The Surrender of New Netherland - American History, 1493-1945

Articles, whereupon the City and Fort Amsterdam and the Province of the New Netherlands were surrendered

20 September 1664

View the articles of surrender of New Netherlands in the resource

In August 1664, four English warships commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, and demanded the surrender not just of the town but of the whole of New Netherland, the Dutch colony that had stretched up the valleys of the Hudson and Delaware rivers for the previous fifty years. The town was lightly defended, since several appeals to the directors of the Dutch West India Company back in Europe for a suitable garrison had gone unheeded, and the whole colony’s population less than a tenth that of the English settlements to its north and south. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, complied with Nicolls’ demands without a shot being fired.

Despite the apparent lack of cards that the Dutch held, and their acknowledged inability to resist the English, the agreement that resulted from Nicolls’ arrival by which New Netherland was "surrendered under His Most Exc[ellen]t Ma[jest]ys Obedience" is a model of munificence and fairness. In some ways it resembles the U.S. constitution itself. Twenty-three clauses guarantee various rights of the West India Company’s erstwhile subjects and prohibit specific demands on them. Under article 3, all people in New Netherland "shall continue free Denizons and enjoy their lands, Houses, Goods, [and] Ships"; if they want to dispose of their land and leave, they may (articles 4 and 6); they may not be compelled to serve in war against any nation (article 9) and may not (if they live in "Manhatoes") have soldiers quartered on them without compensation (article 10). New settlers "may freely come from the Netherlands and plant in this Country" (article 6) and junior public officials may continue to serve in their offices (article 16), or, if they wish, try their luck in England. Article 8 guarantees freedom of conscience and church governance, which under Stuyvesant had been seriously eroded in various persecutions of Lutherans, Quakers and Jews. Most remarkably – given that Nicolls’ occupation was an act of aggression and one of several attempts (eventually successful) to provoke war with the Dutch, whose share of international trade the English coveted – under article 23 any Dutch soldiers in the colony who wish to return home in order to continue to serve are guaranteed safe passage.

But, of course, the fact that a right is written down means nothing without a government willing to abide by its own prescriptions. Though the articles were respected in New Amsterdam (renamed New York, not after the English city but after the Duke of York, the future King James II) and up the Hudson, in the Delaware valley English soldiers under Richard Carr, sent to secure the area, set to looting and burning the towns and, in some cases, transporting the inhabitants to English Virginia to be sold into slavery. Although the Dutch retook New York in 1673 – when the city received a third name, New Orange – it was lost again to the English, this time for good, early the following year. Scant physical evidence of New Amsterdam remains, though Peter Stuyvesant, the man who gave it away, has done fairly well out of posterity: a district of Brooklyn bears his name, as well as a street in Manhattan and one of the island’s largest private housing developments.