Dutch Buy Manhattan

In 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch West India Company's colony in North America, is traditionally said to have acquired Manhattan island from local Native people in exchange for trade goods. The transaction became one of the most famous real estate deals in history, and it marked the beginning of New Amsterdam, the settlement that would grow into New York City. It also remains a much-debated episode, because the sources are thin and the two sides likely understood the exchange very differently.

The background lay in Dutch commercial ambitions. After Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, explored the river that now bears his name in 1609, Dutch traders began visiting the region to obtain beaver pelts from Native communities. The Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, took over organizing the colony of New Netherland. Settlers, many of them Walloon families, arrived in the mid-1620s, with early posts at Fort Orange (near present-day Albany) and on Governors Island before the focus shifted to the southern tip of Manhattan.

Almost everything known about the purchase comes from a single brief letter written in November 1626 by a Dutch official, Pieter Schaghen. It reports that the colonists had "bought" the island from "the natives" for goods valued at 60 guilders. The later figure of $24 was a nineteenth-century estimate and is only a rough, unreliable conversion. The letter does not name the sellers, the exact date, or the items exchanged. Many historians think the people involved were Lenape, perhaps a group such as the Canarsee, who may have been passing through or using the area rather than living there permanently.

This uncertainty matters because European and Lenape ideas about land differed. Many scholars argue that Lenape communities thought in terms of shared use rights, not permanent private ownership, and so may have believed they were granting access or forming an alliance rather than surrendering the land forever. Whether the sellers even had authority to speak for others who used Manhattan is unclear. The popular image of a shrewd bargain with naive sellers is therefore considered misleading.

The consequences were lasting. The Dutch built Fort Amsterdam, and New Amsterdam became the capital of New Netherland, a diverse trading port with settlers, enslaved Africans, and merchants from many origins. Relations with the Lenape and neighboring peoples deteriorated over the following decades, culminating in violent conflicts such as Kieft's War in the 1640s. In 1664 England seized the colony and renamed it New York. Today the 1626 purchase is remembered both as the founding moment of a great city and as an example of the misunderstandings and inequalities that marked colonial land transactions.