In the free-for-all to secure colonial possessions in the New World, the Swedish kingdom was slow off the mark in comparison with other European powers. France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England, all beat Sweden to the punch in establishing footholds in the Americas. When Sweden eventually did so in the 1630s, the achievement was a modest one. One historian described the Swedish colony in North America as “the smallest, least populated and shortest-lived” of all those established by the major European powers (HA Barton).
The initial settlement (1638) was on the shores of Delaware (present-day Wilmington, DE)… later the Swedes extended their colony to portions of land in Pennsylvania and New Jersey★. The first expedition was somewhat derivative, it’s leader was in fact a Dutchman, Peter Minuit. Minuit’s main claim to fame was the purchase of Manhattan Island from the local tribes, but his dissatisfaction with the rewards afforded him by his Dutch masters led him to defect to Sweden. The Dutch colonists ensconced in the Delaware River Valley were openly hostile to the new Swedish colony which they saw as encroaching on their turf. Minuit purchased land from the Lenape Indians (the local native Americans) with the intention of growing tobacco, and a fort (Fort Christina) was built as a base to exploit the fur trade in North America.
The Swedish South Company (AKA Nya Sverige-kompaniet) was responsible for making New Sweden work and the colonists made a fair fist of it in the formative days but ultimately the Swedish colony floundered due to a combination of prevailing conditions and circumstances. The untimely death by misadventure of its experienced leader Minuit was a blow to its crucial formative development. The government tried to entice Swedish and Finnish※ settlers but never managed to attracted more than a few hundred (eventually they were compelled to resort to populating it with Sweden’s criminal classes). As well as a lack of manpower, the requisite government support to make it a success was not forthcoming.
The hard-line approach of Minuit’s successor as governor Johan Printz to ruling New Sweden met with resistance and desertion from the settlers. Printz’s successor, Johan Rising, ascerbated the already frought relations with neighbouring New Netherlands by aggressively attacking them upon assuming command. This provoked a fierce and decisive retaliation from the Dutch commander Peter Stuyvesant who captured Fort Christina and drove the Swedes’ colony out in 1655, never to return.
All in all New Sweden in North America lasted a mere seventeen years. Despite this failure the colony did leave a Swedish legacy for the future United States – Nya Sverige gave North America the log cabin, an iconic emblem of pioneering America settlement. At the same time it brought the Lutheran religion to North America, to add to the growing patch-quilt of Christian faiths in the New World.
🇸🇪 Postscript: Sweden’s “small e” empire
In keeping with its small-scale North American colony, Sweden’s imperial reach overall across the globe remained modest. There were limited holdings in the Caribbean under the auspices of the Swedish West India Company – comprising briefly Guadeloupe (1813-14) and more substantially Saint-Barthélemy (St Bart’s) (1784-1878). The latter was the fulcrum of the Swedish slave trade in the period. In the 17th century the Swedish monarchy also held colonies in Africa known as the Swedish Gold Coast (Svenska Guldkusten) – in present-day Benin and Ghana. Like Swedish North America, Stockholm’s Gold Coast possessions were short-lived, with the Swedes levered out of the region once more by its imperial rivals from Europe.
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★ the New Jersey colony Fort Elfsborg was beset with a nematoceran plague, earning it the nickname “Mosquito Castle”
※ Finland was then part of the Kingdom of Sweden
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Referenced sources consulted:
‘America’s Forgotten Swedish Colony’s, (Evan Andrews), History, 22-Aug-2018, www.history.com
‘The Swedish Come to America’, (Thomas R. Kellogg), Founders and Patriots of America, www founders patriots.org
‘Swedish colonial empire’, New World Encyclopaedia’, www.newworldencyclopedia.org