“That She Shall Be Forever Banished from This Country”: Women, Alcohol, and Elite Enforcement of Native-Dutch Social Distance in New Netherland

In September 1654, the tavern-keeper Maria Goosen Jansz was brought before the Beverwijck [Albany, NY] court for selling alcohol to “a squaw.” Several Dutch men testified against her, alleging that she filled a small pewter bottle for the Native woman. One man even seized the bottle and drank from it, confirming that it in fact contained brandy. Jansz was convicted and warned, and after a subsequent prosecution under the same ordinance, she was fined 300 guilders and temporarily banished from the community. Rather than accompany her into exile, her husband successfully divorced her.

Starting in the 1640s, in the wake of Kieft’s War, Dutch magistrates and the council at New Amsterdam passed ordinances prohibiting alcohol sales to Native peoples ostensibly as a means of preventing violence. However, these laws did little to stop intercultural conflict and uneven prosecutions meant that their effect was largely symbolic. Women tavern-keepers like Jansz and poor and middling men who smuggled alcohol to Native villages and camps were the most common prosecutorial targets under these statutes, which effectively prohibited intimate, small-scale transactions. This paper examines elite regulation of the alcohol trade as a means of delimiting Native and Dutch communities. Dutch magistrates’ prosecutorial choices reflected an effort to bring poor and middling men and women into line with an elite definition of Dutch racial and ethnic identity and to codify an elite ideal of social distance.