New Sweden

At a glance

Why did Sweden want a colony?

Because Sweden had become a Great Power and wanted the commercial appendages of one. Gustavus Adolphus's chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, ran the regency after the king's death in 1632, and the Swedish state was taxing Baltic trade, fighting in Germany, and looking for new revenue. The Dutch merchant Willem Usselincx, who had helped design the Dutch West India Company and then fallen out with it, offered Sweden a blueprint: a general trading company with a charter, a monopoly and a colony in America.

The South Company was chartered on 6 June 1626 with 37 articles; a separate New Sweden Company followed in 1637, with a capital of 36,000 florins, part Swedish and part Dutch — Oxenstierna's kinsmen on one side, the Amsterdam merchant Samuel Blommaert and his network on the other. The 1637 charter itself is lost. That detail matters, because it explains what New Sweden was: a joint-stock venture in which the Dutch provided much of the money and the shipping, and Sweden provided the flag, the soldiers and the claim.

Blommaert's motive was not altruistic. He had been a shareholder in the Dutch Swanendael settlement on the Delaware, destroyed in 1632, and he saw a Swedish colony as a way to revive a claim the Dutch West India Company had neglected. The colony was, in part, a Dutch scheme wearing a Swedish crown.

Who founded it?

Peter Minuit. He had been director-general of New Netherland until 1631, and he knew the Delaware from the Dutch side. The New Sweden Company hired him, and he sailed from Texel on 31 December 1637 with two ships: the Kalmar Nyckel, a Dutch-built pinnace of about 300 tons that the Swedes had bought in 1629, and the smaller Fogel Grip.

They reached the Delaware in March 1638 and anchored off "the Rocks", about two miles up the Minquas Kill. Minuit went ashore, fired cannon to draw the chiefs, and asked whether they would sell the river and as much land as he wanted. On 29 March 1638, five Lenape sachems — Mattahorn, Mitatsimint, Erupacken, Mahomen and Chiton — came aboard the Kalmar Nyckel and sold "as much of the land on all parts and places of the river, up the river and on both sides, as Minuit requested". The deeds were written in Dutch, interpreted by Andres Lucassen, paid for in merchandise, and marked with the sachems' totems. The purchase ran about 67 miles of river frontage and westward, as one account put it, "as far as the setting sun".

The deeds do not survive; the account rests on a deposition by the interpreter. And the sellers were Lenape, not Susquehannock — a distinction popular accounts often miss. The Susquehannock, called Minquas by the Swedes, were the inland suppliers of the fur trade, and their country lay beyond the sold ground.

The Swedes built a timber and earth fort on the rock above the Christina and named it Fort Christina, for the young queen. Minuit sent the Fogel Grip to Jamestown to buy tobacco in April; the governor refused free trade and referred him to the King of England. The Dutch protested in May: the South River, William Kieft wrote, "had been many years in their possession … and sealed with their blood". Minuit sailed for home in June with furs and tobacco, and died that summer — the ship carrying him was lost, the date usually given as 5 August 1638. He left about two dozen men under Måns Nilsson Kling.

How big was it, really?

Very small, and the numbers are usually inflated. The colony's population at its Swedish peak was 368 in July 1654, and that figure included the Dutch of Fort Casimir, which Risingh had just captured. Before the Örnen arrived in 1654 the colony had 70 people. The often-quoted "about 600 settlers" is the population in 1658, three years after the Dutch conquest and including Finns and others.

The sequence is worth keeping straight: 23–24 men left in 1638; about 92 men in the 1644 roll (34 at Fort Christina, 17 at Elfsborg, 8 at Schuylkill, 14 at Upland, 19 at Tinicum); 183 in 1647; about 200 in 1652; 70 in early 1654; 368 in July 1654 with the Dutch; about 600 by 1658. This was a village with a fort, not a colony with a hinterland.

Who were the settlers?

Swedes, Finns, and a handful of Dutch and Germans. The 1640 voyage brought the first families — Gunnarsson, Svensson, Rambo, Bonde, Stiddem — and by the 1650s the Delaware settlements were majority Finnish. The Finns came from the forest districts of central Sweden, the Finnskogar, where they had been settled for generations, and they brought a distinctive agriculture: burn-beating (svedjebruk), the slash-and-burn cultivation of rye in the forest, which required neither plough nor manure and produced a crop in the ashes.

That mattered in America because the Delaware valley was forest. Finnish families cleared land that Swedish farmers, used to meadow agriculture, could not, and their dispersed farmsteads shaped the settlement pattern. The Finnish log house, the pirtti — a combined dwelling, sauna and grain-drying shed — is the ancestor attributed to the American log cabin.

The population also included at least one enslaved African. Anthony, from Angola, is listed in the garrison returns of 1638–40; whether he arrived with the first expedition or the following year is disputed. He is the earliest recorded African in the Delaware valley.

How did it make money?

Barely. The colony's exports were furs, tobacco, corn and cattle. Furs were the original purpose: the 1638 return included 1,258 beaver, 157 otter and 90 other skins, and the cargo was worth thousands of florins. Tobacco was the other cash crop: in 1644 the colony produced 6,920 pounds, worth about 83½ florins per man. Corn and cattle fed the settlers and were sold to the Dutch and the English colonies.

The problem was not production but shipping. Sweden had no merchant marine capable of sustaining a colony 4,000 miles away, and the Dutch controlled the carrying trade. The company's ships were arrested, blockaded or delayed; the Kalmar Nyckel was seized at Medemblik in 1638 by an officer of the Dutch West India Company, and every Swedish governor complained of supply. In 1647 the colony lost 9,288 florins 18¾ stivers on its operations. The colony never paid a dividend, and the Swedish Crown eventually lost interest.

Printz tried to make the Delaware a Swedish monopoly. He built Fort Elfsborg on the east bank to close the river to Dutch traders, and Fort Korsholm on the Schuylkill; he burned the Dutch trading posts he could reach. It was too expensive, and in 1651 he abandoned Elfsborg and Korsholm and concentrated at Christina and Tinicum.

Who ruled it?

Five governors in seventeen years. Peter Minuit (1638) founded it and died. Peter Hollander Ridder (1640–43) ran a struggling garrison. Johan Björnsson Printz (1643–53) was the colony's real builder — a former cavalry officer and Lutheran pastor's son, six feet tall and, by one account, 400 pounds, with a temper and a gift for administration. He arrived in February 1643 with about 50 settlers, built Fort Elfsborg, built New Gothenburg on Tinicum Island with a fort of hemlock logs and a house called the Printzhof, and made Tinicum the first permanent European settlement in what is now Pennsylvania.

Printz also lost the colony's goodwill. In July 1653 twenty-two freemen presented a petition in eleven articles complaining that they were "at no hour or time secure as to life and property"; that they were forbidden to trade with "either the savages or Christians"; that Printz judged cases in his own favour against juries; and that they were denied "the fish-waters, the trees in the woods, the grass on the ground and the land to plant on, from which they had their nourishment". Printz called it mutiny, tried the ringleader Anders Jonsson, and had him executed on 1 August 1653. He sailed for Sweden soon after.

Johan Risingh (1654–55) was the last. He arrived with the Örnen, which had carried about 350 people, nearly a hundred of whom died on the voyage, found the colony at 70 souls, and on Trinity Sunday 1654 captured the Dutch Fort Casimir — renamed Fort Trefaldighet, Fort Trinity, because it was taken on Trinity Sunday. He issued an ordinance on land, forestry and cattle that is the best surviving statement of how the economy was meant to work. Fifteen months later he surrendered the colony.

How was it governed?

As a company, then as a problem. The New Sweden Company appointed the governor, held the trade monopoly and issued instructions from Stockholm; the governor commanded the fort, the militia and the courts. There was no elected assembly, and the freemen had no constitutional voice — which is why the 1653 petition reads less like a colonial assembly's protest than like a workforce grievance: no security of person or property, no freedom to trade, no access to the river, the woods, the grass or the land.

The governor's court was the only court, and the governor was also the company's chief merchant, so the conflicts of interest were structural. Printz heard cases, held the monopoly and commanded the garrison; the petition accused him of judging in his own favour against juries. His answer was that the charges were exaggerated, and Johnson's verdict — that some were true but most overdrawn — is probably as close as the evidence allows.

Below the governor were the company's officers and servants, then the freemen with their farms, then the soldiers. The Dutch, after 1655, kept the Swedish court and militia as a system of indirect rule and added an oath of allegiance; that arrangement — not Swedish self-government — is the one that actually gave the Delaware Swedes their local institutions.

The Lenape were not passive sellers. The 1638 purchase was negotiated, paid for in goods, and marked with the sachems' totems; the Swedes needed Lenape consent to trade and to stay, and the colony's survival in its first years depended on the goodwill of the people whose country it was. The Susquehannock, further inland, were the source of the beaver that made the colony worth having — the "Minquas" of Swedish documents — and Swedish relations with them were commercial and diplomatic rather than territorial. When the Dutch took the colony in 1655, the Lenape and Susquehannock did not simply transfer their loyalty: the war that broke over the Dutch in September 1655 was, in part, a reaction to the removal of a trading partner they knew.

What was life like?

Settled along the river in dispersed farms, not a town. The colony's centre was first Fort Christina, then Tinicum Island, where Printz built his hall and the church. In 1646 the first log church was raised at Tinicum; the congregation was Lutheran, and the colony had a resident pastor from 1647. The farms grew corn, tobacco and vegetables, kept cattle and pigs, and traded furs with the Lenape and Susquehannock. Housing was of logs from the start, because the forest was there and the Finns knew how to use it.

The colony's social world was military and hierarchical. The company appointed officers and held a monopoly of trade; the freemen complained about it. The garrison was small, the militia organised by the governor, and the Lutherans' relations with the Dutch Calvinists and the English to the south were wary. The land was fertile and the river was the road.

What was religion like?

Lutheran, and institutionally thin. The colony was founded as a Lutheran venture, and the Augsburg Confession was its confession; the first pastor, Reorus Torkillus, arrived in 1639, and a log church was built at Tinicum in 1646. But clergy were scarce and the congregation depended on the Swedish Crown and the company for supply. The Dutch conquest did not disturb worship: article 7 of the capitulation allowed those who stayed to "enjoy the freedom of the Augsburg Confession and be allowed a person to instruct them therein".

That clause is why the Swedish church survived at all. Under the Dutch and then the English, the Delaware Swedes kept their Lutheran services, and in the 1690s the Swedish Crown sent a new mission — Andreas Rudman, Erik Björk and Jonas Aurén arrived in 1697 — which reorganised the congregations and built Gloria Dei at Wicaco in 1698–1700. The church became Episcopal in the nineteenth century but kept its Swedish name, its burial ground and its record books, which are among the best sources for the colony's families.

How did it end?

With a Dutch fleet and a legal argument. Peter Stuyvesant sailed from New Amsterdam on 26 August 1655 with seven ships and 317 soldiers, intending to clear the river of Swedish competition. Fort Trinity surrendered on 1 September after a two-day standoff, its garrison mutinous; Fort Christina was invested on 5 September, and Risingh agreed to capitulate on 14 September. The eleven articles were signed on 15 September 1655, and the garrison marched out with drums, fifes and colours.

The terms are worth reading because they show what mattered. Cannon and stores belonging to the Swedish Crown and the South Company remained Swedish property; Swedish and company papers were to remain "untouched, unimpeded and uninspected"; those who wished to leave had a year and six weeks to dispose of their property; and article 7 guaranteed that any Swedes or Finns who chose to stay "shall enjoy the freedom of the Augsburg Confession and be allowed a person to instruct them therein". The Lutheran religion was protected by a treaty article.

Then came the strangest moment in the colony's history. Half an hour after the garrison marched out, Stuyvesant offered to hand Fort Christina back and make an offensive and defensive league, with the Dutch keeping the land below the Christina and the Swedes everything north of it — "the country was large enough for them both". The Swedish council met the next day and unanimously refused: they had no authority to ally with Stuyvesant, they could not subsist (provisions gone, cattle killed, plantations wasted), and it "would be disgraceful to their superiors to reoccupy the fort". The colony was offered its life and declined it.

What did the Dutch think of it?

That it was trespassing. The Dutch claimed the South River by right of Hudson's voyage and by the blood they had spent at Swanendael, and they said so in 1638: Kieft's protest recites that the river "had been many years in their possession … and sealed with their blood". The Swedes answered with the land purchase and the flag; the Dutch answered by encouraging their own traders to keep the river and by refusing to recognise Swedish sovereignty.

For fifteen years the Dutch had the better of it commercially. They controlled the shipping and the prices, sold goods to the Swedish settlers and the Lenape, and watched Printz build forts to close the river. Stuyvesant's 1655 expedition was the culmination of a long argument, not a sudden act: he came with seven ships and 317 soldiers to remove a competitor he had been complaining about for years, and he took the colony in a fortnight.

The Dutch conquest was itself short-lived. In 1664 the English took New Netherland, and the Delaware passed to the Duke of York, then to Penn's proprietorship in 1681. New Sweden's Dutch period lasted nine years and its English period forever.

Why did it fail?

Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

It was undercapitalised. The company raised 36,000 florins, a fraction of what a transatlantic colony required, and it depended on Dutch shipping that its Dutch shareholders could redirect. Every governor complained of supply; the colony's accounts show losses, and the Crown lost interest.

Sweden had no Atlantic fleet. A colony four thousand miles away needs ships, and Sweden's navy was a Baltic navy. The Dutch could blockade the river, arrest Swedish ships in Dutch ports and undercut Swedish prices, and they did all three. Printz's forts were an attempt to solve a commercial problem with military architecture, and they were too expensive to keep.

The colony was strategically pointless. Sweden wanted trade and prestige; the Delaware produced furs that the Dutch could buy more cheaply and tobacco that Virginia grew better. Unlike New France, New Sweden had no missionary project, no alliance system with Native nations that could not be replicated, and no claim to a hinterland. When Stuyvesant arrived with 317 soldiers, the colony had 70 people and no fleet. The surprise is not that it fell, but that it lasted seventeen years.

The comparison with New Netherland is instructive: the Dutch colony had the same problem — a trading post with too few settlers — and fell to the English in 1664 for the same reasons. Small European states could found American colonies; only states with Atlantic navies and settler flows could keep them.

What happened to the Swedes?

Most stayed. Only 37 people left for Europe with Risingh in October 1655. The rest took an oath to the Dutch — only nineteen freemen's signatures survive — and continued as a self-governing community. In August 1656 the Dutch granted them a court and militia north of the Christina, and in 1658 Stuyvesant formalised the arrangement, exempting them from taking sides "if trouble should arise between their respective nations in Europe". The "Swedish Nation" kept its own court, militia, church and land until 1681–83, when the English replaced it with county courts.

The 1669 "Long Finn rebellion" shows how large the Swedish-Finnish population still was: forty-two people — about a quarter of the adult male Swedish-speaking population — were heavily fined for a conspiracy to overthrow English rule, encouraged by a rumour that Charles XI meant to reclaim the colony. The ringleader was publicly whipped, branded and sold into slavery in Barbados.

The first English census of the Delaware in 1671 counted 165 households between Burlington Island and New Castle, overwhelmingly Swedish and Finnish except at the two ends. Their descendants were still there when Penn arrived in 1681, and they are the reason the Delaware valley has Swedish place names, Swedish churches and a Swedish-American memory.

What is left?

The church is the most solid legacy. Gloria Dei, the Old Swedes' Church in Philadelphia, was begun in 1698 and completed in 1700, replacing the earlier log church at Wicaco; it is still an active Episcopal parish and a National Historic Site. The Swedish Lutheran mission of the 1690s — Jesper Swedberg's letters, Charles XI's 1696 letter, and the arrival of Andreas Rudman, Erik Björk and Jonas Aurén in 1697 — re-established regular clergy and kept the language alive into the eighteenth century.

The memory is nineteenth- and twentieth-century work. The breakthrough was 1888, when the Swedish historian and diplomat Carl Gustaf von Blanck and others organised the 250th anniversary; the tercentenary in 1938 drew 20,000 people and a radio address from Franklin Roosevelt, and the American Swedish Historical Museum opened in 1926. In 1988 Congress recognised New Sweden's contribution by public law. The colony that Sweden forgot became a usable origin story for Swedish America.

Did they invent the log cabin?

Not exactly, and the argument is more interesting than the slogan.

The phrase "the log cabin myth" is Harold Shurtleff's, from a 1939 book — and his target was the English, not the Swedes. Shurtleff demolished the belief that English colonists from Newfoundland to Virginia built log cabins as their first houses; they built timber-frame, wattle-and-daub and clapboard houses, and the horizontally laid log house was not part of their tradition. The counter-thesis that replaced it — that the log cabin entered America with the Swedes and Finns on the Delaware — is the one now widely repeated.

The evidence for it is real but indirect. Printz's 1653 inventory describes his hall as "built of hewn logs", a fort of "hemlock logs laid one upon the other", a log storehouse, a log bathhouse and the 1646 log church. Fort Korsholm was "a fine little fort of logs having sand and stone filled in between the woodwork". Holm described Fort Vasa as "substantial log houses, built of good, strong, hard hickory, two stories high". Later American log buildings with similar notching were read as survivals of that tradition.

Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups shifted the credit from Swedes to Finns, and specifically to the Savo-Karelian forest culture: the pirtti, the burn-beating economy, the double log house, the axe traditions. Their 1989 book is the standard statement, and Otis Rice's review calls it "thoroughly researched, convincingly argued" while noting its tendency to give little credit to non-Finnish pioneers.

The sceptical case is chronological. The best-studied "Swedish" log house in Delaware, Josh's Cabin, was dated by its clay pipes to 1750–1800 — far too late to be Swedish, though its excavator, C. A. Weslager, believed it reflected Scandinavian influence. The attribution chain runs from a written description of a seventeenth-century fort to a nineteenth-century building type, with each link an inference. The fair summary is that the Delaware valley was central to the introduction of the log cabin, that Swedes and Finns were the likely bearers, and that the precise origin is still debated. What is not defensible is the NPS lesson plan's flat statement that "the first log cabins were constructed in America" in 1638 — in a document that elsewhere says the origin is uncertain.

Common myths about New Sweden

Timeline of New Sweden

What the map shows next

At 1700 on the map New Sweden is long gone, the English colonies run from Maine to the Carolinas, and New France holds the St Lawrence.

At 1782 on the map the Delaware valley is part of the United States, and the Swedish-Finnish families are American farmers.