[1] He was descended from one Captain Daniel Brodhead, a soldier from Yorkshire, who, after the English acquired New Netherland, was in command of the garrison at Esopus.
[1] When his father's health began to fail, he retired to Saugerties, New York, and as the only surviving son, John accompanied him.
[2] President Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, New York appointed his friend, Albany lawyer and former congressman Harmanus Bleecker to the post of Chargé d'Affaires to the Netherlands.
Bleeker was not allocated any funds for a clerk but apart from a small salary, an attaché of the legation would be in society and have the opportunity of learning German, Dutch, and French.
[3] He learned that in 1818, the old records of the Dutch West India company for the period prior to 1700 had been sold as scrap to paper mills.
[6] The year 1809 had seen Washington Irving's satirical A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.
At the urging of the New-York Historical Society, the state legislature appropriated funds to appoint an agent to gather and transcribe documents relating to New York's colonial history from various European archives.
Brodhead was appointed (1841)[8] by Governor William H Seward to undertake the work, and in four years gathered from England, France and the Netherlands some eighty manuscript volumes of transcriptions, largely of documents which had not hitherto been used by historians.
When Gansevoort died in May 1846, his boyhood friend John Brodhead, was appointed to succeed him, and also took on the role of Herman Melville's literary representative.
With the election of Zachary Taylor as president, Bancroft's political appointment ended, and he and Brodhead returned to the United States in 1849.
[1] When the first volume, which covers New Netherland, was published, George Bancroft wrote, "It is so full, so accurate, so marked by research and an honest love for historic truth, that we have only to bid him go and finish what he has so worthily begun.