[On July 30th,
1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration
in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories,
leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]
On two ways the
Dutch colonial city helps us rethink early American histories.
For forty years,
New
Amsterdam was the capital of the Dutch New
Netherland colony in the Americas. After English
explorer Henry Hudson (sailing at the time for the Dutch, who knew him as
Hendrick Hudson)
explored the area in 1609, a series of subsequent voyages and endeavors
culminated in the May 1624
arrival of the ship New Netherland,
carrying Dutch West India Company operative Cornelius
Jacobsen Mey and thirty Dutch families who disembarked on Manhattan Island
and established the first European settlement there (one subsequently
legitimized by Peter Minuit’s famous or infamous 1626
purchase of the island from the Lenape Native American tribe for 60 Dutch
guilders). The city would grow exponentially over the next few decades, and
would remain the political capital of New Netherland until it was abruptly and
illegally taken by
the English in August 1664, an event that precipated the Second Anglo-Dutch
War (1665-1667) which culminated with the Treaty
of Breda and the official handover of the city to the English and its
renaming as New York (after the Duke of York, brother of the English King
Charles II).
Those histories
are crucial to better remembering the specifics of New York’s origins and
evolution, a fact that one of the region’s
first “historians,” Washington Irving’s alter ego Diedrich
Knickerbocker, knew well. But there are also broader effects to adding New
Amsterdam to our national collective memories. For one thing, as I have argued
in many different arenas including my second and third books,
America’s origin points—however and wherever we locate them—are far more
multicultural, multinational, and multilingual than many of our longstanding
national narratives have posited. Even if there were no particularly tangible
post-transition remnants of the Dutch in New York (which is not the case, on
which more in a moment), there are of course precious few such remnants of any
17th century community or culture, and that has never stopped us
(and should never stop us) from remembering communities like the Plimoth Plantation
Puritans or Jamestown English colony as foundational parts of that early
American landscape. While the stakes of shifting such collective memories of
foundational American communities are particularly high when it comes to originating
and longstanding Hispanic American ones like St. Augustine or San
Diego, we should likewise consider the Dutch in New Amsterdam (along with
the French in the Midwest, the Russians in Alaska, and many others) as part of
that originating post-contact landscape.
Yet it’s also
far from the case that the Dutch disappeared from the city as or after it
became New York (no more than Mexicans did from San
Diego’s Old Town after the 1850 US annexation of California, to cite one
parallel example). I think there’s some collective knowledge of details like Wall
Street’s Dutch origins, and thus of linguistic and memorial legacies of the
city’s first European settlers into its post-transition identity. The same was
true of many of the city’s physical spaces, such as Jan
Van Bonnel’s East River saw mill that remained in operation after the
transition before being purchased and turned into a leather mill a decade later
by English settlers George
Elphinstone and Abraham Shotwell. But I would argue that the most
significant enduring presence—if also a far more difficult one to pin down—was
of the people themselves; I find it very hard to believe that all of those
by-then multigenerational Dutch settlers and families simply vacated the city
after the transition (Van Bonnel certainly did not), and believe it much more
likely that at least some (if not most) remained and became part of the
evolving city of New York. Which is to say, a city like New
Orleans is famous for how many different languages have always been spoken
on its streets, but to my mind that’s a central part of the origin story of
nearly all American cities, with New Amsterdam/New York prominent among them.
Last 17th
century history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?
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