New Netherland, The Dutch Gamble That Became New York

In sixteen twenty-six, a Walloon merchant named Peter Minuit struck what became the most retold real-estate deal in American history. Standing on the southern tip of a long island the Lenape people called Mannahatta, he exchanged trade goods valued at sixty guilders, the one surviving Dutch letter says it plainly, for the island of Manhattan. The Lenape, who held no concept of permanent alienation of land, understood something closer to a use-agreement.

Minuit understood a purchase. The gap between those two understandings would take centuries and considerable violence to fully surface. What Minuit founded was a trading outpost called New Amsterdam, the southern anchor of a much larger claim: New Netherland.

The colony stretched up the Hudson River to present-day Albany, and at its edges touched what are now New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut. It was never a settlement project in the Puritan sense. The Dutch West India Company wanted beaver pelts and a toll position on the Atlantic coast.

The result was something genuinely unusual for its era: a polyglot, commercially minded colony where eighteen languages were reportedly spoken on the streets of New Amsterdam by the sixteen forties, where the first Jewish community in North America arrived in sixteen fifty-four fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil, and where a patchwork of nationalities, Walloons, Swedes, Africans both free and enslaved, English dissenters, made a go of it together under the irritable governance of Peter Stuyvesant. Then, in sixteen sixty-four, four English frigates sailed into the harbor without firing a shot. Stuyvesant wanted to fight.

His own citizens refused to back him. The colony became New York, named for the Duke of York, the future King James II. The Dutch streets and land grants and tolerance for difference left fingerprints the English could not erase, in the Bowery, in Brooklyn, in the patroon estates along the Hudson, and in a certain mercantile temperament that would define the state for centuries to come.