Conquest of New Netherland | |||||||
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Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War | |||||||
"The Dutch Surrender New Amsterdam" by Henry Alexander Ogden | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
England | Dutch Republic | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Richard Nicolls Samuel Maverick | Peter Stuyvesant Johannes de Decker | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
4 warships | Unknown | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
None | 3 killed 10 wounded |
The conquest of New Netherland occurred in 1664 as an English expedition led by Richard Nicolls that arrived in New York Harbor effected a peaceful capture of New Amsterdam, Fort Amsterdam and the Articles of Surrender of New Netherland were agreed. The conquest was mostly peaceful in the rest of the colony as well, except for some fighting in New Amstel. [1]
The commercial rivalry between the Dutch and the English, which provoked the First Anglo-Dutch War was not resolved by the Treaty of Westminster (1654). Hostilities continued between the countries' trading companies. Religious and political differences between the Anglican royalists in England and the Calvinist republicans that ruled the Netherlands also hampered peace. [2] During the Anglo-Spanish War of 1654–1660, Dutch traders supplanted the English in trade with Spain and its possessions in Italy and America. [3]
Conflict developed between the States of Holland and Charles II of England's sister Mary, the widowed Princess of Orange, over the education and future prospects of her son William III of Orange. [4] Charles was influenced by his brother James and Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington as he sought a popular and lucrative foreign war at sea to bolster his authority as king. Many naval officers welcomed the prospect of a conflict with the Dutch. [5]
In the year before the invasion, Captain John Scott harassed several Dutch settlements on Long Island.
In March 1664, Charles granted American territory between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers to James. On May 25, 1664 Colonel Richard Nicolls set out from Portsmouth with four warships and about three hundred soldiers. They arrived at Gravesend Bay on Long Island on August 27 and enlisted the support of militias from the English towns there as they moved west to Breuckelen. [6] Having arrived at Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, Nichols sent director-general Peter Stuyvesant a letter offering lenient terms of surrender. James authorized generous terms because he preferred the profits of an intact colony to the spoils of a ruined one. [7] Despite Fort Amsterdam's limited supply of gunpowder, Stuyvesant was inclined to resist. On September 4, the English ships began to maneuver closer to the fort. Stuyvesant was confronted by ninety-three burghers and his own son, and conceded. [8]
A group of prominent merchants then met at Stuyvesant Farm with Nicholls' officers to draft Articles of Capitulation. [8] The Dutch colonists were guaranteed in the possession of their property rights, their laws of inheritance, and the enjoyment of religious freedom. Article 2 specified that all "publick houses" would remain open. [6] The Articles were signed on September 6, 1664 onboard ship by Johannes de Decker, Stuyvesant's lawyer and chief negotiator. The following day being Sunday the transfer did not take place until September 8 when the Dutch forces marched down Beaver Street and embarked on board the Gideon bound for Holland, and Nicolls assumed the position of deputy-governor.
On September 10, Johannes de Decker sailed north to Fort Orange to warn them the English were coming and to rally opposition. Nicholls sent troops to demand the fort's peaceful surrender. Realizing that control of the mouth of the river, controlled the settlement's future, on September 24, 1664 that vice-director of New Netherland Johannes de Montagne surrendered the fort to the English, and Colonel George Cartwright took command. The next day, Captain John Manning was given charge of the fort, which was renamed Fort Albany, after the Duke of York's title in the Peerage of Scotland. While he was there, Cartwright renewed the Dutch treaty with the Iroquois.
On his way back down river, Cartwright landed at Esopus and the settlement surrendered without resistance. Cartwright took the same precautions as at Albany to conciliate the residents and left the local Dutch officials to continue in power. A garrison of regular soldiers was placed in charge of the fort under the command of Captain Daniel Brodhead of the grenadiers. [9] Brodhead and his wife settled in the area; his grandson, Daniel Brodhead II, founded Dansbury, Pennsylvania.
Around the same time that Nicholls sent Cartwright north to Fort Orange, he dispatched Sir Robert Carr, a relative of the Earl of Arlington, south to the territory the Dutch had previously seized from Sweden. The English took Fort Altena peacefully. Alexander D’Hinoyossa director of New Amstel retreated with some followers to Fort Casimir. Carr fired two broadsides into the fort, then took it by storm. His soldiers then pillaged the surrounding settlements, [10] even though the residents had made no resistance. He seized property, harvests, some 200 sheep, horses, and cows, destroyed a brewery, and a sawmill. He then proceeded further south and plundered Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy's Mennonite settlement near present day Lewes, Delaware.
Carr handed over Dutch soldiers to the merchantman as payment for services rendered and they were subsequently transported to Virginia to be sold. [11]
Carr's behavior angered Nicholls, whose policy had been to avoid conflict between the settlers and the new government. He was also outraged that Carr looked to profit from his excesses while the soldiers were in need. He visited New Amstel, renamed it New Castle, and appointed a new commander, but was unable to compel Carr to give up any of his spoils, and returned to New York without him. [12]
The Peace of Breda that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War left New York in English hands. But on 9 August 1673 (N.S.), during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a Dutch naval squadron under the joint command of Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest and Jacob Binckes retook New York in the Reconquest of New Netherland and the Dutch held on to the colony under governor Anthony Colve for more than a year, until they exchanged it for the colony of Suriname under the Treaty of Westminster (1674).
New Amsterdam was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading factory gave rise to the settlement around Fort Amsterdam. The fort was situated on the strategic southern tip of the island of Manhattan and was meant to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company in the North River. In 1624, it became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic and was designated as the capital of the province in 1625. New Amsterdam became a city when it received municipal rights on February 2, 1653.
Peter Stuyvesant was a Dutch colonial officer who served as the last Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664, after which it was split into New York and New Jersey with lesser territory becoming parts of other colonies, and later, states. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City and his name has been given to various landmarks and points of interest throughout the city.
New Netherland was a 17th-century colonial province of the Dutch Republic located on the east coast of what is now the United States of America. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to Cape Cod. Settlements were established in what became the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small outposts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
The Netherlands began its colonization of the Americas with the establishment of trading posts and plantations, which preceded the much wider known colonization activities of the Dutch in Asia. While the first Dutch fort in Asia was built in 1600, the first forts and settlements along the Essequibo River in Guyana date from the 1590s. Actual colonization, with the Dutch settling in the new lands, was not as common as by other European nations.
Fort Amsterdam was a fortification on the southern tip of Manhattan Island at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers. The fort and the island were the center of trade and the administrative headquarters for the Dutch and then British/Colonial rule of the colony, of New Netherland and thereafter the Province of New York. The fort was the nucleus of the settlement on the island and greater area, which was named New Amsterdam by the first Dutch settlers, and eventually renamed New York by the English, and was central to much of New York's early history.
The Delaware Colony, officially known as the three "Lower Counties on the Delaware", was a semiautonomous region of the proprietary Province of Pennsylvania and a de facto British colony in North America. Although not royally sanctioned, Delaware consisted of the three counties on the west bank of the Delaware River Bay. In the early 17th century, the area was inhabited by Lenape and possibly Assateague Native American Indian tribes. The first European settlers were Swedes, who established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina in present-day Wilmington, Delaware, in 1638. The Dutch captured the colony in 1655 and annexed it to New Netherland to the north. Great Britain subsequently took control of it from the Dutch in 1664. In 1682, William Penn, the Quaker proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania to the north leased the three lower counties on the Delaware River from James, the Duke of York, who went on to become King James II.
Fort Orange was the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland; the present-day city of Albany, New York developed at this site. It was built in 1624 as a replacement for Fort Nassau, which had been built on nearby Castle Island and served as a trading post until 1617 or 1618, when it was abandoned due to frequent flooding. Both forts were named in honor of the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau. Due to a dispute between the Director-General of New Netherland and the patroonship of Rensselaerswyck regarding jurisdiction over the fort and the surrounding community, the fort and community became an independent municipality, paving the way for the future city of Albany. After the English reconquered the region they soon abandoned Fort Orange in favor of a new fort: Fort Frederick, constructed in 1676.
Beverwijck, often written using the pre-reform orthography Beverwyck, was a fur-trading community north of Fort Orange on the Hudson River within Rensselaerwyck in New Netherland that was renamed and developed as Albany, New York, after the English took control of the colony in 1664.
Anthony or Anthonij Colve was a Dutch captain of Marines and the Governor-General of New Netherland during a brief restoration of Dutch rule in New Netherland during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.
Fort Casimir or Fort Trinity was a Dutch fort in the seventeenth-century colony of New Netherland. It was located on a no-longer existing barrier island at the end of Chestnut Street in what is now New Castle, Delaware.
Fort Nassau was a factorij in New Netherland between 1624–1651 located at the mouth of Big Timber Creek at its confluence with the Delaware River. It was the first known permanent European-built structure in what would become the state of New Jersey. The creek name is a derived from the Dutch language Timmer Kill as recorded by David Pietersen de Vries in his memoirs of his journey of 1630–1633. The Delaware Valley and its bay was called the "South River" ; the "North River" of the colony was the Hudson River. The factorij was established for the fur trade, mostly in beaver pelts, with the indigenous populations of Susquehannock, who spoke an Iroquoian language, and the Lenape, whose language was of the Algonquian family. They also wanted to retain a physical claim to the territory.
New Netherland was the 17th century colonial province of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on the northeastern coast of North America. The claimed territory was the land from the Delmarva Peninsula to southern Cape Cod. The settled areas are now part of the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, with small outposts in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Its capital of New Amsterdam was located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan on the Upper New York Bay.
New Netherland, or Nieuw-Nederland in Dutch, was the 17th century colony of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on the northeastern coast of North America. The claimed territory included southern Cape Cod to parts of the Delmarva Peninsula. Settled areas are now part of the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Its capital, New Amsterdam, was located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan on Upper New York Bay.
The history of Albany, New York prior to 1664 begins with the native inhabitants of the area and ends in 1664, with the English takeover of New Netherland. The area was originally inhabited by Algonquian Indian tribes and was given different names by the various peoples. The Mohican called it Pempotowwuthut-Muhhcanneuw, meaning "the fireplace of the Mohican nation", while the Iroquois called it Sche-negh-ta-da, or "through the pine woods". Albany's first European structure was a primitive fort on Castle Island built by French traders in 1540. It was destroyed by flooding soon after construction.
Johannes De Decker was a Dutch lawyer and colonial official. He was one of the six signers of the articles of capitulation of New Amsterdam to the English on September 6, 1664. De Decker was sent to work as a lawyer for Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 1654. He held various top political positions and in 1657 was appointed Comptroller. On September 10, Johannes sailed to Fort Orange to warn them an English expeditionary force was coming and to rally local forces. However, Fort Orange officially surrendered September 24, 1664.
Johannes Megapolensis (1603–1670) was a dominie (pastor) of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, beginning in 1642. Serving for several years at Fort Orange on the upper Hudson River, he is credited with being the first Protestant missionary to the Indians in North America. He later served as a minister in Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, staying through the takeover by the English in 1664.
The Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland was a document of surrender signed on September 29, 1664 handing control of the Dutch Republic's colonial province New Netherland to the Kingdom of England.
In September 1655, Dutch soldiers from New Netherland under the command of Peter Stuyvesant conquered the Delaware River colony of New Sweden. Under the terms of surrender the Swedish settlements were incorporated into the Dutch colony.