Plockhoyists on Delaware Bay

Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy was a Dutch Mennonite and radical social thinker born around 1625. He spent time in England during the 1650s and hung out with the Levellers and others interested in forming utopian communes. Based on this experience, and his wide reading, he wrote a pamphlet called A Way Propounded to Make the Poor of these and Other Nations Happy. 

Plockhoy's aim was to create a "little commonwealth" separate from the rest of society, an elite of work and spiritual values based on co-operative principles in order that "we may better eschew the yoke of the temporall and spirituall pharaohs, who have long enough domineered over our bodies and souls and set up again (as in former times) righteousness, love and brotherly sociableness, which are scarce any where to be found." The co-operative was to share ownership, risk, capital, and work, and no form of hierarchy or leadership of any kind would be allowed. Profits would be shared amont he members equitably.

Plockhoy even had a plan for child care:

because only a quarter of the women were required for cleaning and cooking when groups of families lived together in communal complexes or settlements, three quarters of the women and girls, he urges, would be free to engage in same manual labor as the men.

There could be no clergy of any kind, so that in religion there would be 

"no preheminency, or sole privilege . . . of offering anything or of speaking first." Consequently, such a co-operative would need to vet prospective new members to ensure only "honest, rationall, impartiall persons", that is, personalities free from rigid confessional allegiances as well as vice, were admitted.

(Various sources, including wikipedia, say that Plockhoy was an advocate for "unrestricted religious toleration," but note that among those he excluded from his own community were Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and anyone else who believed in having ministers or priests.)

Having articulated this vision, Plockhoy then set about trying to establish a community of like-minded people based on his social/religious ideas. He tried first in England, but could not get sponsorship. So he went back to the Netherlands and began organizing a colonial venture in Dutch North America.

In 1663 Plockhoy, his wife, their blind son, and about 40 other people landed on Horekil Creek in what is now Delaware; most people think Horekil Creek was what we call Lewes Creek, which would put the settlement in Lewes, but nobody has ever found remains of it, so I think that remains uncertain. Alas for our utopian settlers, their dream was cut short by the outbreak of war between England and the Netherlands the following year; the settlement was burned by the English and the people seem to have dispersed, although Plockhoy and his family may have continued to live in Lewes for some years. And that, alas, seems to be all we know about Plockhoy's communist experiment.

But until today I had never heard of Plockhoy at all, despite being the author of multiple reports and articles on colonial Delaware, so it find this all delightful. What do you suppose happened to those settlers? And can you imagine the conversations they had with other Dutch, Swedish, and British settlers, and the ideas that might have spread out from their strange seed?

Incidentally Plockhoy's collected writings are still in print, including a Kindle edition.

Fascinating.

Quotations are from Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, on which more later.