In your discussion of how the $24 the idians got for Manhattan, you assess today’s value of the money in terms of silver (and find that it would be very little in today’s money).
That’s no doubt true. But, I think, people usuall, in this disscussion, mean to measure the increase in value in terms of the greater value of today’s dollar over that of the earlier period. (I.e., not the price of silver, but the general increase owing to inflation, increased produtivity, whatever).
Obviously, the $24 would be much greater than the $72 you mentioned.
Pretty much everything you’ve ever read about it in history class is sheer nonsense. And that goes double for the history class who says it was purchased by the Canarsie Indians.
We don’t know anything positive and exact about the sale. We don’t have the deed or any transaction papers. We don’t know who the Indians were, although constant references are made throughout the period to the Manhatesen Indians, who lived on the island. We don’t know what they took in exchange. All the West India Company records were sold for scrap in 1821. (There were 80,000 pounds of them, which probably fetched a good price.) We do know that the Indians didn’t sell the land as we think of selling something: they intended to go on living there and did so.
All we do have to go on is a letter sent by Pieter Schaghen back to the States General (the Dutch ruling body) on Nov. 5, 1626. In it he does say that the people there “have purchased the Island Manhattan from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.”
And that’s it. The Indians didn’t take guilders: they had no use for money. They took some unspecified goods instead. Presumably those goods were valuable to the Indians involved, but we’ll never know how to translate that into today’s money.
But what about the 60 guilders? Can we update that? First, it was 19th century historian Edmund O’Callaghan who made the $24 figure, and that probably meant nothing even at the time. But a better comparison would be to other land purchases. Shorto does that and makes this summation:
When did he come up with that figure of $24? I can find it in an article in Northern Light in 1844.
And of course it mean something at the time. Historically, a Dutch silver coin the size of an American silver dollar or a German Thaler was three guilders/gulden). So 60 guilders would have been about $20 US. I’d say it was on the money.
A little sidenote. If the Indians had somehow invested that money in something that paid fairly well, say 8%, they’d have a hell of a lot more money today than the value of Manhattan.
Well - if the “$24” is correct - then that would be roughly $240 based upon the price of silver today. Still a pretty good price for Manhattan I must say.
The current real estate value of New York has nothing to do with evaluating the fairness of the trade. Did you get ripped off paying $30 million for a Picaso because the canvas and paint only cost him fifteen bucks?
What was Manhattan worth when it was purchased? Whatever someone was willing to pay for it. A bunch of people sold something they didn’t need to the only buyer in the market for it. The fact that those people developed it over hundreds of years is neither here nor there.
And the guilders they paid was (and I’ll admit I’m guessing here) probably a year’s wage for a low-paid employee in Holland. There are still places in the US where you can buy land the size of Manhattan for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe I should build the world’s most important city in Central Washington.
345,899,237,500,501.00 Assuming monthly compounding. This number is not adjusted for inflation. This is probably well below what the number would have been adjusted for inflation.
I doubt anyone could get 8 per cent interest in those days, and even if so - what investment could they have made that would still be around, maybe some English bonds or something?
On a side note, wasn’t Manhattan Island also considerably smaller at the time of the transaction? I was under the impression that much of the land area of Manhattan is “artificial”, i.e. landfill to increase the acreage.
Yes, acreage has been added along the edges through landfall, but it’s debatable whether much of the island is artificial.
A map of the added landfill acreage can be found on this page. It says that 3650 acres have been added, or about one-fourth of Manhattan’s current 15,000+ acres, but that apparently includes all the filling in of the numerous creeks and streams that once ran through the island. Those would have been an asset in the 1600s, not something to be paved over.
The Dutch would be surprised with the physical configuration of Manhattan for many reasons - most of the hills were dug away and used to fill in the valleys, giving the island a flatness today it didn’t have in the past. But they would mostly recognize the outline of the island as a whole and wouldn’t be taken aback by any growth in its basic size.
Also, Marble Hill was moved from the island to the mainland (though it is still legally part of the Borough of Manhattan) about 100s ago. About 76 acres.
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When did he come up with that figure of $24? I can find it in an article in Northern Light in 1844.
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I’ve read that figure of 60 guilders in several books (Including Ellis’ The Epic of New York and Loewen’s Lies Across America). I never knew exactly where it came from until I read Exapno’s entry above. I’m gonna have to get that book - I love NYC history.
My understanding is that the “$24” figure came from someone – and I have no idea who – equating that 60 guilders to “2400 english pennies”. Somebody obviously figured “2400 english pennies = 2400 American pennies = $24”, which I don’t think would have been a legit equivalency at any time in history. So the $24 figure has been bogus from the start.
Actually, near the end of the £sd era, in the late 1960s, 1d was worth about 1¢.
I do not clearly understand why the pre-1857 US cent was so close to the size of a penny that it acquired the name “penny”, and kept it even after the resemblance no longer existed. My only guess is that the more valuable penny was valued at more than its weight in copper.
I’m not sure that the $24 figure came from Exapno’s Mr. O’Callaghan. I still don’t know when he came up with the figure but said that I had found the figure available by 1844.
I’d like to know where that idea about the pennies came from.
And more likely, as I said in my first post, sixty Dutch Guilders in the 1600’s-early 1800’s were the equivalent in silver to about $20 US. silver dollars. I suppose I could dig out a 19th century coin reference some time and come up with a more precise figure. I wouldn’t be surprised if I came up with a value of about $24 US.
So it was never a bogus figure. It meant something to an American reader in the early 1800s’. And it was pretty accurate.
The O’Callaghan reference is not footnoted. The bibliography lists two books, two edited collections of documents, and a translated journal for E. B. O’Callaghan, whom I assume is the same person. Interestingly, the earliest one of these is from 1848.
