Dutch Found New Amsterdam
New Amsterdam was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625, when the Dutch West India Company concentrated its scattered Hudson River settlements at a defensible harbour and began building a fort. Peter Minuit, arriving as director in 1626, purchased the island from the Lenape for goods valued in a contemporary letter at sixty guilders — the transaction later rendered as twenty-four dollars, and one in which the two parties almost certainly understood entirely different things to be happening, since Lenape practice recognised shared use rather than alienable title. The settlement's purpose was the fur trade, and beaver pelts from the interior remained its business for decades. Its character was set by the company's indifference to anything but profit. It recruited whoever would come, and by the 1640s a Jesuit visitor reported eighteen languages spoken in a town of a few hundred people — Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, English, Sephardic Jews arriving from Brazil in 1654, and a substantial enslaved African population owned by the company itself. That mixture produced the first arguments about toleration in North America. Peter Stuyvesant, director from 1647, tried to exclude Jews, Lutherans and Quakers, and was overruled by his directors in Amsterdam on frankly commercial grounds. The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, a petition by English residents against the persecution of Quakers, is among the earliest documents of religious liberty in the colonies. The town had a wall along what is now Wall Street, a canal that became Broad Street, and about 1,500 inhabitants by 1664. That pluralism, adopted for profit rather than principle, outlasted Dutch rule and is the settlement's real inheritance. New York's city seal still carries the beaver.
- Year: 1625 CE
- Category: Political
