In 1621 the Dutch West India Company came upon the scene as the successor of the New Netherland Company. Its charter bade it "to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts," and to "do all that the service of those countries and the profit and increase of trade shall require." The corporation was given almost absolute commercial and political power in all Dutch domains between Newfoundland and the Straits of Magellan, the home government reserving only the right to decline confirmation of colonial officers. Three years elapsed before the company attempted to plant a colony. Thirty families of Protestant Walloons—a people of mixed Gallic and Teutonic blood, living in the southern provinces of Holland, whose offer to settle in Virginia had been rejected by the English—were sent over by the Dutch proprietors (1624) to their new possessions. The greater part of the emigrants went to Albany, which they styled Fort Orange; others were sent to the Delaware River colony; a small party went on to the Connecticut; a few settled on Long Island; and eight men stayed on Manhattan. These settlements, relying for their chief support on the fur-trade with the Indians, were quite successful, and the New Netherlands soon became an important group of commercial colonies.
84. Progress within New Netherland (1626-1664).
The settlements united.
In 1626 Peter Minuit, then director for the company, purchased Manhattan from the Indians, united all the settlements under one system of direction, and founded New Amsterdam (afterwards New York city) as the central trading depot. In every direction the trade of New Netherland grew.
The patroon system.
As the settlers seemed to be interested in commerce, and agricultural colonization did not flourish, the corporation secured from the States-General a new charter of "freedoms and exemptions" (1629), which they thought better adapted to the fostering of emigration. This document sought to transplant the European feudal system to the American wilds. Members of the Dutch West India Company might purchase tracts of land from the Indians and plant colonies thereon, of which these proprietors were to be the patroons, or patrons. Each patroon thus establishing a colony of fifty persons upwards of fifteen years of age, was granted a tract "as a perpetual inheritance," sixteen miles wide along the river, or eight miles on both sides, "and so far into the country as the situation of the occupiers will permit." The company retained intervening lands; but no one might settle within thirty miles of a patroon colony without consent of the patroon, subject to the order of the company's officials. The patroons were given political and judicial power over their colonists; the latter might take appeals to the New Netherlands council, but the patroons were generally careful to bind the settlers before starting out not to exercise this right.
Patroon settlements.
Leading members of the company were quick to avail themselves of this opportunity to become members of a landed aristocracy and absolute chiefs of whatever colonies they might plant. Small settlements were soon made on these several domains, which were taken up chiefly along Hudson River, the principal highway into the Indian country. Van Rensselaer founded Rensselaerswyck, near Fort Orange; Pauw secured Hoboken and Staten Island; while Godyn, Blommaert, De Vries, and others settled Swaanendael, on the Delaware. Many of the old patroon estates long remained undivided, and the heirs of the founders claimed some semi-feudal privileges well into the nineteenth century. Attempts to collect long arrears of rent on the great Van Rensselaer estate led to a serious anti-rent movement (1839-1846), which broke out in bloody riots and affected New York politics for several years.
Collisions with English traders.
The patroons, as individuals, haughtily assumed to shut out the Dutch West India Company, of which they were members, from the trade of their petty independent States. The corporation was not only torn by internal dissensions, but soon had on hand a quarrel with New England because of the establishment of a Dutch fur-trading post at Hartford, on the Connecticut (1633), and the vain assertion of a right to exclude English vessels from the Hudson river. On the south, the Dutch came into collision with Virginians trading on the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Trade increased, but colonization did not thrive, owing in part to the rapacity of the patroons, and partly to the mismanagement of the governors sent out to represent the company.