USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 14
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ridge), or 'fly' (valei, a valley) are found they bear witness to the presence of Dutchmen as the first Europeans; and Cape May and Cape Henlopen are their monuments at one extreme as at the other are Fisher's (Visscher's) Island, Block Island, and Dutch Island in Narragansett Bay. The Dutch origin of the name Rhode Island, first bestowed on the isle that the Indians called Aquidneck and then upon the commonwealth of which it was the nucleus, has often been denied but is far more probable than any other that has been suggested. Stuyvesant once wrote that his people had secured a small island in Narragansett Bay 'near the Red (Roode) Island'; and Aquidneck was almost certainly called Roode Eylandt, probably by the first explorer of the region, Adriaen Block.
Some of the minor legacies left by New Netherland to New York have been borrowed by other parts of the country - for example, the 'high stoop' house; the piazza which, in the northern states at least, seems to have been developed from the Dutch stoop; many of the dishes of the skilful Dutch housewife including the now typically American buck- wheat-cake; the Dutch skate and the Dutch sleigh; and a few more or less transmogrified Dutch words. Chief among these are 'boss' (baas) which has acquired a novel political meaning but has also in its true Dutch meaning everywhere replaced the English 'master' in artisans' parlance; and 'boodle' (boedel), an American slang word but a respectable Dutch word meaning household stuff or personal property. 'Pinxter-flower' comes from the Dutch name for Whitsun- tide although we apply it to our Rhododendron nudiflorum while in Holland a pinkster-bloem is an iris. Our weak-fish was named by the Dutch week, soft or tender; our moss- bunker was their marsbancker. 'Cooky' comes from koekje, a little cake; 'hooky' from hoekje, a little corner, 'to play hooky' meaning to hide around the corner. 'Spook,' identical in Dutch, is called by English dictionaries an American word. And every born New Yorker says 'to snoop,' getting it from snoepen which means to pry, to do things on the sly.
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Until 1772 the Reformed Church continued to flourish in dependence upon the classis of Amsterdam, remaining for generations the chief communion in the city in spite of official favor shown to the Anglican Church, and steadily increasing elsewhere. It now embraces within the United States, chiefly in the states of New York and New Jersey, about six hundred and fifty congregations with seven hundred ministers and more than a hundred thousand communicants. In 1902 it counted in the greater city of New York one hun- dred and twenty-eight congregations and missions, while next to the corporation of Trinity Church the wealthiest in the city was the corporation of the Collegiate Church - the actual organization that Domine Michaelius formed in 1628, now owning six church buildings on Manhattan and still controlling the school that Adam Roelandtsen first served.
The New Year's festival of the Dutch, a day for giving gifts and for visiting all one's acquaintances, retained its traditional features in New York until, thirty or forty years ago, the city grew too large for its right observance. More interesting is the story of the Christmas festival of modern America as it has been affected by the St. Nicholas festival of New Amsterdam.
While Catholicism prevailed St. Nicholas was everywhere the children's saint. In Holland, where his personality was modified by memories of Woden, god of the elements and the harvest, he had a peculiar hold on popular affection which persisted into Protestant times. The children of the Dutch still believe that St. Nicholas brings the gifts that they always get on the eve of his titular day, December 6. In New Amsterdam this day was one of the five chief feast- days of the year. After New Orange became New York the characteristic traits of the Dutch children's festival were transferred to the near-by Christmas festival which was English as well as Dutch. It cannot now be said when the change began or when it was firmly established. It is known, indeed, that by the middle of the eighteenth century St. Nicholas Day had been dropped from the list of official holi-
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days which, religious and patriotic together, then numbered twenty-seven. But, on the other hand, more than one memoir and book of reminiscences says that as late as the middle of the nineteenth century some conservative old Dutch families still celebrated the true St. Nicholas Day in their homes in the true old fashion, then bestowing the children's annual meed of gifts. Nor is any light thrown on the question by certain entries in a local newspaper, Riving- ton's Gazetteer, dated in December 1773 and 1774 and referring to celebrations of "the anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called Santa Claus,' for they speak of social meetings of the 'sons of that ancient saint' in which children can hardly have participated, and they indicate days which were neither Christmas Day nor the true St. Nicholas Day.
It is clear, however, that on Manhattan by a gradual con- solidation of the two old festivals Christmas became pre- eminently a children's festival presided over by the children's saint whose modern name, Santa Claus, is a variant of the Dutch St. Niclaes or San Claas. In all European countries Christmas still means simply the day of Christ's nativity; for the 'Old Christmas' whom we meet in English ballads of earlier times, the 'Father Christmas' of Charles Dickens, and the 'Père Noël' of the French are abstractly mythical figures in no way related to St. Nicholas. But everywhere in our America the domestic observance of Christmas centres around Santa Claus with his burden of gifts. The stockings that our children hang on Christmas Eve were once the shoes that the children of Amsterdam and New Amsterdam set in the chimney corners on the eve of December 6; and the reindeer whose hoofs our children hear represent the horse, descended from Woden's horse Sleipner, upon whose back St. Nicholas still makes his rounds in Holland. The Christmas-tree is not Dutch but German; about the middle of the nineteenth century we acquired it from our German immigrants. But even this the American child accepts at the hands of Santa Claus, not of the Christ Child as does the little German. 'Kriss Kringle,' it may be added, a name
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now often mistakenly used as though it were a synonym of Santa Claus, is a corruption of the German Christkindlein (Christ Child).
As the New Netherlander, intent at first upon trade alone, was soon compelled by his necessities and encouraged by chances of traffic in food-stuffs to cultivate his soil, so the agricultural New Englander was soon forced by the poverty of his soil and the rigors of his climate to depend chiefly upon the fisheries and trade, and the Virginian soon learned how to send his tobacco directly from the plantation wharf to England and thence to draw the supplies he needed. Mean- while, however, the English colonies were helped by the trad- ing ambitions of their Dutch neighbors - as when Peter Minuit's agents taught the Pilgrim Fathers the use of wam- pum money, and when New Amsterdam served the Virginian, who had no real seaport, as a mart for his tobacco. When agriculture developed in the Dutch province it is probable that the better methods there in vogue gradually spread beyond its borders. They were wholly different from the methods of the English in America, Stuyvesant explained when he was urging Charles II to let New York trade with Holland, and only in Holland could the proper tools for them be obtained.
The Roman-Dutch system of law which prevailed in New Netherland was 'a kind of irregular mosaic,' says the his- torian of the New York court of common pleas, James Wilton Brooks, but 'on the whole' was 'infinitely superior to the more technical and artificial system' introduced by the English. It was weakest on the criminal side, yet the early New Yorker did not welcome the establishment of trial by jury, so long considered by the Englishman one of the chief bulwarks of his liberties. Even to-day the people of Hol- land prefer their quicker and, as they think, surer ways of getting justice at the hands of experienced judges.
English practices did not altogether banish Dutch practices from the courts of New York until the early years of the
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eighteenth century. Although in modern times it has some- times been affirmed that Roman-Dutch law never rightfully prevailed in a province which the English said had always been their own, fragments of this law, applicable to property held under the Dutch land patents that were recognized as valid by the representatives of the English crown, survived until the State of New York succeeded to the rights of the crown and still remain a part of its common law. The Dutch method of making wills by oral declaration before a notary, or by written instructions put in his keeping, was long employed. Dutch customs in respect to inheritances persisted although the English made some effort to establish rights of primogeniture. The burgher-right secured for resi- dents of the city in Stuyvesant's time restricted rights of suffrage until 1804 and in other ways also constantly affected the history of Manhattan. The district-attorney of to-day is a non-English official, directly descended from the Dutch- men's schout. The custom of registering deeds and mort- gages which was known in early New England as well as in New Netherland was also, as has been said, distinctly non- English. The practice of raising money by excises was borrowed from Holland and first introduced into England, with great difficulty, by the Parliamentarians during the early years of the Civil War. Although used in New England also it was always especially favored in the Middle Colonies. The practice of paying for local improvements by special assessments was dropped for a time under the English gov- ernors but revived before the end of the seventeenth century. It has sometimes been thought that it was then suggested by its very exceptional use in London when the city was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. Local precedents offer a more natural explanation. The city magistrates, for ex- ample, can hardly have been thinking of a rare English prec- edent twenty years old when they ordered in 1687 that in paving a certain street the householders themselves should be responsible for as much of the work 'as lies before their respective doors.'
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As the struggle of the New Netherlanders to win a share in the provincial government went for nothing when they became New Yorkers, in one sense the political history of the State of New York begins with the efforts that secured the establishment of an assembly in the year 1683. But the perpetuation of the city government on Manhattan, the part it was permitted to play in matters of wider than municipal importance, and the survival of Dutch town and district organizations elsewhere, did as much to keep alive the politi- cal aspirations of the people as did the town-meetings of the English Long Islanders which continued in spite of their nominal abolition by the Duke's Laws. Moreover, the politi- cal structure of the province as it was eventually built up reposed on the local foundation stones set by Governor Kieft and Governor Stuyvesant.
In New England the towns, self-governing in local matters, were the units of representation and taxation upon which the political structure of the colony rested; and they so continued after counties were marked out. In Virginia, on the other hand, the vestries which corresponded roughly to the New England townships soon became close corporations, the people at large having no share in choosing their mem- bers; and they were overshadowed by the counties which were the units of representation and exercised all the high offices of local self-government. It was, of course, economic conditions that insured the persistence of a township system in the commercial north with its concentrated population, of a county system in the agricultural south with its widely scattered population. In New York, where the people were both traders and agriculturists and were neither as closely grouped as in Massachusetts nor as dispersed as in Virginia, a mixed township-county system grew up. When Governor Nicolls perpetuated the municipal corporation on Manhattan and confirmed the old town patents, established the courts of sessions that resembled Stuyvesant's district courts, and, as he explained in 1666 in a paper called Conditions for New Planters, granted the 'several townships' liberty to make
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their own 'peculiar laws' and to decide 'all small cases within themselves,' he was wisely elaborating arrangements that had naturally gradually developed in New Netherland. The Dutch commanders and Governor Colve went a step farther in the same direction. So did Governor Andros, making the Duke's Laws valid throughout his province. And what they had established persisted after counties were marked out in 1683. These counties became, as in Virginia, the units of taxation and representation and also of militia organization, but within them the towns that survived from earlier years, or were planted when new regions were settled, played a much more prominent part in government than the Virginian vestries.
Undoubtedly the arrangements of Colve and Andros as William Penn found them existing in the Delaware country influenced him when in 1682 he settled a system of govern- ment for his wide domain - a type of colonial government which stood midway between those of New York and Vir- ginia as the New York type stood between those of Massa- chusetts and Virginia.
Of course the system now in force in the State of New York has at various times been altered and elaborated. Yet it is to-day, as it has always been, a mixed township-county system; and as such it has had more influence in the develop- ment of the northern Middle West, of the great region thrown open to settlement by the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1785, than the system of New England or even of Pennsyl- vania, either establishing itself (with more or less modifica- tion, of course) at an early day or gradually winning its way where New England ideas prevailed for a time. As perfected in these states the so-called 'New York plan,' says our chief authority in the matter of local constitutional development, Professor Howard, is 'the highest form of local organization . . . symmetrical and complete'; it is worthy to become and possibly is destined to become 'the prevailing type in the United States.' Strangely, however, Howard adds that it may be thought 'one of the most perfect products of the
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English mind.' It is a product of the American mind, de- veloped on American soil with some help at the beginning from English officials who, uninstructed by their superiors at home, took their cues from existing Dutch arrangements. De Tocqueville did not see the English mind at work when he decided that the most 'salient' feature of public adminis- tration in our country was its 'prodigiously decentralized' character. Nor can it be said that the English mind has yet developed in its own home-country a well-rounded sys- tem of local self-government.
To the end of the colonial period the concession to women of a more independent standing and wider activities than they enjoyed in communities of English origin bore witness to the Dutch origin of New York. So also did its hospitality of spirit. It was not only in New England, it should be remembered, that inhospitality was long shown to foreigners. Virginia, for example, passed in 1657 a law which gave to aliens the same status as to the Irish servants who were coming in without indentures, making them work as bonds- men for six or eight years. Because Manhattan had been Dutch it always remained, in feeling as in fact, the most cosmopolitan place in the colonies. It was typical as no purely English place became, more clearly typical than even Philadelphia, of what the whole continent is to-day - 'America, half-brother of the world.'
Of course this cosmopolitanism fostered in early New York, as it had in New Amsterdam, that democratic spirit which ought never to be confounded with the existence of republican institutions. Beneath forms of government lie customs and laws. These must be studied when the existence of democratic feeling is in debate; so must the ways in which they were introduced or administered; and so must the attitude toward them of that public opinion which is the voice of the people at large explaining that they indorse their institutions and law-givers, or are cramped by them, or are thinking and speaking in their despite.
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Modern Americans, too often getting their knowledge of political history and social developments only from English sources, have been apt to forget these truths. Seeing how distinctly English in origin are most of our institutions and in how democratic a temper they are administered and by the people indorsed, they fail to understand that while Eng- land did largely give us our belief in the rights of the citizen and in the practicability of republicanism, it was not the well-spring of our democratic ideals. These developed in- evitably on colonial soil, and their growth was helped much less by British precept or practice than in the beginning by Dutch influences variously transmitted and in later years by French teaching and example. The great inequality in social station and in property which the English have inherited from the Middle Ages they maintain because they have 'the religion of inequality,' Matthew Arnold once wrote; and Gladstone affirmed :
There is no broad political idea which has entered less into the formation of the political system of this country than the idea of equality. The love of justice, as distinguished from equality, is strong among our countrymen ; the love of equality, as distinguished from justice, is very weak. ... The love of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy. . .
In Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies in America he says, as many others have said or implied, that in Massachusetts in 1634 'representative democ- racy was fairly established and the Puritan system of a united church and state was on trial.' But this is a self- contradictory statement. The Bay Colony was an aristo- cratic republic. It asserted much more boldly than New Netherland the right of commonwealths to govern them- selves; but not until the republican system which was based on theologico-oligarchical foundations came to an end did democracy get a fair chance to develop in Massachusetts. Early New England, except in the Rhode Island offshoots which it hated and despised, understood far less clearly than
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New Netherland the right of every man to as much personal independence as his neighbors - the right of the individual, rich or poor, gentle or simple, wise or untutored, to think, to believe, and within the bounds of honesty and decency to speak and to act as he might prefer. This democratic temper which recognized, as the English temper did not, the parity in importance of liberty and equality, New Netherland trans- mitted to New York; and New York never lost it although a strong leaven soon began to work among its people toward the development of undemocratic modes of thought and feeling.
In line with the Dutch traditions of the province were the three great achievements by which it rendered service to the colonies at large. One of them was the conservation of the friendship of the Iroquois. This, wrote an English governor of the province, William Tryon, in 1774, was due to the fact that his predecessors had followed 'the system of policy' inaugurated by the Dutch. More explicitly Cad- wallader Colden wrote that, while in the early days of the province the Dutch were often useful to the French 'in saving those of them that were prisoners from the cruelty of the Indians,' on the other hand they had 'gained the hearts of the Five Nations by their kind usage'; their alliance with these tribes 'continued without any breach on either side till the English gained this country'; and then the English 'likewise immediately entered into a friendship' with them which had continued 'without the least breach to this day' - which, in fact, continued until the War of the Revolution broke out.
Another of the great general services rendered by New York was the permanent establishment of the right of free speech, effected in 1735 by the acquittal, forced by local public opinion, of John Peter Zenger, a printer indicted for libelling the government. The third service was the preser- vation of religious liberty. 'The partial establishment of re- ligious toleration,' writes President Eliot, has been 'the main
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work of civilization during the past four centuries'; and the absolute divorce of church from state, says Mr. Bryce, is of all the differences 'between the Old World and the New ... perhaps the most salient.' Toleration, of course, now prevails in all lands that can rightly be called civilized. But ours was the first nation that made full religious liberty an article of organic law; and only here and in Japan does it yet exist - that complete separation of church from state which frees the mind of man entirely from ecclesiastical dictation and frees his churches from the dictation of the secular power. For the establishment of this kind of liberty no other colony fought so long and determined a fight as New York. Only New York and Virginia proclaimed it when the nascent States were framing or altering their constitutions; and New York then stood in advance of Virginia which preserved its ecclesiastical establishment until 1788 while New York, by its constitution of 1777, at once effected the absolute divorce of things civil and ecclesiastical. Massachusetts did not do the same until 1833, Connecticut not until 1834. New Hampshire retained religious tests for officeholders until 1877.
It is difficult to estimate the extent of the general, in- tangible influence that New Netherland and New York exerted upon the other colonies, for it was not a controlling but a modifying force; it was not so much political as mental, temperamental, and social in the broader meaning of the word; and it was aided by the strong influences which, from the beginning of American colonization, the Low Countries exerted through other channels. Also, the influence of America itself must prominently be borne in mind. Here was a vast new world unhampered by the accumulation of the soil in hands comparatively few, little troubled by out- side interference, and virgin of courts and camps, of ancient aristocracies, hierarchies, and binding customs and traditions. Its rich possibilities worked with its pressing needs to en- courage or compel its inhabitants to follow paths which as a whole tended toward democracy, toward a general develop-
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ment of individualism. Beyond a doubt American conditions themselves inspired many of those American ideas and ex- periments in the domains of free thought and free govern- ment upon which much critical labor has been spent in the effort to trace them back to European sources. Similarly, it is labor misdirected to seek for proofs of a fructifying in- fluence exerted by one colony on another in every case where one followed or kept pace with another along a path of progress.
For example, the relative mildness of the criminal laws of New Netherland should not be over-emphasized; all colonial codes were mild as compared with those of Europe. Again, Americans who inherited England's love of civic liberty would in any case eventually have learned the value of natural liberty: they would have learned that the personal rights of man should not be affected by accidents of birth or by sectarian differences. And they would have developed that readiness to believe in the possible excellence of un- familiar ideas and expedients which is typically American but the reverse of what is meant by the term 'insular.' Never- theless, the intermingling of many strains of blood which began on Manhattan and remained the marked characteristic of the Middle Colonies undoubtedly hastened this New World work of education. 'The variety of nationalities in New York,' wrote Horatio Seymour, 'saved it from provincial prejudices' and from 'the narrowness engendered in the minds of those who hear but one side of questions and wit- ness but one phase of teaching.' To this root he traced the peculiar excellence of the first State constitution of New York as compared with those of the other States, and also the wide, strong, and beneficent influence which after the Revo- lution the jurisprudence of New York exerted.
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