How the Dutch made New York a melting pot of diverse cultures

An early sketch of New Amsterdam (Library of Congress)

Although New Amsterdam is largely ignored by historians and New Yorkers alike, the influence of the Dutch is all over the city, if one only knows where to look. From its street names to its culture, New York’s Dutch legacy is undeniable and will be celebrated by the Dutch Embassy in Manhattan in honour of the 400th anniversary of Dutch settlement this year.

Hudson’s voyage

The first known European to arrive in what we now know as New York was Henry Hudson, an English-born explorer employed by the Dutch East India Company. As with the discovery of most of America, Hudson originally set out looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, a direct water route connecting Europe to the spice-rich islands of Asia.

After several months of traversing the North American coastline, in 1609, Hudson sailed through a narrow channel that connects Staten Island to Brooklyn, and later up the river that now bears his name. Upon returning to Europe, Hudson claimed the entire Hudson River Valley for his Dutch patrons, describing the areas as being “as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread upon”.

The landing of Henry Hudson (Christies)

Hudson’s first interaction with the native population was a friendly one. In History of the Indian Tribes of the Hudson (1872), Edward Ruttenber writes that the Dutch visitors asked the Indians for only enough land as would be covered by a hide of bullock. To the surprise of the natives, they then cut the hide up into a rope “the size of a child’s finger” and proceeded to tie it in such a large circle that it ended up encompassing a large piece of land. “The natives were surprised by the superior wit of the whites,” Ruttenber writes, “but did not wish to contend with them about a little land, as they had enough”.

Hudson’s glowing reviews of the land, its abundance of animal furs and its friendly indigenous inhabitants convinced the Dutch to establish a trading port called New Amsterdam, and in 1624, the first Dutch settlers arrived to colonise the region. However, America was then a battleground of several competing colonial powers with the British and the French having already established their own colonies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia. The Dutch West India Company (WIC) knew that they would not be happy with a Dutch presence in the area, and also that the Dutch did not have the resources to fend them off. With that in mind, they attempted to legitimise their control over New Amsterdam by purchasing the land legally.

Purchase of Manhattan Island by Peter Minuit, 1626 (New York Public Library)

In 1626, Peter Minuit, a German Protestant employed by the WIC, sailed into Hudson Bay intending to buy the island from its native inhabitants. However, unfamiliar with local customs, Minuit simply approached the first Native American tribe he encountered and offered to pay them 60 guilders for New Amsterdam. The Indians in question seized upon the opportunity and Minuit consequently purchased the settlement for what roughly amounts to USD 1,000 today. It would later be revealed that the Indian tribe only occupied around a fourth of the land and were ignorant of the concept of ownership, believing that things like air, water and land could not be traded.

Nevertheless, initially, the Dutch and the natives lived in relative harmony, both appreciated the value the other group presented.

However, in time, relations quickly soured.

The relentless hunger of the colonists for fresh territory directly opposed the traditional lifestyle of the native population, and Dutch merchants, seeking trade advantages, did not hesitate to manipulate clans by instigating local conflicts. Matters became worse with the arrival of Director-General Willem Kieft in 1638. During Kieft’s reign, over 1,600 Native Americans were slaughtered by the Dutch.

The arrival of the British

The first vestiges of the British Empire emerged during the early 17th century when King James ended England’s 19-year war with Spain and shifted his focus towards overseas expansion. Trading entities like the East India Company were tasked with overseeing this assignment, and by 1620, already controlled large swaths of land in America and the Caribbean. English Pilgrims, fleeing religious persecution, flocked across the Atlantic, attempting to sail through the Hudson River to claim New Amsterdam for themselves. Although their endeavour was unsuccessful, the British never gave up on conquering the Dutch colony, and for the entirety of New Amsterdam’s existence, its Dutch masters remained cognizant of the looming threat of the British.

Wall Street Palisade (New York Public Library)

The famous financial district of Wall Street even got its name from the palisade constructed by the Dutch there to fend off a potential British invasion. As arguably the two largest naval powers in the world, the English and the Dutch engaged in fierce and often violent competition. Despite Anglo-Dutch tensions improving after a temporary peace treaty signed in 1654, a decade later, a fleet of English ships sailed into New Amsterdam and demanded the colony be transferred to the Crown.

To understand the circumstances that resulted in the Dutch handing over New Amsterdam to the British in 1664, it is important to recognise its importance or lack thereof. According to Charles Gehring, director of the New Netherland Research Center, the colony was considered to be of little value. Instead, the Dutch were focused on the sugar-rich islands of the Caribbean. By the time the WIC shifted focus to New Amsterdam, it was too late. The British were already concerned with the sale of tobacco from the Delaware Valley to the Dutch and started to recognise New Amsterdam as a valuable market and trading outpost.

The Dutch surrender New Amsterdam by Henry Alexander Ogden

As Steven Jaffe, a Manhattan-based museum curator remarks, the Dutch were subsequently “so outgunned and so outnumbered” by the British that they had little choice but to surrender. Although Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged Dutch director general of New Amsterdam vehemently opposed the idea, the British offered either a carrot or a stick. According to Jaffe, “The English basically came in with their four warships and said listen, if you surrender peacefully, we will guarantee the rights and the peace of your inhabitants – they will not have to give up their property and they will be protected by the British Empire. If they did not surrender, the British would be forced to invade. After which, there would be no guarantee as to what would happen.”

History is conflicted in its understanding of these events. While most agree that the transfer of power was bloodless and swift, some argue that the Dutch did mount some form of resistance. According to Willem Klooster, a professor at Clark University, while the WIC was known as a trading company, it actually served as a “war machine” for the Dutch, representing its security interests against the Spanish, English and Portuguese. Klooster states that the Dutch were reluctant to concede New Amsterdam because they feared that the British would become a superpower in the North Atlantic if they gave it up.

Whatever the reality, in 1664, a fleet of English ships sailed into New Amsterdam harbour and claimed the city in the name of the Duke of York.

Tolerance and multiculturalism

Despite their inglorious exit, the Dutch left behind a strong, albeit often forgotten, legacy in New York. It was the Dutch that were said to have introduced a policy of religious tolerance and multiculturalism. According to Stephen Lucas, professor of communication at U W Madison, the very foundation of American values was established by the Dutch. Lucas claims that the Declaration of Independence was based, in part, on the Dutch Plakkaat van Verlatinge.

The former was written at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1776 when the United States won independence from British colonial rule. The document stipulates the individual rights of all American citizens, including the right to life, liberty and equality under the law. The Plakkaat, signed in 1581, similarly established self-governance in Holland after the Dutch revolted against the oppressive reign of Spain’s King Phillip II.

“Of all the models available to Jefferson and the Continental Congress, none provided as precise a template for the Declaration as did the Plakkaat,” says Lucas. “When you look at the two documents side by side, you cannot avoid noticing that the American Declaration more closely resembles its Dutch predecessor than any other possible model.”

The Rigging House, 120 William Street. It was a Methodist church, then a secular building before its demolition in the mid-19th century (Library of Congress)

The Dutch in New Amsterdam were famed for their religious tolerance, with their churches and poor houses serving people of all different faiths.

For example, in 1655, Johannes Megapolensis, a Dutch pastor, wrote a letter in which he described “papists, Mennonites and Lutherans” walking the streets of New Amsterdam at a time when other European powers were engaged in devastating religious wars. During the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, Holland was famed for its openness. As the British philosopher and anti-imperialist chairman of the India League Bertrand Russell notes in his History of Western Philosophy (1945), “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the 17th century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation.”

New Amsterdam’s policy of tolerance is rooted partially in Dutch fundamental values but also practicality. Given the economic prosperity of Holland, people were reluctant to abandon their homes for the wild, unknown shores of the Atlantic. As a result, it was difficult to populate New Amsterdam and leaders like Stuyvesant were desperate to take in whoever was willing to come. “And so the ethnic diversity that becomes very characteristic of New York City is there from the Dutch period,” says Klooster, “partly because they want taxpayers, they want people to develop the land, they want merchants.”

North America’s First Freed Black Settlement in New Amsterdam (New York Public Library)

This ethnic diversity and multiculturalism can be observed from the demographic records of the time. In 1643, 18 languages were spoken in New Amsterdam. By 1664, the colony of New Netherland was 40 per cent Dutch, 19 per cent German, 7 per cent black and 2 per cent Jewish, making the majority of its inhabitants non-Dutch.

New Amsterdam was also incredibly profit-driven. According to Shorto, “the pluralistic community of New Amsterdam invented capitalism, more or less, at the same time that they were founding the colony.” Kenneth T Jackson, a history professor at Columbia University, says New York is different from every other city in the world because it is “driven by money, greed and success”. Even though the Dutch did not really like Catholics, Jews and Quakers, they were willing to accept them as long as they were doing business with them.

This created an ecosystem of social mobility unrivalled in the rest of the United States. In cities like Boston and Philadelphia, if you were born into a certain segment of society, it was nearly impossible to break into the upper class. However, in New Amsterdam, according to Gehring, “as long as you had ambition, and saw opportunities, and could take advantage of opportunities, there was nothing stopping you.”

This tolerance was not unconditional though as the Dutch slave trade tragically demonstrated.

The Dutch and slavery

Given the WIC’s operational mandate as both a commercial company and a military institution with state-like powers, they had supersized control over the Dutch colonies and a mindset firmly geared towards profitability. In The Atlantic Slave Trade (1999), historian Herbert Klein writes that between 1630 and 1650, the WIC “was unquestionably the dominant European slave trader in Africa.”

In 1644 alone, it brought 6,900 slaves from the African Coast. Most went to the Company’s colonies in the West Indies but some were also brought to New Amsterdam to clear forests, build houses, construct roads and grow food. Ironically, slave labour was banned in Holland, with one merchant explaining in his 1685 description of Amsterdam that “slavery is not permitted here” and that “enslaved people are immediately freed upon arrival.”

Klein states that “it was company-owned slave labor that laid the foundations of modern New York, built its fortifications, and made agriculture flourish in the colony so that later white immigrants had an incentive to turn from fur trapping to farming.” However, some argue that given the prevalence and brutality of slavery in every part of the world, the slaves in New Amsterdam were relatively better off. According to Gehring, “Slavery was sort of accidental in New Amsterdam and it almost wasn’t that an indentured slave person was stolen.”

The Dutch had no clearly established codes that governed the status of slaves in New Amsterdam. Enslaved people were able to marry, practice their religion and receive payment for their work. Slaves who had worked for the Company for a certain length of time were granted half-freedom which granted them liberty in exchange for an annual tribute and a promise to work on certain civic infrastructure projects.

The First Slave Auction at New Amsterdam in 1655, by Howard Pyle

They could even petition their case in court – often winning. In 1635, a group of enslaved men successfully appealed to the Company headquarters in the Hague for equal pay to white labourers. In 1644, a group of slaves sought freedom by petitioning Kieft. After serving the Company for roughly 20 years, these 11 petitioners were granted their freedom and promised the same legal status as any other free individual in New Amsterdam.

Free blacks, in turn, were trusted to serve in militias, given arms, allowed to intermarry, owned property, and in some cases, even possessed white indentured servants. By 1664, a thriving “land of the blacks” was established a mile north of Manhattan. During the English colonial period, the inhabitants of this 130-acre refuge became infamous for aiding enslaved people who ran away from their owners.

Shorto argues that although the Dutch started the slave trade, the ramping up of slave labour coincided with the English takeover, and was codified under the British Crown. That being said, Jaffe asserts that while the Dutch had a “looser system of slavery,” they were still “actively involved in enslaving people and using their unreimbursed labour”. This, along with the dislocation of Native Americans, warrants an asterisk being put on any notion of Dutch tolerance during this time.

The legacy of the Dutch in New York is multifaceted. Much is spoken about tolerance and multiculturalism but according to Jaffe, one of the most overlooked aspects of Dutch rule was its contribution to civic discourse. In the late 17th century, the original Dutch inhabitants of New York mounted a short-lived revolt against the English regime. When the movement was suppressed, factions on both sides took their grievances to the colonial legislatures, which Jaffe says, marked the beginning of party politics in America. “You have these factions that hated each other,” he states, “but instead of shooting at each other, they’re appealing to the legislature.”

This Dutch map, made about 1655, shows eastern North America from what is now Canada to Virginia (American Historical Society)

The willingness to express grievances to government at all levels and expect resolution is apparent throughout New Amsterdam’s history, as individuals or groups regularly submitted remonstrances or petitions to their political leaders, a liberty eventually enshrined in America’s Bill of Rights.

Today, most New Yorkers do not know that Wall Street was named after an earthen wall built by the Dutch to repel an expected English invasion. They may not know that Harlem comes from the Dutch neighbourhood of Haarlem or that Santa Claus was based on the Dutch saint Sinterklaas. They may even be unaware that numerous presidents have been of Dutch origin (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt along with the Bushes) with one (Martin van Buren) growing up speaking Dutch as his first language. They may not know about the contribution of the Dutch but they certainly must feel it in the diverse fabric of New York. A concrete jungle of immigrants and religious pluralism. A city that welcomes anyone who has the mettle to survive it.