Dutch Americans

The Netherlands is a western European country on the shores of the North Sea. As of the most recent census information, there are 5,023,846 Dutch Americans, or 1.6 percent of the population. The Dutch were not only a significant immigrant population in American history, they were the original settlers of some of the territory that eventually became the United States. Dutch Americans should not be confused with “Pennsylvania Dutch,” whose name is a corruption of the word Deutsch, meaning German.

The Dutch established New Netherland in the early 17th century, consisting of lands from the [Page 745]Delmarva Peninsula to Cape Cod, a region now occupied by parts of Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York. New Netherland (the capital of which was New Amsterdam, which became New York under English rule) was settled more slowly than its neighbors, New England to the north and New Sweden to the south, and the colony was also less homogenous than its neighbors, consisting not only of Dutch settlers but of Flemish and Walloons from modern-day Belgium, French Huguenots, Scandinavians, and Portuguese. New Netherland, like the Dutch Republic, was a bastion of religious and cultural tolerance, perhaps the first American civilization who could be considered multicultural. Some of the colony's principles were adopted into the U.S. Constitution, and they also provided the legal tradition for the New York area—notably, the Articles of Capitulation, which transferred control of the colony from the Dutch to the English in 1664, guaranteed the right to religious freedom. As a pragmatic matter, this was to ensure the safety of New Netherland's existing citizens, but it also preserved religious freedom as what became an American ideal.

Nassau County, Coney Island, Block Island, Long Island, Rikers Island, Staten Island, Batavia, Dunkirk, Rensselaer, Yonkers, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Dutch Kills, Flushing, and Manhattan in New York; Bergen County and Brielle in New Jersey; Cape Henlopen in Delaware; and Rhode Island all bear names from the New Netherland period. Though the Hudson River is named for the Englishman Henry Hudson, he was working in the service of the Dutch. The families of three presidents— Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—are descended from Dutch colonists in New Netherland.