New Netherland had the distinction of being founded and governed by a great slave-trading corporation—­the Dutch West India Company—­which endeavored to extend the market for its human merchandise whithersoever its influence reached.  This pro-slavery policy was not wholly selfish, for the directors appear to have believed that the surest way to promote a colony’s welfare was to make slaves easy to buy.  In the infancy of New Netherland, when it consisted merely of two trading posts, the company delivered its first batch of negroes at New Amsterdam.  But to its chagrin, the settlers would buy very few; and even the company’s grant of great patroonship estates failed to promote a plantation regime.  Devoting their energies more to the Indian trade than to agriculture, the people had little use for farm hands, while in domestic service, if the opinion of the Reverend Jonas Michaelius be a true index, the negroes were found “thievish, lazy and useless trash.”  It might perhaps be surmised that the Dutch were too easy-going for success in slave management, were it not that those who settled in Guiana became reputed the severest of all plantation masters.  The bulk of the slaves in New Netherland, left on the company’s hands, were employed now in building fortifications, now in tillage.  But the company, having no adequate means of supervising them in routine, changed the status of some of the older ones in 1644 from slavery to tribute-paying.  That is to say, it gave eleven of them their freedom on condition that each pay the company every year some twenty-two bushels of grain and a hog of a certain value.  At the same time it provided, curiously, that their children already born or yet to be born were to be the company’s slaves.  It was proposed at one time by some of the inhabitants, and again by Governor Stuyvesant, that negroes be armed with tomahawks and sent in punitive expeditions against the Indians, but nothing seems to have come of that.

The Dutch settlers were few, and the Dutch farmers fewer.  But as years went on a slender stream of immigration entered the province from New England, settling mainly on Long Island and in Westchester; and these came to be among the company’s best customers for slaves.  The villagers of Gravesend, indeed, petitioned in 1651 that the slave supply might be increased.  Soon afterward the company opened the trade to private ships, and then sent additional supplies on its own account to be sold at auction.  It developed hopes, even, that New Amsterdam might be made a slave market for the neighboring English colonies.  A parcel sold at public outcry in 1661 brought an average price of 440 florins,[30] which so encouraged the authorities that larger shipments were ordered.  Of a parcel arriving in the spring of 1664 and described by Stuyvesant as on the average old and inferior, six men were reserved for the company’s use in cutting timber, five women were set aside as unsalable, and the remaining twenty-nine, of both sexes, were sold at auction at prices ranging from 255 to 615 florins.  But a great cargo of two or three hundred slaves which followed in the same year reached port only in time for the vessel to be captured by the English fleet which took possession of New Netherland and converted it into the province of New York.[31]