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Great Events from History: American History, 1492-1775 - Exploration to the Colonial Era

Kieft’s War

by Michael J. O’Neal

Kieft’s War, also known as the Wappinger War, was a series of conflicts between the Dutch colony of New Netherland and the Lenape and Wappinger Indian tribes in what is modern-day New York and New Jersey. It is named for Willem Kieft, the director-general of New Netherland, who ordered an attack on the Indians without the backing of his advisory council.

Date: 1643-1645

Locale: New Netherland (New York and New Jersey)

KEY FIGURES

Willem Kieft

Claes Swits

David Pieterszoon de Vries

SUMMARY OF EVENT

Kieft’s War had its origins in a number of factors. One was that the Dutch colonists of New Netherland, under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, were unable to understand the concepts of land ownership as the native tribes in and around Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley understood them. When the colonists paid for land with such items as muskets, wampum, and other trade goods, they thought they owned the land. In contrast, the natives believed that the colonists were leasing the land. Believing that the land was theirs, the Dutch colonists increasingly encroached on land occupied by the tribes, and they drove off any natives who tried to hunt on the land. Adding to the problem was cattle grazing. The Dutch let their livestock roam free, but the cattle destroyed the natives’ crops, and in time, natives began to kill any cattle that wandered onto their fields. A third factor contributing to the outbreak of war was the behavior of Kieft himself. Shortly after his arrival at the colony, he saw that it was in difficult financial straits, largely because of the high cost of building and manning fortifications. He sought to remedy the situation by taxing the natives nations. The plan backfired, for it worsened relations with the tribes and produced tensions that would lead to warfare.

Oddly, what touched off hostilities was the disappearance of a few hogs from the farm of David Pieterszoon de Vries. The hogs were likely purloined by other Dutch colonists, but members of the Raritan tribe were blamed. Kieft sent a party of soldiers to a Raritan village, where they killed several people. The Raritan retaliated by burning down de Vries’s house and killing four of his farmhands. Then in 1641, a man from the Wickquasgeck tribe arrived at the house of one Claes Swits, an elderly Swiss immigrant and the owner of a public house. The Indian posed as a buyer of cloth, but his true motive was to kill Swits in retaliation for the death of his uncle at Swits’s hands years earlier. Kieft demanded that the Wickquasgeck turn the killer over, but the tribe refused. Kieft believed that this and other attacks along the frontier would bolster support for a war on the neighboring tribes. To that end, he assembled a number of Dutch colonists known as the Twelve Men, a council he formed to advise him. (The Twelve Men were the first representational body in the Dutch colony; subsequent bodies were the Eight Men and the Nine Men.) The council urged Kieft to hold off, believing it was possible to come to an agreement with the Wickquasgeck and avoid war—which none of the settlers particularly wanted, since New Netherland was a trading colony and the settlers depended on trade with native allies. Nevertheless, the council agreed that the killer of Swits needed to be brought to justice, but a military expedition sent to attack the Wickquasgeck village was unable to locate it. Months passed with no peace overtures from the Wickquasgeck, and when the Twelve Men called for political reform, Kieft dissolved the council.

WAR BREAKS OUT

In 1643, a small number of colonists, some of whom had served on the council of Twelve Men, joined with Kieft and urged war on the neighboring tribes. Kieft decided to attack two settlements. One was Corlaer’s Hook (on today’s Lower East Side of Manhattan), the other was Pavonia (today’s Jersey City). These settlements held a large number of refugees who had come to them under pressure from the Mohawk tribe, who were allies of the Dutch. Kieft divided his force. One was to attack Pavonia, the other to attack Corlaer’s Hook. The nighttime attacks were to take place on February 25, 1643. It was clear that the war parties were to show no mercy, for even children were killed in the attacks—which took place over the vehement objections of de Vries, who often functioned as a go-between between the Lenape and Kieft. He recorded in his diary that the natives were murdered in their sleep.

The massacres touched off two years of warfare between the local native tribes and New Netherland, as native warrior attacked Dutch settlements—which provoked retaliatory violence from the settlers. One of the worst instances of violence took place at the town of Pound Ridge in March 1644. A force of about 130 New Netherland soldiers led by Captain John Underhill attacked the village at night and set it ablaze. As many as 700 natives were killed in the raid, the largest number of casualties in any single attack in the war. It was this massacre that forced the hand of the native confederacy to sue for peace. The war ended in 1645, leaving estimates of 1,600 Native Americans dead.

Map based on Adriaen Block’s 1614 expedition to New Netherland, featuring the first use of the name.

GEAmerExpCo_p0233_0001.jpg

Image via Wikimedia Commons. [Public domain.]

The question that remained was why the Dutch soldiers not only launch a surprise attack on the Indians but slaughter them, including defenseless women, children, and the elderly—in other words, noncombatants. A likely explanation was simple racism. The Indians were seen as culturally and morally inferior. The secretary of the colony, Isaac de Rasière in the late 1620s described the indigenous people in a 1628 letter as “cruel by nature” and “very libidinous.” Calvinist ministers regarded the Indians as heathens. Throughout the 1630s, as the Dutch population grew, there were numerous instances of theft and alcohol-fueled brawls between settlers and the Indians. Further, the Dutch settlers frequently used the word wilden in letters and travel accounts to describe in the indigenous people. The word referred to the stereotypical belief that the Indians were wild and savage, with no religion, no civilization. In these circumstances, it was easy for soldiers and others to dehumanize the Indians.

A further factor was the fear of a conspiracy among the Indian tribes against the Dutch settlement. Ironically, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the actions of the Dutch created the very “conspiracy” that they feared. Kieft was aware of the Pequot War that had taken place in nearby Massachusetts in 1636-1637. From that war he learned that the best way to subdue the Indians was by overwhelming force and the targeting of native villages.

SIGNIFICANCE

Kieft’s War was one of the earliest conflicts between settlers and Indians in the region. The massacres perpetrated by the Dutch encouraged the tribes in the region to unite. Because the Dutch West India Company was dissatisfied with Kieft, the company recalled him and replaced him with Peter Stuyvesant; Kieft was killed in a shipwreck on his way back to the Netherlands. Further, many Dutch settlers in New Netherland returned to the Netherlands out of growing fear of attacks on the Indians. The result was the colony grew slowly, and in 1664-1667, the English seized control of the colony. Meanwhile, the memory of the massacres at Pavonia and Corlaer’s Hook remains strong among natives in the region. One Lenape legal scholar, Steven Newcomb, in 2013 discussed the massacres in Indian Country Today as an example of the “centuries-long perpetration of genocide against our nations and people by Christian European colonizing powers.”

Anne Hutchinson, significant for her role in the Antinomian controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was killed during Kieft’s War, along with all but one of her seven children.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

O’Neal, Michael J. "Kieft’s War." Great Events from History: American History, 1492-1775 - Exploration to the Colonial Era, edited by Michael J. O’Neal, Salem Press, 2023. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GEAmerExpCo_0081.

APA 7th

O’Neal, M. J. (2023). Kieft’s War. In M. J. O’Neal (Ed.), Great Events from History: American History, 1492-1775 - Exploration to the Colonial Era. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

O’Neal, Michael J. "Kieft’s War." Edited by Michael J. O’Neal. Great Events from History: American History, 1492-1775 - Exploration to the Colonial Era. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2023. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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