Book Review: ‘Taking Manhattan,’ by Russell Shorto

Dorothea Angola, Shorto tells us, arrived in New Amsterdam enslaved, possibly in 1627. She married and had children, and in 1644, her husband petitioned the Dutch West India Company for the couple’s freedom, which was granted. Soon after, they were given a six-acre tract to farm in what would become Greenwich Village.

But their children were not freed. There’s no evidence that they were pressed into forced labor, but Shorto writes that “this unbelievably cruel caveat would certainly have ensured that the parents would do whatever the company asked of them.” (Later, Angola petitioned for and was granted freedom for their adopted son.)

The story of Native people is full of death and dispossession, but the 17th-century power dynamics were complex. At one key moment, Shorto writes, a Montaukett leader named Quashawam, facing encroaching British settlers on Long Island, wanted to ally with the Dutch. It seems she tried to warn Stuyvesant that British ships were coming to take Manhattan, but he ignored the message. Quashawam wound up joining forces with the British and the Shinnecock instead.

This is why, when Nicolls and the British sailed in, it was a surprise to the Dutch. Nicolls gave Stuyvesant two days to surrender or be attacked. Meanwhile, the Dutch fought among themselves. The British sent Stuyvesant a note, and he tore it up before the city council could read it. But at the moment of peak danger, Shorto argues, Stuyvesant redeemed himself. He recognized a duty not just to his bosses at the West India Company, but to this new, weird city that was becoming its own thing. An hour before Nicolls’s ultimatum expired, Stuyvesant wrote back. He was willing to negotiate to save the city.

Nicolls wanted New Amsterdam not just for its strategic location, but for its open, commercial culture. So, Shorto writes, he agreed to a deal that “reads more like a corporate merger than a treaty of surrender.”