NEW SWEDEN COLONY

NEW SWEDEN COLONY. "New Sweden" (a term applied only long after the fact) was an amorphous product of a series of scattered settlements in the parts of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania that make up the Delaware River Valley. Sweden reached its apogee as a player in the European search for North American colonies in the first half of the seventeenth century, in keeping with a national need to pursue a mercantilist agenda. Dutch mercantilists William Usselinx and Peter Minuit furthered their own and Holland's economic and political interests by encouraging the Swedish Crown to establish a colony, mainly as a means of thwarting England.

But few Swedes would be lured to the Americas, so the economic and political potential for a New Sweden was undermined from the outset. In political terms, New Sweden had only a brief twelve-year existence (1643–1655) under the Swedish Crown and the inept and despotic rule of governor Johan Printz; his misrule contributed mightily to Sweden's demise as a possessor of Crown settlement in North America.

The cultural significance of the Swedish colonies persisted long after the end of their political existence, however. Fort Christina, settled at present-day Wilmington, Delaware, by a small Swedish contingent in 1638, was short-lived, but left a lasting legacy nonetheless by contributing a Swedish cultural component to the rich ethnic and religious mix of the middle colonies. The most promising Swedish settlement, it never fulfilled the mercantilist promise its founders envisioned. The same fate awaited Fort Nya Elfsborg, founded on Salem Creek in West Jersey in 1643. In this case the failure was attributed largely to the famed Jersey mosquito, a claim New Jersey residents of any era will find easy to believe. Sweden's nationalist effort succumbed completely to overwhelming Dutch force in 1655.

Short-lived New Sweden never counted more than four hundred people, and many of those were Finns, not Swedes. Yet the cultural and ethnic impact endured, as can be inferred from place names like Swedesboro, Finn's Point, Elinsboro, and Mullica Hill, all in New Jersey, and Swede's Ford in Pennsylvania. More importantly, this handful of settlers left behind a strong presence in West Jersey in the form of several Swedish Lutheran churches, the last of which closed its doors in 1786, nearly a century and a half after its founding. In ethnic terms, Swedes remain a permanent surviving element of the diversity that has always characterized New Jersey.

While cause and effect are hard to pin down, Sweden was one of the European nations committed to American independence. It lent money to the American cause in 1782, and entered into a treaty with the new United States in 1783, not only helping to secure Sweden's loans and future trading rights, but placing the nation among the first to recognize American independence. In sum, Swedish linkage to the middle colonies and to New Jersey in particular may have started badly with the abortive creation of "New Sweden" in 1638, but the connection persisted in religious, ethnic, and diplomatic terms through and beyond the American Revolution. In broad cultural terms, it still survives at the start of the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson, Amandus. The Swedes in America, 1638–1938. Philadelphia: 1953.

McCormick, Richard P. New Jersey from Colony to State, 1609– 1789. Rev. ed. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1981. The original edition was published in 1964.

Prince, Carl E., ed. The Papers of William Livingston. New Brunswick, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1979–1988.

Carl E.Prince