Eight Blocks in Manhattan

There's not many people that know of Wall Street that don't have an opinion on what it represents. Anchored within these eight blocks are financial houses and stock exchange that have billions of dollars flowing through them on a daily basis. It is well known that what happens on Wall Street has ripple effects all the way across the United States, and in some cases, the world. 

However, the history of how this street came to be in an equally interesting story, steeped in blood, trade, questionable defensive fortifications, and a complete indifference to the surrounding ocean. 

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Transcript

Season 3 Episode 5 – Eight Blocks in Manhattan

1.       It could very well be argued that New York City is the most famous city in the world. It is one of the oldest standing settlements in the United States, the home of the statue of Lady Liberty, the concentrated symbol of the American dream, and it is the financial center of the two largest stock exchanges in the world. 

2.       It is that third point we are going to concentrate on for this episode. Between the New York Stock Exchange, and the NASDAQ, more money runs through New York City in each day than in any other city.

3.        Any North American financial corporation of any significant size has an office somewhere nearby, and what happens in New York, financially speaking, has drastic effects throughout the United States and in some cases, the world. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in the world who had not at least heard of New York City. 

4.       What makes this even more fascinating is that almost every financial entity that the world economy is tied to, for better or for worse, are housed in one eight block long stretch in Manhattan, a borough of New York City. They call it Wall Street. 

5.       And the story of how that street came to existence involves questionable defensive fortifications, a complete indifference to the ocean surrounding it, and a war thousands of miles away. I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and this is What?! Explain. 

How the Dutch got a hold of the land to make New Amsterdam

6.       After the first permanent European arrivals in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the prominent powers of the day saw the potential of an enormous land, ripe for the taking. France, Great Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands all sent various explorers, colonizers, and most importantly, tradespeople to cement their claims on this faraway land. 

7.       Each country sent in massive trade companies to ensure that they were able to make money and send valuable resources back to their home countries. Furs were a particularly valuable commodity, and these trade companies used whatever means necessary to ensure that they had a significant quantity of them to bring back to their wealthy customers in Europe. 

8.       Many of the trading companies saw the indigenous people that lived in the area as a valuable resource on their own, as they had generations worth of hunting and tracking experience to draw on and were more than willing to work as sub-contractors of a sort. 

9.       However, some saw the indigenous people in the area as nuisances at best and threats at worst. That was the situation the Dutch East India trading company saw with the indigenous people of what would eventually become Manhattan. 

10.   Willem Kieft, the Director-General of the Dutch East India Trading Company, was an incredibly unpopular man. With no experience in governance nor in business, it was widely rumored that he got his posting due to family connections, rather than any competence on his part. 

11.   Kieft arrived in New Amsterdam , the largest Dutch settlement in North America, in 1638. One of his first orders of business was to attempt to collect taxes or tribute payments from the Indigenous peoples in the area. 

12.   Given that the Dutch colonists already had a very mutually beneficial relationship with the Indigenous peoples, including supplying the furs and pelts that the collected Dutch settlements in North America survived off, many of the long-time colonists advised Kieft  against pursuing this course of action. 

13.   Kieft ignored these recommendations and sent an envoy to the chiefs of the tribes in the area, demanding tribute payments. The chiefs unanimously rejected the idea, which put Kieft  in a state of fury, and from then onwards, he took every opportunity to exercise whatever military might he could muster against the chiefs that dared defy him. 

14.   These so-called provocations varied in severity from the theft of livestock from a Dutch farmer, to a drunken brawl at a trading post that ended in the death of the post’s Dutch foreman. 

15.   However, it wasn’t until August 1641 that Kieft’s  vendetta kicked into a whole new level. An indigenous man who belonged to the Weckquaesgeek  tribe killed Claes Swits, an elderly Swiss immigrant who ran a public house in the area. 

16.   Swits was beloved by many in the area, so Kieft attempted to use his death to build support among the Dutch colonists for war against the Indigenous tribes. 

17.   To try and temper Kieft’s  instincts with regards to the tribes nearby, the people of New Amsterdam appointed a group known as the Council of Twelve Men specifically to advise Kieft on the matter. Specifically, they advised him not to do anything stupid. 

18.   The colonists had lived in peace with the Indigenous population for over two decades before Kieft’s arrival, they were outnumbered by an exponential amount, and Kieft’s initial plan was a massacre of every man, woman, and child in the village the killer came from if they did not give the killer up. 

19.   Kieft  ignored the suggestions of the council and sent a punitive expedition of eighty soldiers to the village to attack under cover of night. The militia, however, ended up getting lost and returned to New Amsterdam unsuccessful. 

20.   The Weckquaesgeek elders found out about this expedition and made a peace offering to Kieft  and the Dutch colonists, hoping to head off any further militias which may have had a better sense of direction. Kieft  accepted the offerings, and peace seemed to be the order of the day. 

21.   Encouraged that their suggestions may have led to this result, the Council of Twelve Men attempted to advise Kieft on other non-Indignenous matters, including the establishment of a permanent democratic representative body to manage local affairs. 

22.   Kieft responded in the tried-and-true way that many autocrats do when a representative government is suggested: by forcing the council to dissolve and issuing a decree forbidding the members to meet or assemble ever again. 

23.   Thus, without any checks or balances to his power, and with a burning hatred in his heart, Kieft ordered a militia to attack the Weckquaesgeek camps nearby in an event known as the Pavonia Massacre. 

24.   Men, women, and children were slaughtered by the Dutch militia, with over 160 people dying by blade, fire, or drowning in an attempt to rescue the infants the Dutch threw into the river nearby. This unspeakable act had an effect that Kieft probably didn’t foresee: it gave the Algonquian tribes in the area a common enemy. The people of New Amsterdam. 

25.   The next two years were marked by bloody attacks on both sides, as the Indigenous people sought revenge for the attack at Pavonia, and the Dutch forces retaliated in turn. The farmland outside of New Amsterdam became dangerous to live on, and many of the Dutch colonists fled to New Amsterdam itself, significantly filling the city beyond what it was designed to house. 

26.   The colonists themselves began to resist Kieft’s rule, as he kept pounding the drums of war and demanding they pay more taxes to fund the fight. Some colonists returned to Europe, while others pled with the Dutch Republic to remove Kieft from power. 

27.   In terms of the fighting, the colonial forces were far too few to mount any significant attack, but the tribal forces were far too spread out to strike any finishing blow. The two sides finally agreed to a truce two years after initial hostilities in August 1645. 

28.   Both sides suffered heavy casualties in the fight, and Kieft was recalled back to the Netherlands in 1647 to answer for his conduct in his time in New Amsterdam. 

29.   Unfortunately, he was never held officially to account for what he had done, as the ship returning him to the Netherlands sank off the coast of Swansea, with Kieft dying in the wreck.                                                                                 
Building of the wall

30.   Kieft’s  successor, Governor Peter Stuyvesant,  fearing attack from both the British as a proxy-war to the Anglo-Dutch conflict raging across the sea, and the Indigenous people of the area because the Dutch were still widely considered monsters, decided to have a massive wooden wall built along the northern borders of the settlement of New Amsterdam. 

31.   The construction started in 1652, spanned 2,340 feet across, was nine feet tall, and cost the settlement 5000 Dutch guilders (about $136 thousand US dollars today). Cannons were placed along the top of the walls in strategic areas, and a gate on either side was built as the sole land entrances to the settlement. 

32.   Now, an eight-block long wall intended for defensive purposes that costs this little money raised my eyebrows a little bit until I looked a little deeper: slaves brought in from the Dutch colonies in Africa were almost the entirety of the labor used to build the wall. You tend to be able to cut down on expenses significantly if you don’t pay the people building it. 

33.   Regardless, New Amsterdam was now surrounded by water on three sides, and the new northern wall on the fourth. With the newfound security AND with all of the traffic into and out of the city in the north now being funneled through two gates, the merchants of New Amsterdam saw an opportunity. 

34.   Stalls started to be set up alongside the inner parts of the wall, as merchants and traders started hawking their wares. De Wallstraat, as the area by the wall began to be called, became a highly populated marketplace, as goods of all kinds began to be sold under the shadow of the newly built defensive installation. 

35.   Because, as all the merchants imagined, where else would you be safest in this city than right by the wall keeping everyone out?

British Attacks and taking over the city

36.   Well, kind of. The wall worked wonders in deterring land-based attacks from the Indigenous people still hell-bent on revenge, but with regards to the British, it… wasn’t quite as effective. 

37.   Because the creators of the wall were so focused on the one front connected via land that they entirely did not think about any attacks by sea. The British, a primarily sea-faring nation, took advantage of that by sending four warships into the unprotected harbor of New Amsterdam in August of 1664. 

38.   The British gave the inhabitants of New Amsterdam an ultimatum: surrender the town to British rule, and they would allow the residents to retain all their commercial rights. Basically, things would go on the same as they always would, just with a new ruling power. 

39.   The residents of New Amsterdam took that deal without hesitation, and the British landed and renamed the town New York. 

40.   But why though? Why would the residents of this Dutch colony promptly secede from their home country in exchange for British rule? Well, for the simple reason that by 1664, most of the people in New Amsterdam weren’t Dutch.

41.   In fact, of all the colonial powers settling in what would be known as North America, the Dutch were the ones that had the most difficulty convincing people to leave the Netherlands to settle in this new land. 

42.   This was because the Netherlands was an economic powerhouse at the time. The Dutch had a much higher quality of life than many in Britain or France, so there was much less incentive to leave this good life in their home country to try and hack out a living in an entirely different continent. 

43.   The Dutch government even tried to bribe people to settle in New Amsterdam by offering large tracts of land if these settlers brought immigrants to the area within three years. 

44.   Not many Dutch people took the government up on their offer, but their pro-settlement stance did attract members of displaced groups such as French protestants, Jews, and Germans to their settlements. 

45.   This, combined with 20% of the people in New Amsterdam being of African descent from the slaves brought to New Amsterdam, left most of the residents entirely unwilling to die for the Dutch government, and more than happy to accept new rule if it meant business as usual. 

British taking down the wall and installing the street

46.   The Wall of Wall Street ended up falling into disrepair over time, and in 1699, the British finally demolished the Dutch fortification, leaving only the street behind. Wall Street maintained its lucrative markets, originating in slaves and furs, but moving into securities and stock exchanges as time went on. 

47.   What started as an eight-block long wall became the site of the inauguration of George Washington as first president of the United States, the creation of the New York Stock Exchange, the first demonstration of the telegraph, the first place where electric lights were powered by an electricity plant, and many other historical and financially significant events. 

48.   New York itself became one of the world’s most significant cities, an example of America as a melting pot, and is often considered the financial capital of the world. One could argue that a lot of this may not have occurred if the Dutch hadn’t put all their eggs into one wall-based basket, but who knows for sure?

49.   I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and I’ll talk to you in a couple weeks. 

Conclusion

50.   Theme music and Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, and script editing by Sara Smith, who wonders if Wall Street was named after a wall, what was Cock Lane in London named after?

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