Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.

And today, we’re going to be talking about the Big Apple—back before people called it that. We’re going back to the year 1664 when New York was controlled by the Dutch, and was still known as New Netherland. At the time, the community didn’t extend much beyond the very southern tip of what we now call Manhattan, and numbered only a few thousand people, even if you included all the scattered villages and farms that existed along the shores of modern Brooklyn, Queens, and surrounding areas of Long Island. But in the world of 17th-century geopolitics, New Netherland punched well above its weight, as it was a bustling, multicultural trade hub populated by not only Dutchmen, but also Englishmen, Jews, emancipated black yeomen, immigrants from all over western Europe, and enslaved peoples captured from Spanish ships.

From the English point of view, it was also an aberration, as Dutch control of the area around modern New York City and the Hudson Valley was seen as a geographical aberration that separated England’s Massachusetts colony in the northeast from the Virginia-based colony to the south.

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America - Russell Shorto

Why is New York the archetypal modern city – brash, bold, pulsing with energy? The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York came to be.

Russell ShortoFollow Russell Shorto on Goodreads

In a newly published book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, historian Richard Shorto gives a blow by blow account of how the English took Manhattan from the Dutch—without bloodshed, and, crucially, without destroying the thriving cosmopolitan trading culture that the Dutch had fostered, and which has persisted to this day, three and a half centuries later.

In my interview with Shorto—who is also the founder of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society—he’ll describe the two main characters—Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial administrator who served as the director-general of New Netherland; and the much lesser known Richard Nicolls, the English military officer who was tasked with taking Manhattan by his childhood friends, King Charles II and his brother, the future king James II, who’d been restored to power following the English civil war.

As you’ll hear, taking Manhattan was just one of the two big jobs that the royals had dispatched Richard Nicolls to accomplish in 1664. The other was to restore some order to Boston, which rogue puritans had turned into a sort of quasi-theocratic city state during the chaos of the English Civil War.

The nature of the two projects, Shorto argues, come with important echoes that signal America’s two conflicting identities right up to the present day—the hardline Christian identity that took root in Boston, and the more diverse and capitalist society that emerged in New Netherland, and that Richard Nicolls, to his credit, preserved following his peaceful takeover of the future metropolis.

Please enjoy my interview with author and historian Russel Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

Transcript

Jonathan Kay: Russell Shorto, thank you for joining the Quillette podcast.

Russell Shorto: Happy to be with you.

JK: Congratulations on the book. There are so many amazing things in it, but I want to start with one. People might think it’s a non sequitur, but it just stuck in my mind. New York City was almost called Albania. You mentioned it in passing at one point.

RS: Not quite. So, Richard Nicolls named New York after the Duke of York, who was his boss. James, the Duke of York, was also the Duke of Albany. So he could have called it Albania. Instead, his plan was to call what became New Jersey “Albania.”

JK: Okay. I don’t know why I find that so hilarious. There’s nothing inherently funny about it, but it is funny. I mentioned Richard Nicolls in the introduction. You mention him in passing. In some ways, this book is—not quite a biography of Richard Nicolls—but you do devote a lot to this guy. Like every historical figure from the period, he’s complicated. I think he would have been regarded as complicated even by the English themselves, given his allegiances during the English Civil War. Tell me a little bit about Richard Nicolls—because Peter Stuyvesant, who kind of came out on the losing end of all this—although even that’s complicated—his name is well known in New York. Richard Nicolls, much less so, despite the fact that in some ways he’s the father of New York. Can you tell us about him?

RS: Yeah, that’s why I devoted so much time to him—because he’s so consequential and so little known. For a writer of history, that’s ideal. You talked about him being complicated. I actually find him to be a pretty straightforward figure—compared, for example, to Stuyvesant, who always seemed to have a lot of baggage. Stuyvesant was always trying...

JK: He wore a lot of hats. He had a lot of different constituencies he had to please.

RS: Yeah, and he had a temper. He had this feeling that he should be treated—he called the people in his colony his “subjects”—he felt like he should be treated as royalty or something.

JK: Just a quick little aside—is he one of these guys who benefited from the fact that, whatever you could say about him, he was better than the guy he replaced?

RS: I think Stuyvesant was quite a capable leader. I think he came into the job—we’re now talking about Stuyvesant leading the colony of New Netherland—he came in with certain expectations about how this was going to go. He came into a colony that was in upheaval. They had replaced the previous leader, who had started a war against the native people, and the colonists themselves had opposed that war because they were there to do business—to trade with the native people. So he thought he had to come in and be really heavy-handed. And then he quickly learned that these colonists of his were very strong-willed traders. They had their own trading networks that extended to the Caribbean and South America and Europe, and they weren’t going to just bow down to him.

JK: It wasn’t a feudal situation where he had total control.

RS: Yeah, and once he learned that—which took him a while—then he did something very clever and very skilful. He refashioned his job and saw himself as a kind of middleman between the directors of the Dutch West India Company—under whose auspices this colony existed—and these traders, his population on Manhattan and elsewhere in the colony.

JK: I got the sense that, in modern parlance, it was almost a good cop/bad cop situation. He was the good local cop, intermediating with the bad cop overseas—the corporate types back in the Netherlands who didn’t fully understand the local situation.

RS: Yeah, there was a lot of that. He had to mediate between these two. The directors of the company were these wealthy people in the home country, none of whom were ever going to travel to America. They had no notion. He was often trying to give them a sense of how big these areas were—how far it was to get from Manhattan to Beverwijck to Albany. It was 150 miles up the river—it wasn’t just like “we’ll run there and back.” So yeah, he had a lot of translating to do—trying to translate the situation on the ground to these people in Europe. And then he would turn around to his traders—his population—and I think with those he was close with, he was able to say—of course, it’s not written down in these kinds of interactions—but he was able to say, “Look, here’s what I’m dealing with back home. Help me out here. Work with me.”

And so, in doing this, what he did—which he’s never been fully given credit for, although a colleague of mine, Dennis Maika, is writing a book about just this subject right now—he created Manhattan, later New York City, as this capitalistic global trading centre. He laid the groundwork for what New York City became.

JK: Like a proto-Hong Kong. I derailed you with my question. My original question had been about Richard Nicolls, and then I interrupted you. I said he was a complicated figure—primarily because the moral analysis of any historical figure is complicated by the era they lived in. But I haven’t seen any statues to Richard Nicolls anywhere in Manhattan. Maybe they exist. Can you give us a biographical sketch? Maybe start with: he took sides with King James—who became James II—during the English Civil War. And then it’s the mid-17th century. He’s obviously very well-connected, and he becomes a right-hand man of King James and his brother. Is that a fair synopsis?

RS: Actually, it was his brother Charles who became the king during the Civil War—Charles II. Richard Nicolls was from a little town in Bedfordshire called Ampthill. His lifetime was one of great turmoil in England. For the longest time, of course, you had kings running the place, and beginning in the early 1600s, the Puritans started to grow in power. As the name suggests, the Puritans wanted to purify society—and the monarchy. They associated the monarchy with corruption, and the same with the Church of England. So they wanted to create a new church, more aligned with what they believed God wanted.

By the middle of the century, this erupted into civil war. The Puritans had gained power in Parliament, and Charles I—the father of Charles II and James—was dead set against the Puritans taking power. It all came to a head—literally—when the Puritans captured Charles I and beheaded him. Then the Puritan leader, Oliver Cromwell, became the head of England. The two young princes, Charles and James, fled into exile on the European continent.

Now, Richard Nicolls grew up in this little village of Ampthill at a time when Charles I—before he was beheaded—was a great hunter and regularly visited the area with his sons, because Ampthill was at the centre of the royal hunting grounds. Nicolls’ father was the keeper of the hunting preserve, and the largest, grandest house for the king and his family to stay in was Richard Nicolls’ father's house. So you get this picture of the two young princes growing up with this older boy—Richard Nicolls was six or eight years their senior—because they would come regularly and hunt together and play and do all sorts of boyish, manly activities.

Naturally enough, when the Civil War happened and society split between Puritans and Royalists, Nicolls and his family sided with the Royalists—they’d known the royal family all their lives. When the royals went into exile, Nicolls went with them, and he became particularly attached to James, the younger of the two Stuart sons. So he was with them throughout the Civil War, and when Oliver Cromwell was leading the Puritan government, Nicolls was acting as a spy and a go-between...

JK: This would be the 1650s.

RS: That’s right—trying to get the royals back on the throne. Finally, in 1658, Cromwell died. By 1660, the English were exhausted by the turmoil, and they invited Charles II to take the throne. So the royals came back—and Richard Nicolls came with them. His whole life, he had been connected to these people. They trusted him. They’d known him since they were all children.

Now they were in London in 1660. And for decades, the English had been envious of the Dutch, who had built this global trading empire. Now, with the Stuarts back on the throne, they decided: “We have to catch up.” They looked across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and saw English colonies in New England, and English settlements in Virginia and Maryland—and this whole piece in between, which the Dutch had started four decades earlier with their colony of New Netherland, with New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island as its capital.

The Dutch were trading in West Africa, trading in Asia. They were the only European nation allowed to trade with Japan. They were active all over the world—and there they were in North America with a colony that was effectively taking a bite out of English colonial efforts. So the king and his brother wanted to send an expedition to take over this Dutch colony.

JK: Let me stop you right there, because this is a very interesting subplot. It complicates your story, but it also makes it more fascinating. And we know a lot of this because the official orders given to Nicolls by the monarch still survive. They’re written in very interesting language that gives the monarch plausible deniability about what sort of means should be used. The language is fascinating.

But Nicolls’ first order of business had nothing to do with New York. As he was sailing across the Atlantic, his first order of business was to stop in Boston. I had no idea about this. I know the pop history of New England, which—putting aside the Indigenous factor, which we’re going to talk about—is generally seen as one big happy family. At the time, the Puritans who had come to what we now call Massachusetts were running a kind of theocracy. And they didn’t think much of the English throne, right?

RS: Well, exactly.

JK: And Nicolls had to knock them into shape, as I understand it.

RS: That was part of his mission. Throughout this whole century, you had the Puritans in opposition to the monarchy, the Church of England, and other institutions. It came to a head in the English Civil War. Now the monarch—the Stuarts—are back on the throne. And it was the Puritans who had founded these colonies, in particular the Massachusetts Bay Colony, based in Boston. Over these decades, they had grown very powerful with this very religious, theocratic structure. And they continued to despise the Stuarts, even though they were back on the throne. But they were an ocean away—and the colonists were doing their best to ignore them.

JK: It’s not quite a secessionist movement, but there’s clearly a huge divide—religiously, certainly.

RS: Yeah. They weren’t doing anything as brash as declaring independence, but they were doing their best to ignore England.