The Covenant & the Charter - New Amsterdam

American Political History · Apr 30, 2021 · 25m

While the Bay Colony was banishing Roger Williams and burning Pequot villages, something entirely different was being built three hundred miles to the south. Not a covenant community. A trading post with ambitions.

New Amsterdam was the opposite of Boston in almost every way that mattered: founded not on shared faith but on shared commerce, populated not by the covenantally unified but by an eclectic assembly of European outcasts speaking eighteen languages. Its governing logic was profit rather than piety — and that logic, despite everything, worked. This episode follows the full arc of the…