320 Years Before the Muppets, the English Took Manhattan

New York Times

02-03-2025

The British are coming.
Specifically, Col. Richard Nicolls — fought in France, jailed by Cromwell, partied with the Duke of York — is sailing in to take New Amsterdam from the Dutch.
Rushing around the southern tip of Manhattan, scrambling to save his village, is Peter Stuyvesant, a Dutch West India Company company man whose employment history includes getting a leg sawed off after a Caribbean battle and heading north to run the trading post at the mouth of the Hudson.
We know who is going to wind up with the island in 1664 — we're not sitting around eating stroopwafels here — but in 'Taking Manhattan,' Russell Short tells the story beautifully, and makes a compelling case for its enduring importance.
There were two takings, really, and they came one right after the other: The Dutch took Manhattan from the Indigenous Lenape in 1626, then the British took it from the Dutch 38 years later.
The second taking is the heart of this book. The British, rebounding from decades of infighting (the beheading of Charles I, Cromwell's rule, the Restoration), wanted to extend their North American land grab. The Dutch had claimed territory from present-day Albany to Delaware, and the center of the action, then as now, was Manhattan.
The Dutch West India Company had set up shop on the island to ship beaver pelts across the Atlantic, and the village that sprang up was, in Shorto's telling, fundamentally Dutch — wildly capitalistic and also, in a circumscribed, relative way, unusually tolerant for its time.
In an age of monarchies, the Dutch had formed a new republic in Europe. The agreement that unified the country in 1579 had specified that 'no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion,' a radical position that other countries thought was a terrible idea. This freedom extended to New Amsterdam, and it drew hustlers from all over Europe — immigrants who transformed the colony from a regional office of the West India Company into a cosmopolitan village that seeded the modern metropolis. As Shorto puts it, 'New York was New York even before it was New York.'
This was, more or less, the argument Shorto made 21 years ago in 'The Island at the Center of the World,' his book about Dutch Manhattan that became a minor classic among popular New York histories and a perennial player in stoop giveaway piles. The new book is more reboot than sequel; it covers similar literal and figurative ground. But in 'Taking Manhattan,' Shorto draws on recent scholarship to describe the lives of ordinary people largely left out of the earlier book, reminding us that a city built on commerce led to freedom for some and horrifying exploitation of others.
Dorothea Angola, Shorto tells us, arrived in New Amsterdam enslaved, possibly in 1627. She married and had children, and in 1644, her husband petitioned the Dutch West India Company for the couple's freedom, which was granted. Soon after, they were given a six-acre tract to farm in what would become Greenwich Village.
But their children were not freed. There's no evidence that they were pressed into forced labor, but Shorto writes that 'this unbelievably cruel caveat would certainly have ensured that the parents would do whatever the company asked of them.' (Later, Angola petitioned for and was granted freedom for their adopted son.)
The story of Native people is full of death and dispossession, but the 17th-century power dynamics were complex. At one key moment, Shorto writes, a Montaukett leader named Quashawam, facing encroaching British settlers on Long Island, wanted to ally with the Dutch. It seems she tried to warn Stuyvesant that British ships were coming to take Manhattan, but he ignored the message. Quashawam wound up joining forces with the British and the Shinnecock instead.
This is why, when Nicolls and the British sailed in, it was a surprise to the Dutch. Nicolls gave Stuyvesant two days to surrender or be attacked. Meanwhile, the Dutch fought among themselves. The British sent Stuyvesant a note, and he tore it up before the city council could read it. But at the moment of peak danger, Shorto argues, Stuyvesant redeemed himself. He recognized a duty not just to his bosses at the West India Company, but to this new, weird city that was becoming its own thing. An hour before Nicolls's ultimatum expired, Stuyvesant wrote back. He was willing to negotiate to save the city.
Nicolls wanted New Amsterdam not just for its strategic location, but for its open, commercial culture. So, Shorto writes, he agreed to a deal that 'reads more like a corporate merger than a treaty of surrender.'
The deal guaranteed that Dutch people could continue to come to New Amsterdam and enjoy freedom of religion. Dutch ships could still come and go freely and the local government could continue to function largely as before.
Nicolls changed the name to New York because he liked it better that way; it honored his buddy the Duke of York, who would eventually become King James II. The name was new, but the city — on the make, polyglot, racist in some ways and tolerant in others — would endure.
It is hard to love the city and to recognize its horrors. But it is possible; there is proof; Russell Shorto has done it.