Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [48]
It was in this context that it occurred to Stuyvesant and company strategists that New Amsterdam would make a convenient entrepot for the slave trade in North America and a source of vital supplies for the plantation economies developing to the south. It might also be profitable to establish a local market for slaves, perhaps even bring them directly from Angola, thus bolstering New Amsterdam’s labor force, hastening the reoccupation of its hinterlands, and securing the entire colony against encroachment from New England. Stuyvesant was one of the new policy’s most ardent supporters. His tour of duty on Curaçao coincided with the construction there of vast pens capable of holding thousands of slaves at a time, and it was he who suggested the administrative unification of Curaçao with New Netherland.
Nieu Amsterdam, mid-seventeenth century. The figures in this Dutch print—two colonists, a woman holding a basket of fruit and a man with tobacco leaves, as well as the bare-chested slaves behind them—are identical to those in a contemporary depiction of Barbados, except they are seen here with New Amsterdam in the background. Which came first is unknown, but this version nicely conveys the West India Company’s growing involvement with slavery and the slave trade in New Netherland. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
The last Dutch stronghold in Brazil fell to the Portuguese in 1654, and implementation of the new policy got underway the very next year. A company ship, the Witte Paert (White Horse), anchored in the East River with nearly three hundred Guinea slaves—the first specifically intended for local buyers—stowed below decks in conditions so cramped and filthy that residents must have been able to smell the ship from the far side of town. Additional shipments arrived before the end of the decade, though the real surge of imports did not come until after 1660, when some four hundred slaves were sold at public auction in the space of three or four years. By the mid-1660s New Netherland had about seven hundred slaves all told, three hundred of whom were held in New Amsterdam, far outnumbering its seventy-five or so free blacks and constituting over 20 percent of the town’s total population.
That population had meanwhile grown rapidly, for at the same time it began importing slaves, the West India Company had mounted its most ambitious campaign yet to attract free colonists. It issued a more liberal set of Freedoms and Exemptions and published a barrage of promotional pamphlets praising New Netherland’s abundance of rich, easily cultivated land.
Although immigration figures are incomplete and inexact, it appears that the company’s efforts—in tandem with Stuyvesant’s reform program—succeeded admirably. By the mid-1650s New Netherland’s population had climbed to perhaps thirty-five hundred men, women, and children; a decade later, to nine thousand. Of that number, some fifteen hundred lived in New Amsterdam alone, roughly three times as many as Stuyvesant found fifteen years earlier. Only one-fourth of the town’s three hundred adult white males could claim to have lived there longer than he had. The newcomers were as diverse as ever, too: half of them hailed from Germany, England, France, and the Scandinavian countries. By the mid-1660s, indeed, only 40 percent of New Netherland’s population was actually Dutch, while 19 percent was German and 15 percent English. But these weren’t the same kind of people who had been drawn to the colony during its first twenty or thirty years. Seventy percent came over in family groups, many of them couples in their early twenties with small children. Only one in four was a single male, and for the first time a small but significant proportion, about 6 percent, were single women. Better than half were farmers