Mannahatta

Under the guns of the fort a trading town grew up, and Peter Stuyvesant gave it a municipal charter in 1653. It was a town of many tongues: enslaved Africans had been brought in from 1626, Jewish refugees from Recife arrived in 1654, and by 1664 about 2,500 of New Netherland's nearly 9,000 colonists lived here. Peace with the Munsee was never secure; in 1655 several hundred of them occupied the town, and as they left, shots were fired and raids broke out across the river. In 1664 English forces took New Amsterdam and renamed it New York for the Duke of York. A century later it became the British stronghold of the American war, occupied from 1776 until 1783, when its port was the last they evacuated.