New Netherland

By the early 1600s, competition between European powers to establish colonies in the New World had already resulted in large claims made on behalf of Spain, England, and France. The Dutch joined the race for colonial riches in 1609, when Henry Hudson, an Englishman employed by the Dutch East India Company, explored the coast of North America, roughly from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. His reports led the States General, the legislature of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, to issue an exclusive patent to a private company for the exploration and colonization of “Nieuw-Nederland” in March 1614.

Dutch traders quickly arrived to settle in the area of modern Manhattan Island, and in 1615 they founded Fort Nassau on Castle Island in the Hudson River near modern Albany in an attempt to further control the fur trade. Although Dutch land claims ranged from the Delaware River to the Connecticut River, it is estimated that only about 270 Dutch lived in the vicinity of New Amsterdam (modern New York), and another 30 lived at Fort Nassau, renamed Fort Orange, by 1630.

In 1621, the States General gave a trading monopoly in North America to the Dutch West India Company in an attempt to make the colony more productive. Pieter Munuit, who arrived as director of the colony in 1626, quickly organized the area, purchased more land from indigenous peoples, and constructed a fort to guard the settlement. In 1619, the Dutch began offering large tracts of land to anyone who could bring at least 50 families to the colony to make it productive. Given the title of “patroon,” these large landholders resembled the planters of the south in wealth and land holdings, but the labor was contracted with free people working as tenant farmers.

The patroon was given a number of rights and privileges, including the appointment of local civil officials and creation of local courts. This approach bore fruit with a rapid rise in population and productivity. By the 1640s, it was estimated that some 18 different languages were spoken in New Amsterdam, and the guarantee of freedom of religion approved in the Dutch Republic in 1597 led to a religious diversity that included, aside from the Dutch Reformed Church, Catholics, Quakers, Anabaptists, and both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

The most profitable commercial enterprise continued to be the fur trade. Cordial relations with the Mohawks, a member of the Iroquois Confederacy that controlled the area around the Dutch outpost at Fort Orange, allowed the Dutch to divert a considerable amount of the fur trade away from the French in Canada and into the coffers of the Dutch West India Company. Eventually, declining profits and an ill-advised attack on local indigenous villages brought changes in the colonial administration. Pieter Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 with the title of director-general and a charge of increasing profits. He quickly sent a small army to defeat a group of Swedes who had settled in the vicinity of modern Philadelphia on land claimed by the Netherlands, then incorporated both the land and people into the Dutch colony.

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