New Netherland Council Dutch Colonial Administrative Correspondence

This series is arranged chronologically by date of correspondence.

The Dutch West India Company (WIC) appointed Petrus Stuyvesant director-general of New Netherland, Curacao, Bonaire, Aruba, and their dependencies in 1647, a position in which he served until 1664. During the first six years of his term he successfully dealt with significant problems which had mounted during the previous administration including issues relating to trade with native tribes; boundary lines between New England and New Netherland; competition for trade in the Delaware Valley with England and Sweden; encounters with New Sweden settlements on the Delaware River; trade in the Caribbean; and the relationship between Rensselaerwijck, the patroonship of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, and Fort Orange and the WIC. Although there were problems with the Swedes and Native Americans in the Hudson Valley, 1654 to 1664 marked a period of growth in New Netherland.

This series contains administrative correspondence of Petrus Stuyvesant during his seventeen year term as director-general of the colony of New Netherland (1647-1664). The correspondence consists mainly of incoming letters from the directors of the West India Company in Amsterdam and the governors of neighboring colonies. The letters address matters relating to the defense, commercial interests, and prosperity of Dutch holdings in North America and the Caribbean. Colonial boundary disputes and competition for trade among the English, Swedes, and Dutch are among the topics discussed. Most of the outgoing correspondence, copied into separate books for future reference, is no longer extant. Therefore, this series generally represents a one-way correspondence from the directors to Stuyvesant.

The colonial administrative correspondence originally constituted volumes 11-15 of the New York Historical Manuscripts in the New York State Library. Volumes 11 and 12 sustained loss to the edges of each page in the 1911 New York State Capitol fire. Notable among the correspondence is a letter from the directors of the West India Company rebuking Stuyvesant for arresting and banishing John Bowne, a Flushing Quaker who persisted in holding religious meetings in his home. The original records are in the Dutch language.

Photostat use copies of selected documents are available at the New York State Archives.

High resolution images of all original documents in this series are available in State Archives Digital Collections.

Translated in: Correspondence, 1647-1653, trans. and ed. Charles T. Gehring ("New Netherland Documents Series") (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).

This item was removed from the series (originally Colonial Manuscripts, Volume 15, p. 12) as part of the Freedom Train exhibit that traveled the state from January 1949 to February 1950 (L. 1948, Ch. 659). During 2000/2001 the item was reintegrated with the rest of the series.

Retrieval of records from secure storage is subject to delay. Researchers are encouraged to use digitized versions and/or published translations.