American History Hit - Origins of New York

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

In 1624 the first Dutch settlers arrived on Manhattan and established New Amsterdam, what is now New York. We hear about life in that Dutch colony and meet some of the very first New Yorkers. Don's guest is Andrea Mosterman, author of Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York.To find out more about how the Sail4th 250 parade of tall ships will help celebrate America’s birthday on July 4, 2026, visit https://www.sail4th.org.Edited by Aidan Lonergan, produced by Freddy Chick. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is May 1624. A three-masted Dutch ship, a Carrick, fresh from a transatlantic voyage,

glides into a vast sheltered harbor. The ship rises on the tide, its towering spars reaching skyward, sails billowing with promise. Aboard are the first settlers sent to establish a colony called New Netherland. All around them stretches an overwhelming expanse of nature, deep, glistening, waters, winding coves, back channels, and endless unspoiled shoreline. Forested islands are draped in grapevines, wild plums, hazelnuts, strawberries, and tall grasses. The settlers gaze upon this wondrous panorama, and imagine hopefully that these quiet waters will soon team with fishing boats, the shores be cultivated with crops and livestock,

all serving a town thriving with gardens and busy streets. Of course, little could they know how the future would eventually unfold on this island called Manhattan. That tranquil harbor one day giving rise to a skyline of steel and glass, a waterfront bristling with global commerce. What is so still in this moment will one day become the roaring cacophony, known as New York. All, it's Don Wildman here. Welcome to American History Hit. I wanted to begin this episode with the image of a show. ship making its way from Europe to the new world, to remind us that from its earliest days as a European settlement, New York's harbor and waterways have shaped the city, making it thrum with the energy of

commerce and the hope of people arriving by ship to seek their fortunes and freedom. That energy has, in turn, driven the growth and success of the United States. So it's fitting that a centerpiece of the nation's 250th birthday celebrations in 26 will be a special spectacular parade of tall ships and naval vessels through New York Harbor, accompanied by a flotilla of smaller vessels. For more information about the Sailforth 250 Parade, check out the link in the show notes. Today's episode is all about the very earliest days of New York when it was not called New York at all, but rather New Amsterdam. Devoted listeners may recall that we covered this story a long time ago, New Amsterdam's transitioned from Dutch to English with

author Russell Shorto, Episode 47. In that discussion, we cover the leadership of the Dutch colony. Today, we mean to understand more about the everyday life of the Dutch in those days, how the citizens of this remote outpost in the new world would have lived, what was life-like for the average man, woman, or child. To take us through this fundamental legacy is Andrea Mosterman, a historian who specializes in the history of Dutch early America, and in particular how slavery operated for the Dutch across the Atlantic. Her first book was Spaces of Enslavement, a History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York. Hello, Andrea. Welcome to the pod. It's great to be here. So let's first refresh listeners to the very beginning of Dutch colonization

in North America. 1609, an English mariner, irony, Henry Hudson, hired in Amsterdam by the Dutch East Indies Company. Why and to what end? What were they trying to accomplish? So Henry Hudson, was trying to find, as we see with many of these somewhat early explorations, a passageway to the east. And that is why he's traveling to this area. He goes up the Hudson River and at some point realizes that that's not going to get him anywhere. The river gets too narrow. He returns to the Netherlands with that news, but with that he does also talk about, you know, the things that he saw, the people that he met, because that he was able to obtain,

and especially the furs in that particular time, were of real interest to the Dutch. And that's why we see the Dutch becoming interested in that region, but really more for trading purposes. So from 1609 onward, initially the focus is really on obtaining access to trade there with the various indigenous peoples. and again, especially looking for the various furs that they were able to get that were very much in demand in Europe at the time.

Kind of a two-part settlement because it was really Fort Orange, which then becomes eventually Albany, way up the Hudson, which is receiving helts and all kinds of things from the Mohawk River, essentially. New Amsterdam in the harbor is part of that system. It had begun as that earlier passage to these very profitable, trading posts. I think it's really important right up front. The Dutch are about making money, as opposed to these refuges of religious orientation up in Boston and so forth that's going on for the English. This is all money. That's what the Dutch do. So take me through the major events

after 1609, because there's a period of time before 1624 when that colony really starts. Yeah. So during that period, the Dutch are establishing some forts and some trading posts, if you will, and for that trade with the various indigenous people. And so then it's not until 1621 when the Dutch West India Company is founded that they are looking more toward actually settling the region. And that is where, you know, in 1624, they send the first families there to actually like try to have a settlement rather than just have these trading posts in the area. And there I will say that the Dutch West India company was,

interested in making money, of course, but it also was very much considered a war machine against the Spanish, that of course the Dutch had were fighting this war of independence and still were very much at war with the Spanish at the time. And so it was also trying to create this global empire, if you will, and competing with the Spanish and defeating them when possible. So they were looking to really expand their empire and some of the literature, actually saving indigenous people from Spanish Catholicism was given as one of the reasons why the Dutch West India Company was looking toward colonization in the Americas. And so it was diverse. But so it was really with the Dutch West India Company that we see

that they're looking towards settling the areas. So expanding it's beyond. on just trading posts. Right. But right in that nomenclature, there's a shift. I mean, the Dutch East Indies are those like Papua and New Guinea and all that sort of thing down in the Pacific. That was their orientation. And now they've created the Dutch West Indies, which we're referring to, and they're in

charge of this. But they're also going to be very interested in sugar down in Caribbean and all kinds of other revenues that are being made. But up here, it's largely about the pelts. That corporation, the Dutch West Indies, Indies company is formed in 1621. They are focused not only on the Americas, but also West Africa, and that's going to play out very soon in this conversation because it becomes a whole different kind of business.

The ship, the New Netherlands, is dispatched in 1624 to establish this colony. 15 years from Hudson's first contact. You mentioned families, a whole idea of a new kind of population is coming over for New Amsterdam. How many people are on this ship? So there's no, there's two ships. There's first the Eindracht, unity, and then there's the New Netherlands. And both of them leave in 1624.

There's no clear records of exactly how many people were on board. But from what we can kind of reconstruct, it was no more than two dozen that were on the unity, which or the Eindraq, which was the first one. Those two ships, so they both arrived in the spring of 1624. the initial people did not settle on Manhattan Islands. So the people on board the unity were actually settling some in what now would be Albany, that area. There were some on what the Dutch called Nolton Islands, which is Governor's Island, which of course is right off of Manhattan. Some were sent to New Amsel, like the Delaware River.

It wasn't New Amstel yet at the time, but it was by the Delaware River. And some were sent to Connecticut. So they're not yet in New Amsterdam itself, but soon after we see that some of these families are moved or are moving to New Amsterdam. But so it's really not more than like two dozen initially. And it takes a few years before they're actually settling in the most southern point of Manhattan. Sure. You mentioned the conflicts back in Europe.

I mean, so much is going on with the Spanish and in northern Europe. the resistance against them. Belgium is going to come out of that. And it's all sort of driven by wars and conflicts against Catholicism, as you say, against the sort of was viewed as fascism by those people up in the north. So in some sense, there is a religious aspect to it. Some of these people are called our Walloons, right? That's the term.

Yeah. Some of them were from what is today, Fran. Some of them would be like from the area of what's today, Belgium. But one of the people that we actually know came on one of these earliest ships are yours John Serapaglia and his wife, Catalina Atrico, and we know from a later deposition that she gave that she was born in Paris. So they were from various regions, but yes, many of them, and especially those first people, they were referred to as Walloon families.

They were not from, they were not like born and raised in the Netherlands, even if they traveled to New Netherlands via the Netherlands or the Dutch Republic. The same period. Early 1600s, the English are setting things up in Jamestown and Plymouth. And we know how horrible those experiences were at first. We've talked about it a lot on this series. Why will this venture be any different for the Dutch? Have they learned from the miseries of the British? I don't know if you could say they've learned from the misery of the British. I'm not sure even if their experiences were that different, but perhaps we just don't have the records that detail. some of the misery. One of the earliest records, I believe it's from 1626, there is a letter or

a testimony that details that, you know, they're having children in the colony, they're able to cultivate the land. So it sounds as if, you know, in Catalina Trico, when she gives a deposition much later on, she talks about the relationships with the indigenous people when they were, she was initially amongst the people in Albany, and then she's with her family there, settling New Amsterdam. And she talks about relationships with the indigenous people being really good initially.

So I, but I think that, I mean, I cannot imagine it not have been challenging to settle in that area. But were they better at those relationships with those indigenous people? I don't know. I don't think that, you know, it's hard to say, right?

because yes, there are moments where we see that there's trade and there are established relationships that seem good. But then on the other hand, there's also some really horrific wars and attacks on indigenous communities, as we see during Keith's War, where they're horrific. So it's, you know, it kind of depends on who you ask and when you ask them. I think early on during those early settlements, if you just have a few families in those areas that does not give the same, that, you know, that does not threaten indigenous communities in the same ways that, you know, an established town might or would.

Let's talk about the, speaking of apocryphal history, the $24 required to buy the island of Manhattan. I mean, of course, it's not in reality that way. So what is the real story behind the acquisition of that land or can we call it acquisition? The records that we have of that, is a letter that details that it was a purchase through goods worth 60 guilders at the time. So the $24 is a later on kind of like calculation of what at the time. And I believe that was from the early 20th century that calculation. So now it would have been much more, right? And that probably was like goods like knives or cloths that they would have exchanged for supposedly Manhattan.

Now, there is, of course, the whole difference in how people understand land use or ownership of land between European and indigenous ways of, you know, understanding that. And there's plenty of reason to believe that the indigenous people did not actually, so those would be the Monsei Lenape, that they did not actually see this as like selling off their land to the Dutch. and that meaning that they could not access their land anymore or that that would now belong to Dutch people or the West India, the Dutch West India Company. There's a scholar, Erin Kramer, she has this really great blog post on the Gotham Center History blog

that talks about this and the different understandings of land use and owning land and what that might have meant for the indigenous people versus the Dutch in this moment. So it's very much using Dutch. law to apply in this New World setting and claiming lands through that judicial system and understanding of how it works. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

It's so fascinating. I mean, really, we can look at these early colonizations as how mankind parted ways with more organic relationship with the land, which was so much of what indigenous peoples had, versus. this imposed idea of human beings and the land, which is now European colonists, how the Europeans view this, that you possess land, that your society is structured based on that ownership. It's a complete fork in the road of human civilization at that point. And you can see it right here and elsewhere in all kinds of colonization, but it's amazing. It is not an amicable, I mentioned before they got along better. Indeed, actually, as you mentioned, there's a lot of wars that come

along later on with those peoples. 1655, there's the Peach War with the Lenape people, and then Keith's War, of course, is going on. So let's not pretend that it was all peachy, so to speak. But let's talk about life in New Amsterdam, the daily life and what it was like.

How much do we know about that as far as records kept and descriptions? I've been thinking about this a lot. Some of it we can see from the records, but of course there's only certain records that we have. So it's always difficult to reconstruct. But we do for New Amsterdam actually have a pretty good sense of where people were living. There's some projects that actually are mapping this, very, very detailed maps.

And I think that really helps that you can see, you know, where did Stuyvesant live, who, of course, was the well-known director general or governor of New Netherlands in the 1650s and 1660s. Where was the fort? What was in the fort? Where were the taverns? Like we have some sense of where people would go to. to have a drink, right? We know where they had some of the gardens,

where they had the commons, where the enslaved people live. So that has been very helpful. And actually the New Amsterdam History Center, if your listeners are curious, like they have a really great, their website has a really great tool to see that map

and some of the people who are living there. They have an exhibit going on right now as well in New York City about that. And that's really helpful in kind of seeing where do people live, who are their neighbors. One of the interesting things about that is I think that you can see how incredibly small it is. So it's at its largest.

It's the part south of Wall Street. And it was not Manhattan has added a lot of lands in, you know, since then. So it actually was a much narrower area even than it is today. And so anywhere you go, like you could get there, I think. I mean, I've tried some of these routes and it would take me. 10 minutes at most, maybe, maybe 15. So it's a very small area. And we see people, you know, have various, of course, occupations. There's bakers. There's, you know, a minister. There's a Dutch reformed church, which eventually they will build a church within the fort. There's a lot of farming.

Farming, of course, is important to be able to sustain a community like that. The sea was a big part of things. Yeah, so a lot of sailors and soldiers are becoming actually residents of that town. Trade was really important. So we see a lot of these people like Calwood Localombs. He was an important merchant who was trading with, for example, the various indigenous people by the Delaware River. So there's many, many different occupations, different things that people are doing,

also different places where people are coming from. And so there are some descriptions of. the many different languages that were spoken in New Amsterdam because of the various origins of the people who are living in that town. And so when thinking about daily life, I mean, so I think, you know, the mapping and kind of thinking about the occupations and what people were doing on a daily basis helps. The records are more showing us the court cases. Like, those are the types of things that come out in the records a lot. So we have the deeds. We have court records. And so there you can also get a glimpse of daily life.

And there's a lot of, you know, accusations, slander cases. People will say that their reputation is being tarnished because they're called this, that, or the other. There's a lot of that in the records. Theft, animals that are not contained and are, you know, like damaging properties. So those are the types of things that we see that also are, you know, part of the daily life in this town. Well, you can get a sense that there is a real community. and society being built. I mean, that's the feeling that this has,

that there's real intention. I suppose that my confusion is, it's a corporate town. It's a company town, basically, you know, both this and Fort Orange. Are they all involved in the same mission as far as building this colony for the company, or is there a broader idea of this place?

So it very much, like the colony belongs to the Dutch West India Company, right? Like they are in charge of it. And that includes New Amsterdam. So we also see that initially, any court cases would go to the council, like any legislative issues are resolved by the council, which was the legislative body in the colony

representing the Dutch West India Company. This changes over time in the 1650s, it becomes a town. It has its own court system, and so it gains some independence in that sense. So that changes some of that. Now, whether or not that means, I don't think that the population,

I don't get the sense that the people who actually are on the ground are there to, you know, for the mission of the Dutch West India Company. These are oftentimes people who are just living their lives. They're trying to survive. They're trying to thrive. And then, of course, there aren't safe people who are forced in that area to help contribute to building that colony. So you don't get the sense that they're there.

with this, you know, like, yes, let's do this and let's make the Dutch West India Company great. I don't see that in the record. Put me in the middle of the town there. You've already described it a little bit, but does Broadway exist yet? It does. I guess the main street, right? Yeah. And if I'm remembering this correctly, this was already before the Dutch settlement, an important

thorough way for the indigenous people. So it's and it would go all the way along Manhattan as we still, of course, see today. So, so yes, that exists. It's one of the broader streets. There's a canal in the city. So this is really, or the town, I should say, like in the 1640s, New Amsterdam at about a population of 500 people, it never reached more than a thousand historians believe. So it was really small. but it had a canal and we see the Dutch actually doing this in Batavia and in Indonesia as well

where they're trying to kind of reconstruct these types of towns that look like the Dutch town and canals are an integral part of that. So there's a canal, there's, of course, in the area of Battery Park, there's the fort with the church. Is it a peaceful place? I mean, by descriptions, are there a sense, is there a sense of threat from beyond? I mean, they built the wall for a reason there, which becomes Wall Street, of course. Well, that was really, that was during Keith's war, right? That there were these increasing tensions with the indigenous people in the 1640s with the

Mount Selinape, which really, like at the time, even many of the colonists were blaming Kifth, Director General, William Kifth, for increasing those tensions and then really escalating the situation. But so we do see attacks on Dutch farmers. We also, as I mentioned, see horrific attacks by the Dutch on indigenous people. There's one massacre in Provonia that's described in great detail that that was just horrendous. So that is what the wall is for. And so, yes, there is that sense of fear in that sense, especially, you know, as the town is growing,

and these relationships with local indigenous people are becoming increasingly tense. we also see of course that there's always the threat of the English and you can really see this in the in the records that the English are always kind of a threat as to you know like looking toward this area but but it becomes more and more a threat and of course by the 1660s they actually you know by 1664 they actually take over the colony but but it's long before that that we see the Dutch already kind of talking about this and knowing that the English have their eye on the colony. So there's that. But internally, there's the personal strife between people,

but it really feels like a lot of it is just, you know, like people and neighbors who are in fights with each other. The most tensions are really, you know, coming from the outside. You can only imagine. I mean, you're out in the middle of nowhere. You know, this is a very remote idea of life for people who are used to, you know, European communities, which are very dense, and very human. Suddenly they're in this very unhuman environment where nature is really out there guiding the whole day-to-day life. How was it for children? Is there any record about how children were schooled and how that was organized? This is something that I find difficult to answer. It's always difficult to find children in the records. And I have not done a deep dive.

but we do see that in many of these communities, in general, Dutch children would get some basic education. And this, of course, has to do in part with the Dutch Reformed religion and needing to be able to read the Bible and access the Bible. And so I think that a lot of these children would have gotten the basic education. we also see that there's women who, you know, have that education. So it's, in that sense, we see that women are, you know, also taking part in trade and business. And so it's slightly different from what one might assume when thinking about these early communities. We see children, like, relatively early on in some cases, you know, learning a trade. And so in some cases in the form of like an indentured servitude.

So I suspect that children, you know, early on would help out with their families. If it was not like working within the home or on the farm, then maybe by being rented out to a neighbor to help or to learn a trade. There's very, you know, that's, I think from the records that I've seen, most of what. what we can reconstruct about that. Interestingly, Catalina Trico and Inouardes, Janso de Palio, whom I mentioned earlier on,

they are known to have had the first born European descendant child in the America, Sarah, Sarah Vapalya. Yeah, I believe it was 1625, so very early on. The first New Yorker, there you go. The first European descendant,

that's New York, but yes. That's right. You're stepping into the territory that we were inevitably going to get to, which is early enslavement at this point. The Dutch had a lot to do with pioneering a commercialized systemic trade in enslaved Africans. How much was New Amsterdam part of creating that system and how much was slavery part of life in New York? In New Amsterdam, which is said. Yeah. So we see and save people in New Amsterdam relatively early on.

Yeah, Biacobes believes that it was in 1627. and he has a, you know, convincing evidence that it was indeed likely in 1627. So relatively early that we see the first and saved Africans in New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam or New Netherlands was, it was part of these Dutch trading networks, but the role that it played changed over time. So we see, for example, that when Peter Stuyvesant becomes the director general in 1647, he is also the director general of Aruba, Bonnet, and Curacao. And yeah.

And so he is very much also involved with what at that moment is really kind of the foundational moment to develop Curacao into this safe trading depot. So the Dutch were involved already in the safe trade, mostly to Brazil, mostly transporting people to Dutch Brazil. for a time for a brief period, Brazil was the northern part, like Rousseef, was part of the Dutch, the Dutch West India Company territories. And so they were shipping a lot of unsafe people, especially from West Central Africa and the Dutch West India Company also at some point controlled the port of Luanda in

today is in Gola. So they were very much involved with that. we see that by the 1650s, however, when Thetor Stuyvesant is the Director General and he's in charge of those islands, that they're really developing Curacao into like a safe trading depot where they will send and save people to predominantly,

like the objective is to make money off of the trading of people, of human beings, to mostly the Spanish colonies, which are like Curisaw is right off the coast of Venezuela, on a clear fall day, people have told me, you can see the Venezuelan coast from Curacao, right? So it's relatively close. And so those were Spanish areas. The Spanish did not have any trading posts in Africa.

And so they were very much interested in obtaining and saved Africans from other people. And the Dutch were kind of trying to tap into that market. So that was Jerusalem's tenure. We see also during that period that he's increasing the number. of unsafe people that are being brought to New Netherlands. So when saved Africans are in New Netherlands as early as 1627, the population is relatively small. But if we look at the church records,

we actually see that, you know, the whole population is relatively small, right? So I think at some point historians calculated that it might have been about a third of the population. I don't know if that is accurate. It's very difficult at times to have. have good numbers when it comes to this. But it definitely, when you look at some of the early church records,

statutory foreign church records, where some of these in safe Africans were also marrying and baptizing their children in New Amsterdam's statutory form church, they are mentioned relatively frequently that you see a person's name of Simon Congo, you know, probably coming from Congo or Maikin van Holam. Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Is it fair to say that American enslavement or North American enslavement begins in New York?

Because it had already been happening elsewhere, right? I mean, in North America. Yeah. So, of course, in Virginia, it's like a decade earlier, right, with the arrival in 1619. But the Dutch were involved also in that, right? So we do see that it may not have been New Neville and Lerner. itself, but we do see that the Dutch were very much kind of involved with the beginnings of slavery in North America and in many of those areas, at least, always want to be careful with

North America because, of course, the Spanish were already involved for much longer. But if we look at the Atlantic seaboard, and we do see Dutch involvement being pretty crucial in that. The interesting element to me is that the Dutch at this point, and even today, were so respected and admired for their market abilities, their ability to commercialize things and figure out how to systematize stuff. And when they applied that to the slavery market, this is when things really took off. That's kind of what I'm talking about, is how much were they fundamental to the building of that early marketplace and that mentality that this was a way to make a lot of money? They were. So yes, and this is actually one of the things that I'm working on right now to really

establish the importance of the Dutch in that. But yes, we see that the Dutch are with the development of Curacao, one of the first people to really turn slave trading itself, not the first people, but the first kind of like country company that really is trying to make money off of slave trading in and of itself. And that is definitely also influencing New Netherlands. And we see that during Syvesant's tenure, he's regularly asking Matthias Beck, who is in Curacao in charge there, for more enslaved people. for New Amsterdam and New Netherlands.

And just one thing to note, like, when we think about daily live in New Amsterdam, one of the things that I didn't mention is that, of course, there were also enslaved people very much, like a part of that town. So if you walk down the streets of New Amsterdam, you would have also encountered enslaved Africans. And some of the records referred to them working in a chain gang, right?

And the chain gang actually, in some cases, criminals, would be sentenced to work a long, the company slaves in the chain gang. And so those would also be things you'd see in New Amsterdam. And that would make it markedly different from what you would see in Amsterdam at the time, right? Where there was a black population, but slavery was supposedly not allowed. And so we don't see like in slave people. There would be a safe, you know, slave auctions.

We know that there's an auction in the spring of, I believe it was 1664. Yeah, May 1664, we know there's an auction likely taking part in place in front of the courthouse where in safe people, including a woman with a child, are being sold to the various people who want to purchase them. So that was also a part of that town in daily life in that town. The English take control of New Amsterdam in 1664. Little known detail is that Peter Steibonson, Director General of New Amsterdam, blames a slave ship for his having to surrender to the English.

Explain that story. Where does that come from? So this is actually part of a longer history of Pater's divasants, complaining that the unsafe people that are transported from Curacao to New Amsterdam are older, weaker. So he's oftentimes asking for more unsafe people in the colony. And he blames Matthias back in Curacao actually for sending the stronger and healthier and safe people to the spend.

and sending him the older and the sick people. So in the case of the Gideon, which arrives just a few weeks before the English take over the colony, it arrives in New Amsterdam with 290 and safe men and women, still alive on board that ship. And they, at that point, had come from Curacao. When they arrive, it's, you know, within weeks that the English are arriving in the harbor and taking over the colony.

And later on, Stuyvesant says that he in part could not protect the colony because these people that arrived on the Gideon were so weak that the provisions that he would have needed for his troops went to these and safe people to feed them. And that that is why he was not capable in that moment to defend a colony as he perhaps would have done otherwise. James Baldwin mentions this later on and talks about it as the marvelous foreshadowing of the scapegoat role.

I'm paraphrasing, I'm close to how he says it, but like the scapegoat role that the black would play in American life. It's something along those lines. And it does stand out as, you know, even in that moment, it's blamed on the unsafe people who have no role in all of this, right? Like they had taken there by force that he lost the colony. It's often said that Dutch enslavement was somehow, I don't know, kinder and gentler than other. It wasn't. It was just as harsh as anyone else. It was. And, you know, it's really interesting because there's a lot of attention oftentimes given to half freedom, which is this. So some of the unsafe people that we see actually going to the Dutch Reformed Church, having their children baptized there, some of the earliest people in the colony, some of them were able to obtain half freedom as,

it's sometimes referred to where they would get land. So we actually see that a lot of these formerly and safe people got land in the area that's today like NYU area, Washington Square Park, right? Is that it? And but they still would need to contribute to the company. They still would have to pay dues. They would have to help the company when it needed them. Their children would remain in bondage.

So it wasn't a full freedom. But oftentimes their cases have been used to say, well, sea slavery was really not that hard in or not that terrible in New Amsterdam. Because here are these people who are able to obtain like this conditional freedom. They get land. They live. And we see that, you know, decades later, those families are still in the area. But, you know, there's another side to that story, as I mentioned, where in safe people are working and changing. gang and are sold at public auction in the town.

And so it's a much more complex history. And yes, absolutely does not mean that slavery was more benign in the Dutch colony. Of all your studies in these people, are there any favorites that you have, some individuals you can tell us about? Absolutely. And, you know, as somebody who studies slavery, it's very difficult for me now to choose one of the unsafe people who, regardless of the circumstances under which they were brought to New Amsterdam, were able to make a home for themselves there. And one of the people that comes to mind is Mike and von Nchola,

who according to later records, was brought there in 1628. So really one of the very first people, an unsafe woman who perhaps came from Angola because that was her last name. She married in the town. She was able to get conditional freedom in the 1660s, and eventually in 1663, she was able to get full freedom.

The conditional freedom that she obtained, by the way, was that she and two other women was able to become free as long as they would return to Peter Stuyvesant's house to clean that every week, I think it was. So that, you know, under that condition, they were able to obtain their freedom. She was among the many people who lived in that area by NYU. believe she lived on the corner with her husband of Houston Street and Bowery. And they raised a child who was a child of half free people who, as I mentioned earlier, was still in saves or in some form of bondage. They were able to get freedom for that child. So she's just one of these people that I think really tells the story of New Amsterdam in the light of slavery. and the ways in which and safe people in that area were able to make the best out of,

yeah, persevere and really make the best out of these horrific circumstances under which they came there. She attended the Dutch Reformed Church. So she was very much a part of that community, but in a very different way. So we've intentionally focused this conversation on life in New Amsterdam, but we have to bring this to a close with the Dutch capitulation to the British. September 8th, 1664. This is still a mysterious moment

for a lot of listeners, for me as well. Can you explain? So now we've talked about how hard it was to create this community, how much went into building it, people coming over building lives. 40 years after developing New Netherlands, the Dutch give it up without a fight.

Explain that moment and how this would have affected the everyday people. Yeah. So I think that Russell Shoredo does a really good job of talking about this in his new book, Taking Manhattan,

because he really talks about the background of the various players that play an important role in this. But I think overall, this moment has not received the attention from historians as it should. One of the things that I think stands out is that for these Dutch, these people,

and we say Dutch people, but many of them were not Dutch, right? As we talked about, like, there were balloons, there were Africans. There were people from various parts of Europe and beyond. And for many of those people, people, they, I think in that moment, feared more like a violent attack by the English than being taken over. And they negotiated that they were able to, you know, like that they had certain rights.

And so I think that that in that moment was enough for the population. And as Shorto talks about, like, they are the ones who are really like trying to convince Derosongs to give in. But I don't want to say that this means the Dutch gave up on the colony or that they were not sad about it, if you will. Because we actually see that they take back New Amsterdam, right, in New Netherlands in 1673. That's a moment that really needs a lot more attention from historians because it's oftentimes forgotten. But there is this period where they take the area back. And there are other instances where we see, and I was just recently in the Arachai, I was really looking into this period.

And we see people, I mean, so they have to pledge allegiances, right? There's people who might refuse it or might try to get out of it. There's in Brooklyn at some point an attack on an image of the king in the late 17th century. So, you know, when the Dutch tried to take the colony back in 1673, we see that a lot of the residents are actually very excited about that and are helping the soldiers to take over the colony and actually guiding them on how to do this in that moment because they want to go back to that rule. So I think that it's not as if, you know, 1664 in the English takeover

and that's the end of it and everybody is okay with that. I think that there's a lot of kind of, you know, more subtle resistance, yeah, and more to it. And again, something that I think deserves more attention and hopefully, you know, in a couple of years or decades, we'll be able to have a better picture of really what's going on the ground. But from the things I've seen, there's a lot more to it, and it's fascinating. I'm in the middle of that book, taking Manhattan right now. It's really interesting.

I think it's fascinating. And we're going to wrap this up now. But the sense that the Dutch remain and all of what they have been building in terms of a mercantile colony remains as well. The English are only too happy to receive taxes. You know, it works out for everybody in the end, sort of, you know, because the estates remain, all those Dutch people still have their homes. All that continues to process as this unique place. And as, as Shorto points out, this very directly contributes to a very unique quality to New York, as opposed to other places. Just like Boston comes from the Puritans.

This New York really comes from the mercantile enterprise of the Dutch. And it resonates throughout all the decades to come. It's really fascinating. I mean, that's oversimplifying it, looking backwards. but it's really true. Yeah, I mean, and it shows also that going back to your earlier question, what the people who live there were concerned about was more at their own livelihood, right, than the Dutch West India Company.

And I think that that's something we see in that moment, too, that they were okay with that change as long as it did not affect their own livelihood and lives too much, disturbed that too much. They had already created a kind of different identity. It's tempting to think of it anyway. You know, far, far away across the ocean, they were now creating their own culture, which, you know, in some ways becomes America.

It becomes the United States eventually. Andrea C. Mosterman is an associate professor of Atlantic history and Joseph Treggle professor in early American history at the University of New Orleans. Mosterman's articles have appeared in the Journal of African History, Early American Studies, and elsewhere. Her book, Spaces of Enslaving. A history of slavery and resistance in Dutch, New York, has been the basis for so much of our talk today, and I hope you'll find it yourselves.

Thank you so much, Andrea. Nice to meet you. Thanks for talking with us. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend.

American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.