New Amsterdam (1625–1664): Dutch Manhattan Before New York

New Amsterdam was the Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, founded by the Dutch West India Company in 1625 as the capital of the colony of New Netherland. Under directors such as Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant it grew into a busy, multilingual port town. In 1664 it surrendered to the English and was renamed New York, but its Dutch origins still shape the city’s streets and character.

Background: the Dutch in North America

The Dutch interest in the region began with Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage for the Dutch East India Company, when he sailed up the river that now bears his name. Dutch merchants soon followed to trade for beaver pelts with the Lenape, Mahican and Mohawk peoples.

In 1621 the Dutch Republic chartered the West India Company, which received a monopoly over Dutch trade and colonisation in the Atlantic. In 1624 the company sent its first settlers, many of them French-speaking Walloon Protestant refugees, to posts on the Hudson, the Delaware and the Connecticut rivers. A year later it chose Manhattan, with its deep natural harbour, as the colony’s centre.

Founding and the 1626 purchase

In 1625 the engineer Cryn Fredericksz began laying out Fort Amsterdam at the island’s southern tip, and settlers were gathered there from the outlying posts. Peter Minuit, a Walloon born in Wesel, became director in 1626.

That year Minuit bought Manhattan from local Lenape people. The only contemporary record is a letter of 5 November 1626 from Pieter Schaghen, a company official in Amsterdam, who reported that the island had been purchased for goods worth 60 guilders. The goods were probably cloth, metal tools and kettles.

In the nineteenth century the sum was converted into 24 dollars, a figure repeated ever since. It is a poor guide to value, and the Lenape almost certainly did not share the European idea of selling land outright; they probably saw the agreement as granting shared use. The group that sold it may not even have been the island’s main users.

Life in a company town

New Amsterdam was run as a business. Directors appointed by the company held almost all power, and settlers had few rights to govern themselves. Trade in furs, and later in tobacco and other goods, was the town’s lifeblood.

Growth was slow, because few people in the prosperous Dutch Republic wanted to emigrate. To attract settlers, the company in 1629 offered huge estates called patroonships to investors who would bring 50 colonists at their own expense. Only one, Rensselaerswyck near Fort Orange (now Albany), really succeeded. In 1639 the company also gave up its monopoly on the fur trade, opening it to private merchants.

The town itself remained small. It had a fort, a windmill, a church inside the fort walls, warehouses and a canal, the Heerengracht, later filled in to form Broad Street. Houses were built of wood and later of brick, with the stepped gables familiar from towns in the Netherlands.

The town was remarkably diverse. The French Jesuit Isaac Jogues, who visited in 1643, reported that 18 languages were spoken among its inhabitants. Settlers came from the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, France, England and elsewhere.

Slavery was part of New Amsterdam from the start. The company brought enslaved Africans from 1626, and they did much of the work on the fort, roads and farms. In 1644 some were granted a so-called “half-freedom”, with land of their own but continuing obligations to the company, and a small community of free Black landholders formed north of the town.

Kieft’s War and Stuyvesant’s rule

Director Willem Kieft, who arrived in 1638, tried to tax the Lenape and other local peoples and then launched brutal attacks. In February 1643 Dutch soldiers massacred more than 100 Native people sheltering at Pavonia and Corlears Hook. The resulting conflict, known as Kieft’s War, lasted until 1645 and left the colony devastated, with many hundreds of Native people and dozens of settlers killed.

Peter Stuyvesant, a strict Calvinist who had lost his right leg in a battle on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin in 1644, became director-general in 1647. He rebuilt the fort, repaired streets, regulated taverns and in 1653 granted New Amsterdam its own municipal government, with burgomasters and schepens on the Dutch model. The same year the town built a defensive wall on its northern edge, the origin of Wall Street.

His rule was resented by many settlers. In 1649 a group led by the lawyer Adriaen van der Donck sent a petition, the Remonstrance of New Netherland, to the States General in The Hague, complaining of company misgovernment and asking for self-rule. The municipal charter of 1653 was partly a response.

Stuyvesant was intolerant of religions other than the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1654 he tried to expel 23 Jewish refugees who had arrived from Recife in Brazil, but the company’s directors, some of whose shareholders were Jewish, overruled him. In 1657 residents of Flushing signed the Flushing Remonstrance, protesting his persecution of Quakers, a document often cited in the history of American religious liberty.

The English takeover

New Netherland sat between England’s New England and Chesapeake colonies, and English settlers had long pressed into its territory. In March 1664 King Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, granted the whole region to his brother James, Duke of York, even though it was Dutch.

In late August 1664 four English frigates under Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived in the harbour. The fort was weak, gunpowder was short and many townspeople were unwilling to fight. Under pressure from leading citizens, Stuyvesant agreed to generous terms that allowed the Dutch to keep their property, trade and religion. The articles of surrender were signed on 27 August 1664 by the English calendar, 6 September by the Dutch one, and two days later the town was handed over and renamed New York.

The Dutch briefly recaptured the town in August 1673 and called it New Orange, but the Treaty of Westminster returned it to England in 1674. Under the Treaty of Breda of 1667, the Dutch had already accepted English possession of New Netherland while keeping Suriname.

Legacy

New York kept many Dutch features. Dutch remained widely spoken in the city and the Hudson Valley for generations, and place names such as Harlem, Brooklyn (Breuckelen), the Bowery (bouwerij, farm) and Wall Street come from this period. Stuyvesant retired to his farm on Manhattan and died there in 1672.

Historians have debated how far Dutch tolerance and commercial culture shaped later New York. Some, such as Russell Shorto, argue that the colony left a lasting tradition of openness and trade; others stress that it was also a place of war, slavery and company control.

Timeline

• 1609: Henry Hudson explores the Hudson River for the Dutch East India Company.
• 1621: The Dutch West India Company is chartered.
• 1625: Fort Amsterdam is laid out at the southern tip of Manhattan.
• 1626: Peter Minuit buys Manhattan for goods worth 60 guilders.
• 1643–1645: Kieft’s War devastates the colony.
• 1647: Peter Stuyvesant becomes director-general.
• 1653: New Amsterdam receives a municipal government and builds its wall.
• 1664, 27–29 August (6–8 September, new style): Stuyvesant surrenders to the English; the town becomes New York.
• 1673–1674: The Dutch briefly retake the town as New Orange.

Why it matters

New Amsterdam lasted fewer than 40 years, but it planted the seed of what became the largest city in the United States. Its mix of peoples, its focus on trade and its conflicts over land and slavery foreshadowed much of New York’s later history.