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In lower Manhattan, at Pearl Street and Coenties Alley in the oldest part of New York City, walls and a cistern are visible under the sidewalk, through pains of clouded glass. Next to them, the outline of a 17th-century building is marked in colored brick.
“That is the footprint of the original Stadt Huys, which was first the city tavern and then became” the city hall of New Amsterdam, the author and historian Russell Shorto said. “When they were excavating to put in that skyscraper [85 Broad Street, built for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s], the archeologists identified and marked out those little bits.
“New York plows ahead. But there are those tantalizing remnants. And really, the street pattern of the financial district is the street pattern of New Amsterdam. I’ve given many tours there and what I tell people is: ‘Just don’t look up at the skyscrapers, or it ruins the effect. If you have the Castello Plan, the map of New Amsterdam from 1660, you can make this left and that right and make your way around.’”
One alternative to packing an ancient map and walking is to read Shorto’s histories. In 2004, he had a hit with The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. Now, two decades later, he has published Taking Manhattan, about how, in 1664, New Amsterdam became New York.
“It was not always the plan to follow it,” Shorto said of his earlier book. But both books grew from a “translation project that’s been going on in Albany [the New York state capital, up the Hudson River] since the 1970s, translating 12,000 pages of the official corpus of the Dutch colony. Over the past five, six or seven years, they have moved to … the last few years [of New Amsterdam]. And that gives a picture of the colony at its height, just before the English took over. And that made me think: ‘Well, I’m now getting a sense of the place the way Richard Nicolls would have seen it, as this fruit that had ripened.”
Nicolls was New York’s first English governor. To Shorto, he presents “that alluring combination of a highly influential yet seriously neglected figure”. He was a soldier, a civil war veteran from Ampthill in Bedfordshire with close ties to the Duke of York, the future King James II. Sent to take New Amsterdam from the Dutch, he did so by negotiation rather than force, then renamed the place for his boss.
“Like everyone else, I had kind of jumped over that moment,” Shorto said. “It’s seen as if it’s inevitable but as with any historical period, if you zoom in and focus and look at it from the perspective of the people on the ground, then of course you don’t see it as inevitable. You see the future as uncertain.”
Nicolls faced great uncertainty from the moment his ship reached the great harbor of New Amsterdam, then paused to await the rest of his squadron. Shorto captures the moment in typically evocative prose, Nicolls and his men, nerves on edge, aboard a ship riding “an immensity of blue-brown tidal chop”. Miles away, on the low southern tip of Manhattan, Peter Stuyvesant faced uncertainty too. He was the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, a wooden-legged hard case who faced ruin but eventually, with his townspeople and Nicolls, achieved a strange sort of coup, averting death and destruction to birth a true world city.
It was built on the backs of others. Native peoples – the Lenape, the Esopus, more – ceded land to the Europeans and died from disease that came with the ships. Africans arrived in those ships, in increasing numbers, most to live a miserable life, enslaved.
Echoing a device used for Revolution Song, his book about how America won independence, Shorto threads the stories of ordinary people in New Amsterdam with those of the leaders tangling above them. One is Dorothea Angola, who “as her name suggests … had been born in Africa but had lived most of her life in New Amsterdam. And while she was African, she was enslaved to no one but was, in fact, a property owner, a woman who commanded respect.”
Her presence is one indication that since Shorto wrote The Island at the Center of the World, much about history and its uses has changed. Everything is contested. Reckonings with dark legacies, of colonialism and slavery, are increasingly common.
Shorto said he had “changed, along with society. I’m much more aware than I was then. So that becomes part of this story.” But he also warns of the dangers of presentism, the projection of modern attitudes on to events centuries past.
“Europeans were not smarter than Native Americans,” he writes, “nor were Native Americans morally superior to Europeans.”
He said: “There is that tendency to say, ‘OK, now we’re going to focus on the Native American side of the story, and they are necessarily in a morally higher position.’ I think you could pull back and forth. You could look at it from our perspective and say: ‘Yes, they were swindled.’ But if you spend most of your time on the ground with the characters, then when I’m with this person, I’m trying to do it from their perspective, and then if I’m switching to someone who’s on the other side, I’m doing it from their perspective then.”
Shorto does not shrink from the cruelties of colonialism and slavery, the hypocrisies of religion that supported such schemes. But as he thinks of himself “more as a storyteller than a historian”, so he feels more freedom than most academics.
“Over thousands of years, I don’t think humans have gotten more intelligent, or wiser. For the Native people, granted, Europeans came and pushed things, but indications are that Native people valued certain things in the relationship as well. So then you have this very human thing, that kind of back and forth. You have an obligation to look at: ‘What were they getting out of it, and how did they negotiate these deals, and how did the other side respond?’”
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Shorto considers another bit of received historical wisdom: that the Dutch Republic of the 1600s was a shining beacon of religious tolerance.
“You know, the Dutch have been asking themselves questions for 20 years now. I know Dutch people who basically say: ‘There never was Dutch tolerance.’ I don’t think that’s true. You have to look at what it was and was not. It basically applied to other white European Christians. But nevertheless, it was something, at a time when in France and in Spain, intolerance was official policy. So that made the Dutch Republic a different kind of place, and it made this colony different as well.”
New Amsterdam was very different to Boston, the English settlement to the north, which Richard Nicolls’s royal master ordered him to bring to heel, a task every bit as challenging as dealing with the Dutch on Manhattan. At the end of his book, Shorto peers into a divide that echoes down to this day.
“We might think of American politics as having two wings. One is defiantly moralistic, harps incessantly on the country’s Christian origins, and insists that these should be the guiding principles in settling issues of the day. We can look to the Puritan settlement of New England as the source of this strain in American politics.
“When the Puritans arrived, they saw America as the promised land and believed they had God’s blessing … to establish on the American continent a base of righteousness. This strain of thought runs through all the great political issues the country has grappled with. It has been used to justify slavery, to combat women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, to oppose abortion, to champion Donald Trump.”
On the other hand, “while volumes of scholarship have been devoted to the Puritan element in American politics, the source of the other wing of political thought has been harder to pinpoint, partly because it is so diverse. It sees itself as secular, reason-based, rooted in the Enlightenment. It is a messier tradition. I think there’s good reason to look to New York as its source.”
Shorto said he was offering “a suggestion more than a thesis … I just wanted to plant the idea that Richard Nicolls took the colony from the Dutch in this very creative way, and that set up this place that was relatively tolerant, outward looking, globally minded and pragmatic. But he failed in his second mission” to bring the Puritans under control.
“Did he set up this kind of Manichaean struggle between these two ideologies, who have been at war with each other ever since? I think it’s an interesting template for looking at all of American history – right to this very moment.”
