Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [6]
Still, even $669.42 is a bargain basement price by today’s standards, and in contemporary Dutch terms, too, sixty guilders was a trifling sum. In 1628, by way of comparison, the capture of a single Spanish treasure fleet netted fifteen million guilders. This fact cannot be gainsaid by indulging in “what if” financial legerdemain, as do those who suggest that if the Indians had invested their twenty-four dollars at 6 percent interest for three and a half centuries they would now have, before adjusting for inflation, somewhere in the vicinity of sixty-two billion dollars, a figure more in line with current Manhattan real estate prices.
A more cogent objection to the “great steal” scenario notes that the values were in fact incommensurable. When the Dutch “bought” Staten Island, we know, they paid for it in axes, hoes, needles, awls, scissors, knives, and kettles. If similar trade goods were involved in the Manhattan arrangement, then the Dutch were engaged in high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness in tasks ranging from clearing land to drilling wampum.
More telling still, it appears from a later repurchase agreement that the people who made the original arrangement didn’t live in Manhattan and so were in no position to offer up even use-rights or visiting privileges. Perhaps it was the credulous Europeans who got skinned.
But once again mere facts are beside the point. The story, like all good myths, has easily resisted such assaults because it ratifies the popular conviction that deal driving and sharp practice and moneymaking and real estate lie somewhere near the core of New York’s genetic material.
The twenty-four-dollar story is also mythically akin to Aztec and Roman fables in bestowing on New York a fundamental legitimacy. It proclaims a city whose acquisition was based not on conquest but on contract. As another local historian put it in 1898: “It was an honest, honorable transaction worthily inaugurating the trade and traffic of America’s mercantile and financial capital; satisfying the instincts of justice and equality in the savage breast.”
Here, quite apart from the underlying implication that history didn’t begin until the Europeans arrived, the myth glosses over uncomfortable realities. It is true and important that in North America the Dutch preferred purchase to pillage. But they were prompted less by ethical niceties than by realistic appraisals of the Indians’ superior strength and their indispensability as trade partners. The Dutch, however, were no shrinking tulips: when their power waxed and their need waned, they would engage in ferocious wars of conquest, and Indian heads would roll—quite literally—down Bowling Green.
Finally, however, as is usually the case with myths and legends, the notion that New York is rooted in a commercial transaction gets at a deeper kind of truth.
New York would not become a warrior city, living by raids on its hinterland. Even when centuries later it emerged as an imperial center, it was never a military stronghold. True, the most prominent building in the Dutch town was a fort. But it was never much of one—pigs rooted at its foundations and cows wandered in and out of its crumbling walls—and the Netherlanders never assembled here the kind of military resources they deployed elsewhere in their empire. For all their occasional bellicosity, the Dutch were a trading people, and their town would ever after bear the imprint of its creators.
Nor would New York become an urban theocracy, a citadel of priests. No shrines or temples were erected to which swarms of pilgrims flocked to pay religious tribute or receive inspiration. Despite the formidable number of churches established