So, the New Amsterdam wall was constructed. Did it work? Did it make the village safer? Did it keep out the undesired? On one level, the answer is “yes.” No New Englanders or English ever attacked the settlement from the north. On the other hand, the New Englanders and English never tried to invade this way. Perhaps that means that The Wall was an effective deterrent, but that is doubtful. Even if enemies wanted to conquer the settlement from the north, the thought of slogging through forests and over rivers was more likely a deterrent than some planks stuck in the ground.

The Wall was certainly unlikely to be a successful defense by itself. It would only have been useful along with a strong military presence. The Wall surely could have been scaled. Fighting folks would have been necessary to repel the climbers. Furthermore, you would think that a cannonball would have gone through the wooden planks easily and that fire might have brought it down entirely. The Wall might have slowed an attack, but by itself seems unlikely to have stopped a determined force. The goal must have been to give the inhabitants time to gather their own forces to repulse an attempted incursion, not for The Wall to provide an impregnable barrier.

There were flaws in this reasoning, however. First, The Wall, as with infrastructure today, needed to be kept in good repair for it to function well, and that did not happen. Those stories about the thrifty Dutchman come into play here. Apparently, many New Amsterdam residents when they needed a shelter for Petrus the pig or Harriet the hen wondered for a moment where they would get the wood for the structure and then—aha—remembered the planks a short walk away. The Wall was also an inviting source of firewood. Planks soon were missing from The Wall. A careful eye might have noticed that whenever there was a new gap in the wall, there was freshly sawn wood in someone’s yard.

The defense strategists, however, had a bigger problem. While the English and New Englanders never breached The Wall, unfriendly Indians did enter New Amsterdam. After The Wall was built, Stuyvesant left the village taking troops to confront Swedes in Delaware. At the same time, Indians of various tribes came down the Hudson heading to Long Island for a confrontation with traditional enemies. As they crossed Manhattan outside New Amsterdam, an Indian woman was killed by a Dutchman for stealing a peach from his orchard. The Indians then stormed into the village, ransacking houses. The Wall did not prevent this. The Indians did not even have to climb or breach The Wall; they simply went around it. The Wall may have gone from river to river, but even if it extended into the rivers, it was apparently not hard to wade or swim or canoe around it. (Remember the effectiveness of the Maginot line?) In what became known as the Peach War, fifty whites and fifteen or so Indians were killed. Peace was obtained not through better border protection but with a treaty.

This Indian incursion highlighted the fact that even if The Wall had successfully sealed off the northern border, it did not change a fundamental fact of New Amsterdam’s geography. The island–surprise, surprise–was mostly surrounded by water. Why attack from the land when there were so many landing spots for boats and men?

Eventually, New Amsterdam was threatened by the English, but not from the north. Instead, the English in 1664 menacingly anchored four warships with a couple thousand men off Brooklyn at the entrance to the harbor. A quarter of those men proceeded to a ferry landing across from Manhattan. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but not many other residents of New Amsterdam, if any, stood with him. The settlers may have thought they would have been destined to lose any battle, but it also seems that having settled in New Amsterdam, they had no great tie to the Netherlands and no great enmity towards the English. Their true bond was to their life in New Amsterdam. The English promised that they could continue with their lives as long as they swore allegiance to the English king. This was an easy choice for these commercial men. Soon, without a shot having been fired, the men of New Amsterdam, including Peter Stuyvesant, had signed that English oath. (Stuyvesant was recalled to the Netherlands for a how-could-you-let-that-happen? conversation. He blamed the West Indies Company for not having better armed the colony. Even though it was now controlled by the English, Stuyvesant returned to New York and his house and farm where he died in 1672.)

On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam was formally ceded to the English and the settlement became New York. What remained of The Wall, which stood in the way of progress and expansion, was torn down by the English in 1699.

The Wall was a waste of time, effort, and money. It served no useful purpose other than to give the illusion of a defense to what was not a real danger.

Perhaps some other time we can talk about the Berlin wall.