Book excerpt: How the Dutch and English reached a deal for the peaceful transfer of New Netherland

Excerpted from Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America. Copyright (c) 2025 by Russell Shorto. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company Inc. All rights reserved.

Thanks to the negotiations that were held over the two days since (Peter) Stuyvesant’s “however” letter, the details of an agreement had been worked out by the time the twelve men sat down at Stuyvesant’s bowery. They had only to put it down on paper and sign the thing.

The document they formulated is so congenial in its terms that it indeed reads more like a corporate merger than a treaty of surrender. It is essentially a bill of rights, which the English guaranteed to the inhabitants. It contained twenty-­three articles. The people of the former New Amsterdam were to continue living as “free Denizens and enjoy their Lands, Houses, Goods, Shipps, wheresoever they are within this Country, and dispose of them as they please.” More remarkably, the agreement provided “that any people may freely come from the Netherlands, and plant in this Country, and that Dutch Vessells may freely come hither, and any of the Dutch may freely returne home, or send any sort of Merchandize home in Vessells of their owne country.” This made it clear that (Richard) Nicolls wanted not only the island, not only the people of New Amsterdam, but their connections. He wanted these to invigorate the new entity.

The agreement contained protections that the Dutch negotiators had pushed for: “No Dutchmen here, or Dutch Shipp here, shall upon any occasion be prest to serve in Warr, against any Nation whatsoever.” And “The Townesmen of the Manhatons shall not have any Souldier quartered upon them.”

Religious liberty was a relatively easy point to hash out since the two sides felt the same on the matter: “The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their Consciences, in Divine Worship, and Church Discipline.”

Where the negotiators most likely locked horns was on the matter of the political arrangement of the new city. Nicolls had not been given authority to allow the inhabitants to continue governing themselves. But the Dutch pushed hard on this, and Nicolls relented. In fact, though he didn’t appreciate it at first, doing so was necessary if he wanted their system to continue. The municipal government that Stuyvesant and the other leaders in New Amsterdam had pushed for a decade earlier was what set the place apart from other colonial outposts. In a wildly dangerous and unstable world, it provided enough stability to encourage merchants and investors to bet on Manhattan.

So Nicolls agreed: “All inferior civill Officers and Magistrates shall continue as now they are,” and “the Towne of Manhatans, shall choose Deputyes, and those Deputyes, shall have free Voyces in all Publique affairs, as much as any other Deputyes.”

In addition, Stuyvesant won a concession that he had been especially desirous of including: that “if at any time hereafter the King of great Brittaine, and the States of the Netherland doe Agree, that this place and Country, be redelivered into the hands of the said States … it shall immediately be done.” He had reason to believe that this agreement, however peaceably reached, would lead to war in Europe, and once that war was over, there was every likelihood that Manhattan would become Dutch again.

Together, these articles had a single purpose: to reassure the inhabitants of Manhattan. The message to them was clear. Don’t go anywhere. Stay here. Keep your shops open. Keep the ships coming and going. Nothing will change.

Over time, of course, things did change, but slowly, incrementally. The remarkable thing about this transfer-­of-­power document, about the English takeover of Manhattan and the Dutch colony of New Netherland, is that by the time both sides sat down together at Stuyvesant’s country property, they wanted much the same thing. What mattered to most of the population of Manhattan was that they be allowed to remain on the island that had become their home, to keep their property and business, and to go about their lives as they had. This was what Nicolls most wanted too. Historians have noted the remarkable concessions Nicolls made, both in the back-­and-­forth with Stuyvesant during the harbor standoff and in the final surrender negotiations. But what he gave was also in alignment with his objectives. He wanted not only the territory but the society that had developed there. He wanted the secret sauce, and they knew the recipe.

What was in the secret sauce exactly? It involved a new way of doing business, which included financial methods that had been pioneered in Amsterdam; the curiously diverse population and its equally diverse trade network; and the political stability to ground it all.

This is why the last years of New Netherland are so relevant and why the documents in the New York State Library translated by Charles Gehring and Janny Venema are so vital. Thanks to the publication of those records, which has unfurled one volume at a time over a period of more than four decades, supplementing and adding detail and perspective to the material published earlier, we can now see New Netherland more or less as its inhabitants saw it and as Richard Nicolls came to see it; we can appreciate why Nicolls wanted to keep it intact. The merchants of New Amsterdam, with Stuyvesant as middleman between them and the West India Company, had devised a newfangled approach to Dutch capitalism, and the results were evident. New Amsterdam had doubled in size in the past decade. The trade on which it had been founded four decades earlier – in furs – ­continued thanks to the unending demand in Europe, but merchants had also developed a vigorous tobacco industry, which linked to the English in Maryland and Virginia and to Europe. In the years leading up to Nicolls’s arrival, in fact, more consistent production coupled with greater demand in Europe had resulted in what Dennis Maika has called a “tobacco frenzy,” which would of course go on for centuries. And in recent years these merchants had likewise begun to develop slavery into what would become – thanks in no small part to steps Nicolls would soon take – ­an elemental part of New York’s rise. Surely the groundwork laid by the Dutch with regard to a slave trade was especially appealing to the English, given the work that Nicolls’s doppelganger had begun in West Africa. It would have been, for them, part of what made Manhattan so attractive.

Through these documents we can see New Amsterdam as if we were accompanying Richard Nicolls on his first stroll through its streets. Its people were no longer content with the primitive lives of the generation that had founded the colony. They had built solid and elegant homes, outfitted with wainscoting and tongue-­and-­groove flooring and stocked with silver, crystal, and brandy for entertaining; good-­quality paper and ink to write their letters; elegant furniture made by European craftsmen; stockings and lace; thimbles and needles; “French scissors” and “Venetian pearls.” Just in the few months preceding Nicolls’s appearance, eleven big cargo vessels had arrived from Europe, their holds packed with goods.

From the time he was chosen to lead his mission, Nicolls had been studying the Dutch colony. He had learned from people like George Baxter, Samuel Maverick, and John Winthrop Jr. how it functioned. By the time he sent his delegates to Stuyvesant’s bowery, he had a very good sense of its value.

And the leaders of the colony – ­Stuyvesant, Steenwijck, Megapolensis, and the others – had a sense of what Nicolls’s mission was. They knew English politics: they grasped perfectly well the deep philosophical division between the Stuart government and the Puritan governments of New England. They may not have known a great deal about Nicolls’s own history, but they understood that he was the Stuart representative and that he was tasked with solving the puzzle of North America, which had two components, one of which involved gaining some kind of mastery over the New England colonies.

And although we are focusing our attention on the two leaders, largely because they are the ones who left the most records behind, we should keep in mind that nearly everyone in New Amsterdam took part in this resolution of the conflict. The residents of the city appreciated what they had created and knew, from years of disappointment, that the West India Company was not going to support it. As Van Ruyven, Stuyvesant’s secretary, would later write, the leaders of the colony had appealed to the home country for assistance “not once, nor one year, but for several years and by almost every ship.” Everyone in the colony knew that they had built something of value, that the English wanted it, and that their supposed overlords, the West India Company directors, sitting in their headquarters on the Brouwersgracht in Amsterdam, had consistently ignored their appeals for aid, believing to the end that their outposts in the Caribbean and South America would eventually yield higher profits and therefore that that was where their money should be invested. So the people of New Amsterdam took matters into their own hands.

The standard view that American history has of the English taking of Manhattan distorts this picture by forcing a particular type of Anglocentric frame on it. It probably relates to the fact that many early American historians were themselves descendants of the English Puritans who settled New England. Those pious gentlemen – for they were all men – crafted narratives in which their forefathers were the heroes. This meant lionizing (and sanitizing) the Puritan project in America – indeed, making it synonymous with the American project. And once Nicolls had his victory, it meant relegating the Dutch colony of New Netherland to a dismissive paragraph or two, telling a semicomic story in which cartoonlike Dutchmen muddled around in North America for a few decades, with fat bellies and clay pipes, not sure what to do with the valuable real estate they had somehow landed on, until the English relieved them of it and started New York on its journey. As Dennis Maika has elucidated this misreading, “The story goes like this: New Netherland was a colony in decline when it was rescued by the English in a surprise attack in 1664, its Director-­General, Peter Stuyvesant, unable to defend it. The city of New Amsterdam surrendered without a fight, suggesting both resignation to the inevitable and just a hint of Dutch cowardice.”

The reality is more complicated and more meaningful for us today. Ultimately, it was Stuyvesant, his councilors, and the people of New Amsterdam together with Nicolls and the other English officials in his squadron who, through the give-­and-­take of their negotiations in the harbor, crafted the idea of creating a kind of hybrid colony, which would maintain the features of its Dutch predecessor but move forward under the flag of England. Their idea was all the more remarkable because, in Europe, these two nations were enemies on the verge of open warfare. It was remarkable too that this transfer happened without the loss of a single life.