Peter Stuyvesant, selected in May 1645 by the Dutch West India Company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the colony of New Netherland, Stuyvesant had arrived in New Amsterdam on May 11, 1647, and in September of that year had appointed an advisory council of Nine Men as representatives of the colonists.

Stuyvesant was probably born in Peperga, Friesland, in the Netherlands, to Balthazar Johannes Stuyvesant, a minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein in 1612.

He had grown up in Scherpenzeel, studied in Franeker, and joined the Dutch West India Company about 1635; he had been director of the Company's colony of Curaçao from 1642 to 1644.

He had attacked the Spanish-held island of Saint Martin in April 1644 and been wounded, the lower part of his right leg struck by a cannon ball.

He had returned to the Netherlands, where his right leg was amputated and replaced with a wooden peg.

Stuyvesant has become involved in a dispute with Theophilus Eaton, the governor of New Haven Colony, over the border of the two colonies.

A conflict had started in 1648 between Styuvesant and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck.

Stuyvesant had claimed he has power over Rensselaerwijck despite special privileges granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer in the patroonship regulations of 1629.

Stuyvesant had marched to Fort Orange with a military escort in 1649 and ordered houses to be razed to permit a better defense of the fort in case of an attack from the Native Americans.

When Van Slechtenhorst refused, Stuyvesant had sent a group of soldiers to enforce his orders.

The controversy that followed results in the founding, in 1652, of Beverwijck, a fur-trading community north of Fort Orange on the Hudson River, that is to become Albany, New York.

A new plan of municipal government had been arranged in the Netherlands, and the name "New Amsterdam" is officially declared on February 2, 1653.

Stuyvesant makes a speech for the occasion, saying that his authority will remain undiminished.

A meeting of the commissioners on boundaries had taken place in September 1650, in Hartford, Connecticut.

The border had been arranged to the dissatisfaction of the Nine Men, who declared that "the governor had ceded away enough territory to found fifty colonies each fifty miles square."

Stuyvesant had then threatened to dissolve the council.

Stuyvesant is now ordered to the Netherlands, but the order is soon revoked under pressure from the States of Holland and the city of Amsterdam.

Stuyvesant prepares against an attack by ordering the citizens to dig a ditch from the North River to the East River and to erect a fortification.

A convention of two deputies from each village in New Netherland in 1653 demands reforms, and Stuyvesant commands that assembly to disperse, saying: "We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects."

The Dutch claim the area south to the Delaware (at this time called "South River"); the Swedes claim an area for the Realm of Sweden on the south side of the Delaware that encompasses much of the present-day U.S. state of Delaware, eventually including parts of present-day southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey on the north side of the river.

The colony of New Sweden remains in constant friction with the Dutch.

The Dutch under Peter Stuyvesant in 1651 had established Fort Casimir at present-day New Castle, only seven miles (twelve kilometers) south of Fort Christina, in order to menace the Swedish settlement.

On Trinity Sunday in 1654, Johan Risingh, Commissary and Councilor to New Sweden Governor Lieutenant Colonel Johan Printz, officially assumes his duties and begins to extricate all Dutch from the Delaware River.

Fort Casimir, its garrison having no gunpowder, surrenders and is renamed Fort Trinity (in Swedish Fort Trefaldighet).

The Swedes are now in complete possession of their colony.

The Susquehannocks meet with the Swedes on June 21, 1654, to reaffirm their ownership.

The legal-cultural foundation of toleration as the basis for plurality in New Amsterdam supersedes matters of personal intolerance or individual bigotry.

Hence, and in spite of certain persons private objections (including that of director-general Petrus Stuyvesant, who has requested that Jews be excluded from New Amsterdam), the Dutch West India Company on April 26, 1655, grants the Sephardim permanent residency on the basis of "reason and equity".

The Jews in New Amsterdam petition the government on July 27 for a separate Jewish cemetery.

The New Amsterdam government and Peter Stuyvesant bar colonial Jews from military service on August 28, 1655.

Peter Stuyvesant, in reprisal for the Swedish attack, sails into the Delaware River with a fleet of seven vessels and about seven hundred men and retakes Fort Trinity, the former Fort Casimir on September 11, 1655, renaming it New Amstel (in Dutch Nieuw Amstel).

Subsequently, Fort Christina, located one point six miles east of present downtown Wilmington, Delaware, also falls on September 15th and all New Sweden comes under the control of the Dutch.

John Paul Jacquet is immediately appointed Governor, making New Amstel the capital of the Dutch-controlled colony.

The Swedish and Finnish settlers continue to enjoy a degree of local autonomy, having their own militia, religion, court, and lands.

Natives attack New Amsterdam in Stuyvesant’s absence.

Jews are finally allowed to own their own homes in New Amsterdam in 1656, thirty-five years after the arrival of the first Jewish immigrant in the North American colonies.