Dutch Americans
Dutch Americans are Americans of Dutch and Flemish descent whose ancestors came from the Low Countries in the distant past, or from the Netherlands as from 1830 when the Flemish became independent from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands by creating the Kingdom of Belgium. Dutch settlement in the Americas started in 1613 with New Amsterdam, which was exchanged with the English for Suriname at the Treaty of Breda and renamed New York City. The English split the Dutch colony of New Netherland into two pieces and named them New York and New Jersey. Further waves of immigration occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries.
According to the 2021 American Community Survey, an estimated 3.1 million Americans claim total or partial Dutch heritage, while 884,857 Americans claimed total Dutch heritage. In 2021, 113,634 Dutch Americans were foreign-born. The 2009-2013 survey estimated 141,580 people of 5 years and over to speak Dutch at home, which was equal to 0.0486% of the total population of the United States. In 2021, 95.3% of the total Dutch American population of 5 years and over only spoke English at home.
Prominent Dutch American political figures include Presidents Martin Van Buren, Warren G. Harding, and Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.S. Senators Philip Schuyler, Nicholas Van Dyke, Hamilton Fish, John C. Ten Eyck, Daniel W. Voorhees, Arthur Vandenberg, Peter G. Van Winkle, Alan Simpson, Fred Thompson, John Hoeven, and Christopher Van Hollen. Two of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Egbert Benson and John Jay, were also of Dutch descent. Governors John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Harold G. Hoffman and Thomas Kean of New Jersey, William Henry Vanderbilt III of Rhode Island, George Bell Timmerman Jr. of South Carolina, and Cornelius P. Van Ness of Vermont were also born to Dutch American families. Today the majority of the Dutch Americans live in Michigan, California, Montana, Minnesota, Illinois, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Idaho, Utah, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Not included among Dutch Americans are the Pennsylvania Dutch, a group of mainly German Americans who settled in Pennsylvania in the colonial era and whose name is a derivation of the Pennsylvania Dutch endonym Deitsch, which means "Pennsylvania Dutch" or "German". Ultimately, the terms Deitsch, Dutch, Diets and Deutsch are all descendants of the Proto-Germanic word, meaning "popular" or "of the people"; while all Germanic cognates of the term refer to some Germanic people, they more commonly refer to Germans than Netherlanders.
Dutch presence in the present-day territory of the United States
Early exploration
In 1602, the Dutch government chartered the Dutch East India Company. It sent explorers under the command of Henry Hudson, who arrived in 1609 and mapped what is now known as the Hudson River. Their initial goal was to find an alternative route to Asia, but they found good farmland and plenty of wildlife instead.Oldest Dutch settlement
The earliest Dutch settlement was built around 1613; it consisted of a number of small huts built by the crew of the Tijger, a Dutch ship under the command of Captain Adriaen Block which had caught fire while sailing on the Hudson in the winter of 1613. The ship was lost and Block and his crew established a camp ashore. In the spring, Block and his men did some explorations along the coast of Long Island. Block Island still bears his name. Finally, they were sighted and rescued by another Dutch ship and the settlement was abandoned.17th century migration
Dutch trade in the New York area led to the establishment of trade posts as early as 1613. Permanent settlers arrived in 1617 at what is now Albany, New York. New Amsterdam was settled in 1625. In 1629, Dutch officials tried to expand the northern colony through a plan that promised "Liberties and Exemptions" to anyone who would ship fifty colonists to America at his own expense. Anyone who did so would be allowed to buy a stretch of land along the Hudson River from the Dutch West India Company of about twelve miles, extending as far inland as the owner wanted. The landowners were called patroons and had complete jurisdiction over their domains as well as extensive trading privileges. They also received these rights in perpetuity. That was a form of feudalism, which had vanished in the Dutch Republic but was introduced in North America. The Patroonships were not a success; by 1635, the Dutch West India Company had bought back four of the five patroonships originally registered in Amsterdam.The Native Americans were no longer consulted or offered/asked to sell their lands. The Dutch were confronted with a new phenomenon, Native American raids, since the local tribes had now realized that the Dutch were not simply visitors but people set to settle their land.
The Dutch realized that they had gone with the wrong approach as they offered great privileges to wealthy, not poor, citizens. It was not until 1656 that the Dutch state abandoned its passivity and decided to actively support New Netherland. The Dutch state issued a proclamation, which stated that "all mechanics and farmers who can prove their ability to earn a living here shall receive free passage for themselves, their wives and children".
Although the Dutch were in control, only about half the settlers were ethnically Dutch. Manhattan grew increasingly multicultural. In 1664, the English seized the colony and renamed it New York. The Dutch briefly recaptured the colony in 1673, but during peace talks with the English, they decided to trade it in 1674 for Suriname in South America, which was more profitable.
18th century
In the hundred years of British rule that followed the change of ownership of New Netherland, Dutch immigration to America came to an almost complete standstill.While the Netherlands was a small country, the Dutch Empire was quite large so emigrants leaving the mother country had a wide variety of choices. New Amsterdam was not high on their list, especially because of the Native American risk. The major Dutch cities were centers of high culture, but they still sent immigrants. Most new arrivals were farmers from remote villages who, on arrival, in America scattered into widely separated villages with little contact with one another. Even inside a settlement, different Dutch groups had minimal interaction. With very few new arrivals, the result was an increasingly traditional system cut off from the forces for change. The people maintained their popular culture, revolving around their language and their Calvinist religion. The Dutch brought along their own folklore, most famously Sinterklaas, and created their own as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They maintained their distinctive clothing, and food preferences and introduced some new foods to America, including beets, endive, spinach, parsley, and cookies.
After the British takeover, the rich Dutch families in Albany and New York City emulated the English elite and purchased English furniture, silverware, crystal, and jewelry. They were proud of their language, which was strongly reinforced by the church, but they were much slower than the Yankees in setting up schools for their children. They finally set up Queens College in New Jersey, but it quickly became anglicized. They never attempted to start newspapers; they published no books and only a handful of religious tracts annually. Pietist leader Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen launched a series of revivals that challenge the mainstream church's emphasis on sacraments. Church buildings increasingly followed English rather than historic Dutch models. Politically, however, there was a strong anti-British sentiment that led most of the Dutch to support the American Revolution. One famous Dutch folk hero was Rip Van Winkle, characterized by being absurdly old-fashioned and out of date, which aimed to instill the establishment of an American culture distinct from British culture. Most farmers focused on providing subsistence for their families; about a third were chiefly oriented to market prices.
Dutch Quakers came to the Philadelphia area in response to the appeal of William Penn. Penn, himself a Dutch Briton, had paid three visits to the Netherlands, where he published several pamphlets.
Colonial Dutch American population in 1790
The Census Bureau produced estimates of the colonial American population with roots in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, by scholarly classification of the names of all White heads of families recorded in the first U.S. census of 1790. The government required accurate estimates of the origins of the colonial stock population as basis for computing National Origins Formula immigration quotas in the 1920s; for this task scholars estimated the proportion of names in each state determined to be of Dutch derivation. The final report estimated about 3.1% of the U.S. population in 1790 was of Dutch origin, heavily concentrated in the Middle Colonies of historic New Netherland which became the British American Colonial Province of New York, Province of New Jersey, Province of Pennsylvania, and Delaware Colony—ultimately forming the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.19th century
During the early nineteenth century, large numbers of Dutch farmers, forced by high taxes and low wages, started immigrating to America. They mainly settled down in the Midwest, especially Michigan, Illinois and Iowa. In the 1840s, Calvinist immigrants desiring more religious freedom immigrated. West Michigan in particular has become associated with Dutch American culture, and the highly conservative influence of the Dutch Reformed Church, centering on the cities of Holland and Grand Rapids.Waves of Catholic emigrants, initially encouraged in the 1840s by Father Theodore J. van den Broek, emigrated from the southern Netherlands to form communities in Wisconsin, primarily to Little Chute, Hollandtown, and the outlying farming communities. Whole families and even neighborhoods left for America. Most of these early emigrants were from villages near Uden, including Zeeland, Boekel, Mill, Oploo and Gemert. By contrast, many Protestant agrarian emigrants to Michigan and Iowa were drawn from Groningen, Friesland, and Zeeland; areas known for their clay soils.
The Dutch economy of the 1840s was stagnant and much of the motivation to emigrate was economic rather than political or religious. The emigrants were not poor, as the cost of passage, expenses, and land purchase in America would have been substantial. They were not, however, affluent and many would have been risking most of their wealth on the chance of economic improvement. There were also political pressures at the time that favored mass emigrations of Protestants.