The Dutch West India Company built New Amsterdam, the capital of its American colony of New Netherland, and designed it to resemble Dutch cities back home. The population of the colony, however, was more ethnically and religiously diverse than was the Dutch homeland.
In July, 1625, the Dutch West India Company
The most persistent myth about the history of New York City is that Minuit cheated the Manhattan
When the company dismissed Minuit in 1632, New Amsterdam was a tiny settlement of some three hundred people, most of them living in small wooden houses with reed roofs, clustered close to the protection of the fort. A windmill used to saw lumber reminded the residents of the Dutch homeland. From the beginning, Manhattan had a very diverse ethnic and linguistic population. The first settlers sent by the company were thirty Walloon families, French-speaking Protestant refugees from the Catholic-controlled southern Netherlands who stubbornly refused to learn Dutch. They would soon be joined by German, English, Spanish, Scandinavian, and Portuguese colonists, rendering the colony extremely polyglot. Slaves imported by the company added Africans to the mixture; by the 1660’, three hundred slaves and seventy-five free blacks lived in the city. When the future Saint Isaac Jogues visited New Amsterdam in 1643, he was told that eighteen different languages were spoken there. Probably only a bare majority of the population during the life of the colony was Dutch; the Netherlands was at the peak of its prosperity in the seventeenth century, and few of its citizens chose to leave it for the New World.
The settlement came close to extinction in the 1640’s due to the mistaken, brutal Indian policy of director-general Willem Kieft
Stuyvesant began a vigorous policy of improvements that, during the 1650’, transformed the bedraggled settlement into a small, distinctly Dutch city containing three hundred buildings and fifteen hundred residents. What had been wandering paths were surveyed and organized into regular streets. A small creek running through the city was widened, its sides were straightened, and it was turned into a canal (later Broad Street) crossed by three stone bridges. The canal, two windmills, and newly built, gable-ended brick residences, roofed with imported Dutch tiles, reminded residents of Holland. A Sunday market held on the banks of the canal permitted farmers from Brooklyn to bring their produce into the center of the settlement. A city pier on the East River led to a busy two-block commercial district of warehouses, workshops, and taverns. In 1653, Stuyvesant established an almshouse for the aged poor, in 1654, an orphan asylum was constructed, and in 1658, a hospital followed. Fearing attack from New England during the first Anglo-Dutch War, Stuyvesant built a high stockade fence (later Wall Street) along the northern border of the city in 1653.
Governor Peter Minuit purchasing the island of Manhattan from Algonquian Indians.
A 1660 map of New Amsterdam located nineteen licensed taverns and three breweries. Merchants met to socialize and conduct business at the stone City Tavern, which became City Hall after the municipal government organized. The rectangular fort enclosed a stone barracks, a guard house, a church, and the governor’s residence. A wide street, later named Broadway, ran north from the fort to the Land Gate in the wall. As the city grew, it clustered around the fort and the East River dockside; much of the land directly south of the wall was planted with vegetable gardens and orchards.
While doing his best to turn New Amsterdam into a neat, orderly Dutch town, Stuyvesant refused to accept the policy of religious toleration that made the Netherlands unique in Europe. Zealously protective of the privileges of the Dutch Reformed Church
Stuyvesant’s dictatorial governing style infuriated many colonists, who accused him of arbitrary rule and political favoritism and complained that he placed the profits of the Dutch West India Company ahead of the colony’s welfare. Led by Adriaen van der Donck
When an English fleet appeared in the harbor in August, 1664, Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but the leading burghers refused to support him, and he reluctantly capitulated. In negotiating the terms of surrender, the citizens induced the English to maintain the existing city structure and to guarantee the continuance of all the rights and freedoms they enjoyed.
Stuyvesant successfully guided the transformation of a struggling settlement into a solidly established European society, imitating its Dutch model. By 1664, New Amsterdam had become a small but vibrant commercial city with the most diverse population in North America. Successful merchants, although still junior partners of the great Dutch magnates, were involved in all aspects of Atlantic commerce. Immigration had increased and the demographic makeup of the immigrants was markedly different: In the colony’s first decades, the colonists were overwhelmingly rootless males. Now, young couples, many with children, chose to join the colony. Citizens became accustomed to managing the affairs of their city.
Dutch New Amsterdam became British New York, but the original city would transmit a heritage of freedom and self-sufficiency to its new incarnation. Parts of its political structure would endure into the nineteenth century. More important, the city would demonstrate that people of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious traditions could live together, for the most part peacefully. As a conspicuous example of successful diversity, New Amsterdam prefigured the future of New York City and the United States.
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Burns, Ric, and James Saunders. New York: An Illustrated History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Lavishly illustrated chapter on New Amsterdam helps visualize life in the colony. -
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Five chapters provide a succinct history of New Amsterdam. -
Cantwell, Anne-Marie, and Diana diZerega Wall. Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Archaeological digs in lower Manhattan reveal details about daily life in New Amsterdam. -
Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Rink carefully analyzes immigration patterns to New Netherland and stresses the importance of private merchants’ activities. -
Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Shorto argues that the social and political practices of New Amsterdam’s inhabitants powerfully influenced the development of American democracy.
Saint Isaac Jogues; Peter Minuit; Peter Stuyvesant.