New Netherland, a colony that stretched along the Hudson River from Manhattan Island to present-day Albany, was the principal Dutch outpost in 17th-century North America. The Netherlands was a major commercial power in the 17th century; Dutch MERCHANTS ruled plantations and trading posts around the world, from Brazil to Indonesia, China, and India, and they were eager to gain a foothold in North America as well. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an English explorer employed by the Dutch East India Company to seek a Northwest Passage to the East Indies, crossed the Atlantic in the ship De Halve Maen (Half Moon) and claimed the territory around the mouth of the Hudson River for the Dutch. The English, who were trading rivals of the Dutch, seized De Halve Maen from
Hudson and contested Dutch claims to the area, initiating a pattern of Anglo-Dutch friction that would be a recurring motif throughout the half-century of New Netherland’s existence. While political negotiations faltered, Dutch merchants financed private voyages to the Hudson River valley and competed to gain control of the regional FUR TRADE.
Historians generally date the Dutch settlement in New Netherland from 1614, the year in which the States-General (Dutch parliament) granted exclusive trading privileges in the region to a group of Dutch merchants incorporated as the New Netherland Company. In the company’s charter the settlement was officially named New Netherland. Although the New Netherland Company sponsored annual voyages to its possession and built a trading center, Fort Nassau, on Castle Island near Albany, it failed to establish a permanent settlement in the Hudson River valley. The company’s grant of exclusive trade expired in 1618, and it was superseded by a national joint-stock company, the DUTCH West India Company, which in 1621 assumed responsibility for overseeing Dutch trade and settlement in North America.
Early Dutch settlement efforts were divided between Fort Orange (Albany) and New Amsterdam (Manhattan). Ironically, the first European settlers in New Netherland were not Dutch but Walloon (French-speaking Belgians); 30 Walloon families settled at Fort Orange under the sponsorship of the West India Company in 1624. The Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam was established in 1625. In fact, the West India Company was too deeply absorbed in the fur trade to devote much attention to settlement. It forged an alliance with the Iroquois Confederacy and persuaded the Iroquois to channel the fur trade through Dutch (rather than French or English) settlements. West India Company administrators looked disapprovingly on colonists who attempted to break the company’s fur trade monopoly rather than breaking farmland.
New Netherland’s early years were stormy, but in 1626 Peter Minuit arrived in New Amsterdam and assumed leadership of the colony. In five brief years (1626-31) Minuit reorganized the colony and put its economic life and military defenses on a firmer footing. Minuit’s predecessor, Willem Verhulst, had paid local Indians 60 Dutch guilders (in commercial goods) for Manhattan Island, thereby strengthening Dutch claims to the territory. Minuit followed suit by purchasing Staten Island as well. These land purchases set a precedent for New Netherland colonists’ acquisition of land from local Indians by purchase or treaty rather than seizure; this policy, observed in the early settlement years, was abandoned in the 1640s with disastrous results. As New Netherland was still a tiny settlement of about 270 souls, Minuit evacuated most of the soldiers and settlers at Fort Orange, recalled other settlers from the Connecticut and Delaware river valleys, and consolidated settlement on Manhattan Island for mutual security. He also opened diplomatic relations with the English colony at Plymouth. The West India Company dismissed Minuit from office in 1631, but he returned to the Delaware Valley several years later as the governor of New Sweden.
Beginning in the 1620s the Dutch experimented with several plans to lure settlers to America. The most famous of these was the patroonship system, established during Minuit’s administration. In 1629 the West India Company invited Dutch citizens to apply for patroonships. Each patroon (literally, patron) who sponsored 50 immigrants to New Netherland would be granted a semifeudal domain along the Hudson River in which to create an agricultural village and manor. Patroons would exercise administrative and judicial powers within their territory, and they were also granted trading privileges, including limited access to the fur trade. Several patroonships were laid out, but only one, Rensselaerswyck, proved successful; the rest were abandoned and resold to the West India Company, which abandoned the patroonship system by the mid-1630s. In 1639 the company addressed settlers’ economic needs more directly by revising the company’s settlement rules to permit settlers to trade freely in all commodities, including furs. In later years the company also offered free land to all comers, but New Netherland remained a mercantile colony, in contrast to the predominantly agricultural colonies of New England. Settlement proceeded slowly; the political and religious stability and economic prosperity of the 17th-century Netherlands discouraged Dutch families from removing to America.
The 1630s and 1640s were marked by internal conflict between settlers and a series of unpopular governors and by territorial conflict between New Netherland and neighboring English and Native American settlements. From the 1620s on the West India Company had periodically laid claim to parts of present-day Connecticut and had even built a small trading post, the House of Good Hope, on the Connecticut River. However, in the 1630s and 1640s English settlers from Massachusetts established several flourishing towns in the region, and in 1650 the Dutch were obliged to cede their claims to the Connecticut River valley to the English in the Treaty of Hartford. That treaty was not the diplomatic defeat it appeared to be, however, for it secured all the territory actually occupied by Dutch settlers and forced the English to recognize Dutch claims to New Netherland. Meanwhile, the Dutch achieved another diplomatic coup on the border with Quebec. The Iroquois, armed by the Dutch, attacked the Huron, a powerful Great Lakes tribe that cooperated with the French to channel the fur trade through Montreal. The Iroquois overwhelmed the Huron and thereby drew a vast inland fur-trading region into the Dutch sphere of influence.
Even as the Dutch cooperated with the Iroquois, however, their relations with Indians in the lower Hudson Valley and coastal region deteriorated. Two principal groups of Native Americans lived in present-day New York before the arrival of the Dutch: the Iroquois Confederacy, formed about 1570 from five constituent tribes, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca; and the Algonquin tribes, chiefly the Mahican and Munsee. In the Albany region, where the Iroquois Confederacy was a major diplomatic power and Dutch settlers favored fur trading over farming, colonial administrators worked to preserve the peace, but in the lower Hudson River valley land-hungry Dutch settlers clashed bitterly with the Mahican and Munsee. Director General Willem Kieet, appointed by the West India Company in 1638, pursued an aggressive policy of land acquisition and Indian taxation. In the summer of 1641 Indian raids on outlying Dutch settlements touched off an exceptionally violent war that, in spite of brief truces in 1642 and 1643, was not concluded until August 1645. Kieft’s war decimated the coastal Indian population—nearly 1,000 Indians died in the war—but it failed to eliminate Native American opposition to Dutch settlement. On the contrary, embittered Algonquin continued to harass Dutch towns for decades.
The arrival of Kieft’s successor, Peter Stuyvesant, in 1647 marked a turning point for the colony. In contrast to New Netherland’s earlier, mostly transient directors general, Stuyvesant governed the colony for 17 years (1647-64). He guided New Netherland through administrative reform, territorial expansion, and a fresh wave of settlement. Some of his victories were military: In 1655 Stuyvesant led an expedition that captured New Sweden and reabsorbed it into New Netherland under the name New Amstel. Upon his return Stuyvesant discovered that the Mahican and several allied tribes had made a surprise attack on New Amsterdam. He acted quickly to shore up the city’s defenses: He forbade Indians to enter the city armed or remain there overnight, imprisoned those who were drunk, and punished white settlers who sold them liquor. New Amsterdam never suffered another Indian attack, although Indians laid siege to Esopus (Kingston) in 1659; hostilities dragged on until 1664, when the Dutch decisively broke the Native American power base in the lower Hudson Valley.
Stuyvesant also granted town governments greater autonomy. By the 1650s English colonists had established several villages on western Long Island, within the Dutch sphere of influence. The English colonists brought with them a vigorous tradition of self-government, and they demanded the same political autonomy that New England settlers enjoyed. Nearby Dutch communities followed suit, requesting local powers patterned on the liberal governmental structures of the English settlements. Under
Stuyvesant’s administration town officials, particularly the schout (selectman/justice of the peace) and schepens (sheriff/district attorney), acquired considerable power. Suffrage remained far more restricted than in New England, however; New Netherland retained the Dutch system of closed corporation government, under which incumbents nominated their successors.
As New Netherland became a more stable and viable settlement, the English viewed it with increasingly covetous eyes. The English and Dutch were long-standing commercial rivals, and New Netherland became a choice prize in the Anglo-Dutch wars. When an English war fleet commanded by Colonel Richard Nicholls sailed into New Amsterdam’s harbor in September 1664, Stuyvesant surrendered without a fight. As the Dutch knew from earlier skirmishes with the English in Connecticut, they could not hope to win a military victory over the far more numerous English forces. The English capture of New Netherland in 1664 was not decisive; English and Dutch forces continued to dispute control of the region for several years, and the Dutch recaptured New Amsterdam briefly in the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1673. New Netherland was restored to the English in the peace treaty of 1674, ending the Dutch colonization project in North America.
Of all the European colonies in North America, New Netherland was the most ethnically and religiously diverse in the 17th century. The first immigrants to the colony were French-speaking Walloons; company officials and patroons also recruited settlers from England, Germany, and Norway. By midcentury scarcely half of New Netherland’s European population was ethnically Dutch, and a clergyman reported that 18 languages were spoken in the port city. Numerous religious groups were represented, including Lutherans, English Congregationalists, Quakers, and Jews, as well as Dutch Reformed Protestants.
New Netherland also had a substantial African-American slave population. The West India Company began importing slaves in 1626 in response to the colony’s more or less permanent labor shortage; many were brought from the Dutch plantation colony at Curayao rather than directly from Africa. Growing demand for slaves among private citizens forced the company to renounce its monopoly on the slave trade in 1648. Around the same time the company created a distinctive status called “half-freedom”; “half-free” blacks, imported and owned by the West India Company, were rented out to settlers, an arrangement that saved settlers the cost of purchasing slaves and allowed the “half-free” a modest degree of personal autonomy. New Netherland’s enslaved and “half-free” black colonists worked primarily in agriculture and construction; by 1664 they numbered about 700 out of a total colonial population of 8,000.
New Netherland’s ECONOMY, unlike that of most of the British American colonies, was founded on trade rather than agriculture. Dutch law accorded women much more extensive legal rights than English law did, and women played an active role in commerce in the Dutch settlements. Men and women alike struggled with the West India Company’s labyrinthine economic regulations, which extended not only to the lucrative fur trade but also to baking, brewing, butchering, and a host of other basic occupations. Agricultural output was low. Although the West India Company sent several hundred livestock to New Netherland in the 1620s, it ceased to provision the colony in 1626, and immigrants devoted little attention to agriculture. The colony’s real strength lay in its cosmopolitan furtrading centers. The English conquerors were reluctant to disrupt the lucrative fur-trading network established by the Dutch, and Dutch culture and customs continued to flavor New York (as the English renamed New Netherland) long after the English conquest.
Further reading: Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York: Random House, 2004).
—Darcy R. Fryer
World History
