The British sailed into what was re-named New York Harbor and took Manhattan, that’s what happened. But what happened after that happened? In Taking Manhattan, Russell Shorto tells us what happened:
Scholars of American history once chose to set the entire story of colonial New England within the frame of “freedom.” In this reading the struggles against the Stuart kings of the 1600s set the course for the valiant war of independence of the colonists a century later against the Hanover king, George III. New England’s early days, however, can just as readily, and perhaps more honestly, be seen through the lens of Christian hypocrisy: as a story of the murder and subjugation of Native Americans followed by endless factional strife–a story of bickering, backstabbing, recrimination, fulmination, excommunication, banishing, and decamping, followed by boundary disputes and more bickering. Throughout the 1600s every clash in the region, it seems, boiled down to differences in religious practices. There was a simple reason for this. New England, with its rolling green hills and sweetly flowing rivers, was in the eyes of the Puritans who sailed from England to the New World supposed to be the new Promised Land, yet Massachusetts Bay held the key to it. It alone had a charter from the king, and its leaders wielded it as a scepter. The colony set the laws, demanded obedience to its rulers, minted its own coin, shielded itself from meddling by the mother country, and decreed that only those who were members of its church and followed its interpretation of the Bible would have a say in how things were done.
Although both the Dutch and subsequently the British entered into the lucrative business of slave-trading, Manhattan retained the best from New Amsterdam, a godless, kingless, polyglot democratic republic which incorporated but also actively buffered Wall Street, and shrugged off the worst of British values, until it couldn’t any longer.
Altogether, I’m so, so grateful my town was launched by the Dutch.