England Seizes New Amsterdam from the Dutch
An English squadron of four ships under Richard Nicolls anchored off New Amsterdam in late August 1664 and demanded its surrender. Peter Stuyvesant capitulated on 8 September without a shot fired. England and the Dutch Republic were not at war. Charles II had simply granted the entire territory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers to his brother James, Duke of York — land the Dutch had occupied for forty years — and sent a force to collect it. The strategic motive was the Navigation Acts. New Netherland sat between the New England and Chesapeake colonies and functioned as a hole in the English trading system, through which colonial tobacco and sugar reached Amsterdam duty-free. Stuyvesant wanted to fight. The fort was decrepit, the garrison small, the powder short, and the burghers of the town — including his own son — signed a remonstrance telling him that resistance would achieve nothing but the destruction of their property. He is said to have torn up the summons and had the pieces reassembled and read aloud. The Articles of Capitulation were unusually generous: residents kept their property, their inheritance customs, their language and their churches, and Dutch officials stayed in place. The town was renamed New York and Fort Orange became Albany. The seizure helped trigger the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in which the Dutch burned the English fleet in the Medway. At the Treaty of Breda in 1667 they kept Surinam and conceded New Netherland. They retook the town briefly in 1673 and traded it back. The Dutch presence survived in law, language and family names for generations. The eighth president of the United States grew up speaking Dutch.
- Year: 1664 CE
- Category: Military
