Alright, let's dissect this historical footnote. The Treaty of Hartford. Sounds rather… final, doesn't it? Like something you'd sign after a particularly brutal game of Monopoly, only with more territory and less fake money.
Treaty between New Netherland and Connecticut
The Treaty of Hartford is the rather dry moniker given to an agreement, or perhaps more accurately, a grudging acknowledgment of reality, hammered out between New Netherland and the burgeoning Connecticut Colony. It was formally concluded on the 19th of September in the year 1650, under the auspices of the rather less-than-picturesque locale of Hartford, Connecticut. One imagines the air was thick with unspoken resentments and the scent of damp wool.
Background
By 1650, the Dutch presence in North America, what they optimistically termed New Netherland, was beginning to feel like a small boat being nudged by a much larger, more insistent tide. The English, with their relentless expansionist tendencies and frankly alarming birth rates, were encroaching. This pressure was palpable enough to compel Petrus Stuyvesant, the Director-General of New Netherland – a man whose very name sounds like a baroque opera – to venture to Hartford. His objective: to negotiate a border with Edward Hopkins, the governor of the English Connecticut colony. It was a diplomatic dance, performed with the grace of two bears in a phone booth. Stuyvesant, bless his Dutch heart, was attempting to carve out some semblance of order from the encroaching chaos. The Dutch colony, clinging precariously to the edges of the continent, was finding its space increasingly compromised by the sheer, unyielding momentum of English settlement.
The Treaty
The core of the treaty involved Stuyvesant making a rather significant concession. He traded away Dutch land claims that were, in theory, quite expansive. These claims stretched the full length of the Connecticut River and extended eastward all the way to the vaguely mystical shores of Narragansett Bay. In return, he secured what he likely considered a more defensible, or at least a more clearly defined, boundary on Long Island. They settled on a dividing line that would run 50 Dutch miles west of the mouth of the Connecticut River. On Long Island itself, the line was to be drawn southward from the westernmost tip of Oyster Bay, carving its way through what is now known as Nassau County. The ink, or perhaps quill scratches, were dry on September 19th.
In essence, this treaty was less about establishing new realities and more about acknowledging the ones that had already solidified. The Dutch settlement, largely concentrated around the Hudson River, featured only scattered trading posts along the Connecticut, including the rather uninspiringly named Fort Hoop, which, in a twist of historical irony, would eventually evolve into the very Hartford, Connecticut where this agreement was forged. Meanwhile, the relentless demographic surge of New England, coupled with the inherent penchant of its religiously-motivated colonies to fragment and multiply, had led to a substantial English presence in the Connecticut River Valley, along the entire coastline of Long Island Sound, and, crucially, on the eastern reaches of Long Island. The treaty was, therefore, a somewhat belated attempt to draw lines on a map that had already been redrawn by the sheer force of human migration.
Aftermath
Back in the hallowed halls of European diplomacy, the Dutch West India Company gave the treaty its imprimatur. However, across the Atlantic, the English government, which, with a remarkable lack of self-awareness, considered all Dutch claims in North America to be utterly without merit, simply refused to acknowledge it. Yet, on the ground, in the messy, untidy theatre of colonial America, the agreement held. It endured, remarkably, right up until the rather dramatic English conquest of New Netherland in 1664. It's almost amusing, in a darkly ironic way, that the borders we see today between Connecticut and New York, and between Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, are, with only minor, almost negligible, adjustments, precisely those that were painstakingly negotiated in 1650. A testament, perhaps, to the enduring power of a clearly delineated line, even if it was drawn in a moment of Dutch desperation and English arrogance.
Further reading, for those with an insatiable appetite for such matters:
• Cohen, Ronald D. (October 1969). "The Hartford Treaty of 1650: Anglo-Dutch Cooperation in the Seventeenth Century". New-York Historical Society Quarterly. 53 (4): 311–332. LCCN 2000002281. Retrieved 1 January 2020.
This article, concerning the intricate history of Connecticut, is, I'm told, a stub. Apparently, more can be said. If you feel compelled to contribute, Wikipedia is always eager for more words.
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And this particular piece, a mere whisper on the winds of history concerning a treaty, is also classified as a stub. The world, it seems, is always in need of more context.
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