Part I · TWO HOMELANDS, TWO FLAGS · Chapter 1

Two Witnesses at the Font

Manhattan · 5 July 1662

In the record Elizabeth Cregier (1662–1740) · Martin Cregier (c.1617–c.1711) · Nicasius De Sille (1610–1691) · Francis Cregier (d. 1666) · Walburg De Sille

The record is four lines long. It sits in the baptismal register of the Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam, in the column for July 1662, and it reads, in the church's own shorthand:

Every family history has to start somewhere, and most start with the man whose name it carries. This one carries the name of a cooper from Winschoten named Garret Dircksen Croesen, who had landed across the river at Breuckelen two years before this baptism and was, that same summer, in trouble with his church over some trees. He will get his chapter. But the story of how this family became American does not begin with him. It begins with this child, because of who was standing beside her.

The three witnesses were her grandparents. The first, Martin Kregier, was the Burgomaster of New Amsterdam — the closest thing the town had to a mayor. The second, Nicasius de Silla, is entered with his title, Fiscael: the Schout-Fiscal of New Netherland, the colony's prosecutor, sheriff and attorney general in one office. The third was Martin's wife. In the stone church that stood inside the fort at the foot of Manhattan [19], on a July morning in 1662, a merchant's daughter was baptized with the city's chief magistrate and the colony's chief law officer standing as her sponsors. She was born at the top of the Dutch world in America.

She would die in 1740 on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the widow of that cooper's son, with the English flag over everything she had ever lived under since she was two [1]. A family researcher who had spent the 1920s and 1930s in the Pennsylvania deed books wrote of her and her husband, in 1933, as "that grand and brave old couple, Derrick and Elizabeth, being twice transplanted" [2]. That is the arc of this book, and it is hers first.

Martin Cregier, Burgomaster of New Amsterdam

The man standing at the font had come over around 1642 as a sergeant in the West India Company's militia, with his wife Elizabeth and their two oldest boys, Martin and Francis — both born in the Netherlands [3]. Within a year he had a lot "for a house and garden north of the fort," granted by Governor Kieft in a patent that measures it out in rods, feet, inches and grains [4]. By 1644 he was baptizing a son with the Governor himself as a witness, along with the Fiscal, a ship's captain and the colony's surgeon — "sort of a 'who's who' in New Amsterdam," as the family's own genealogist put it [3]. In 1648 he was one of the town's first four fire wardens. In 1649, "late a sergeant, now a freeman," he gave a power of attorney to collect 1,271 guilders, nineteen stivers and four pennies the Company still owed him for his service [5].

He kept a tavern. He held a share in a privateer called La Garce. He wrote a great many letters, which in a colony where the cooper across the river signed with a mark is its own kind of biography. And on 2 February 1653, when the town was chartered as a city, he was appointed its Burgomaster, serving in the office in 1654, 1659, 1660 and 1663, and as Orphan Master in the years between [5]. Stuyvesant sent him to the Delaware in 1651 to deal with the Swedes; the report he signed there records four Lenape sachems ceding the land around Fort Christina to the Dutch, on the condition that "whenever anything is the matter with his gun, it shall be repaired for nothing" [6]. He sat in the convention of November 1653 that tried to make rules for a colony being squeezed between pirates and the English.

He was, in other words, the establishment. And he was not, on the morning of the baptism, a young man. If the historians who put his death at "aged about ninety" have his birth right, he was somewhere near forty-five when he held his granddaughter at the font — old enough that the next year's work should have gone to someone else.

It did not. On 7 June 1663 the Esopus Indians walked into the palisaded village of Wildwyck, eighty miles up the river, as they did on any market day, and then burned it. Twenty-one people were killed in the fort and the new village outside it; the register of the dead is a list of houses and doorways — "in front of his house," "opposite his door," "on the farm" — and ends with a man, eight women and twenty-six children carried off as prisoners [7]. Stuyvesant gave the expedition to Martin Cregier. He resigned the burgomastership to take it, and on 4 July 1663 — a year, less a day, after he had stood at the font — he was landing two yachts' worth of men and supplies at the mouth of the Esopus Kill [8].

He kept a journal every day of it, in the rain, on the march, for six months. Fifty-two pages of it survive in typescript. It is the only place in four centuries where a member of this family speaks in his own voice at length, and it is not comfortable reading. It records the day he slapped a mutinous horseman with the flat of his sword in front of the officers. It records the assault on the Esopus fort on 5 September — the squaw piling wood who screamed, the chief Papequanaehen among the dead, three soldiers killed, twenty-three Christian prisoners recovered, and an old man who "would not go farther" — "we took him aside and gave him his last meal." And it records, on the march home the next day, in the same flat hand that noted the weather and the tides:

The man who spent twenty years assembling the family's history read those journals several times and wrote that each time he had to pause at that one sentence [8]. So does this book. It will not be the last time the family's own documents say something the family would rather they did not, and the rule from here on is that the document wins.

The last captives were bought back by the end of December. Martin's final entry, on 3 January 1664, has him drifting down on the ebb to the end of Manhattan island and arriving "about twelve o'clock in the Manhattans" [8]. Peace was signed in May. He had been home a week when Stuyvesant gave him the next problem.

Nicasius De Sille, Schout-Fiscal of New Netherland

The other grandfather was a lawyer, and the family history behind him is longer than the colony's. Nicasius De Sille was born at Arnhem, in Gelderland, in 1610. His grandfather and namesake had come to Amsterdam from Mechelen "soon after the revolt of the United Provinces against Spain," been chosen Pensionary of the city, and been sent in 1587 "with others on an embassy to Queen Elizabeth of England"; he was ambassador to Denmark and Germany after that, and when he died in 1600 he was buried in the choir of a church in Amsterdam, which the family's papers call "a very high honor" [9]. So the child at the font had a great-great-grandfather who had stood before Elizabeth I, and a grandfather who was about to stand before her successor's navy.

Nicasius the younger rose to Advocate-Fiscal of the States General, and in 1653 the Company sent him out to be First Councillor to Stuyvesant — "a man well versed in the law and not unacquainted with military affairs; of good character, and satisfactory requirements" [10]. He came with at least two children by a first wife who is nowhere named: a son Lawrence, who clerked in the secretary's office, and a daughter, Walburg. In 1655 he married again, a Tryntje Crougers from The Hague. The marriage lasted about a year and ended in one of the first divorces recorded in New York; the family history says, with a directness the church record does not, that "the lady had a problem; she was drunk most of the time" [10].

On 20 June 1656 he was made Schout-Fiscal, an office "with the capacity to levy punishments and executions of sentences," and he held it until the English came [10]. He stood in for Stuyvesant when the Director-General was away. He took a patent for 265 acres at New Utrecht on Long Island, laid out by the surveyor Jacques Cortelyou — the man who drew the map of the city that opens this book — and built there "the first house covered with red tiles," with a palisade around the garden that the neighbours whispered was against Indians and was in fact against pigs. He kept the town's first record book and "interspersed [it] with poems of his own" [11]. When the family's genealogist reached him he wrote, with some understatement, that Elizabeth "didn't lack for important and notable grandfathers."

The two grandfathers knew each other well, and worked together. In 1660 Stuyvesant named them "as a committee of two" to find a new minister for the church at Breuckelen, and the man they chose, approved by the Classis of Amsterdam on 16 February 1660, was Dominie Henricus Selyns [12]. It will matter to this story that Selyns was the minister who, within two years, walked out to a twenty-eight-acre farm at Gowanus with an elder beside him to tell a young cooper that he could not take communion until the matter of the trees was cleared up. The two men at Elizabeth's font had picked the man who would prosecute her future father-in-law.

Francis Cregier, merchant on the South River

Between these two men, and almost invisible beside them, is the father. Francis Cregier had married Walburg De Sille in the same church on 29 February 1660 — "Frans Kregier, van Borcken, en Walburg de Silla van Mastricht," the register says, giving each of them a European hometown as the Dutch registers always did [13]. He was a merchant "at New Castle on the Delaware," on the river the Dutch called the South River; he was in Manhattan as a witness to a baptism in February 1660, married there a week later, and was there again for his own daughter's baptism in July 1662 [1]. Then, four years later, the Court Minutes of New Amsterdam note "a sale of the estate of Frans Cregier, deceased," on 18 December 1666 [1]. He was dead before his daughter was five. The family history puts her at "about three," which fits an estate settling in late 1666 and a death some time before it; no record of the death itself has been found.

Twenty-two years later, when Elizabeth married, the Breuckelen register called her "j.d. van de Zundt rivier" — a young woman not before married, from the South River [14]. A girl baptized in Manhattan and married in Brooklyn does not get entered as being from the Delaware unless she spent her childhood there; the likeliest reading is that Walburg and the baby went down to New Castle with Francis, and came back up to Manhattan after he died. In 1669 her mother remarried — Willem Bogardus, son of the Reverend Everardus Bogardus and of Anneke Jans, whose farm on the west side of Manhattan would be fought over in the courts for the next two centuries [14, 19]. Elizabeth grew up in that household, with seven Bogardus half-brothers and half-sisters baptized around her in the same church where she had been [1].

What happened to the men at the font

In January 1664, a week after Martin Cregier came home from the Esopus, an Englishman named John Scott rode into the Dutch villages of Long Island with a following of armed men, "some quasi authority from the Duke of York," and a flag. At Breuckelen he raised the flag, told the crowd the ground they stood on belonged to the King of England, and got no answer. So he turned on a boy standing near him — "the son of Burgomaster Krygier," the old Brooklyn history says — and ordered him to take off his hat to the royal standard. The boy refused. Scott struck him. A Dutch bystander said that a man ought to strike men, not boys, four of Scott's followers set on the bystander, and the affair ended with an axe, a retreat, and a threat to burn the town [15].

Which of Martin's sons this was, nobody has been able to say; his known sons were grown men by then, and the family's genealogist leaves the question open. Stuyvesant put Martin on the commission to deal with Scott on 11 January. He was, the genealogist assumes, not present when the boy was struck — "or Scott may have had a few notches carved in his hind side." The point is not who the boy was. The point is that eight months before the surrender, a Dutch family in Breuckelen was already being made to take its hat off to an English flag, and had already refused.

The ships came in August. Four of them, with six hundred men, anchored in Gravesend Bay, and Stuyvesant, who wanted to fight and found nobody willing to fight with him, was made to give the colony up without a shot. The Articles of Capitulation were ratified on 8 September 1664, and nine men signed them. The list runs: P. Stuyvesant, Director-General; N. De Sille, Councillor; Martin Cregier; Paulus L. Van der Grist, Burgomaster; Peter Tonneman, Schout; and four schepens [16].

Both witnesses. Twenty-six months after they stood at the font for a child, the Fiscal and the old Burgomaster signed away the country she had been baptized into. She was two years and two months old.

They took the loss differently. Nicasius went out to his red-tiled house at New Utrecht, where the pigs were, and died there in 1691 [11]. Martin, who had a sloop called the Bedford and, the family history says, a dislike of the English, took it up the Hudson to the Mohawk and settled at Niskayuna, north of Albany. When the Dutch fleet retook the province for fifteen months in 1673, they asked him to serve once more, and he did, valuing the estates of New Orange "above one thousand guilders" to raise money for a government that was gone again within two years [17]. He made his will there in Dutch in 1702 and died, before 1711, at about ninety — in the words of a nineteenth-century historian, "in the Mohawk Valley, away from the English" [18].

Elizabeth stayed. On 5 March 1684 she married Dirck Croesen, "young man not before married, from Brooklyn" — getrouwt tot Breuckelen, married at Breuckelen, in the church her grandfathers had found the minister for [14]. He was the cooper's eldest son; he could not write his name; he was, by then, spending his time on a patent of land eight miles west across the Kill, on Staten Island, that his father had taken under the English. She went with him.

1. Elizabeth's baptism, her father's death and her Bogardus half-siblings: Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 194–196, transcribing Baptisms from 1639 to 1730 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York (Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. II), pp. 55, 65, 95, 121, 134, 143, and the Court Minutes of New Amsterdam, 1666, p. 50. Her death in 1740 and burial in Bucks County: Cruise, p. 194. Throughout this chapter the colonial records are read as Cruise transcribed them, not in the originals; where he and the original ever disagree, the original will win, and this note will say so.
2. Frank King Swain's 1933 note on "that grand and brave old couple": Cruise, p. 80.
3. Martin Cregier's arrival c. 1642 as a Company sergeant, his family, the "who's who" baptism of 1644: Cruise, pp. 196–197, citing NYG&B Baptisms, Vol. II, pp. 15, 17.
4. Patent GG 60 of 18 May 1643, "north of the fort": Cruise, p. 197, citing Gehring (ed.), New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Land Papers, GG 60.
5. Fire warden (1648), the power of attorney for 1,271 guilders (4 August 1649), the burgomastership from 2 February 1653 and the years he served, Orphan Master: Cruise, pp. 198–199, citing O'Callaghan, Register of New Netherland, 1626 to 1674, p. 13, and Scott & Stryker-Rodda, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Vol. III, p. 131.
6. The Fort Nassau report of 9 July 1651: Cruise, pp. 200–201, citing O'Callaghan, Register, pp. 141–142.
7. The attack on Wildwyck, 7 June 1663, and the list of the killed: Cruise, pp. 201–203, citing O'Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, Vol. IV, p. 42.
8. The Esopus journal — the arrival of 4 July 1663, the horseman, the assault of 5 September, the child in the creek, the last entry of 3 January 1664 — and the genealogist's own remark on reading it: Cruise, pp. 203–212, reprinting "Journal of the Second Esopus War, by Capt. Martin Kregier," in O'Callaghan, Documentary History, Vol. IV. The full journal is in the public domain and runs to some fifty-two typescript pages; this chapter quotes a fraction of it.
9. The De Sille line back to the Pensionary of Amsterdam and the 1587 embassy: Cruise, pp. 218–219, quoting documents compiled by Katherine B. K. Weaver (1953) and citing Matthews, "The De Sille Family of Holland," NYG&B Record 34 (Jan. 1903), pp. 24–28, and McCracken, "Nicasius De Sille's Great-Grandfather," The American Genealogist 34 (Apr. 1958), p. 128. The burial place is given there as "the Choir of the Red Church in Amsterdam," and is quoted as printed.
10. Nicasius De Sille's birth, appointment as First Councillor (24 July 1653), the 1655 marriage and divorce, appointment as Schout-Fiscal (20 June 1656): Cruise, pp. 217–220, citing NYG&B Marriages from 1639 to 1801, Vol. IX, p. 19.
11. The New Utrecht patent, the red-tiled house, the palisade and the pigs, the town records with poems in them, his death in 1691: Cruise, pp. 219–223, quoting Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (1867), Vol. I, p. 259, and Weaver's notes from Rambles about Historic Brooklyn.
12. The committee of two that chose Dominie Selyns, approved 16 February 1660: Cruise, p. 220, citing Stiles, Vol. I, p. 138. The Selyns–Croesen tree affair itself is in Cruise, pp. 52–61, and is the subject of a later chapter.
13. Francis Cregier's marriage, 29 February 1660: Cruise, p. 215, citing NYG&B Marriages, Vol. IX, p. 25.
14. Derrick and Elizabeth's marriage record of 5 March 1684 ("van de Zundt rivier"), and Walburg's remarriage to Willem Bogardus in 1669: Cruise, pp. 170–171, citing NYG&B Marriages, Vol. IX, p. 54.
15. John Scott at Breuckelen, January 1664, and "the son of Burgomaster Krygier": Cruise, pp. 212–213, quoting Stiles, Vol. I, p. 122; the commission of 11 January 1664 from O'Callaghan, Register.
16. The Articles of Capitulation, 8 September 1664, and the nine signatures: Cruise, p. 213, citing O'Callaghan, Register of New Netherland, p. 162. The ships in Gravesend Bay: Cruise, p. 92.
17. Martin Cregier's service during the Dutch reoccupation of 1673–74: Cruise, p. 214, citing O'Callaghan, Register, pp. 163, 167.
18. Martin's will (12 January 1702, proved at Albany 3 March 1711), the sloop Bedford, and the two nineteenth-century tributes ("away from the English"): Cruise, pp. 213–217, citing Collections of the New-York Historical Society for 1897, Abstracts of Wills, Liber 8, p. 28, O'Callaghan's History of New Netherland, and Cornelius Hoaglant's Hoaglant history of 1886.
19. Background on New Amsterdam in the 1660s — the church inside Fort Amsterdam, the surrender, and the Anneke Jans farm litigation: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (Doubleday, 2004). Cruise's own note on the Bogardus marriage cites Totten, "Anneke Jans (1607–1663) and Her Two Husbands," NYG&B Record 56 (July 1925), p. 216.