Political Organization of New Netherland

When the stock of the Dutch West India Company was secured, and the several boards of direction were chosen, the College of XIX gave to the Amsterdam Chamber the exclusive management of the affairs of the province of New Netherland. Brodhead enumerates among the prominent members of that Chamber, Jonas Witsen, Hendrick Hamel, Samuel Godyn, John de Laet, the historian; Killian Van Rensselair, Michael Pauw, and Peter Evertsen Hulft. The names of these men were identified with the first European possession of the States of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. The Company took measures immediately to secure their title to the domain by more extended actual occupation. They had taken possession of the country before their final organization, by virtue of their charter, because they knew how jealous were the English; and to give a show of actual occupation, they had sent trading vessels which bore instructions to the officers at Manhattan and on the North River, and, as we have seen, proceeded to build fortifications.

Within seventeen years after the discoveries of Hudson, the foundations of the great commonwealth of New York were laid by families, most of whom were voluntary exiles from their native land for the sake of freedom of thought and action. These were the first seeds of the state. To these were added, at the season of germination, noble plants from Holland, of genuine Hollanders, who brought with them those principles of toleration which lie at the foundations of a truly Christian state and give it sustenance. The community of their capital was very soon as cosmopolitan as their mother city of Amsterdam, of which Andrew Marvell quaintly wrote:

New Amsterdam gave to the state and nation a race in whose veins courses the blood of Teuton, Saxon, Celt and Gaul. The colonists from Holland exhibited, from the beginning, a more enlarged vision of the rights of conscience and respect for the dignity of personal freedom, than any other of the early American settlers. Their passion for far-reaching commerce and adventurous enterprise has ever hovered over Manhattan Island like a tutelar deity, during all its social and political vicissitudes, and has made New York City the commercial emporium of the Western Continent.