The Unreconciled Dispute Between New York and Boston

With Russell Shorto

In Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, Russell Shorto brings to life the English takeover of New Amsterdam. The city that emerged from a dramatic standoff stood in stark contrast to Boston—with one place more globally minded and another more inward-looking. Shorto argues that the unreconciled differences between “the two ideological centers of the colonies” spread outward and are still with us today.

Russell Shorto is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical and senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute. He’s the bestselling author of eight books. A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to our conversation on the Skipped History podcast:

Full disclosure: the New York Yankee fan in me colored my commentary more than once

Ben: To begin, can you talk about Manhattan before the Dutch entered the scene?

RS: Manhattan Island was this incredibly rich ecosystem with many different microclimates—thick forests, swamps, bears, wolves, deer, beavers, otters, porpoises offshore. It was Native American territory, of course.

The Lenape, otherwise known as the Munsee or Delaware people, occupied what became the New York City region, extending west into New Jersey and south to Delaware. Manhattan Island, as far as people can tell, was mostly used seasonally for hunting. Groups like the Shinnecock on Long Island would use it as well. So, even before Manhattan became a global crossroads, it was a crossroads of Native cultures.

Ben: You note the island was named after a type of wood the Lenape favored for making bows: Manna-hatta. And in terms of the richness of the flora and fauna, you add that New York's harbor once produced single oysters the size of a dinner plate.

RS: That's crazy, right?

Ben: Amazing. And now I understand why oysters are considered aphrodisiacs. Nothing says let's go back to your place like slurping a booger the size of a dinner plate.

RS: Ha!

So, the Dutch were the first Europeans in the area. There’s the infamous deal where, supposedly, they “bought Manhattan Island for $24" from the Lenape. That didn’t actually happen.

Rather, they agreed to something like a defensive alliance with the Lenape. The Lenape allowed them to live there, agreeing that if one side were attacked, the other would help out. To seal the deal, there was an exchange of goods. The figure that’s been misinterpreted—60 guilders’ worth of goods, later valued by a 19th-century translator at $24—wasn’t a payment for the island but a token of completing an agreement. It consisted of things like copper kettles and knives.

Ben: Contrary to related narratives, in your introduction, you note that Native America is still part of the fabric of the region today. New York City has the largest American Indigenous population in the country, with 180,000 people spread across the five boroughs.

RS: Exactly.

Ben: Getting to the heart of your book, can you talk about the two defining dynamics of New Amsterdam, as you see them?

RS: Sure. The Dutch pioneered tolerance—or relative tolerance. It didn’t apply to enslaved Africans, Native people, or Jews, who were seen as an alien nation.

But it was still a watershed. In 17th-century Europe, intolerance was official policy in Spain, England, and France. The guiding idea was that the world was dangerous, and everyone had to be on the same page to survive. So societies enforced a state religion.

The Dutch flipped that idea. They didn’t have a choice—the Netherlands is a big river delta, flat, much of it below sea level, easy to flee to if you were escaping religious persecution, as many people did. They were also a seafaring people, learning other languages and cultures to do business. So the Dutch encouraged differences—and flourished. They had the greatest economy in the 17th century, which came with them to Manhattan.

At the same time that they founded the colony, they created the building blocks of capitalism: the concepts of a corporation, stock, and a stock exchange. That’s why Wall Street, originally the northern perimeter of New Amsterdam, became associated with finance.

Ben: And this was all long before the term "capitalism" had been coined.

RS: Right. And this is where the English enter the story. They, in particular, were jealous of the Dutch economic engine.

By this point, the Stuarts were on the throne. Charles II was king, and his brother James, the Duke of York, was his right-hand man. They decided, let's start working on an empire. They had the New England colonies, and Maryland and Virginia were sort of starting to form. But their arch-rivals, the Dutch, had this choice territory right in the middle—New Amsterdam.

So the Crown sent a flotilla of warships under the command of a guy named Richard Nicolls. His mission had two parts. Part one was to do as much damage as needed to take control of the Dutch colony. Part two was to go to New England and to get the Puritan leaders of Boston to recognize the Stuarts as their rightful government.

The backdrop is that England was deeply polarized in ways resonant today. On one side were the Puritans, whom I would consider religious extremists. On the other side were the Royalists, whom I think it’s easiest to think of as basically everyone else. Boston was a Puritan stronghold, and the Stuarts wanted Nicolls to force them to bow down to the throne.

Ben: Can you give us a little more background on Richard Nicolls? That'll also lead us to Peter Stuyvesant, the other major player involved.

RS: Sure. Richard Nicolls is quite forgotten today, but he created New York as we know it: he named it and became the first governor. He had known the King and the Duke of York his whole life. Nicolls was a really smart and creative guy, which is why the Crown tapped him to lead this mission.

Peter Stuyvesant was the director of the Dutch colony. He ran it for 17 years, very capably, but was kind of a hothead. The Dutch government was more interested in the East Indies and Asia, where they were getting their spices and money. They never really focused on New Amsterdam, and Stuyvesant had been warning them that the English were going to come.

Finally, the English arrived, and the heart of the book is this two-week struggle. The English are in their ships in the harbor. The Dutch are in their fort at the tip of the island. They have their cannons pointed at one another, but they're sending messengers and boats back and forth. Both sides realized they could work something out that would benefit them. And I think that's what makes this moment so interesting—they both wanted much the same thing.

Ben: Referring to the Dutch combination of pluralism and entrepreneurialism, you write, Nicolls “wanted not only the territory but the society that had developed there. He wanted the secret sauce, and they knew the recipe.”

RS: That's right. New translations of records from the time allow us to see New York Harbor the way Nicolls would've seen it: as this buzzing, thriving place where ships were going in and out, traveling to the Caribbean and Europe. For him to just bomb them, open fire, and take the island—well, then he would have to start all over again and figure out how to do it.

So the so-called Articles of Surrender he and Stuyvesant negotiated in 1664 read more like a bill of rights. The surrender said: “We guarantee you can keep your homes and businesses. In fact, we want you to keep up your contacts in Europe and the Caribbean. In exchange, though, the city will be under English jurisdiction. And oh, by the way, we're going to change the name.”

That was the concession.

Ben: So, Nicolls changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York. You also point out that New Jersey almost became known as Albania.

RS: Yeah. The Duke of York was also the Duke of Albany, and Nicolls wanted to distribute James’s titles. I know New Yorkers who still think of New Jersey as Albania.

Ben: It's true. Though, for the record, I looked up how you pronounce Snooki in Albanian, and it's very similar. So I think she would've found success either way.

RS: Good to know...

Ben: Can you reflect on how Nicolls’ mission went?

RS: Definitely. Nicolls succeeded in the first part of his mission. He acquired New Amsterdam, kept the unique blend of relative tolerance and capitalism, and transferred it to the English.

Ben: Emphasis on relative. We haven’t gotten into the history of slavery in the city yet.

RS: Yes. Slavery was part of the Dutch colony almost from the start, though it was an ad hoc affair. The first shipment of enslaved Africans from Africa arrived in the harbor two weeks before Nicolls got there. Under the English, slavery eventually became an industry. People are slowly coming to appreciate that, over the next century, New York became a major slave-trading base.

Ben: Some of these stats that you include are astounding. For example, by 1730, some 42% of families in the city owned slaves.

42% of families?! Percentage-wise, that basically means there were twice as many families that enslaved people as there are Mets fans today. And it feels like Mets fans are everywhere.

RS: I'll take your word for it.

Significantly, when it came to the second part of his mission—subduing the Puritans—Nicolls utterly failed. The Puritans more or less said, "We don't need you." They defied the king's pronouncements. And so you had two very different ideological centers in the colonies. New York was a pluralistic, outward-looking, and globally minded society. Boston was more inward-looking, theological—more it’s "my way or the highway."

I think that dynamic sets up a really interesting standoff throughout American history.

Ben: It certainly helps explain why I hate the Red Sox so much.

RS: Ha, yes. The geographical homes of those mindsets may have changed, but I’d argue the two different sensibilities have been locked in a struggle since the 1600s—that the failure to incorporate or resolve the differences between these two perspectives was, in many ways, at the heart of debates over slavery and the Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil Rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more.

Granted, it's impossible to trace ideas. They're like molecules. And yet you still have to try because we have to make sense of where we are. At some point in our history, the seeds of a conflict between pluralism and tribalism were planted—many, I think, during these disputes between the English and the Dutch. Those ideas became part of our culture, and we're dealing with them right now.

Ben: I find that a compelling argument. And bringing us back to where we started—with Indigenous dispossession—you also write that we’re still dealing “with our failure to process the injustice that the American experiment is built on.”