In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too difficult, they explained.
When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict.
This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden, English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ... depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.”
Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter, once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland.
The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson, pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.
But, since the Navigation Acts were almost as obnoxious to the English colonies as they were to the Dutch, ways were found in America to circumvent them. Intercolonial trade practices developed that soon baffled the monopoly-minded merchants of London and Bristol. Stuyvesant discovered, for instance, that he could exchange negroes and “other merchandise” for Virginia tobacco, and then reship the English product via New Amsterdam. Thus, goods intended for British bottoms were being carried by the Dutch to foreign markets, in spite of the English navigation laws.
Under these circumstances, from the British viewpoint, there was only one thing left to do. Whatever remained of Dutch authority and jurisdiction in America would have to be stamped out by military force. To accomplish this the English had only to take the Hudson River. It was not only the main highway to the fur stores of the Iroquois, it was the key to military control of the continent. And it could be seized at small cost, the Council of Foreign Plantations suggested.
Whereupon James, Duke of York, persuaded his brother, Charles II, to grant him title to various lands in America including all the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, and to finance an expedition against New Amsterdam. The English did not bother even to declare war, since, as the king curiously put it, New Amsterdam “did belong to England before, but the Dutch drove our people out of it.” A conglomeration of assumptions hardly warranted by any facts!
Someone has written that the conquest of New Netherland by the force sent out by the Duke of York was “a mere bit of bellicose etiquette.” Others have been more direct, calling it “bold robbery.” In any case, when Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived off Fort Amsterdam in the late summer of 1664, with four frigates and five times the fire power of Stuyvesant’s guns, New Amsterdam became New York without a shot being fired. So did Fort Orange up the river. It only remained then for Sir Robert Carr to descend upon the Delaware settlements to force the allegiance of all those seated there, and New Netherland ceased to exist.
The English had closed ranks on the coasts of America. British colonies now stretched out in line, unbroken by foreigners, from Spanish Florida to French Canada—one united front—for trade, for war.