USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 39
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In 1658 the burgomasters joined to their petition to the Company for reduced customs rates a renewal of the people's request that a master for a Latin school might be sent out, saying that many young persons already able to read and write desired further instruction but could not obtain it as the nearest grammar school was at Boston. If New Amster- dam could now secure one, they explained, it might 'finally attain to an academy' and thus become a 'place of great splendor.' Accordingly, the Company sent out a master to whom the city gave a salary of 500 guilders with permission to
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exact six guilders from each pupil. Proving unsatisfactory he was sent back to Holland. Ægidius Luyck, a young man who had been tutor in Stuyvesant's family, was put in his place, the provincial and the city government each paying him 500 guilders a year. Under his management the 'Greek and Latin school' of New Amsterdam attracted pupils from all parts of the province and even from far-away Virginia.
While during the latter years of New Netherland almost every town and village had its schoolmaster, on Manhattan after the year 1661 there were, in addition to the grammar school, two free elementary schools - the original school in the city and another in the Bowery village. In Boston, which by 1664 had about three times as many inhabitants as New Amsterdam, the only school supported from the public funds was still the Latin school; and the school law enacted for Massachusetts in 1647 needed reenactment in 1665. At New Haven a 'colony grammar school' was opened in 1660 because all efforts to maintain town grammar schools had failed; in 1662 it was suspended for lack of patronage but was soon reopened with the help of a private benefaction. The laws of this colony said that children should be taught to read and write but not that elementary schools should be maintained. In 1660 the general court of Connecticut also complained of 'small progress' in the founding of town grammar schools two-thirds of the cost of which was borne by their pupils, offered a bonus of £100 and an annual subsidy of £40 to the town that would set up a colony school, and laid penalties on parents whose boys could not read and write.
The attempts of the Dutch authorities to induce the Indians to send some of their children to be taught at New Amsterdam proved futile, and so did the efforts of their clergymen to Christianize adult savages. Domine Megapolensis was the first Protestant missionary who went among the wild tribes, learning for this purpose, while he was at Fort Orange and some years before John Eliot produced his Indian Bible, what he called the 'heavy Mohawk tongue.' But in 1654 he and Domine Drisius wrote to the classis of New Amsterdam
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that they were deeply discouraged. Even their most promis- ing pupil, a sachem who had come to Manhattan and learned to read and write English, had, they said with refreshing candor, 'only the bare knowledge of the truth without the practice of godliness,' was greatly given to drink, and ‘no better than other Indians.' Three years later they wrote that he had steadily gone down hill, pawning his Bible and be- coming a 'regular brute.' Two things, they explained, were necessary if the savages were to be Christianized: they must be really subdued and the whites must set them a better example.
Never, it seems, did the New Netherlanders ask for a print- ing press. In their day Holland was the great publishing house of Europe, printing more than all other countries com- bined and as eager in political pamphleteering as in the eighteenth century England came to be. It has been com- puted that some ten thousand Dutch pamphlets of various kinds still survive from the seventeenth century; and those other precursors of the modern newspaper, broadsides or handbills, were as plentifully produced to be stuck about in public places. As the press was absolutely free, whatever the people of New Amsterdam or their friends in the father- land wished to print could there be published. Nor, indeed, were conditions very different in Massachusetts, for the press established at Cambridge in 1638 was under the control of the presidents of Harvard College and published nothing beyond public documents, almanacs, and the theses of Har- vard students. All else, including controversial pamphlets, was sent for publication to England. A private press was not set up in Massachusetts until 1665 and then was under strict censorship.
Hostile Indians and Englishmen, wars and the prospect of wars, commercial disputes and financial perplexities did not glut Peter Stuyvesant's appetite for work. Of his own motion he attempted religious persecution.
Nothing of the kind had been thought of in New Netherland
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until 1652 when Domine Megapolensis petitioned that an Anabaptist woman be brought before the governor, the Nine Men, and the consistory of the church for using 'calum- nious expressions against God's work and his servants.' In 1654 the Lutherans, who included some of the Dutchmen and all of the Scandinavians on Manhattan, asked leave to call a clergyman of their own and transmitted the prayer to the West India Company when Stuyvesant told them that he was bound by his oath of office to sanction only the established church of Holland. In 1656 Megapolensis and Drisius com- plained about the 'sectaries' of many sorts who were openly holding services on Long Island, and the government forbade under heavy penalties all 'conventicles and meetings whether public or private' different from those of the Reformed church and all preaching by 'unqualified' persons, explaining, however, that it did not thereby
. . intend any constraint of conscience in violation of previously granted patents, nor to prohibit the reading of God's Holy Word, family prayers and worship, each in his household.
This ordinance, unwise and unnecessary but legal accord- ing to the orders of the West India Company as embodied in the Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1640, the sectaries generally disobeyed; and the Lutherans, whom the Company now instructed Stuyvesant to treat mildly but with- out favor, continued to demand the wider liberties they had enjoyed in Holland. Fines and imprisonments followed, one or two banishments, and renewed appeals to the Company.
In June, 1657, a year after the Quakers first entered Massa- chusetts and Connecticut, five of them were brought by an English ship to Manhattan. Visiting the governor they found him, as they afterwards reported, moderate 'both in words and actions.' But two of them, women, were arrested and briefly imprisoned for preaching turbulently in the streets. The others, going to Long Island, were also arrested and soon sent on to Rhode Island which Domine Megapolensis described as a place of 'errorists and enthusiasts.' Then, it
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was said, Thomas Willett urged Stuyvesant to greater severity. By order of the governor in council a Quaker named Hodgson who made himself conspicuous on Long Island was arrested, imprisoned, and condemned to pay a heavy fine or to work for two years chained to the Company's negroes. Refusing to pay or to work he was severely and repeatedly flogged, and when Stuyvesant's sister interfered to save his life was turned out of the province. Stern en- actments issued against the harboring of Quakers had little effect except to make converts to their faith. Some of the English Long Islanders approved of the governor's course; more of them disapproved; and twenty-eight freeholders of Flushing with two of Jamaica joined in a remonstrance, a noble document nobly phrased which was written for them by the town clerk of Flushing, Edward Heart, and carried to Governor Stuyvesant by the sheriff, Tobias Feake. The 'law of love, peace, and liberty,' said the remonstrants, which in Holland was extended even to 'Jews, Turks, and Egyptians,' was the 'glory' of the Republic. They themselves could not condemn the people called Quakers
. .. neither stretch out our hands against them to punish, banish, or persecute them. . .. That which is of God will stand, and that which is of man will come to nothing. . .. Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them but give them free egress and regress into our towns and houses. . . . This is according to the patent and charter of our town ... which we are not willing to infringe or violate.
As a reply Governor Stuyvesant arrested Heart, Feake, and two others, deprived Flushing of the right to hold town- meetings, and altered its government. Heart, asking for mercy, was released upon payment of costs; Feake was de- posed from his office and sentenced to pay a fine or to go into banishment; and the governor proclaimed a general fast-day so that his people might lament the introduction of the 'new, unheard-of, and abominable heresy.'
It was just at this time that the States General were offer- ing hospitality in New Netherland to persons 'of tender
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conscience in England or elsewhere oppressed.' With no good grace could the Company deal harshly with the schis- matics already in its province. It did not wish to do so, yet it hesitated and temporized under pressure from the orthodox church in Holland which, supporting the complaints of the ministers in New Netherland, used every effort to secure for the province a rigorous enforcement of laws that were virtually a dead letter in the fatherland.
John Underhill seems to have played no conspicuous part in these controversies, but in 1660 he wrote to Winthrop urging that in Connecticut the Quakers might be left 'to their liberty granted by the good old Parliament of England.'
In 1661, when the Quakers on Long Island grew troublesome again, Stuyvesant issued stricter ordinances than before against the public exercise of any except the established religion, and in 1663 he sent the leader of the Friends, John Bowne, for trial to Holland. There Bowne was acquitted of evil act and intent; and at last the Company prescribed re- ligious toleration for its province, writing to Stuyvesant that, although it wished Quakers and other sectarians would remain elsewhere, he must not put a stop to immigration by treating them rigorously. Following liberal courses, it said, Amster- dam had prospered and doubtless New Amsterdam would be equally blessed.
This was the end of persecution in New Netherland. At their worst Stuyvesant's attempts had been mild compared with those of New England. Of course he never thought of such a law as that which made it a capital offence for Quakers to return to Massachusetts after banishment; he never tried to oblige all persons to attend the services of the established church as was the rule in Virginia as well as in England and in Massachusetts; and the earnest way in which the au- thorities on Manhattan disclaimed any intention of 'lording it over the consciences' and the private practices of their subjects stood in strong contrast to the so-called Cambridge Platform, framed in 1658, which required the magistrates of
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the Bay Colony to punish infractions of ecclesiastical doctrine as well as of ecclesiastical observance.
No reference to the Arminian heresy, so conspicuously troublesome in Holland forty years before, appears in the story of the doctrinal disputes in New Netherland. Yet when this story is read in detail it reflects, weakly and in miniature of course, the character of the great struggle in the fatherland which was more political than theological. The clergymen of Manhattan, not believing like their first predecessor Michaelius that the affairs of church and state might better be kept distinct, feared that the recognition of divers sects would weaken their own influence in public affairs - as they phrased it, would produce public 'disorders.' And General Stuyvesant, distrusting all Englishmen for political reasons, was much more incensed by the readiness of the Long Island schismatics to ignore or defy his authority than by their proneness to schism, much more by the noisy self-assertion of the Quakers than by their doctrines. He molested no one who did not insist upon the right to worship publicly. A Lutheran minister who thus insisted was or- dered back to Europe. A famous Jesuit who did not thus insist lived at New Amsterdam during the winter of 1658 on friendly terms with Domine Megapolensis. This was Father Le Moyne, the founder of missions among the Mohawks and Onondagas and the discoverer of the valuable salt springs at the spot that is now Syracuse. It was he who persuaded the governor of Canada to let the New Netherlanders trade on the St. Lawrence.
John Bowne the Quaker returned from Holland to live peaceably at Flushing where his house, built in 1661 with a kitchen chimney twelve feet wide, is still standing. In 1663 the Lutherans of the city formed a congregation. By 1660 twelve or more churches for the orthodox had been built in various parts of the province, and by 1664 the West India Company had induced the classis of Amsterdam to send out thirteen ministers. Often the people begged for more; and with pathetic eagerness they profited as largely as they could
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by their meagre opportunities for public worship, those who had no pastor asking for periodical visits from the nearest one or making long Sabbath journeys to his church. Some communities complained that the church rates were too heavy, but more than one village paid them which had neither church nor minister, using the money doubtless for the relief of the poor.
Jews were never persecuted but at first were ill received in New Netherland.
Exiled Jews as well as Christians had long found in Holland their only place of refuge. Those who were living as so- called New Christians under the Portuguese in Brazil welcomed the advent of the Dutch and then resumed the practice of their ancient faith; and from Brazil in 1654, when the Portuguese had driven out the Dutch, came to New Amsterdam by way of Curaçoa the first band of Hebrews whom the province re- ceived. They are usually said to have been the first Hebrews received on the North American mainland, and undoubtedly they were its first Jewish settlers although the records of Massachusetts for the year 1649 show two Jewish names, apparently those of mere visiting traders. They numbered twenty-seven persons, men, women, and children. The richer among them had pledged themselves for the passage money of the poorer. Before they could discharge the debt their goods were seized and sold by auction while two of them were held for a while as 'hostages.' The church spent several hundred guilders in relieving their needs; yet Domine Me- gapolensis begged that the 'godless rascals' might be sent away, and supported Stuyvesant when he asked the Company to forbid all Jews to 'infest New Netherland.' His con- gregation, he explained, murmured about their coming be- cause they had no other God than 'the unrighteous Mammon' and no other aim than 'to get possession of Christian property' - charges often expressed at this period in almost identical words by English colonists in the West Indies.
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Some of the newcomers, warned away by the provincial and the city authorities, moved on to Rhode Island and founded the Jewish colony at Newport. Meanwhile, however, the Company had written that Jews might reside in the province if they would support their own poor. A few came from Holland, bringing merchandise with them, at the time when Stuyvesant was organizing his South River expedition. As the citizens expressed a 'disgust and unwillingness' to associate with them in the burgher guard, according to the custom of the fatherland they were exempted from service on payment of a commutation tax. They were forbidden to hold real estate or to traffic to other parts of the province; but the Company reproved the governor for this, saying that, as in Holland, they should not be employed in the public service or allowed to keep 'open retail shops' but might traffic in other ways, hold real property, and 'exercise in all quietness their religion within their houses.' With this end in view, the Company added, they would probably prefer to live close to each other as they did in Amsterdam. The sug- gestion passed unheeded. No Jewish quarter was ever es- tablished in New Amsterdam or New York. In 1656 land for a Jewish burial ground was granted outside the city, more than a mile beyond the wall to the eastward of the Bowery Road. A portion of it remains near Chatham Square. The oldest place of the kind in the United States it is still owned by the original congregation, Shearith Israel; and this con- gregation still preserves the traditions of its Portuguese origin. The oldest stone now standing in the burial ground bears the date 1683.
When burgher-right was established in 1657 several Hebrews wished to buy the Small Burgher-Right. The bur- gomasters rejected them but the governor in council decided that according to fatherland precedents they must be re- ceived. Few later signs of opposition to the presence of Jews on Manhattan can be traced. The dislike to them seems soon to have died away. During a long period of years Abraham D'Lucena, the leading spirit among those who had come to
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New Amsterdam from Brazil, was a prominent and honored merchant in New York.
In 1648 a woman was hung as a witch in Boston; in 1654, when the general court at Plymouth made laws for a settle- ment on the Kennebec, one crime marked as punishable with death was 'solemn conversing or compacting with the devil'; and for this crime there had been nine executions in Con- necticut before the year 1662. The spirit thus evinced excited among the Dutch a distrust of the lawmakers of New England. As instructed by the West India Company, Stuyvesant promised in 1663 that some Puritans who wished to come from New Haven to settle on the Raritan River should have their own church services and their own laws; but he insisted that, as their laws were severer than his own, appeals to his court should be permitted in criminal cases except when conviction was obtained upon 'voluntary confession' and, even when it was thus obtained, in all 'dark and dubious' cases such as witchcraft and the like.
The only New Netherlander ever charged with witchcraft was Judith Varleth, a sister of Stuyvesant's brother-in-law, and she was accused at Hartford where her father was living.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS: Col. Docs., I, II, XIII, XIV (398) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Records of New Amsterdam, I-V, VII (360) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390) ; Ecc. Records, I (167).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II (382), and Register of New Netherland (386); Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405) ; Manual of Ref. Church (96); Valentine, Hist. of New York (402) ; Innes, New Amsterdam and its People (357) ; Valentine's Manuals (508).
CORTELYOU MAP : Col. Docs., XIV.
LISTS OF HOUSES AND PLACES: New Netherland Papers, 1650 (Dutch Documents, MSS., Moore Collection) in N. Y. Public Library, Lenox Building.
STUYVESANT'S HOUSE and BOWERY VILLAGE: Anon., The Bowery (74); Rikeman, Stuyvesant Village (75); Tuckerman, Peter Stuyvesant (493). - MAP of Stuyvesant Property, in Valentine's Manual, 1862.
TOWNS: Col. Docs., XIII; and see Reference Notes, Chap. VIII. HARLEM: Laws and Ordinances; Riker, Harlem (209); Toler and Nutting, New Harlem, Past and Present (370); Valentine, First Establishment of the Village of Harlem (210); Pirsson, Dutch Grants (207). - MAP of 1807 in Valentine's Manual, 1863.
LONG ISLAND TOWNS: Laws and Ordinances; Col. Docs., XIV; Docu- ments Relating to the History of Long Island (286); Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn (293) ; Thompson (291) and other histories of Long Island. - STUYVESANT TO NEW ENGLANDERS : Col. Docs., XIII. POLHEMUS and SELYNS: Ecc. Records, I; Manual of Ref. Church; Baker, The First . .. Church at Brooklyn (99).
BERGEN : Laws and Ordinances; Col. Docs., XIII; Van Winkle, Old Bergen (68).
MELYN: Col. Docs., XIII; Cornelis Melyn Papers, MSS., N. Y. His- torical Society Library.
BURGHER-RIGHT: Laws and Ordinances; Records of New Amsterdam, II, VII; Burghers of New Amsterdam (80). - "CHARTER ": Convention of 1829 (quoted) and Kent (quoted), in Kent, Charter of the City of New York (93).
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CITIES IN HOLLAND : Asher, Dutch Books . . . Relating to New Nether- land (7) ; Jameson, Origin ... of the Municipal Government of New York City (327) ; histories of Holland.
TEMPLE (quoted) : his Observations on the United Provinces of the Netherlands (353).
CITY GOVERNMENT and CITY COURT: see Reference Notes, Chap. X.
ORPHANS' COURT: Records of New Amsterdam, I; Minutes of the Orphan-Masters of New Amsterdam (145).
OFFICIALS : Register of New Netherland.
PHYSICIANS: Bosworth, The Doctor in Old New York (160). - VAN DER DONCK (quoted) : his Beschrijvinghe van Niew Nederlant (425).
CHILD (cited) : his New Discourse of Trade (500).
OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS : New Netherland Papers, 1650, as above.
SPECIAL ASSESSMENTS : Rosewater, Special Assessments (480) ; E. R. A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation, 3d ed., New York, 1900.
WAMPUM CURRENCY : Laws and Ordinances; Records of New Amster-
dam, II, IV; Col. Docs., I, II, XIV; and see Reference Notes, Chap. II.
SCHOOLS: Records of Massachusetts Bay (312) ; Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven (373); Records of Connecticut Colony (125) ; and see Reference Notes, Chap. VI.
MEGAPOLENSIS and DRISIUS (quoted) : Ecc. Records, I.
ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS : Laws and Ordinances; Col. Docs., XIV; Papers Relating to the State of Religion in the Province (452) ; Onderdonk, Queen's County in Olden Times (301) ; Waller, Hist. of Flushing (295) ; Thompson (291) and other histories of Long Island; John Bowne, Journal in Amer. Hist. Record, I (Peri- odical) ; J. Bowden, Hist. of the Society of Friends in America, London, 1850; and see Reference Notes, Chap. VI. - FLUSH- ING REMONSTRANCE: in Col. Docs., XIV. - UNDERHILL TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VII.
FATHER LE MOYNE: Col. Docs., XIV.
JEWS : Col. Docs., XII, XIV ; Laws and Ordinances; Records of New Amsterdam, I, VII; Burghers of New Amsterdam; Daly, Settle- ment of the Jews in North America (252) ; Kohler, Beginnings of Jewish History in New York (250) ; Dyer, First Chapter of New York Jewish History (250a).
VARLETH FAMILY : Col. Docs., XIV; Records of Connecticut Colony; Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, V.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE
1652-1664
(GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
The said city New Ansterodam is very delightsome and convenient for situation especially for trade, having two main streams or rivers running by with an excellent harbor; the end of the said rivers or streams is the ordinary passage from and to New England and Vir- ginia; ... it may evidently appear that the Dutch have intruded into his Majesty's rights in the very best part of all that large northern empire. ...- Concerning New Netherland or Manhattan. About 1663.
Governor Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam is seldom pic- tured, like Governor Van Twiller's, as a setting for opéra bouffe performances. It is often painted, with no greater degree of truth, as the counterpart of some insignificant seaport in the peaceful, prosperous, unexcitable Holland of to-day. It is described as a sleepy, 'slothful village of apa- thetic boors and burghers stupefied by beer and tobacco and living in a stagnant isolation from which they were fortunately aroused by the advent of the English as their rulers.
A seaport planted anywhere in the world by Dutchmen of the seventeenth century could not be a drowsy place, and the one that they planted on Manhattan was not an isolated place. It lived by traffic with the ever-dangerous people of the forest, with Englishmen up and down the coast, and with men of many nations eastward and southward across the sea; and it was a thoroughfare in a sense that was true of no other place on the American mainland, for those who voyaged between New England and Virginia preferred to pass through
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the safe waters of Long Island Sound, ships from England bound for New England often tarried in the harbor, and so at times did Dutch, French, and English privateers. Life was more varied and more agitated within the ‘walls and gates' that enclosed New Amsterdam's heterogeneous popula- tion, excited by many controversies and threatened by many perils, than it was in any English-American community. Rarely indeed except in the depths of winter can New Amster- dam have known a quiet day, never a dull, monotonous season. Liveliness was one of the few things it never lacked, torpidity one of the moods of mind it could not encourage, peaceful sloth one of the careers for which it offered no chance.
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