By the time Judith Stuyvesant gave ‘to the Reformed Mother Dutch Church or Congregation of the citty of New York’ her ‘Church or Chappel Situtated (sic) on my bowery or farms’, the site had witnessed decades of weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Judith included the chapel’s wooden structure, hewn out of the old-growth forests that had made up the physical landscape of the Lenape people, in her will, and she made provisions for the community to reuse that wood when it began to decay, as it inevitably would.⁴ Women from the surrounding bowery village had sat with scores of children in that chapel, likely segregated in the centre of the sanctuary that was rimmed by benches intended for male congregants, following early modern Dutch Reformed practice.⁵ The bowery’s chapel had played host to several ministers, but none wrote more prolifically (and poetically) about the diversity of his time in that community than the reverend Henricus Selijns. Gender, enslavement, dispossession, and war infused the verses Selijns penned in his 1663 wedding gift poem entitled Bruydloft Toorts (Bridal Torch) for his friends’ marriage in New Amsterdam. In it, he described the colonists’ revenge for the Esopus attack of Wiltwijck, such as burned crops and the murder and dispossession of Indigenous people, specifically women and children.⁶ Women in Indigenous communities across the eastern seaboard held natal rights to land and waterways alongside men, in contrast to the patrilineal norm in Northern Western Europe. Such clashing conceptions of usage led to violence directed against Native women and people in general, colonial violence that made up the tapestry of Judith’s life in New Netherland. The geography of warfare shaped the location and placement of the chapel’s surrounding community.

In 1655, an overwhelming force of Indigenous peoples from the river valleys and eastern coast occupied New Amsterdam, partly in retaliation for the Dutch incursion into the Delaware river valley and the murder of an Indigenous woman by a Dutch colonist, Hendrick van Dijck. The woman had reportedly been killed for taking a peach from van Dijck’s bowery. Left alone in New Amsterdam while her husband sailed south to conquer the Swedish Delaware colony for the Dutch, Judith would have borne witness to scores of burned boweries and known the women, children, and men taken hostage. Judith’s husband Petrus settled a group of free Black families on the border of his bowery as a buffer for any future invasion and requested the Dutch West India Company (wic) send enslaved African men to aid in later war efforts against the Esopus.⁷ The Stuyvesant bowery’s wheat fields, dairy cows, pigs, horses, wagons, sleighs, and brick bowery house tied it to Dutch early modern culture. Its chapel’s wooden frame physically and religiously marked the land as a colonised space; the diverse women and children gathered in the sanctuary’s centre promised successive generations committed to the Dutch colonial project of dispossession.

By the time that Judith wrote her will, scores of Black couples had spoken their vows at the chapel on the Stuyvesants’ bowery.⁸ At least one elderly Black woman within that community, named Mayken van Angola, may even have remembered the site before the chapel was erected. Mayken had lived in southern Manhattan at least two decades longer than Judith, and in her freedom petition of 1662 testified that she had been enslaved to the wic and was among the first Black women to arrive in the colony.⁹ She arrived as an adolescent or young woman. Brought in as comfort women by the wic for the men enslaved to the company, these young women faced a harsh existence and were, as historians Leslie Harris and Susanah Shaw Romney assert, explicitly meant for both physical and reproductive labour.¹⁰ Andrea Mosterman has persuasively argued that the Dutch used the importation of enslaved peoples throughout their global empire to displace local populations and claim land.¹¹ Such activities also gesture to the West India Company’s desire that these captive women would produce a certain kind of upright enslaved worker for the colony. No such official settlement plan existed for European arrivals to New Netherland, despite small numbers and anxieties about Indigenous peoples and the growing English presence in Long Island and New England.¹² Nevertheless, the stories of Mayken and other early African women uncover the importance of Black women in the creation of a certain type of racialised subject: progeny meant not merely for labour but who, at least in the first generation of settlement, could be inculcated to a certain degree of socio-religious loyalty.

Mayken, like Judith, worshipped in the Dutch Reformed Church and witnessed community baptisms. But inequality infused the entwined nature of these early American women’s lives. Mayken negotiated an attenuated freedom alongside two friends – one that included the stipulation that they take turns serving Judith’s household by cleaning the Stuyvesant property. Mayken subsequently gained her full freedom after approaching the court a second time in 1663.¹³ Although her final petition cited her ill health and advanced age, Mayken lived several more decades as a vital member of the free Black bowery community: she married twice – both husbands, Domingo d’Angola and Manuel Pieters, were free Black landowners. When Mayken wed Manuel, six decades after arriving in the colony, she said her vows at the chapel on the Stuyvesants’ Bowery.¹⁴

When Mayken was laid to rest at the end of her long and eventful life, she may have been buried in the Stuyvesant family vault. While the burial of an African-descended woman with a prominent Dutch colonial ruling family might have been meant as a final act of honour, if she were indeed interned on the bowery, Mayken’s earthly remains would not rest near the descendants of the majority of the Black community, either enslaved or free.¹⁵ Scholars have detailed the activities of executioners (some of whom were African), gravediggers, and aansprekers (funeral bidders), in the context of colonial New Netherlands, but little attention has been given to the duties performed by women in caring for the dead.¹⁶ Before her burial, Mayken’s body would have been prepared by those close to her, who washed, shrouded, and laid her out on a bed of straw, as Mayken had no doubt done for many others during her own lifetime. Mayken’s hands, which had cleaned the Stuyvesants’ property, would have also likely prepared the bodies of her friends Susanna and Lucretia, who had not lived to see a day when their freedom was not attenuated. Judith Stuyvesant took care to ensure the preservation of the ‘tombe or vault which was built by my deceased husband in the said Church’, but made no mention of arrangements for Mayken’s burial in the vault.¹⁷ Mayken outlived Judith, so if she were interred in the vault it would have been at the behest of Judith’s son, Nicolaes Willem, or his second wife, Elisabeth.¹⁸ Judith’s great-grandson Petrus Stuyvesant would, in the nineteenth century, officially open the family vault to the burial of those he enslaved and their families. By the time of Mayken’s death, enslaved African-descended people were being brought in increasing numbers into the colony and, by the turn of the century, they were buried in a separate burial ground outside the city.¹⁹

Anna, one of Judith Stuyvesant’s granddaughters, grew up on the bowery, but her life starkly contrasted with her grandmother’s. Anna lived through the deaths of her father in 1698 and elder brother Petrus, who died by drowning in 1706, when she was nine and seventeen years old respectively. Petrus died a year after the Dutch Reformed Church community of New York refused to recognise the legitimacy of his marriage to Rachel Eckeson, a local woman of lower status, thus dooming his infant son to carry the name Benoni, a term which publicly denoted bastard status for male children.²⁰ After the death of her father Nicolaes Willem Stuyvesant, Anna’s mother Elizabeth married the English captain George Sydenham, who was physically abusive. Anna and her siblings, as Judith’s last living heirs, inherited Judith’s ‘gold and silver either coined or uncoined consisting in Jewells’, her ‘best Casse [Case] or Coobert [cupboard]’ as well as all her ‘China Earthen Ware’ and ‘all my linen, none excepted’.²¹

Despite such an inheritance, Anna Stuyvesant’s childhood was marked by want and abuse. Anna’s family was alienated from her mother’s female relatives through a series of legal suits pressed by George. He also locked away food, and Anna’s mother testified that she sometimes had to hide food ‘in the cellar under the tub’ for her children to eat. Cellars were frequently places where enslaved labourers were forced to live out their days in captivity. Such hidden places were meant to mask the active labour of the household that wealthy and middling Low County women were tasked with managing.²² Elisabeth maintained that in addition to abusing her and her children from her first marriage, George ‘tied the negroes up and whipped them for nothing’. The Sydenhams enslaved ten people at the time: four men, two women, two little boys, and two little girls.²³ Due to English common law, George claimed the lands that Elisabeth brought into their marriage and attempted to wrest title to the bowery from her grasp as well, even though the will of her first husband, Nicolaes Willem Stuyvesant, ensured the bowery would legally pass to their children in the event of his death. George had Elisabeth arrested and imprisoned after she refused to leave the bowery, and Anna – by then a young widow – sheltered her mother in New Jersey after breaking her out of jail. In the end, only Anna’s brother Gerardus’s gendered claim to the land prevented George’s efforts to take possession of the bowery.

Wills have long been used to construct histories of New Netherland’s colonial past, and even chart the changes experienced by colonists and the enslaved under first Dutch and then English rule.²⁴ Within the lines of Judith’s will lay pathways towards exploring the ways that European women living under Dutch rule constructed and conceived of their possessions and environments as part of the Dutch colonial project. Enslavement shaped the lives of most African-descended women in the colony, but some were free, and a few owned lands near the Stuyvesant Bowery. Mayken’s story uncovers the memories that such African women held about the bowery and the strength of their social ties to the place histories have most frequently associated with the Stuyvesant family. Despite the ascendancy of English common law, Judith conveyed land to her neighbours, and Dutch female trading culture continued to proliferate across the newly conquered New York. Yet, legal arguments resting on Roman-Dutch precedent versus English coverture miss the ways that these changes were racialised, enacted in violence, and played out in gendered spaces that were actively being claimed and transformed by the actions of colonial men and women. Judith described the bowery in her will, not primarily in terms of ‘Lands and real Estate’ but rather as linens, cash, and furniture. While Judith’s male grandchildren inherited the lands that made up the bowery, it was her female descendants who carried with them the material bowery that Judith claimed. When Anna Stuyvesant Prichard wrote her own will in 1759, she, like her grandmother before her, passed down gold, linens, furniture, and money. Her brother Gerardus inherited the bowery and the enslaved men, women, and children who toiled on the property.²⁵

The spaces described in Judith Stuyvesant’s will – her chapel, family vault, and lands of inheritance – when read alongside the evidence of diverse women’s lives offer an alternate view into colonial New Netherland and New York. These documents illuminate how possession operated in multiple forms: Judith’s bequests, Mayken’s requests, and Anna’s inheritance. Such documents reveal the myriad ways that possession was always refracted through the prism of experience for early Americans and how considering gender from diverse perspectives can offer deep avenues of historical discovery, from documents that have long been positioned as fragments.