Military History of New Jersey by David Petriello

Author:David Petriello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

K IEFT’ S W AR

The first major war to be fought in New Jersey erupted soon after the expulsion of the English. William Kieft, the leader behind that move, had arrived in New Netherlands in 1638. He was in charge of a small yet potentially profitable colony of about eight hundred souls. Starting in 1630, the Dutch inhabitants of Manhattan had also been spilling over into modern-day Hudson County, establishing the patroonship of Pavonia. Kieft’s dealings with the natives soon turned antagonistic. Attempts by the governor to extract tribute from the tribes failed and only strained relations further. The theft of some pigs from the farm of David de Vries ultimately became the cause de célèbre that allowed Kieft to launch a punitive raid against a Raritan village on Staten Island. The Raritans, in return, would burn de Vries’s house and kill four of his workers.

Murder followed murder as the situation slowly escalated. A local Dutchman, Claes Swits Rademacher, was murdered with an axe by a Wappinger in 1641. That same year, a drunken brawl turned violent between Hackensack Indians and some Dutch colonists at AchterKol along the present-day Hackensack River. Fear among the residents led to the formation of a council of twelve to deal with the impending crisis.

Kieft soon took matters into his own hands, launching a punitive expedition against the natives in 1642. Unfortunately for the Dutch, the force got lost in the dark. A second expedition sent later would fare no better. Anger began to mount against the governor due to his perceived inaction in the matter, “keeping himself protected in a good fort, out of which he had not slept.” 13 In response to both local criticism as well as his own ideas concerning the natives, Kieft launched an all-out war against the Indians of New York and New Jersey in early 1643.

On February 26, 1643, a party of eighty Dutch soldiers under Sergeant Rodolf entered an Indian refugee camp in Pavonia, Jersey City. The Weckquaesgeek and Tappan had sought protection at the Dutch settlement following attacks by their traditional enemies, the Mahican. Falling upon the helpless natives, the Dutch massacred over eighty men, women and children. David de Vries, who opposed the move by the governor, wrote years later that “about midnight I heard a great shrieking and went to the ramparts of the fort and I looked over to Pavonia, and saw nothing but firing and heard the shrieks of the savages being murdered in their sleep.” 14 Their bodies were thrown into trenches, and those who escaped fled to New Amsterdam thinking their assailants to be Mahican.

Infants were torn from their mothers’ breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to

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