USA > New York > New York County > Manhattan > The pioneers of New-York. An anniversary discourse delivered before the St. Nicholas Society of Manhattan, December 6, 1847 > Part 4
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The law of social and political progress in New England, as
"Our ancestry may be traced to four nations, the . Dutch, the British, the French, and the Germans. It would have been strange had a people so formed, been tainted with national prejudices. Far from it. We are, if I may be allowed to say so, born cosmopolite."-Giorerneur Morris.
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we gather it from her many able and patriotic writers, has been the gradual liberalizing of a strict demi-ecclesiastic caste of men of a homogeneous origin. The law of progressive civilization in colonial New-York, was simply that of mind acting upon mind, without appeal to any admitted standard doctrine-the attrition of man acting upon man, without reference to either identity of race or superiority of origin.
When therefore the colonists of New-York, who had here practised their opposing creeds, while blending their different races, for many generations preceding the era of the Declaration of Independence-when the people of New-York, I say, took their + place in the American confederacy as an independent people, the type of character developed by their peculiar condition, was already marked-marked strongly and emphatically-but marked by any thing else than the characteristics of Puritanism; which are now so often erroneously held up as representing the seminal principles of freedom both in this State and others.
1 say "erroneously," for in this colony, even in the early days of the Dutch rule, the full privileges of citizenship were here accorded to all who had a direct interest in the soil; while in Massachusetts Bay colony, where the ministers of religion were not restricted to powers purely spiritual, similar privileges were denied to all who were not received into the Church of which Plymouth Rock was the corner-stone.
The amiable Robinson had admonished his people that " more light would come." Yet, while our neighbors disdained to borrow the light of toleration from New Netherland, those of their own blood, who brought more light to the Puritans, were compelled to fly to the Dutch here for an asylum, even as their rigorous brethren had in former years fled to the Dutch of Holland; until Roger Williams, the good, the liberal, the charitable, driven out with the rest, planted the tree of toleration in Rhode Island.
But let us look more closely into these modern claims of political Puritanism, of which we now hear so much, as originating the theory and setting in motion the practice of North American liberty. Is the germ of all American freedom traceable to Plymouth
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Rock ? Is the genius of American institutions referable solely to the Puritan origin of New England ?
Guizot calls the reformation begun by Luther " an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of spiritual order !" Now Puritanisin, instead of being at the head of that insurrection, came in after the battle was half fought; came in as the claimant, the claimant by Divine right, of a new form of spiritual control, not less absolute than that which it opposed !
It was a brave spirit, that of old Puritanism; and I yield to none in honoring its undaunted antagonism to older forms of des- potism over the rights of conscience-but it was not less a des- potism ?
It was an adventurous spirit, that of old Puritanisin, and I honor it not less for its self-martyrdom of exile, than for its unflinching grapple with the dogmas of its enemies.
But I will not recognize its ferocious intolerance in forcing its own dogmas upon Quakers and Anabaptists in this land, as proving that it offered a true priesthood for the altars of freedom! I will not recognize that its blind uses of power have proved aught to the world in THE SCIENCE OF LIBERTY-aught save the mental vigor and conscientious hardihood of its stern asserters of narrow doctrine.
And, speaking still of Puritanism in its political aspect -- I will recognize its hard earned triumphs as marking more than one glorious tide in the moving waters of human freedom-but I will not recognize it as the spirit which first released the waves-I will not recognize it as the compelling power which still teaches deep to call unto deep until the true knowledge of human rights is wide spread as the ocean, and the voices of true liberty are echoed from every shore.
Hear the language which these Pilgrim fathers used in reference to their free-hearted hosts of Holland, when assigning their reasons for leaving that hospitable land of stubborn tolerance.
" Inasmuch as in ten years time, whilst we sojourned among them, we could not bring them to reform any thing amiss among them."
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Now the prerogative to meddle with the concerns of your neighbor, here asserted with such unconscious simplicity ; to meddle according to your conscience, and your opinion of what is good for your neighbor, is directly opposed to the notions of liberty, in which the forefathers of New-York were tutored, and is still most repugnant to some of their descendants as the great political impertinence of the present day.
And here a few words as to the mode of meddling.
The Puritans brought from England this grand axiom of resistance to monarchy and aristocracy. ASSOCIATED OPINION -- organized sentiment is the great engine of a people's power against hereditary oppression.
Here was a great political truth. Here was the introduction of a moral Church into politics to countervail the ancient influence of unmeaning party cries, or unthinking fealty to a leader. But upon this truth the veritable Pilgrims stopped short !
Now what learned the recusants of their order in Holland | what did they come to practise along with their Dutch friends here in New Netherland ? They learned the true principle of INDIVIDUAL. REPRESENTATION; and that an oligarchy of associated doctrine is in a free country the most subtle instrument wherewith to strangle individual liberty. And they came to New Amsterdam to practice resistance against such an oligarchy which they left behind them in Massachusetts Bay.
The first great principle of the Plymouth Rock meu, in after years, contributed largely, in these northern States, to make us a nation : the last inbred spirit of the men of New-York can alone keep us free among ourselves.
In the war of the Revolution these two great forces of national and of home freedom acted in accord, But they have often, both before and since theu, been arrayed against each other; and they will still be continually in conflict until their relative bearing and respective value are clearly understood by our countrymen.
I need not remind you how their action has been illustrated in New- York of late years, in the campaigus of anti-masonry and the disputed claims of political teetotalism!
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It matters not what part our people took upon either of these questions, or whether it was worth while for men of sense to take any part. But the excitement among the people of New York proved how keenly their sensibilities are alive to the political action of any such organized influence, any associated moral church with a self-constituted priesthood, undertaking to regulate the State, or interpret the lives of its citizens. This keen jealousy of the assumption by any society whatever, (whether secret or open) of power which has never been delegated by the individual, is the antagonist spirit to Political Puritanism, and God grant that it may ever be strong in the soul of every truc son of New-York.
I wish clearly to be understood in the use I here make of the word " Puritanism " as reflecting in no way upon the religious sentiments of any class of men, either here or elsewhere. The leading Church doctrines of New England, based upon the prin- ciples of Geneva, are common alike to Scotland and to Holland. I take the term in its original purport, when " Puritanism" referred not to religious conviction, but simply to that arrogant assumption over our neighbor, which prompts us to conspire with others to trample apon his individual rights, feelings, habits, and prejudices, in the blind assertion of our infallible church of Opinion-a church whose first altar is always reared in the soul by the anti-christian spirit of " I-am-holier-than-thou !"
When it first lifted itself on Plymouth Rock, there, and at that time, the spirit of Puritanism was made respectable by the pioneering hardihood of those self-banished men; made worthy our reverence by their conscientious earnestness in founding a church for their own peculiar faith; made touching by their long years of travail and suffering in bearing the ark of their faith about with them from shore to shore ! But since then that spirit, divorced from these conditions, and held up in its nakedness as the true spirit of liberty-held up, too, most often, by those who have departed from the very church whose suffering fervor could alone sanctify its temporary rule and ministry-has stalked abroad through every State in this Union, claiming to be the only true representative of the American sentiment of freedom, and wither-
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ing in its grasp all manly independence of action and feeling. It siezes upon the press, and under the joint cry of " moral progress " and " freedom of discussion," it claims the right to meddle with the domestic hearth and private affairs of every citizen : borrowing a different form of cant, it juggles itself into the heart of politics; where, armed with the patronage of office, it smirkingly avows and arrogantly proclaims to its opponents the old dogma of " spoil- ing the Egyptians " as a fresh political precept in a Republican country. Nor content with its dirty triumphs here, it smoothes its grimacing wrinkles at political success, into new blandness of complacent hypocrisy, and invades the fields of Literature and Art, to cramp their development, and dwindle their growth. The poet must no longer write an Anacreontic, because " Teetotalism " is the order of the day. The painter must no longer depict the gallant deeds of his country's soldier, because " Public Opinion" leans to the theory of " Universal Peace." And the same spirit of Puritanism, that " Public Opinion " of Plymouth Rock, which ejected Roger Williams from Massachusetts, would still make feeling, intelligence, thought and talent, the mere handmaids of present accepted theory-compel Fancy to dance her bompipe in the splints and bandages of doctrine, and turn the dream of Genius into a nightmare on the bed of Procrustes .*
Beware, then, brethren of St. Nicholas, of the form which inge- nious scholars are now teaching the spirit of Puritanisin to assume
* The New England reader at home who is not aware that "the principles of the Puritans," and " the principles of '98," are alike appealed to in this State by crude Reformer or slang-whanging Politician to promote some partizan movement, will smile at the above as unmeaning tirade. The ingenious labors of more thought- ful theorists, tracing pretty much all American free speculation to Plymouth Bort, threatens to throw a fearful weight upon that sacred platform. And that which ne once reverenced as the purely historical crag of New England, Iting itself abore the ocean in all the majesty of simple granite, certainly does not gam maauch in out eyes, as now daily more and more converted into a mass of political and plukoso. phical conglomerate, to which each speculative writer pretends that a pebble wze contributed in his peculiar favor ; and whose friable components they insist opon reclaiming in their original state, whether blended with the so'l of the Battery, or underlying the pavement of Chestnut-street.
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in this State-that of a purer caste of men, originating beyond your own border, who hold up the doings of their forefathers as prece- dents for your Government ; teach you their story in the lecture- room as what ought to be your story ; write your legalized books of education as if your State were a provincial offsprout of theirs ; and hold up their local references of habit and authority in your very halls of legislation, as law, to order your society.
I quarrel not with any New Englander for making Plymouth Rock his Mecca ; yet I will not accept it as the Delphic oracle of New York. I honor the home spirit of those who advance themselves as its faithful priests everywhere ; but I deny their inspiration, when, by a New England ordination, they claim to be our interpreters.
" The Landing of our Pilgrim Fathers " is the landing of Hendrick Hudson ;* and his first crew of brave adventurers from the two great maratime nations of Christendom is our nearest type of a European origin. If it be not, we want none other at second hand, but look for our father-land HERE upon our own sovereign soil.
" We grew out of this sacred ground with our pioneer predeces- sors,"f said that accomplished statesman and gallant gentleman, in whose veins commingled the blood of the Huguenot martyr with that of " the Belgie and British Patriot," which forms the old stock of New York, and whose comprehensive genius in tracing the story of this State, broke forth into prophecy as he dwelt upon our fusion of races upon a soil which had already nurtured the noblest and most powerful race of aborigines on this continent-the
* The anniversary of the 4th September, 1609, was thus celebrated in this State by the generation which has just passed away. See Miller's Discourse before the N. York Hist. Soc. Why should not the sons of " the Empire State " now recog- nize it everywhere ?
t Corencur Morris, who goes on to ask, " Have we not some traits to mark our common origin (with) a people free as the air they breathe ; acute, dexterous, elo- quent, subtle, bravo ? Is it not likely this may be the character of our children's children ? Never will those who tread the soil in which the Mohawks lie entomb- ed, submit to be slaves." Col. N. Y. Hist. Soc. 1814.
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Roman-like and far conquering Iroquois. The shallow sophis- tries of Puritan Anglo-Saxonism had not yet been heard within our borders when that philosophic mind of New York ventured upon its far-sighted predictions of what those blended forces of best manhood must accomplish, in a region whose natural resour- ces afford a field for all the most powerful energies of civilization ! He looked upon the Susquehanna connecting us with the Chesa- peake ; upon the Genesee connecting us with the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; upon the Alleghany linking us with the sea of Mexico ; upon the great Lakes binding us to the boundless West ; upon the Hudson uniting us with the civilized world. He turned from the bloody school of our energies, in a hundred and fifty years of bor- der wars, and imagined those same indomitable powers applied to the arts of peace ! *
The curious speculative theory of that philosophic statesman is now History. Yes, it has been History for more than twenty years. For the men of New-York were acting History, while those in other States were writing it for us and our children ; and the successful mingling of those wondrous waters through the agency of Clinton's more practical mind, has by introducing a new current of population into our State raised such a wave as almost to wash from the memory of the present generation the deeds of colonial enterprise upon which Mr. Morris predicated his generous prophecy. We hear much of the " Empire State," we forget the " Empire Colony "-the province where the two most powerful nations of Europe so long contended for empire. We forget that with a population less than that of either Massachusetts or Vir. ginia, here was the great seat of English executive and colonial power, in time of peace : and here, as Chancellor Kent has em. phatically termed it, was " the Flanders of North America," in timo of war.
The bold deeds of Miles Standish and the celebrated names of
* See Discourse before the N. Y. Hist. Soc. in connection with the testimony which Mr. Sparks adduces as to Governeur Morris's agency in our system of inter- nal improvements.
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Miantonimo and Philip of Pokanoket, have made the Indian wars of New England familiar to every school-boy, familiar as are the savage forays into Kentucky of a much later day ; yet-while the border conflicts with naked savages of all the other States together, would not fill one chapter of the early military history of New- York-what do the rising generation know of our own wild-wood annals ? what of "those arduous circumstances which marked our origin and impeded our growth-those ravages to which we were exposed-those persevering efforts to defend our country in the long period of nearly one hundred and seventy years ; from the first settlement by the Dutch in 1614 to the time when this city was evacuated by the British in the close of 1783." It is fortunate for the existing inhabitants perhaps, that the old military glory of New-York should be merged and forgotten in her present successful cultivation of the arts of peace. But while we can trace much of the modern spirit of enterprize and improvement in her old colonial energies, as exhibited in another sphere of action, that martial spirit which first gave them vitality, is not unworthy of commemo- ration. That martial spirit which, leaving so few non-combatants, made the revolution in New-York truly a civil war; that spirit of action whichi compelled every New-Yorker to take up arms for " King" or " Colony ;" which furnished regiment after regiment to the crown, and treble the number to the confederacy; which blazed forth with all its desperate energies in the death-grapple of brothers at Oriskany, and which is traceable in the gallantry of New-York's exiled sons, even down to the field of Waterloo !* Surely that military spirit of the storied past should not be forgotten while we enjoy its best fruits in the prosperous present. We hear much of what our Eastern neighbors endured for the protection of doctrine-it may be healthful to hear what our fathers did for the protection of home. I might now go back to the Indian wars of Governor Kieft, when he made a requisition upon the authorities at Albany for " two hundred suits of mail," to repel a threatened
& Sir William De Lancey, who gallantly fell in the charge at the battle of Waterloo, was of the New-York family of that name.
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attack upon Manhattan; an attack which his folly had provoked, and which resulted in that Indian onslaught which cut off the families of so many settlers, and shut up the survivors for a season within the defences of New Amsterdam. But I prefer to turn to the general affairs of the whole province, as showing its military position for a full century of New-York history.
The French penetrated to Lake George, nearly simultaneously with the Dutch reaching Albany, in 1609. And the wars with " New France," which commenced with the earliest period of New Netherland history, though ostensibly suspended when the parent countries were at peace with each other, were never fully concluded till after the conquest of Canada by the British arms; and the incessant conflicts between the Iroquois of New-York and the Hurons, Otawas, and Adirondacks of the St. Lawrence, were in fact a struggle between the French and English, to secure possession of Northern and Western New-York. A grasping desire for territory on the part of the French, and a bitter jealousy of their rivalry in the fur trade, on the part of the New-Yorkers, impelled the colonists on either side to share personally in these Indian quarrels, without troubling themselves much about the danger of compromising politically the mother countries which pretended to sway them.
Whether the French, after drawing their wonderful line of forts, which extended through the western wilderness from Quebec to New Orleans-whether they really ever hoped to cut a path to the Atlantic by the way of the Hudson, it is now difficult to say. But long previous to Leisler's ill-starred attempt to expel them from Canada, and down to the period when Wolfe triumphed at Quebec, the old chronicles which record the formidable descent of Count Frontignac, the massacre of Schenectady, and other inroads of Hurons and Adirondacks, led on by French officers, tell us repeatedly of sudden taxes levied, and men warned to hold them- selves ready in arms, even in the city of New-York itself-so remote from the scene of the never-ending border strife.
The first really formidablo inroad from "New France," as Canada was then called, was that of De Tracey, De Chaumont,
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and De Courcelles, in 1666, with twelve hundred French soldiers and one thousand Indians. De Barre's descent with seventeen hundred men, followed in 1685. The burning of Schenectady in 1690, made their next attack memorable. In 1691 they were again within fifteen miles of Albany. In 1693 they were repulsed from Schenectady by Peter Schuyler. In 1695 three hundred of their soldiers made a lodgment at Oswego, while five hundred were driven out of New- York by way of Lake Champlain.
In 1696, one of the best appointed armies that ever displayed upon this continent, an army led on by an array of Counts, Barons, and Chevaliers, with full battering train, complete camp equipage, and comissariat amply provided, penetrated as far as Onondaga Lake. The peace of Ryswick brought a breathing spell to the province. But in 1710 the old border struggle was renewed, and the province remained an armed camp till the peace of Utrecht in 1713. Again the province is in arms and marching upon the French at Niagara in 1727. And the enemy penetrated to Saratoga and cut off thirty families in a night in 1747.
The battle of Lake George, where Sir William Johnson won his spurs, and where eight hundred of the invaders, under Dieskau, were left dead upon the field, brings us to 1755. The assault of the Marquis of Montcalm on Fort Ontario, with four thousand troops, follows; and the massacre of Fort William and Henry, with the devastation of German Flats on the Mohawk, by the invaders, brings us to (175$) the duplicate battle of Lake George, when seventeen thousand men, under Abercrombie, were defeated by the French; the reduction of Fort Frontinac, on Lake On- tario, by three thousand provincials, the fight with the galleys on Lake Champlain, and the different affairs of Crown Point and Ticonderoga.
Within the seven years of the War for Independence, the battle of Long Island, the battle of White Plains, the storming of Stoney Point, the affair of Fort Montgomery, the burning of Kingston, the sanguinary struggles of Cherry Valley and the Mohawk, with Oriskaney, the bloodiest field of all our Revolutionary conflicts, and Saratoga the most glorious, crowd in with Niagara; Ticonde-
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roga, and Crown Point, to mark their names yet again upon the blazing tablet of our military annals. And still once more, in 1814, the events at Fort Eric and Sackett's Harbor, at Champlain, and Niagara, swell the records of fierce conflicts upon her soil, and approve New-York the battle-field of the Union, the Flanders of American History .*.
We all know the part which New England played in the most brilliant of those battles; we all know that where duty calls or danger threatens, the sons of the Puritans are there with unblench- ing front and arm the readiest to strike. But her surviving soldiery from many a desperate field, who afterward returned to incorporate themselves with us, and till the soil they had first bathed with their blood, came not to preach and write us into the provincial condition from which they had aided in rescuing us! And if they brought back " the schoolmaster " with them, it was but just that the forum and lyceum of other States should minister to the distracted land which kept war from their homes by concentrating its devastations in this the great Military ARENA of the North. But if that ministry of " candle, book and bell" is to be the burial of our identity ; the annihilation of our peculiar and original place in the constellation of the Old Thirteen, and the ascription of all the glories of the Empire State to a modern'and peculiar caste, we had rather that the schoolmaster had never been abroad within our borders. Reading and writing, although the readiest aid to education, are not education itself; intellect is not character ; nor can intelligence ever stand as a substitute for those sterling qualities of the patriot, which at best it but embellishes and makes available.
I am not one of those who desire to see my country converted into a race of intellectual sharpers, nor have I any faith in the deification of Cyclopedias ; and however much I may delight in the ingenious speculations of " New England Philosophy," I never would dream of exchanging for it the New-York touchstone of common senso by which its crudities are safely tested. It was in the school of
" Yet our gallant New-Yorkers in Mexico did not need these memories to inspirit them ?
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home, not in the public lecture-room-it was amid the Lares and Penates, not in the public temples of Pallas and Apollo, that our Schuylers, Jays, Morrises, Livingstons and Clintons, learned best to serve their country. "If I do not greatly deceive myself, there is no portion of the history of this country which is more instructive or calculated to embellish our national character, than the domestic history of this State," says the illustrious Chancellor Kent. "" Our history," adds that thoughtful and earnest inquirer after the Right and the True-" Our history will be found upon examination as fruitful as the records of any other people, in recitals of heroic actions, and in images of resplendent virtue. It is equally well fitted to elevate the pride of ancestry, to awaken deep feeling, and kindle generous emulation." That " generous emulation," who shall presume to strike down its spirit among us, by parcelling out the glories of New-York among the different races that erewhile con- tributed to swell her population, and then passing them to the account of some other state or country, whether American or European ?
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