Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [67]
Loyal to the end, Stuyvesant prepared to make a fight of it. He had little to work with, however. Fort Amsterdam was (as usual) in no condition to withstand an assault, and its 150 or so soldiers were short on guns and ammunition. The town itself had no more than 250-odd men capable of bearing arms, and owing to the recent arrival of nearly three hundred slaves, its reserves of food were insufficient for a siege. After years of acrimonious strife with Stuyvesant, moreover, few of its residents were willing to risk themselves and their property for him or the West India Company.
So when Nicolls sent him a letter guaranteeing “every man in his Estate, life, and liberty” if New Amsterdam capitulated peacefully, Stuyvesant showed it to no one, certain that the revelation of its contents would only increase “popular murmurs and disaffections” in the town. Three days later he tore up a “friendly” letter from Governor Winthrop of Connecticut repeating Nicolls’s offer and begging him to “avoid effusion of blood.” But word of both letters had leaked out. A crowd of irate workmen and magistrates gathered at the Stadhuis, where they made Stuyvesant reassemble Winthrop’s letter and read it aloud. That same afternoon he suffered a second humiliation when Nicolls moved his frigates up through the Narrows and trained their guns on the town. Stuyvesant climbed the bastion of the fort and made ready to open fire, but Dominie Megapolensis took him firmly by the arm and led him down again.
Early the next day, ninety-three of New Amsterdam’s most prominent men, including virtually every present or former municipal officeholder as well as his own seventeen-year-old son, sent Stuyvesant a petition reiterating the folly of resistance against “so generous a foe.” Finally accepting the hopelessness of his position, Stuyvesant informed Nicolls that he would give up. Negotiators from both sides met at his bouwerie and drafted formal Articles of Capitulation.
On September 8, 1664, the West India Company’s colors were struck, and the soldiers of the garrison marched down to the East River shore, drums beating and flags flying, to board a ship for the long trip home. Scarcely had it raised anchor than Nicolls announced that in honor of his master Fort Amsterdam would henceforth be called Fort James, while Fort Orange would become Albany. Both New Amsterdam and New Netherland would be known as New York.
When he received news of New Netherland’s capitulation, the Dutch ambassador in London hurried to the court to demand that Charles II return the colony at once. Not only did the king refuse—the Dutch had no right to be there in the first place, he said—but the duke of York added an angry warning that the crown was as determined to put the States-General in its place as Cromwell had been. The idea of another fight with Holland was in fact becoming more and more popular by the day. Parliament appropriated the money for it in February 1665; in March Charles II declared war.
The West India Company had meanwhile ordered Stuyvesant home to explain what had happened. He gathered his papers—including a testimonial from the magistrates that he had always been “an honest proprietor and patriot of the province and a supporter of the reformed religion”—and left for Amsterdam in the spring of 1665. The company, he discovered on his arrival, wanted a scapegoat. It publicly accused him of lying, incompetence, and cowardice, adding that New Amsterdam’s merchants and clergy hadn’t exactly distinguished themselves, either. Stuyvesant angrily rebutted the charges in a remonstrance to the States-General. If anything, he wrote, it was the company’s own penny-pinching stupidity that had lost the colony, not his eighteen years of “trouble, care, solicitude and continued zeal.”
The States-General had other things to think about, though. Its war with England was going better than expected, and in June 1667 a Dutch fleet sailed boldly up the Thames, burned three British men-of-war, and towed