PallasThe Lenape and Early Manhattan 4th grade · age 9
By Simit Patel · published October 23, 2026
Director Kieft ordered the Lenape living near New Amsterdam to pay a tax in corn, wampum, and furs to the Dutch colony. Should the Lenape have obeyed that order?
Under what conditions is obedience or disobedience to authority justified?
The Judgment Lab asks: What do we think about that? When we work on the Judgment Lab, our ultimate goal is to articulate our own principles and values in a thoughtful and respectful way.
As you learned in the reading, the Lenape had lived on the land they called Lenapehoking for more than ten thousand years. They governed themselves peacefully. Each community chose its own leader, called a sachem, and that leader could not make big decisions without the community's approval.
When Dutch merchants first showed up, the Lenape welcomed them as trading partners. But the Dutch West India Company wanted more than trade. It claimed a huge stretch of Lenape land and called it New Netherland. In 1626, the Dutch offered the Lenape a small amount of trade goods for the whole island of Manhattan. The Lenape probably thought they were agreeing to share the land, not give it away forever. The Dutch treated it as something they had bought for good.
Then Willem Kieft, the colony's director, tried to force the Lenape to pay taxes in corn, wampum, and furs and to leave their homeland. The Lenape had never agreed to be ruled by Kieft or the Dutch. When the Lenape refused, Kieft launched terrible attacks from 1643 to 1645. Dutch soldiers massacred thousands of Lenape men, women, and children, including a horrifying slaughter at Pavonia. The Lenape fought back, but the destruction was overwhelming.
The Judgment Lab asks under what conditions obedience or disobedience to authority is justified. Authority means the power someone has to give orders and expect people to follow them. A parent has authority over a child, and a teacher has authority over a classroom. But authority can also be claimed by someone who was never given that power by the people being told what to do — as when Director Kieft tried to give orders to the Lenape, even though they had never chosen him as their leader.
Was Director Kieft right to order the Lenape to pay him a tax — and should the Lenape have obeyed that order?
Follow the steps below to complete this Judgment Lab. By the end of the lab, you will have decided whether you think the Lenape should have obeyed Director Kieft's order to pay a tax in corn, wampum, and furs. You will also articulate and test your principles about under what conditions obedience or disobedience to authority is justified.
Step one
Generating claims
Director Kieft ordered the Lenape living near New Amsterdam to pay a tax in corn, wampum, and furs to the Dutch colony. Should the Lenape have obeyed that order?
Yes
No
Step two
Articulating principles and values
Under what conditions is obedience or disobedience to authority justified?
Always, never, or sometimes?
Principles
I think that obedience or disobedience to authority is justified when...
Values and beliefs
I think that because I believe that...
Step three
Testing principles on a new case
The Stamp Act Protests
About a hundred and twenty years after Director Kieft tried to tax the Lenape, people in the thirteen British colonies in America faced a tax question of their own. In 1765, the Parliament in Great Britain passed a law called the Stamp Act. It said that colonists had to buy a special stamped paper for almost everything printed: newspapers, calendars, playing cards, and the papers people signed when they bought land or got married. The money would help pay for British soldiers stationed in America.
The colonists were used to taxes. But their own town meetings and colonial assemblies had always voted on their own taxes, and they chose the men who sat in those assemblies. No colonist voted for anyone in Parliament, which met three thousand miles away across the ocean. Colonists said that meant Parliament had no right to tax them at all. A lawyer in Boston named James Otis and leaders in Virginia like Patrick Henry argued this out loud and in print.
So the colonists disobeyed. Merchants refused to buy British goods. Crowds called the Sons of Liberty frightened the stamp collectors until nearly every one of them quit, and in Boston a mob wrecked a royal official's house. In October 1765, representatives from nine colonies met in New York at the Stamp Act Congress and sent a protest to the king. Within a year, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act — though it insisted it still had the right to make laws for the colonies.
Apply your principle to the new case
According to your general principle, should the American colonists have obeyed the Stamp Act? Why or why not?
From The Lenape and Early Manhattan, a 4th grade history lesson on Pallas.