Peach Tree War - Impact and Aftermath

Impact and Aftermath

At the time, the New Netherland colony may not have understood the Susquehannocks' attack as a retaliation for the Dutch conquest of New Sweden, although the records show that the Swedes of the Zuydt Rivier (Delaware Valley) were aware of the Susquehannock motive. The New Netherland colonists believed the attack was motivated by the murder of a young Wappinger woman named Tachiniki, who was killed by a Dutch settler for stealing a peach – an incident that had raised inter-cultural tensions shortly before the assault.

After ransoming the hostages at Paulus Hook, Stuyvesant repurchased the right to settle the area between the Hudson and Hackensack rivers from the Native Americans and established the fortified hamlet of Bergen (at today's Bergen Square), and required blockhouses to be established at outlying towns.

The nascent colony of Cornelis Melyn on Staten Island was abandoned. Colen Donck (at today's Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx), one of the farms known to have been raided and burned, was that of democratic reformer and champion of local self-rule Adriaen van der Donck. Records show van der Donck to have been alive in August and dead by the following January, and indicate that there was some sort of inquiry into the sacking of his home in the raids. As a consequence, it has been speculated that he may have died in, or as a consequence of, the "war," although there is no definitive record of his manner of death. If so, this would be ironic both because van der Donck was a respectful pioneer in Native American ethnography and linguistics and because he was the political nemesis of Stuyvesant.