The 13th of March marks another important anniversary in the history of New Amsterdam. For on March 13, 1653, less than two months after New Amsterdam formed its first municipal government, it faced an existential threat. The 1st Anglo-Dutch war had broken out in late 1652, and word had reached Governor General Petrus Stuyvesant and the council of Burgomasters and Schepens that English troops were amassing in New England for a possible overland invasion from the north. From the records of New Amsterdam:

“Upon reading the letters from the Lords Directors [of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam] and the last received current news from New England concerning the preparations there for either defense or attack, which is unknown to us, it is generally resolved:

First. The burghers of this City shall stand guard in full squads overnight…

Second. It is considered highly necessary, that Fort Amsterdam be repaired and strengthened.

Third. Considering said Fort Amsterdam cannot hold all the inhabitants nor defend all the houses and dwellings in the City, it is deemed necessary to surround the greater part of the City with a high stockade and a small breastwork….”[1]

From the 13th to the 19th of March 1653, they discussed the plans for defense and how to bid out the work. And on the 17th, someone, possibly even Stuyvesant himself, drew a little sketch in the margins of the court record of a cross-section of the defenses, consisting of a ditch, embankment and palisade wall. The wall built by the spring of 1653 to defend against the English would eventually give its name to Wall Street (although the Dutch called it Het Cingel, the Belt). All of this I have covered thoroughly in past blogs, but a few new questions have arisen concerning the history of the wall.

A recent Bowery Boys podcast about the wall kindly directed listeners to my earlier blogs. However, one part of the story intrigued/stumped me. They reference an earlier wall built in 1644 near the end of Governor Kieft’s war with the native tribes. Was it possible that the wall really was built to defend against attacks by the natives and not the English? This blog explores that possibility and raises new avenues for exploration. The language quoted in these records obviously reflects the viewpoints of the Dutch colonial government. The Municipal Archives plans to add new content to New Amsterdam Stories by 2024 describing colonization from the perspectives of the original Munsee Lenape inhabitants and enslaved peoples to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Dutch settlement on Manhattan. These long over-due stories were originally planned when the website was launched, but the relocation of our offsite collections and COVID disrupted these plans.

The source for the 1644 wall claim is a Curbed New York article that references an article in Harper’s magazine “The Story of a Street,” from 1908, by Frederick Trevor Hill. In it, Hill wrote that on March 31, 1644, Kieft ordered a barrier to keep in stray cattle and defend against Native Americans. Hill was a lawyer and historian, and his enjoyable, but rather fanciful, article does get some things right, like this footnote:

“About this time (1655-6) the residents of Pearl Street, inconvenienced by the high tides, caused a sea wall to be erected, and the space between this barrier and their houses to be filled in, making a roadway known as De Waal, or Lang de Waal. Incautious investigators have confused this with Wall Street, and their error has resulted in some astonishing ‘history.’”

Very true. Since he was correct about this, his 1644 claim bears investigating. For the original source we need to go to records in the New York State Archives:

“31st of March [1644]

Whereas, the Indians, our enemies, daily commit much damage, both to men and cattle, and it is to be apprehended that all of the remaining cattle when it is driven out will be destroyed by them, and many Christians who daily might go out to look up the cattle will lose their lives; therefore, the director and council have resolved to construct a fence, palisade, or enclosure, beginning from the great bouwery to Emmanuel’s plantation. Everyone who owns cattle and shall desire to have them pastured within this enclosure is notified to repair there with tools next Monday morning, being the 4th of April, at 7 o’clock, in order to assist in constructing the said fence and in default thereof he shall be deprived of pasturing his cattle within the said enclosure.”[2]

Already the claim starts to fall apart, as what is described is a cattle pen not a defensive wall. The main concern seems to be that cattle would wander up-island when put out to pasture, which was dangerous for the cattle and for colonists who were in the woods looking for them. Earlier records scold colonists for letting their cattle trample the maize fields, which caused conflict with the Lenape and hurt the supply of grain for the colonists. Incidentally, the next two passages in the state records are notices of the peace treaties signaling the end of the war.

So not a wall, but where was this cattle fence? Hill thought it ran from “William Street… to what is now Broadway, and possibly from shore to shore, marked the farthest limits of New Amsterdam, as it then existed, and practically determined the location of Wall Street.”[3] Hill then went on to colorfully describe Stuyvesant in 1653 “stumping along the line of Kieft’s old cattle guard, seeking an advantageous location for the Palisade…” and placing it “some forty or fifty feet south of the old barrier and practically parallel to it….”[4]

Was this really the correct location? According to the original 1644 records, the enclosure was to run from “the great bouwery to Emmanuel’s Plantation.” Bouwerie is Dutch for farm, and the street now named Bowery was indeed the road that led to tracts of Dutch farmland. The “Great Bouwery” most likely referred to the large tract of Company farmland that ran from Bowery Street to the East River, later to become Stuyvesant’s farm, but all these large farms were north of present-day Worth Street. And where was Emmanuel’s Plantation? Historian I.N. Stokes identified Emmanuel as Emmanuel Pietersen. No map shows the exact location of his farm, but Stokes notes that Emmanuel was previously known as Manuel Minuit, perhaps because he had been enslaved by Pieter Minuit, founder of New Amsterdam.[5]

Less than two months before the fence ordinance, on February 25th, 1644, the Dutch West India Company resolved the petition of ten enslaved men who were demanding their freedom. They were granted conditional freedom for themselves and their wives, but not for their children who remained enslaved to the Company. The Company gave them farmland north of the town that had been abandoned by white settlers during Kieft’s war. The area became known as the Land of the Blacks, and eventually remnants of it were called Little Africa. Emmanuel was not one of the ten men, probably having gained his freedom earlier, but he would later marry Dorothy Angola, the widow of Paulo Angola, one of the ten. Together, Dorothy and Emmanuel merged their farms and successfully petitioned for the freedom of Dorothy’s adopted son Anthony in 1661.

All of this is fascinating history, but is this anywhere near Wall Street? No, it is not. It is in what are now the East and West Villages. Stokes suggested the cattle fence “ran west from the Bouwery Road, along ‘the old highway’ (the Sand Hill Road), as far as Minnetta Water, where the bridge crossed the road to Sapocanikan…. Then westerly along the line between the later Warren and Herring farms to Emanuel’s land (near the corner of West Third and Macdougal Sts.).”[6] This is a bit confusing, but Sand Hill Road was an old Lenape trail that “commenced at the Bowery, and ran across that part of the city now known as Waverley Place, on the north side of Washington-Square, then Potter’s Field…”[7] The eastern bit of this road still exists at Astor Place and Greenwich Avenue preserves its western terminus. “Minnetta Water” was a fresh water stream now buried under Minetta Street. It originally flowed from around Union Square southwest to the Hudson River and would have formed a natural border for the enclosure. The line described by Stokes can be seen on a map of native trails, and on the farm map above as the northern border of Herring Farm. And lastly, Sapohanikan was a Lenape fishing settlement on the other side of Minetta. Although the Dutch had violently pushed the Lenape out by 1644, the area known as Greenwich Village (Greenwijck in the original Dutch) was still called Sapocanikan until the English colonial period.

Why was Hill so convinced the location of this pasture was so much further south? Perhaps he was confused by an 1897 map showing a marshy sheep pasture within the City limits in 1642, along with the original Dutch land grants. But there are no grantees named Emmanual shown on this map, nor any great farm. The name Emmanuel or Manuel is not Dutch, but it was a common name amongst many of the early enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam, suggesting that they had been seized from Portuguese or Spanish ships or were from Portuguese colonies in West Africa. Although there were other Manuel’s recorded in 1644, all of them were part of the group of freemen given properties in the Land of the Blacks.

This finally brings us to one more recent online myth about the wall, that part of the reason for its construction was to keep out the freed black colonists north of the wall. Perhaps the origin of this concept was the close timing between the February 1644 land grants and the March 1644 “fence” construction, but as we now see not only was this 1644 project not a wall, but if Stokes is right, it also ran right across the Land of the Blacks, with most of the farmland south of the fence.

New scholarship may reveal more definitive answers, but unless new information comes to light, March 13, 1653 remains the birthday of Wall Street.

After publishing this blog another reference to the fence turned up while trying to find the location of Emmanuel’s plantation. In D.T. Valentine’s 1866 Manual of the Corporation Council, writing about the lands given to freed Blacks in 1644 he writes:

“We find, as further corroboration of the idea that the negro settlement was designed as an outpost, the fact that in the same year a great inclosure was established in the center of the negro settlements for the protection of the cattle of the whites. It had been a prominent object in the economy of the newcomers to increase the number of domestic animals, and for that purpose they were allowed to run at large through the forests covering the island, insomuch that at a much later period it is recorded that the woods were filled with animals almost as wild as when in their native condition. They were yearly driven by a grand turn-out of the cattle proprietors into an inclosure for the purpose of branding the yearlings, when they were all set loose again. The Indian troubles required more careful herding of the cattle than that alluded to, and hence, by resolution passed in the Provincial Council in 1644, it was decided that a clearing be made on Manhattan Island, extending from the Great Bowery (afterward Stuyvesant’s) to Emanuel’s plantation (Manuel the negro); and all inhabitants who wished to pasture their cattle within the clearing, to save them from the Indians, were required to appear by a certain day to assist in building a fence around the same.”

Valentine was not great in citing his research, but further evidence of the location of the 1644 cattle fence.

[1] Fernow, Berthold, The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, vol. 1, pp. 65-66

[2] Van Laer, Arnold J.F., New York Historical Manuscripts, Dutch, v. 4, p.216

[3] Hill, Frederick Trevor, “The Story of a Street,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1908, p. 688

[4] Hill, p. 690

[5] Stokes, I.N., Iconography of Manhattan Island, v.6, p.76

[6] Stokes, v. 6, p. 76

[7] Ibid, v. 6, p. 50