USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 19
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contentiousness with the tongue, the fist, and the cudgel, gambling, profanity, thievery, adultery, and unmentionable crimes - with all these the lawmakers and magistrates of the Bay Colony were concerned; and the records of New Haven indicate that the last-named were probably more common there than in New Netherland.
De Vries was shocked by the prevalence of gambling among the Virginians, who played away even their bond-servants, and told them that he had 'never seen such work in Turk or barbarian.' Also, he charged them with a general dishonesty that he did not attribute to the New Netherlanders despite their fondness for illicit fur trading. The English in Vir- ginia, he wrote, were very hospitable but were so far from being ' proper persons to trade with' that one had to be watch- ful or he would be 'struck in the tail.' If they could deceive any one they counted it 'a Roman action' or boasted of play- ing 'an English trick.' If any one did trade in Virginia he should
. . . keep a house there and continue all the year, that he may be prepared when the tobacco comes from the fields to seize it if he would obtain his debts.
It was thus that the Virginians did among themselves, the captain explained. In a less judicial mood he wrote on another page that the English, whom he had known in the East and West Indies as well as on the American mainland, were a 'villainous people' who would 'sell their own fathers for servants on the islands.'
Under heavy penalties the laws of Massachusetts forbade dancing in public inns even at weddings, 'unprofitable fowl- ing,' all kinds of games, and the taking of tobacco publicly. Those of New Amsterdam said merely that no form of amuse- ment, like no form of work, should be indulged in before, during, or between service hours on the Sabbath. Many other marks of difference help to show that New Amsterdam supplied a better soil than a Puritan community for the growth of the gracious plants called hospitality and cheerfulness. It
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also supplied a less congenial soil for the weeds hypocrisy and perjury. Roger Williams pointed out how these weeds were fostered and forced by the laws which in Massachusetts and New Haven made orthodox opinions a test for full rights of suffrage ; and, writing to the Reverend John Cotton, Sir Richard Saltonstall said:
This your practise of compelling any in matters of worship to do that whereof they are not fully persuaded is to make them sin . . . and many are made hypocrites thereby, conforming in their outward man for fear of punishment.
'Better be hypocrites than profane persons,' wrote Cotton in reply. This was not the Dutch point of view. Nor was it the Dutch practice to interfere in matters of conscience and private belief.
In all countries there were many persons at this period and in some there were sects that advocated religious tolera- tion; in England congregations of foreign refugees had re- ceived special permission from the crown to enjoy their own forms of discipline and worship as native nonconformists might not; and in France the Edict of Nantes, issued in 1598, gave the Huguenots political rights and in a few specified cases religious privileges. But Holland and the Turkish empire were the only European states that sanctioned that general toleration which now prevails in all really civilized lands and in one or two has borne the perfected fruit of full religious liberty. As the world owes constitutional govern- ment to the English revolution, says Lord Acton, federal repub- licanism to the American revolution, and political equality to the French revolution and its successors, so to the Dutch revolution it owes religious liberty.
In seventeenth-century Holland, it need hardly be ex- plained, religious liberty and equality in our modern American sense did not exist; there was an established Calvinistic church which the people at large were taxed to support, no other church was officially recognized, and the toleration of
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others was often opposed. Yet such toleration was estab- lished by one of the articles of the Treaty of Union between the provinces, and it continued to prevail even more widely in practice than in theory. Protestants of all sorts had political rights and privileges of private worship, even the poor and humble Anabaptists who were bitterly persecuted everywhere else. Although after the conclusion of the truce with Spain in 1609 Catholics were still excluded from public office they were permitted to have large churches if by making them look like houses outside they respected the letter of the law enacted during the life-and-death conflict between Protes- tantism and Catholicism. And although the law gave the Jew no rights he also found in the Republic a safe asylum and worshipped there privately in peace. Moreover, the clergy even of the orthodox church were excluded from political office and only in one province had any visible political power; only in Utrecht, and there as landed proprietors, were they represented in the provincial assembly.
During the famous ten years' struggle of the Calvinists to cast the Arminians out of the established church Holland still remained the most tolerant country in Europe. This struggle, as has been told, was in its essence political. The great leader of the Arminians, John of Barneveld, was condemned to death on political not on ecclesiastical charges; and the punishments meted out to others when the international Synod of Dort decided against the Arminians were mild indeed compared with those that followed upon ecclesiastical victories in other lands. Many Arminian ministers were banished, and all non- conformists were forbidden publicly to preach or to teach. But the ban was soon removed, and thereafter Arminians en- joyed the same tacit rights of semi-public worship as other schismatics. In spite of the great diversity of opinion in the Republic, wrote Bishop Burnet, during a visit he made in the year 1664 he found 'much peace and quiet'; and he attrib- uted the fact to 'the gentleness of the government and the toleration that made all people easy and happy.'
The Amsterdam classis of the Reformed Church was the
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ecclesiastical head of the church in New Netherland as in other Dutch colonies, sending out ministers and comforters of the sick at the request of the West India Company, of congregations lacking pastors, or of the patroon who in 1642, as he wrote to Governor Kieft, secured for Rensselaerswyck a 'very pious and experienced minister,' Domine Megapolen- sis, who, he hoped, would be blessed by the Lord in his work 'among the dissolute Christians and blind heathen.' Mega- polensis, who in after years was a conspicuous figure on Man- hattan, was now thirty-nine years old. His contract pledged him to serve at Rensselaerswyck for six years on an annual salary for the first three of 1100 guilders, half to be paid from Holland, half on the spot in necessaries, food, and clothing; he was also to get an allowance of wheat and of butter, and after the end of the three years 1300 guilders. He preached his first sermon at Rensselaerswyck to about one hundred persons.
The secular head of the colonial church was the West India Company which reserved to itself rights of presentation and the power to determine ecclesiastical conditions. It first ex- pressed its wishes in this direction in the regulations of 1638, saying :
Religion shall be taught and practised there according to the Con- fession and formularies of union here publicly accepted, with which everyone shall be satisfied and content, without, however, it being inferred from this that any person shall hereby in any wise be con- strained or aggrieved in his conscience, but every man shall be free to live up to his own in peace and decorum provided that he avoid frequenting any forbidden assemblies or conventicles, much less col- lect or get up any such. . ..
Each householder and inhabitant shall bear such tax and public charge as shall hereafter be considered proper for the maintenance of clergymen, comforters of the sick, schoolmasters, and such like necessary officers.
The Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1640 laid no emphasis upon liberty of conscience and prescribed no eccle- siastical assessments, saying succinctly :
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No other religion shall be publicly admitted in New Netherland excepting the Reformed as it is at present preached and practised by public authority in the United Netherlands; and for this purpose the Company shall provide suitable preachers, schoolmasters, and com- forters of the sick.
In short, liberty of conscience was granted in New Nether- land while the state church of its fatherland was there estab- lished and the local government was empowered to forbid the public exercise of any other form of worship. The last- named provision, however, remained a dead letter in Governor Kieft's province; no form of religious worship was forbidden.
These arrangements, more liberal than any European gov- ernment except the Dutch would then have countenanced, did not mean, be it repeated, what we now call religious free- dom. This existed as yet only in the newly born plantations of Rhode Island. Even Domine Michaelius, who wanted to separate ecclesiastical from secular affairs in New Amsterdam, would not have maintained, like Roger Williams, that a state church was an abomination and that between state and church there should be no point of contact. On the other hand no typical Dutchman can have understood the spirit of New England, a spirit briefly expressed by Nathaniel Ward when he wrote in his Simple Cobbler of Aggawam that two of the things his heart naturally detested were 'foreigners dwell- ing in my country' and 'toleration of divers religions or of one religion in segregant shapes.' Incomprehensible to a New Netherlander must have been the action of the synod of Massachusetts when, in 1637, it carefully tabulated eighty heretical, erroneous, and unsafe opinions as held by the people of the colony - twice as many as the Catholic church had condemned Martin Luther for teaching.
It was upon a basis of toleration that Maryland was suc- cessfully founded, by a Catholic proprietor who even if he had so desired could not have attempted to make of an Eng- lish a Catholic colony. But much nearer to the Puritan than to the Dutchman stood the orthodox Englishman of the time. As early as 1632 the assembly in Virginia laid penalties on all
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who might dissent from the Anglican church as there estab- lished; and in 1644 it passed a law requiring conformity to the Book of Common Prayer which effected the dispersion of the dissenting congregations that had been formed in the province.
In the eyes of the New Netherlanders even a priest of Rome was a man to be helped and comforted in distress and admired for missionary zeal. In the year 1642 when the famous French Jesuit, Isaac Jogues, the first missionary sent from Canada among the dreaded Iroquois, was captured by the Mohawks young Arendt Van Corlaer of Rensselaerswyck tried to rescue him, making with two companions a long journey on horseback to his place of detention. The Indians refused the offer of a ransom of six hundred guilders' worth of goods -'to which,' Van Corlaer wrote Van Rensselaer, 'all the colony will contribute' - but promised to spare the priest's life. In 1643 they brought him to the shore of River Mauritius. Urged by Van Corlaer, helped by a Dutch skip- per, and befriended by Domine Megapolensis he escaped, secreted himself for weeks, and at last, when the Mohawks consented to exchange him for a great ransom, was brought by Kieft's order to Manhattan. Megapolensis and other friends accompanied him down the river, Kieft fed him at his own table, supplied him with 'black clothes and all things needful,' and gave him free passage home. At New Amster- dam, he afterwards reported, he met only two persons of his own faith, an Irishman and a Portuguese woman, but the people all flocked to see him, deeply lamenting his misfor- tunes, and some of them embarrassed his humble soul by their passionate sympathy. A Polish Lutheran, falling at his feet and kissing the fingers that torture had mutilated, with streaming eyes exclaimed: 'Martyr of Christ ! Martyr of Christ !'
Soon afterwards the life of another Jesuit, Father Joseph Bressani, was saved in a similar way. He also was brought to Manhattan where Kieft allowed him to administer the rites of his church to his co-religionists, and issued a procla-
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mation recommending him to the Christian charity of all Dutch officials whom he might meet on his journey back to Europe. In Massachusetts it was then a punishable offence to say that the Catholic was a Christian church. In 1647 the general court ordered that if a Jesuit or popish priest who was not an accredited envoy were brought within its jurisdic- tion by shipwreck or other accident he should depart at once, that any who might come of his own free will should be banished or otherwise punished and if he repeated the offence should be condemned to death, and that suspected papists should be arrested and examined.
Although Father Jogues, it may be added, reached France in safety he returned to his labors among the Iroquois and perished at their hands in 1646 - the first of the Catholic missionaries martyred on the soil of New York.
The last execution for witchcraft in Holland took place in 1610. To the New Netherlanders thirty years later the belief in witches so firmly held in New England must have seemed as unwarrantable as to the New Englanders appeared the faith of the Canadians in the miracles exploited by their Jesuit and Sulpitian shepherds. The one and only sign of the delusion that was so closely connected with the hatred of heresy to be found in the annals of the Dutch province is a fear expressed by Governor Kieft that the Indian medicine- men were directing their incantations against himself.
Again, in New Netherland self-righteousness and morbid curiosity were not stimulated by law as they were in Massa- chusetts where magistrates had the right to pry, and to depute others to pry, into the details of family life. There was none of that delving in the substrata of other people's souls which tempted even John Winthrop to prurient thought, leading him to believe and to record things with which we forget that he concerned himself because the pages that tell about them cannot be reproduced in modern books. Reading the chronicles of New Netherland one cannot fancy it the scene of such episodes of mingled intolerance, superstition, and indecency as those in which Winthrop most prominently
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figured when magistrates and elders sought to demonstrate the schismatic iniquity of Mrs. Dyer the Quakeress and Mrs. Hutchinson the Antinomian by proving that they had given birth to monstrous infants.
Civil marriage was customary in New Netherland but there was no prejudice against the ecclesiastical ceremony as there was in New England. Records of both kinds of marriages were kept. As we have them they begin with the year 1639.
In Holland the public schools, primary and secondary, which in Protestant times replaced the old church and cathe- dral schools were established by law, as they were not in England, and were supported from the general public revenue. They were true public schools - 'the common property of the people,' writes Motley, 'paid for among the municipal ex- penses.' They were free to all and were frequented in demo- cratic fashion by the children of the well-to-do and of the poor and by girls as well as boys. At the very first and often again as the years went by the West India Company pledged itself to supply its province with such schools. It did not wholly ignore these promises but never adequately fulfilled them, and the colonists loudly complained of the fact. In the prom- ises as in the complaints the minister and the schoolmaster are bracketed together as public officials of equal importance although neither the one nor the other had any concern with political or judicial affairs. Schoolhouses are referred to in the people's petitions as public buildings of prime necessity.
Until 1639 Adam Roelantsen remained the master of the official school which was set up when Governor Van Twiller arrived and was evidently an elementary school. Jan Steven- sen succeeded him. There was then at least one private school on Manhattan. In this each pupil paid annually two beaver skins. By 1643 the people had raised a fund for a public schoolhouse which appears to have been placed in the hands of Governor Kieft.
In New England as in England much less public attention was paid to elementary than to advanced schools. Harvard
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College was founded in 1636, three years after the Jesuit college at Quebec and as distinctly for theological purposes. To prepare pupils to enter it was the chief task of the first school established in Boston, by order of town-meeting, in 1635; and this school, perpetuated in the Boston Latin School, remained for half a century the only public school in the larg- est of American towns. The first Massachusetts school law, enacted in 1642, did not order the establishment of schools but simply the teaching of reading to children and appren- tices by heads of families 'or others.' The more famous law of 1647 was provoked by the decay of learning in the colony where immigration from England had virtually ceased - by the lack of persons competent to hold positions requiring education. The general court then ordered that each town of one hundred householders should maintain a grammar school to fit boys for college, naming definite penalties for non-performance; and without mention of penalties it said that each town of fifty households should designate a master to teach reading and writing to the children 'who should resort to him.'
In Plymouth there was no public school for fifty-two years after the founding of the colony, during which time it had spread into twelve villages. The first that was established, in 1672, was a Latin school. In Connecticut the first educa- tional move of the general court was to try to get money for Harvard College. Its first school law was not passed until 1650. Hartford established a town school in 1642, the other towns apparently not until later years.
The term 'free school,' it may be explained, meant at this time in England an endowed school where boys from certain families, or boys specially selected to be sent to college, got their education free or for less than the usual cost. Nor were the early New England schools free schools in our modern sense. They were maintained partly by the colony or the town from specified sources of revenue, partly, as Winthrop explains, by annual payments from the individuals benefited, these charges being 'either by voluntary allowance
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or by rate of such as refused.' Only Indians were taught without charge. Again, girls were not admitted to any public school in Massachusetts until after the Revolution. They had to depend altogether upon home instruction, as seems to have been very largely the case with boys in their younger years.
All these facts have a significance deeper than that which attaches to them as facts in the history of education in America. They belong with many others which, as they gradually come to light, will show how much more democratic in spirit was New Netherland than any of the English prov- inces, always excepting Rhode Island whose place in the world was as a place of refuge for the radical, protestant, innovating spirits unwelcome or ill at ease in the neighboring colonies. In regard to one highly important engine in the work of democratizing the world, however, the Dutchmen's province lagged very far behind Massachusetts. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639. There was never one in New Netherland; there was none in New York until the year 1694.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, XII (398) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : De Vries, Voyages (527) ; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I (382) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
CHARTER OF FREEDOMS AND EXEMPTIONS: in Col. Docs., I. MILITIA : Scisco, Burgher Guard of New Amsterdam (318).
BREEDEN RAEDT: Anon., Breeden Raedt aende Vereenichde Neder- landsche Provintien (76).
WINTHROP (quoted) : his Hist. of New England (368).
THE TWELVE MEN : Col. Docs., I; De Vries, Voyages; Register of New Netherland (386).
REMONSTRANCE OF NEW NETHERLAND (quoted) : Van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Neder-Land (423).
JOURNAL (or SHORT ACCOUNT) OF NEW NETHERLAND: in Col. Docs., I.
SETTLEMENTS BEYOND THE HARLEM RIVER: Shonnard and Spooner (538), and other histories of Westchester County.
ANNE HUTCHINSON : Winthrop, Hist. of New England; C. F. Adams, ed., Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay (58) ; Hutchinson, Hist. of Massachusetts-Bay, I (313) ; Lawrence, Anne Hutchinson (231) ; Whitmore, Genealogy of the Hutchinson Family (232) ; Savage, Genea. Dict. (200).
DOUGHTY : Riker, Annals of Newtown (300).
LADY DEBORAH MOODY : Wood (290), Flint (287), and other histories of Long Island ; Gerard, Lady Deborah Moody (326). - WINTHROP (quoted) : his Hist. of New England.
THE TOWN: Wilson, New York Old and New (413) ; De Voe, The Market Book (308) ; Valentine, Hist. of New York (402) ; Valen- tine's Manual, 1857 [with map compiled from the records] (508) ; etc.
BRONCK'S INVENTORY : in Col. Docs., XIV; Jonas Bronck, his Library, in Historical Magazine, 1864 (213) ; Shonnard and Spooner, and other histories of Westchester County.
CITY INN: Gerard, Old Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam (481) ; Earle, The Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam (482) ; Innes, New Amsterdam and Its People (357).
CONTRACT FOR BUILDING THE CHURCH: MSS., State Library, Albany. KIERSTEDE : Bosworth, The Doctor in Old New York (160).
FIRST VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM: Andrews, New Amsterdam, New
Orange, New York (524) ; Asher, Dutch Books . . . relating to New Netherland (7).
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FIRST PLAN OF MANHATTAN: Andrews, as above; G. Marcel, Repro- duction de Cartes et de Globes relatifs à la découverte de l'Amérique . ., Paris, 1893.
SLAVERY: Morgan, Slavery in New York (473) ; Northrup, Slavery in New York (474) ; Williams, Hist. of the Negro Race in Amer- ica (351). - DOWNING TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VI. - WINTHROP TO BRADFORD: in R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Win- throp, 2d ed., Boston, 1869.
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE (quoted) : his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (353).
CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS : Laws and Ordinances of New Nether- land; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch; Records of Massachusetts-Bay (312) ; Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven (372). - WINTHROP (quoted) : his Hist. of New England.
DE RASIERES TO BLOMMAERT and MICHAELIUS TO SMOUTIUS: see Reference Notes, Chap. III.
SALTONSTALL AND COTTON (quoted) : in Hutchinson, Original Papers (311).
ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS: Col. Docs., I; Ecc. Records, I (167) ; Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America (453) ; Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America (450). - BURNET (quoted) : his Hist. of My Own Time (177).
FATHERS JOGUES AND BRESSANI: Jogues, Novum Belgium (430) ; his Letter in Col. Docs., XIII; Jesuit Relations, I (248) ; The Jogues Papers (254) ; Ecc. Records, I; Manual of Ref. Church (96) ; Martin, Life of Father Jogues (253) ; Campbell, Pioneer Priests of North America (446) ; Parkman, The Jesuits in North America (191). - VAN CORLAER (quoted) : in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix.
WINTHROP ON MONSTROUS BIRTHS : his Hist. of New England (368) ; Welde, Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, in Adams, Antinomianism (58).
MARRIAGE RECORDS: Marriage Licenses (309) ; Marriage Records (310) ; Church Records (97).
SCHOOLS : Pratt, Annals of Public Education in the State of New York (171); Dunshee, School of the Collegiate Reformed Church (462) ; Fernow, Schools and Schoolmasters (464) ; Van Vechten, Schools and Schoolmasters of New Amsterdam (463); Valentine, Schools and Schoolmasters in the Time of the Dutch (465); Clews, Educational Legislation . .. of the Colonial Governments (170) ; Boone, Education in the United States (172) ; Records of Massa- chusetts-Bay (312) ; Records of New Plymouth (442) ; Winthrop, Hist. of New England; Dilloway, Education Past and Present, in Vol. IV of Winsor, ed., Memorial History of Boston, Boston, 1882-3; B. C. Steiner, Hist. of Education in Connecticut, Wash- ington, 1893. - MOTLEY (quoted) : his Rise of the Dutch Republic (163).
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