectual, emotional, and physical condition when the alcohol is drank?31 The early and the modern view can also be combined: intoxication as a goal within the context of social exchange: drinking bouts for the elite were a form of social exchange during which it was arguably the goal to get drunk and then to keep behaving properly, which was both masculine and honorable.32
The approaches mentioned above call for a micro rather than a macro perspective. An early scholar who had taken such an approach was Keith Wrightson. In 1981, he wrote an article in which he used a rural case study to put forth a “vital perspective that has not been applied rigorously to other contexts by later work”.33 In the article, Wrightson writes that the early
28 A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Violence and Disorder in Traditional Europe (Kirksville: Truman State University
Press, 2009), 5.
29 Peter Clark and Keith Thomas are examples of scholars who wrote that early literature. Hailwood (2013),
39-40.
30 B.A. Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001), 6.
31 P. Withington, “Intoxicants and Society in Early Modern England” in The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 3
(September 2011), 636.
32 A. Duiveman, personal conversation.
33 J. Brown, “Alehouse Licensing and State Formation in Early Modern England” in Intoxication and Society:
Problematic Pleasures of Drugs and Alcohol, eds. J. Herring et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
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modern alehouse was a prominent and central feature of village society in pre-industrial England.34 His 1982 book English Society 1580-1680, which reads like a further developed version of the mentioned article, expands his theories about early modern village societies. Following Wrightson, judicial sources do not necessarily have to be read and perceived as conflicts; they can be interpreted as acts that define the limits of the burdens that could reasonably be placed on the tolerance of the community.35 The rural village communities Wrightson describes were not socially isolated; the population was surprisingly mobile, drawn by economic opportunities or pushed by the lack of them.36 Because families became spread out through this mobility, kinship was not the primary factor that held the communities together, he argues; it was neighborliness and friendship.37 Wrightson concludes that
Neighbourliness and friendship thus operated both to promote harmonious and co-operative relationships among groups of largely unrelated householders and to overcome personal or familial isolation in a relatively fluid society in which individuals and independent nuclear families were little cushioned by kinship ties and obligations.38
The notion of creating social ties through neighborliness and friendship sheds new light on judicial sources: they were, in Wrightson’s words, an “essential feature of the constant process of readjustment of social relationships at the local level.”39 The horizontal and vertical
social relationships within local communities were built on both formal and informal levels. Formally, there were, among other events, sports, games, festivals, and dances. Informally, there was the “daily round of informal recreation”: neighbors meeting in alehouses after work or church services, or plainly in the street and at the market square, or in someone’s house. Direct face-to-face contact was essential.40
The similarities between rural England as described by Wrightson and New Amsterdam are quite remarkable. Both populations were mobile. To begin with, the majority of the people
34 K. Wrightson, “Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590-1660” in Popular Culture and
Class Conflict 1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, eds. E. Yeo & S. Yeo (Sussex:
The Harvester Press, 1981), 1-27.
35 K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 53. Sociological studies have shown
that communities are actually riddled with conflict and division. G. Day, Community and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2006), 50.
36 Wrightson (1982), 41-43.
37 Family still was the “basic unit of society. […] Within the family, individuals found security and identity and
the satisfaction of both physical and emotional needs not catered for by other social institutions.” Wrightson (1981), 66.
38 Wrightson (1982), 55. 39 Wrightson (1982), 61-62. 40 Wrightson (1982), 62-64.
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of Amsterdam in the New World were immigrants coming from different places in Europe: the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and even Turkey.41 Most people were drawn or pushed to New Netherland by economic opportunities or the lack of them in Europe (most people came from somewhere other than the booming province of Holland).42 They could find employment in the service of the Dutch West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, W.I.C.) as soldiers, sailors, or officers, they could be merchants (either private or as agent for trading firms), farmers, craftsmen, or contract workers.43 There were also people who went to North America not necessarily for economic reasons: they already had family living there. There were quite a few married couples (i.e. Joris and Catalyntje Rapalje, Jan Perier and Aafie Leenders, and Pieter and Aeltje Cornelisen) living in New Netherland. In the Records of New Amsterdam, women substituting for their husbands can be found regularly, and also the other way around. Another example of a family is the Van Couwenhoven family: father Gerrit and his two sons Pieter and Jacob. Joris and Catalyntje Rapalje are an example of a family crossing the Atlantic together, but there are also examples of people travelling to New Netherland without any relatives or the prospect of meeting relatives on arrival. Govert Loockermans and Adriaen van der Donck were such people.44 They would make new acquaintances soon enough, new connections that would prove to be strong.
Ironically, it is a judicial source that proves the presence of such strong connections and neighborliness in New Amsterdam. On the night between July 15 and 16, 1664, for unknown reasons, Hendrick Jansen Smitt committed suicide by hanging himself on the branch of a tree near the water. Officer Pieter Tonneman requested that “his goods shall be forfeit, the corpse drawn on a hurdle as an example and terror to others, and brought to the place, where it was found hanging and there shoved under the earth; further that a stake, pole or post shall be set there in token of an accursed deed.”45 His request was not granted: the Court ordered that the
41 D.S. Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” in New York History, vol. 61, no. 1 (1981),
48-60.
42 Ibidem. W. Klooster, “Winds of Change: Colonization, Commerce, and Consolidation in the
Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, vol. 70, no. 3 (1997), 54-56. From 1610 until 1660, Europe suffered from large economic depressions. The United Provinces, however, remained unaffected. In the second half of the seventeenth century, economic growth started to stagnate in the Netherlands, which resulted in an increase in people migrating to New Netherland and other colonies. Jacobs (1999), 68-69.
43 Jacobs (1999), 71-101. Also orphans from Amsterdam were sent to New Netherland, and people also migrated
for religious reasons.
44 R. Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten
Colony that Shaped America (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 40-41, 103, 106. Jacobs (1999), 86-87.
Loockermans first went to New Netherland as a cook and was later employed as a cleric. When he returned to Amsterdam, he married Adriaentje Jans, and he took her with him when he went back to New Netherland as an agent for the Verbrugge family.
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body was to be buried in a corner of the churchyard in the evening after the ringing of the bell at nine o’clock and that the goods left by Smitt were to be forfeited as was proper. The Court had been moved to this decision by eight of Smitt’s neighbors, who in this way helped Smitt’s widow. Hendrick Kip the elder, Hendrick Willemsen, Jacob Teunis Kay, Teunis Cray, Frans Jansen van Hooghten, Ambrosius Weerhem, Nicolaes Backer, and Pieter Winster requested a decent burial for Hendrick Jansen Smitt because he had been “an old Burgher here, of whom no bad behaviour was ever heard”.
New Amsterdam was in no way a group of socially isolated individuals, nor was it a socially isolated community. Its people traveled to other settlements like Rensselaerswijck, went north to trade or negotiate with the natives, had contact with the English colonies, and some traveled back and forth between New Netherland and Europe regularly.46
Another similarity between Wrightson’s rural communities and New Amsterdam is the presence of drinking houses. In 1644, 25 Essex villages had on average one alehouse per 95 inhabitants, and in 1647, thirty south Lancashire villages had one per 57 inhabitants, while in New Amsterdam, there were at least 21 licensed tappers by January 9, 1657.47 For a population
of fewer than 1,500 people, that is a high number.48 To compare, in Amsterdam - a city of 65,000 inhabitants at the turn of the seventeenth century, and over 220,000 in the late seventeenth century - there were over 500 drinking establishments in 1613, and at least 1350 at the end of the seventeenth century.49 The German city of Augsburg, with over 30,000 inhabitants in the first half of the seventeenth century and thus one of the largest cities in
46 In 1634-1635, Harmen Meijndertsz van den Bogaert, Jeronimus dela Croix, and Willem Thomassen traveled
from New Amsterdam up north to find out why the natives had stopped sending furs. Van den Bogaert kept a journal. H. Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, W.A. Starna (translator), C.T. Gehring (translator), A Journey into
Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635: the Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2013), 1-54. In October 1663, a New Netherland delegation went to Connecticut to try to settle on the boundary between the two colonies. “Journal kept by Cornelis van Ruyven,
Burgomaster Cortlandt and John Lawrence, Delegates from New Netherland to the General Assembly at Hartford, in New England, in the month of October 1663” in DRCHSNY, 385-393 Govert Loockermans sailed back and forth between the Republic and New Netherland, see note 44. Adriaen van der Donck, Jacob van Couwenhoven, and Jan Evertsen Bout sailed back to the Republic to request from the States General the removal of Stuyvesant as Director-General of New Netherland. Shorto, 213-ff.
47 Wrightson (1981), 3-4. RNA, vol. 2, 263-264. The figures given by Salinger differ slightly
48 A population of 1,500 souls was estimated by the petitioners who requested Stuyvesant to surrender to the
English in September 1664. A copy of the remonstrace can be found in The Hague. Stukken betreffende de
bemoeiingen van de Staten-Generaal met de beschuldigingen tegen en de verdediging van Pieter Stuyvesant, gewezen directeur-generaal van Nieuw-Nederland, inzake zijn gedrag bij het verlies van Nieuw-Nederland, 1665-1667. Met retroacta, 1661-1664, Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Staten-Generaal, access number
1.01.02, inventory number 12564.57. The figure of 1,500 people probably excludes the circa 300 slaves and 75 free blacks in the town. J.D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New
York City, 1664-1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13.
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Germany, had 26 wine taverns and inns in 1600, declining to only 14 fifty years later.50 In the English colonies, the number of licensed drinking houses per capita was lower than in New Netherland. Before Massachusetts limited the number of drinking places in each town in 1680, there were about 32 public drinking places in Boston (population of 4,500); after the legislation was enacted, only 16 were left.51 It must be noted that the Puritans in Massachusetts upheld stricter laws concerning the providers of alcohol (taverns, inns, etc.) than any other North-American colony in the seventeenth century, resulting in a lower number of drinking houses.52 In Philadelphia, within four years after the settlement was founded, there were at least six taverns in operation, growing to a number of 101 in the early 1700s.53 The relatively high number of tap houses in New Netherland suggests that these also played a central role in public life. In combination with the absence of widely extended families with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, this only makes it seem logical to assume that most social relationships were developed through something like Wrightson’s neighborliness and friendship. However, such an assumption has not been researched yet.
The reason for this is unclear and can only be guessed. Perhaps it is because of the assumption that social ties mainly worked through family and that New Amsterdam was like a wild west village where it was one for one and all for themselves, which works very well in the modernizing frame of growing individuality as posed by Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber. However, social historians have shown that communal ties remained strong throughout the early modern period.54 Other reasons could be the idea that drinking houses, where social relations could be established, only were hubs of social unrest, or the lack of evidence on formal festivities, which could have functioned as social binders, or the fact that festivities and
50 B. Ann Tlusty, 32-33. The numbers may seem small, but the number of just over one hundred breweries
within the city of Augsburg makes one suspicious about the amount of alcohol that was consumed by the inhabitants and the chapter also does not answer the question where the poorer people drank, as Tlusty largely focusses on well-to-do drinkers. Tlusty does not seem to give a full account of the drinking places in Augsburg. This uncomplete picture, if you will, is due to a narrow focus on only wine taverns and inns: buildings in which accommodation for travelers could be found in addition to food and drinks. Phillips, 106.
51 Phillips, 145. The number of 32 seems low. Put in perspective, however, the number of drinking places was at
some point relatively higher than in Amsterdam. In Boston, 1679, there was one drinking place for every 141 inhabitants. In Amsterdam, there was at first one drinking place for every 130 inhabitants in the early 1600s, and one for every 163 at the end of the seventeenth century. Kevin P. McDonald gives a larger number of taverns in Boston: 54, but that seems strange since the 1680 bill had limited the number of drinking places. He also mentions the presence of 17 inns and taverns in New Amsterdam, but that does not correspond to the 21 people who had a license to tap. K.P. McDonald, “Inns and Taverns” in Colonial America: An
Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, ed. J. Ciment (London: Routledge, 2016),
437.
52 Phillips, 143-146.
53 McDonald, 438. Taken with a pinch of salt, see previous note.
54 K. Davison, “Early Modern Social Networks: Antecedents, Opportunities, and Challenges” in The American
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traditions were regulated or even banned. Events such as New Year and May Days were regulated in an ordinance dating from the end of December 1655. The Director General and the Council of New Netherland forbade “shooting and planting of May poles on New Year and May Days within this province of New Netherland; also, any noise making with drums or dispensing of any wine, brandy or beer upon those occasions.”55 Events that were organized
were economic in character. In 1641, a cattle fair and a hog fair were instigated, taking place annually on 15 October and 1 November respectively.56 In 1648, Monday became the weekly market-day and a ten-day free market was established to take place on the first Monday after St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), “corresponding to the legal Amsterdam Fair,” as part of an ordinance for the regulation of trade enacted by Peter Stuyvesant and the Council of New Netherland.57 Other formal events were religious in character. On September 6, 1645, a day of Thanksgiving took place to celebrate the peace with the Indians, and on July 29, 1654, a general day of Thanksgiving was proclaimed to celebrate the end of the war with the English (First Anglo-Dutch War, 1652-1654), and on August 25, 1655, a general day of fasting, thanksgiving, and prayer took place to make sure God would bless the expedition against the Swedes in the Delaware Valley.58 On all three occasions, the people of New Netherland were called to church, where the festivities (read: preaching, prayer, and glorifying God) would take place.
There is more evidence on informal activities than there is on formal activities; the sources only need to be looked at and interpreted in another way than has been done until now. The anecdote about Jan Symonsen and his gunner is a good example of how a judicial source can be interpreted differently for socio-cultural purposes.
The Dutch took their drinking habits to the New World, and since the tavern played a central role in the Republic’s city life, it must have done so too in New Amsterdam.59 Telling is the fact that the New Amsterdam City Tavern was the most expensive building to have been built in the town by the 1640s; it even exceeded the newly built church in cost.60 Taverns had four social functions, according to historian Maarten Hell: they lavished and lodged guests, and were the center of social, political, and economic activities.61 Various social networks met in drinking houses, people heard the latest news from travelers, group meetings were held (the remonstrance that was given to Stuyvesant to persuade him to surrender to the English was 55CM6, 173-174. 56CM4, 121. 57CM4, 492. 58CM4, 280-281. CM5, 159-160. CM6, 74-75. 59 Hell, 10-11. 60 Salinger, 195-196. 61 Hell, 10.
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drawn up during a meeting in the City Tavern), and business agreements were established. Everything happened in the presence of copious amounts of alcoholic beverages.
The key word that ties everything together in this regard is company, the word seventeenth-century people used to describe sociability.62 It is a word that, in the 1600s, encompassed three different types of social interaction. First, the term was used to describe “quite formal associational bodies” (also called communities) with everything related to it (rituals, membership, norms and values, and hierarchies). Second, “company” described “habitual and voluntary association that was not incorporated into a formal body.”63 Third, it
denoted accidental, occasional, or transitory encounters. The concept of “company” provides a framework for researching early modern sociability. “First, ‘company’ suggests a politics […] of social participation involving inclusions, exclusions and the construction of boundaries.” Second, “participation, and the boundaries of company, often related to the multifarious functions and meanings informing sociability.” Third, “all company […] was shaped by objective factors,” and fourth, “the manner in which objective conditions were used and appropriated in practice depended on the habitus of the people involved and which early modern people regarded as their ‘disposition’, ‘will’ and ‘ability’. At the heart of company was the relationship between agency (the subjective acts of the involved persons) and structure (the objective circumstances and resources).64
The act of drinking together was a traditional ritual of social cohesion, something that constituted the group, and created identity and social bonds.65 Intoxicants were in many instances part of the context in which people were in company with each other, whether it was in drinking houses or at weddings.66 It is strange that scholars think that in New Amsterdam, a place where alcohol was so abundantly present and consumed (if one is to believe the popular image), the local community was held together by family connections and economic interests, while the evidence seems to clearly point out an equally important additional direction that is neglected: friendship and neighborliness, constituted by drinking.67 How did alcohol help to constitute the community of New Amsterdam between 1624 and 1664?
62 And, of course, trading associations such as the West India Company.
63 There was no sharp distinction between institutionalized and uninstitutionalized company. Withington, 300. 64 Withington, 297-303.
65 Frijhoff (1998), 24. P. Scholliers, “Meals, Food Narratives, and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present”
in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages, ed. P.
Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 8-9. Chrzan, 164. Tlusty, 147 ff. A. Duiveman, “How to Refuse the Goblet: Drinking Rituals, Sociability and flow in Nederlands displegtigheden, 1732-1735” in Nieuwe Tijdingen, vol. 3, no. 1 (2019), in press.
66 P. Withington, “Company and Sociability in Early Modern England” in Social History, vol. 32, no. 3 (2007),
302.
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In this Master’s Thesis, alcohol is the structure, the objective resource, through which I will reconstruct the community of New Amsterdam. In the first chapter, I present the theories I have deployed throughout this thesis: community theory (which is highly interwoven with identity theory and emotionology), social network theory, and drinking culture. It also contains the main definitions that I have used. In the second chapter, I will provide the historical context of alcohol consumption in New Amsterdam. I will describe how it was regulated and how men of the same profession worked together as a small community towards a common goal, whether it was regulation, production or the trade of alcohol. The third chapter is the most important one. In it, I will use the theories described in chapter one and the context of chapter two to read the primary sources. Through this approach in analyzing the judicial cases in the Council
Minutes and the Records of New Amsterdam, I will provide insight in the community of New
Amsterdam: the role that alcohol played in establishing and tightening it within its context of sociability.
The Sources of New Netherland
In its forty years of existence, the New Netherland administration created quite the pile of records about the colony; among others there were administrative, legislative, notarial, and judicial sources. These and correspondence between the colony and the WIC have been preserved, as have some of the correspondence of private persons like Govert Loockermans and the ministers of New Amsterdam. There is a lot to work with. However, the sources are also a bit problematic, not because of who created them, but because of what happened to them afterwards: water and fire damage, carelessness, and good intentions took their toll.
The Amsterdam Chamber of the first West India Company (1621-1674) was responsible for New Netherland, and it must have kept a large archive. However, it was largely sold as old paper in the early nineteenth century and likely destroyed. Only the archives of the Zeeland Chamber remained largely intact.68 The surviving WIC records can be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague, and contain correspondence, minutes, and summaries of information that was communicated to the States-General.69 References to New Netherland elsewhere in the Dutch archives may be found where they are not expected. The papers about the Brazil colony, which was supervised by the Chamber of Zeeland, contain some documents
68 Jacobs (1999), 15. E. van den Boogaart, “The Archive of the First West India Company (W.I.C.) 1621-1674”
in Itinerario, vol. 4 (1980), 60.
69 C.T. Gehring, “A Survey of Manuscripts Relating to the History of New Netherland” in Revisiting New
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relating to New Netherland.70 In the Amsterdam City Archives, around 800 notarial record books with references to New Netherland have been preserved, but they have not been fully researched yet.71 On the other side of the Atlantic, much more work has been done to make the documents of New Netherland available for historical research, mostly due to the fact that many American researchers do not have the skills to read and interpret seventeenth-century Dutch.
The original manuscripts of New Amsterdam were kept in the town’s fort. When the Dutch surrendered to the English colonel Richard Nicolls in the late summer of 1664, the whole administration and its records were handed over to the English. When the Dutch captain Cornelis Evertsen de Jongste (the Youngest) and Jacob Benckes retook the colony in 1673, the records were handed over to them, only to revert to the English in 1674, when New Netherland was given back to the English. Kept safe in the fort on the tip of the Manhattan peninsula, the records were then moved to Boston by Governor Edmund Andros (around 1686) as this was the capital city of the short-lived Dominion of New England (1686-1689). Shortly after the Leisler period, the records were returned to New York, but some were possibly lost along the way or remained in Boston.72
The eighteenth century meant more destruction for the records. In 1741, during the slave conspiracy of New York City, many buildings in the city caught fire, among which was the governor’s residence in the fort. The fire spread, reaching the storage area, where the records were kept. Manuscripts were thrown out of the window to keep them safe from the flames, but many loose papers blew away in the wind. The second great eighteenth-century event that took its toll on the records was the American Revolution. For safekeeping, the records were stored on two English warships, the Duchess of Gordon and the Warwick. During this period, the papers suffered much water damage.73
Prospects for the documents were better in the nineteenth century. Interest in the early colonial period of the state of New York rose, which led to multiple translations of the primary sources. The first to set off on the task of transcribing and translating the early sources was a Dutch immigrant named Adriaen van der Kemp. Because he was hired by New York’s governor Dewitt Clinton, Van der Kemp had to finish his translations of the council minutes before the end of Clinton’s term (1818-1823). He therefore summarized or omitted passages he considered
70 J. Jacobs “A Troubled Man: Director Wouter van Twiller and the Affairs of New Netherland in 1635” in New
York History, vol. 85, no. 3 (2004), 227-228.
71 Gehring, 294. 72 Gehring, 287, 303. 73 Gehring, 304.
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irrelevant. Additionally, Van der Kemp had failing eyesight, leading to numerous errors in the transcriptions. Both factors led to a result of questionable quality.74
In 1839, J.R. Brodhead was employed by the State of New York to travel to Europe and collect transcriptions of archive material about the colonial history of the state. He collected these in the Netherlands, London, and Paris. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (1797-1880), an Irishman who had studied medicine in Dublin, Paris and Quebec, and had developed a passion for history, resulting in his book History of New Netherland (1846-1848), was then employed to make translations of the transcriptions Brodhead had brought back with him in 1844. This resulted in the extensive source translations known as Documents Relative to the Colonial
History of the State of New York. When O’Callaghan became the New York State archivist in
1848, he also started to work on the records of New Netherland.75 In the 1850s, he took the record books apart and completely reorganized the folios in such a way that it reflected “his sense of chronology and record type.”76 Forty-eight record books had become twenty volumes.
Although O’Callaghan’s translations were an improvement on Van der Kemp’s translations, they are still flawed due to the Irishman’s limited knowledge about seventeenth-century material culture.77 Another problem was O’Callaghan’s view of the New Netherland colony, which he implicitly compared to the ‘model colony’ of New England. The perception of New Netherland as a failure can be traced back to his work and its negative view.78
In 1876, Prussian immigrant Berthold Fernow succeeded O’Callaghan as the state archivist. He also embarked on the journey to transcribe and translate the old Dutch sources. Between 1895 and 1897, he published the Records of New Amsterdam, the minutes of the city council of New Amsterdam. Translations of the six original folios had been made by his predecessor, except for the first one, which was made by a man named Westbrook (who had done a poor job). O’Callaghan’s translations were reworked by an unnamed scholar and Fernow did the editing and made a new translation of the first original folio, completely rejecting Westbrook’s translations.79 Fernow, however, was held back in his good intentions by a lack of
knowledge of the seventeenth century, resulting in some mistranslations and mistranscription
74 Gehring, 289. Jacobs (1999), 18.
75 J. Monet, “O’Callaghan, Edmund Bailey” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10 (2003), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/o_callaghan_edmund_bailey_10E.html, retrieved 06-17-2019.
76 Gehring, 288. 77 Gehring, 290. 78 Jacobs (1999), 21.
79 W.L. Strong, “Introduction” in The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653-1674 anno Domini, ed. B. Fernow,
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of proper names.80 An example of this is the inconsistent transcription of the name David, which is regularly given as Dauid.81
In the early twentieth century, Arnold John Ferdinand van Laer assumed the office of archivist and he was not pleased at all with the translations that had been made by his predecessors. He began new translations, but when he had finished translating the first volume of the collection of the New York State Archives (the first of three volumes of the Register of
the Provincial Secretary, 1638-1660), disaster struck. On March 29, 1911, a fire broke out in
the New York State Library in Albany, the state’s capitol. The archives suffered a lot of damage, but many Dutch records were miraculously saved because they had been stored on the bottom shelves of the cabinets. When these collapsed, they were covered by the English records that shielded them from total consumption by the fire.82 Even though this was a severe setback, Van Laer had his translation so fresh in mind that he was able to rework O’Callaghan’s translation, fixing numerous errors.83 Before he retired, Van Laer made numerous translations, which would
lay on the shelves for another few decades, until they were published in 1973.
Even though many of the Dutch records have been transcribed and translated, there is still even more that has not been. New documents turned up over the years; the correspondence of Govert Loockermans, and an until 2003 unknown 1635 letter by Wouter van Twiller (sixth director of the New Netherland colony) to the W.I.C. are two examples of such findings.84 The New Netherland Institute, established in 1974 by its director Charles Gehring, seeks to find all these sources on New Netherland to transcribe and translate, to make them accessible for study, while trying to stay as true as possible to the form of the originals.85
The Records of New Amsterdam and the Council Minutes have frequently been used in modern historical research. However, scholars have not used community theory, social network theory, or drinking culture to look at these sources, even though these approaches seem promising at first glance (and they prove to be, during this thesis). On the next pages of this thesis, I will outline the theories.
80 Gehring, 290.
81 In 17th-century Dutch writing, the u was used for both the u and the v. 82 Jacobs (1999), 20.
83 Gehring, 291.
84 Gehring, 295. Jacobs (2004), 227-228.
85https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/about-nni/, retrieved 06-17-2019. C.T. Gehring, “Introduction” in
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1. Theoretical Framework
On July 3, 1656, before the Court of New Amsterdam, Schout (law enforcement officer) Nicasius de Sille sued Dirck Clasen Braeck for having tapped alcohol on Sunday during the sermon. In his defense, Braeck said he had only treated Nicolaes Verleth (a commies of the WIC86), Cornelis Aertsen (likely a WIC official87), Ide van Vorst (farmer), and their wives to a beer “through friendship and good neighbourhood, without taking a penny therefor, as they did him many favours heretofore when after his cattle.”88 The defendant was excused with a
warning.
This anecdote reveals the existence of three different forms of community in mid-seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. First, there was the community that went to church on Sunday, to attend the sermon. This community mainly consisted of the members of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the only religion allowed to be practiced in the open.89 It was strictly Calvinist, but from the winter of 1656 onwards, the boundaries began to loosen to such an extent that other Christians, such as Lutherans, could go to the church (i.e. for baptisms) without it feeling uncomfortable because they had to comply with dogmas they did not agree with.90 In 1660, the ecclesial community of the Dutch Reformed Church consisted of 371 people.91 Braeck and his fellow drinkers were apparently not part of this community, having not attended the service in the church. The second form of community one can find was political: the one that regulated drinking laws in the town, of which Schout Nicasius de Sille was a part. The third form of community to be found in this anecdote is the most important one in this respect: the social community formed by the drinking partners. The words Braeck used to describe the people he was drinking with are very revealing. They show that he felt connected to them; they were neighbors, part of the same community, and through that, he allows us to perceive a part of his identity as inhabitant of New Amsterdam. Braeck had an emotional attachment to his drinking partners, perceiving Verleth, Aertsen, Van Vorst, and their wives as
86 Commies was a rank of Dutch officials or civil servants. More important than a cleric, but less important than
the head of a department. The term now does not exist anymore in the Dutch governmental system.
87 This is a guess, derived from two other cases, one in which Cornelis Jansen, wood sawyer, demands payment
for service during the last troubles with the Indians and one in which Aertsen, together with Thomas Hall, demands payment for repaired fences as they were Overseers of the Common Fences on the Island of Manhattans. RNA, vol. 2, 91-93.
88RNA, vol. 2, 131.
89 J. Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009), 144.
90 E. Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 136, 186-ff.
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his friends. They helped him out when he was having trouble with his cattle, so he treated them to a drink, which was the normal thing to do.
It is fairly easy to give a description of some sort of community in New Amsterdam. Historians of New Amsterdam generally focus on religious identity, race, or political (full, lesser, or no burgher rights) and economical positions (rich and poor, specific occupational groups like bakers) to define communities, but everybody places these communities into a frame of social stratification.92 In one article, published in 1999, Adriana E. van Zwieten notes twice that women’s lives revolved around family, friends, and neighbors, but she does not really elaborate on this hint about social communities more than telling that women helped each other around the birth of a child.93 It appears that the stressing of a religious identity, such as Judaism or Calvinism, or a racial identity is enough to define the different communities in New Amsterdam, which is too simple because it ignores the possibility of relations between people from various backgrounds. This is especially the case in Dutch taverns, where it did not matter what one’s background was.94
One notable exception in this scholarly tradition goes beyond this frame of politics and economics. Even though she does not entirely break loose therefrom, Susannah Shaw Romney does add some social touches to the story. In her book New Netherland Connections, she stresses the importance of people’s intimate networks: “a web of ties that developed from people’s immediate, affective, and personal associations and spanned vast geographic and cultural distances.”95 She argues that these intimate networks were crucial to building a Dutch
empire, and that women were the main builders and maintainers of these networks that were
92 J.A. Schiltkamp, “On Common Ground: Legislation, Government, Jurisprudence, and Law in the Dutch West
Indian Colonies: the Order of Government of 1629” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch
Colonial Period in America, vol. 70, no. 4 (1997), 73-80. W.F. Page, ““By Reason of Their Colour”:
Africans in New Netherland, 1624-1674” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch Colonial
Period in America, vol. 71, no. 4 (1998), 75-84. J.H. Williams, ““Abominable Religion” and Dutch
(In)tolerance: The Jews and Petrus Stuyvesant” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch
Colonial Period in America, vol. 71, no. 4 (1998), 85-91. M. Dickinson Shattuck, ““For the peace and
welfare of the community”: Maintaining a Civil Society in New Netherland” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly
Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, vol. 72, no. 2 (1999), 31. J. Jacobs (1999), 279-338. D.J.
Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture in Early New York” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the
Dutch Colonial Period in America, vol. 73, no. 2 (2000), 28-33. L. Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice:
Jews in New Amsterdam 1654” in De Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in
America, vol. 77, no. 2 (2004), 23-30.
93 A.E. van Zwieten, ““[O]n her woman’s troth”: Tolerance, Custom, and the Women of New Netherland” in De
Halve Maen: Quarterly Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, vol. 72, no. 1 (1999), 4, 12.
94 Hell, 85.
95 S. Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century
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built around family and kin.96 The underlying assumption Romney makes in her book is that all networks she describes are rationally and carefully built by people with their own economic position and prosperity in mind. While her work shows that the people of New Netherland had extensive networks spanning the Atlantic and shows how these networks grew, she fails to describe how the connections in these networks formed on a purely social level.
Romney does stumble upon the matter of alcohol in the New World, but mainly when it comes to the illegal trade between the Europeans and the natives (again for the purpose of economic networks). On one occasion, she touches on an important point: in 1656, Erick Michiels from Finland and Cornelis Martensz from Sweden had given beer to natives as a gift. They were sued for it because it was against the resolution that forbade the trade of alcohol with the natives. The two newcomers had probably been eager to establish economic relationships, says Romney, “buying a few people a beer doubtless struck them as a good way to make friends and trading partners among their new neighbors.”97 This sentence has a sarcastic tone to it that
implies Romney’s neglect of the importance of the anecdote: the importance of alcohol in establishing social and communal relations.
It must be said that, while Romney talks about relationships and networks, she only uses some terms derived from network theory; she does not study these networks extensively, she merely describes that they were there through a quantity of qualitative sources. Talking networks, she does not write about communities; she cannot do that because she does not touch upon the subjects of identity and emotions that are involved in the dynamics of communities. Community, identity, and emotions are three things that are heavily interwoven and cannot be disconnected from each other. Additionally, one of Romney’s fundamental assumptions, that early modern people were individualistic and did not have strong communal ties (besides family), has been proven wrong.98 Romney has taken one step towards fully understanding the New Amsterdam community by describing the existence of widely spread networks. However, this can be taken further by diving into the social community of New Amsterdam, and by cutting through the social structures, for which network theory will prove to be useful.99
In this chapter, I will outline the theoretical framework that I will be using to research that social community. First, I will discuss the three key terms community, identity, and
96 It was already discovered in the nineteenth century that family structures were indeed important in “shaping
the forms of the wider society” Albeit latently. J. Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The
Citizens of Granada, 1570-1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
97 Romney, 164. 98 K. Davison, 460. 99 Davison, 466.
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emotions; their historiography, definitions, and theories. Second, I will write about network theory, which I will use to visualize the community of New Amsterdam. Thirdly, I will discuss drinking culture, the theory behind the social lubricant alcohol, the factor that tied people together.
1.1 Community, Identity, and Emotions
Communities are a fundamental aspect of society, “perhaps its very core,” says sociologist Graham Day.100 The distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society, or association, (Gesellschaft) dates from 1887, when the influential German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies explained this now famous distinction in his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. “All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world.”101 Society is a vague and superficial concept, while community is the more genuine and
concrete.102 Still, “the term ‘community’ is one of the most elusive and vague in sociology”; broadly speaking, it “refers to those things which people have in common, which bind them together, and gives them a sense of belonging with one another.”103 Sociologist Ruth Durant
has defined community as “a territorial group of people with a common mode of living striving for common objectives.”104 According to sociologist Roland L. Warren, “communities include
a specific population, living within a specific geographic area, amongst whom there are present shared institutions and values and significant social interaction.”105 A very positive definition
of community is given by Robert A. Nisbet: a community encompasses “all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion and continuity in time.”106 In 1983, David Lee and Howard
Newby termed community as “a sense of common identity, enduring ties of affiliation and harmony based upon personal knowledge and face-to-face contact.”107 Day gives a definition
100 G. Day, 1.
101 F. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. Tönnies is
often criticized for a too romanticizing idea of community because of his sentimental approach of the rural community. His definition should therefore be seen more as an ideal type rather than a classification. S. Brint, “Gemeinschaft Revisited: A Critique and Reconstruction of the Community Concept” in Sociological
Theory, vol. 19, no. 1 (2001), 2-3.
102 Tönnies, 19. 103 Day, 1.
104 Durant, quoted in Day, 9.
105 R.L. Warren, The Community in America (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1963), 2. Warren himself
admits that this is a vague characterization.
106 R.A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1966), 47.
107 D. Lee & H. Newby, The Problem of Sociology: An Introduction to the Discipline (London: Hutchinson,
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that is twofold: “A community is a place, or setting, displaying certain social characteristics, that can be identified and described; but community is also something that is felt, and which has an emotional or affective impact.”108
There is no real consensus on a definitive definition for the term “community.” Historian Don Harrison Doyle even seems to implicitly imply that communities differ through time and space; that the definition of community has to be rewritten in accordance to the subject that is studied.109 All of the definitions mentioned above have their flaws. Durant’s does not take into account that communities cross borders (people playing online games, members of the same family living on different continents, etc.), and within communities, people do not necessarily have to strive for common objectives. Warren has the same regional problem as Durant. Nisbet’s definition can only lead to small communities made up of family and close friends. He excludes larger communities. Also, communities are not necessarily continuing: when the Dutch football team plays a match, the Dutch will root for that one team. When the players return to their respective clubs and play matches for their own teams, the supporting community falls apart into different groups of fans, sometimes even with bitter rivalries. Lee and Newby suffer from the same problem, and their face-to-face part also is not necessary (i.e. people in the Johan Cruijff ArenA watching a football match of Ajax are part of a community, but they will never have face-to-face contact with all 54,989 other supporters). Day’s own twofold definition is shaky as well. If we stick to this definition, a building, the desolate town of Chernobyl, a football match, and a birthday can be a community. These things are no living entities; they cannot feel an emotional or affective impact; they are merely the means through which people can form a community. They are forms of space.
Michel de Certeau made a distinction between place (“the order in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence”; distinct locations) and space (“practiced place”, places used in many ways by human beings).110 There are four different
notions of space. The first is physical (geographical) space, the environment, as described by Fernand Braudel in his La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II (1949).111 This notion of space comes closest to the notion of place; it is a perceptible context that is visible to the people within that context (the mentioned building or a specific town,
108 Day, 31.
109 D.H. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois 1825-70 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1978), 155.
110 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117. 111 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: HarperCollin,
