By the mid-17th century, English claims in the New World were well-established for those colonies along the New England coastline. The hard-scrabble existence and high mortality which had so characterized the early years of settlement had given way to communal permanence and relative prosperity. Still, the relationship of these growing settlements, with the surrounding forest and inhabitants, remained uneasy. Intent on establishing a wilderness Zion, where tight controls over religious practices could be consistently managed and overseen, these English settlers often described their surroundings as “cursed” land, “the environment of evil,” a “kind of hell” on earth. The earliest Puritans of New England, steeped in an Old Testament, Biblical worldview, believed they found themselves in such a “wilderness condition” of continental proportions. It was their God-ordained destiny to transform the dismal American wilderness into an earthly paradise, governed accordingly by the Word of God. Fine Arts Magazine

The Dutch, on the other hand, came during the same period to explore the little-known region between the English and French-occupied northern realms and the Spanish territories to the south. On a tip from Captain John Smith, founder of the failed settlement in Jamestown, Virginia that an area of open water might lay to his north, the English explorer, Henry Hudson, set sail across the Atlantic on behalf of the Dutch. He navigated his ship, Half Moon, into Chesapeake Bay and ultimately, northward to a great river estuary, with an island bearing the Indian name, Mannahatta, nearby, believing its wide mouth might promise a passageway to the Orient.

Hudson sailed on behalf of a group of businessmen, comprising the Dutch West Indies Company and his objective was to establish trade routes as he went. While he did not passage to the Pacific, he charted the lands adjoining the river and created trading posts along the way (New Amsterdam [New York], Fort Orange [Albany] and Fort Nassau [Gloucester, NJ]) with thriving, receptive Indian communities. Many Dutch families with mercantile interests under land grants from the Dutch West India Company, soon followed. By the 1660s, several thousand settlers inhabited a loose-knit network of communities in New Netherlands—stretching from central Long island and the Connecticut River Valley, west to New Amsterdam and up the Hudson River in towns whose names are familiar today—Breukelen, Staten Island, Haarlem, Yonkers, Peekskill, Sleepy Hollow, Fishkill, Rensselaerswyck, Staatsburg, Kaatskill, Reinbeck, Cortlandt, New Palz and Kinderhook, among others.

While these communities prospered at a local level, under legal contracts resembling merchant-family monopolies to exclusively produce and sell certain goods and products, the larger business experiment in fur trade with the natives, initially undertaken by the Dutch West India Company, never prospered. The small agrarian communities tucked into the hills and vales of the Hudson Valley remained relatively isolated and ungovernable by a variety of kings’ court-appointed, colonial overseers, including Peter Stuyvesant. In 1664, having declared war on the Dutch, Charles II of England sailed into New Amsterdam harbor, demanding the surrender of Dutch territories to the English. Unable to excite the local population to resist, Stuyvesant gave up without a shot fired.

After a mere 40-year reign (with a brief return to Dutch rule in 1673-74), the vast reaches of the Delaware Bay, stretching from the Virginia border to the south, north along the coast and extending up the Hudson toward French-controlled Canada were now under English control.

But, the story does not end there.

What is important for us to understand today is the role that Dutch settlement and its cultural heritage exerted on our American identity. This influence was due, in large part, to how the English subsequently managed these new territories under their control after 1664. While the legacy of Dutch presence in the New World was brief, in formal terms, their values and traditions endured. The reasoning is that the benign governance practiced by the British in the years following their vesting of authority, did much to insure the preservation of selected Dutch cultural traits and traditions. In retrospect, we easily recognize many of these traditions as the fundamental building blocks of our Constitutional guarantees as Americans.

Fortunately for us today, the stern Puritan orthodoxy of earlier New England settlements did not extend its influence to English rule elsewhere in the region. English imperial rule would prove difficult to enforce over great distances and, apart from taxation for selected goods, the new government proved no more effective than the displaced Dutch authorities in their ability to unify and assimilate the firmly-ensconced Dutch communities into the new English hegemony.

Apart from different names (New Amsterdam became New York, New Netherlands became the colony of New York, Fort Orange [then Beverwijck] became Albany), little changed for the Dutch living under English rule. Euro-Dutch national traditions, which had been imported as ‘whole cloth’ to the New World in 1629, persisted: freedom of conscience, religious tolerance and theological pluralism; the rights of women to inherit and own property; free trade and rights to property transfer; a long-standing tolerance for multi-national immigration resulting in cultural melting-pot communities; presumption of innocence in a court of law; open political debate between parties holding differing views of governance; the right to a local, standing militia and no taxation without representation were key components of Dutch daily life that would persist in this region until another, more overarching form of government was established. It would take another 150 years for these principles to be codified in the years immediately following the American Revolution.

Author’s Note: Historical scholars, James R. Tanis and Stephen E. Lucas, in separate articles, contend that a Dutch document, the 1581, Act of Abjuration, issued in the wake of the Dutch revolt against Spain, together with the Union of Utrect, 1579 (both reprinted in the colonies in English in the 1750s), became the models for Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and later, the U.S. Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution.

In essence, during their brief rule in colonial America , the Dutch profoundly influenced our national identity, both politically and socially. As the 19th century dawned, the legacy and romance of the Hudson River Valley and its quaint, isolated farm communities still extant, would now fuel a very different fire. The legends and folklore, the traditions and traits of the Dutch and their English neighbors, would become the building blocks for a new literary tradition to be added to a growing catalogue of symbols that would form the heart and soul of an emerging nation.

*The Dutch Legacy Captured in the American Lexicon:

The Dutch infused the English language with many words and social institutions that are now part of our everyday lives: courant (newspaper);Columbia University; cranky; stoop; hook (of land); scow; bush (for back country); bushwhacker; cruller; coleslaw; cookie; pancake; anchor; easel; landscape; stove; wagon; yacht; whole grains with milk for breakfast; pretzel; pit (as in peach); waffle; boss; the game of golf; ice skating; Santa Claus (from Sinter Klass); Sint Maartin’s Eve, or Beggar’s Day, when masked children went with lanterns from door-to-door, asking for sweets and fruit…combined with the Irish-Celtic celebration of All Saints Eve on October 31st, to become Halloween.

*Thanks again to David Voorhees for this concise list, in his article, The Dutch Legacy in America, appearing in the volume, Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, edited by Roger Panetta, Hudson River Museum/Fordham University Press, 2009.

Part III: The influence of the rich literary history of the Hudson River Valley in shaping American identity