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Stuyvesant came out for a personal inspection of the troubled town. Its residents raised the Dutch flag and gave him “a dinner or public entertainment in as good a stile as the place could afford.” In return, he obligingly let them borrow some slaves to finish the palisade and sent “a half dozen shackles with an iron rod and a good lock” to help maintain law and order. But Nieuw Utrecht wasn’t going to be built in a day. A year later Stuyvesant learned that it was still torn by “controversies, misdeeds, and difficulties” and that new measures were needed “to stimulate the people to build dwelling houses, a block house and public pound, and to dig wells for the benefit of the community.”

In Nieuw Haarlem, by comparison, things proceeded rather more smoothly. Several attempts had been made between the later 1630s and the early 1650s to plant settlements on the rich flats that bordered the Manhattan side of the Harlem River, several miles to the north of New Amsterdam. None had survived Kieft’s War and subsequent Indian troubles, but the land was too valuable to ignore, and settlers there would form an important line of defense for New Amsterdam. (Dutch residents of the colony wouldn’t have forgotten how Nieuw Haarlem’s namesake in the Netherlands put up a legendary seven-month resistance to the Spanish army before capitulating.)

In 1658 Stuyvesant tried again. Grants of between forty and fifty acres of arable land were oifered to prospective colonists, along with promises of a court, a minister, and regular troops in time of danger. Two parallel streets, cutting the modern block pattern diagonally, were laid out to meet the Harlem River between the present 125th and 126th streets. The first twenty-odd house lots were sandwiched between them in two ranges, with garden plots and planting fields assigned to each on the surrounding flats. To emphasize his support for the fledgling settlement, Stuyvesant set company slaves to work on a wagon road linking it with New Amsterdam.

Within a few years Nieuw Haarlem had thirty male residents. Most were heads of families and landowners; some were probably tenants of well-to-do investors in New Amsterdam who had begun to speculate in real estate. They nonetheless made up a strikingly diverse group, including eleven Frenchmen, four Walloons, four Danes, three Swedes, three Germans, and seven Dutchmen. One, Jean La Montaigne, was a veteran colonist, an experienced Indian fighter, and a perennial member of Stuyvesant’s council. The majority of La Montaigne’s fellow settlers, by contrast, were recently arrived tradesmen who had little or no experience with farming. One was a butcher, one a carpenter, another a mason. Others had previously occupied themselves with making barrels, shoes, pots, soap, or beer. Their diversity and inexperience seem not to have been sources of conflict, however, and they appear to have escaped the troubles that beset their counterparts elsewhere in New Netherland.

Despite the differences among these and a half-dozen other such towns and villages, they were the raw material out of which a distinctive rural society was taking shape on the outskirts of New Amsterdam. These Dutch towns and villages were quite different from the closed, self-sufficient, egalitarian, organic communities of New England. Their inhabitants were essentially strangers, often of widely mixed national backgrounds—imagine the confusion of tongues in Nieuw Haarlem—and they had been brought together by nothing more elevated or complex than the West India Company’s promises of land and protection. None had the history of communal sacrifice and struggle, much less radical dissent, that solidified early New England towns, although Flatbush residents strove to maintain a rough equality in the ownership of land and to emphasize cooperative rather than competitive behavior (each household, for example, owned a share of the village’s public brewery).

Nor did the Dutch towns encourage the broad popular participation characteristic of their English counterparts. As a rule, each was governed by a court