speak for himself, and first as to the climate: "It is of a sweet and wholesome breath, free from those annoyances which are commonly ascribed by naturalists for the insalubriety of any Country, viz. stagnant Waters, lowness of Mr. Wolley Shoars, inconstancy of Weather [!], and on the the excessive heat of the Summer [!!]; ; New York climate. it is gently refreshed, fanned, and allayed by constant breezes from the Sea. . . . Nature kindly drains and purgeth [the land] by Fontanels and Issues of running waters in its irriguous Valleys, and shelters it with the umbrellas of all sorts of Trees which Trees and Plants do undoubtedly, tho' insensibly, suck in and digest into their own growth and composition those subterraneous Particles and Exhalations, which otherwise wou'd be attracted by the heat of the Sun, and so become matter for infectious Clouds and malign Atmospheres. I myself, a person of a weakly Stamen and a valetudinary Constitution, was not in the least indisposed in that Climate during my residence there, the space of three years." 66 Allowing for a somewhat too roseate tint in the references to the freedom from fickle weather and torrid heat, this is an excellent description of the breezy and salubrious air of Manhattan. As for the people, they impressed Mr. Wolley as extremely high-flown religionists," but he had never visited Boston or New Haven. Even in this comparatively tolerant New Netherland, the ministers of different churches sometimes would not take tea together, and our young Cambridge friend did not relish such narrowness. A Latin supper. "There were two Ministers, or Dominies as they were called there, the one a Lutheran or HighDutch,1 the other a Calvinist or Low Dutchman,2 who behaved themselves one towards another so shily and uncharitably as if Luther and Calvin had bequeathed and entailed their virulent and bigoted Spirits upon them and their heirs forever. They had not visited or spoken to each other with any respect for six years together before my being there, with whom I being much acquainted, I invited them both with their Vrows to a Supper one night unknown to each other, with an obligation that they should not speak one word of Dutch, under the penalty of a bottle of Madeira, alledging I was so imperfect in that Language that we could not manage a sociable discourse. accordingly they came, and at the first interview they stood so appalled as if the Ghosts of Luther and Calvin had suffered a transmigration, but the amaze soon went off with a salve tu quoque and a Bottle of Wine, of which the Calvinist Dominie was a true Carouzer, and so we continued our Mensalia the whole evening in Latine, which they both spoke so fluently and promptly that I blushed at myself with a passionate regret that I could not keep pace with them. As to the Dutch language, in which I was but a smatterer, I think it lofty, majestic, and emphatical." 3 So The intemperate zeal of red-faced Dominie Nieuwenhuysen sometimes hurried him into a pace 1 Dominie Bernhardus Frazius. 2 Dominie Nieuwenhuysen. Dominie Rensselaer. which he could not keep up. Dominie Nicholas van Rensselaer, having been ordained in England by a bishop, had come to be Van minister at Albany as colleague to the aged Dr. Schaats, whose oratory seemed to our Labadist visitors so uncouth. Nieuwenhuysen denied that ordination by an English bishop could confer the right to administer sacraments in the Dutch Reformed Church, and he therefore insisted that Van Rensselaer should be forbidden to baptize children; but when the point was argued before Andros and his council, the zealous Calvinist was obliged to recede from his position. An attempt was soon afterward made to convict Van Rensselaer of doctrinal heresy. Charges of "false preaching" were brought against him by Jacob Leisler, a wealthy German, one of Nieuwenhuysen's deacons, and a young English protégé of his, named Jacob Milborne. The result of the trial was the acquittal of Van Rensselaer, while Leisler and Milborne were obliged to pay the costs. We shall by and by meet the deacon and his friend under very different circumstances. Already this incident shows the existence of two mutually repugnant trends of feeling in the Dutch church at New York; the one aristocratic, liberal, mellow, and inclined to fraternize with Episcopacy; the other democratic, fanatical, bitter, and Puritanical. Such antagonisms were to bear fruit in deadly feuds. According to Andros's own report, the province of New York consisted of twenty-four towns, villages, or parishes, divided into six precincts for courts of quarter sessions. The total value of the estates was about £150,000, equivalent to at least $3,000,000 of the present day. A merchant worth £1000 ($20,000) was deemed rich, and a planter with half that amount in chattels was accounted very well off. The population of the city since. 1664 had increased from about 1600 to about 3500. Three ships, eight sloops, and seven boats were owned in the city, and of these craft four had been built there. The revenue of Estates and revenues. the province was £2000, not enough" by a greate deale," which was a source of worry to the Duke of York. The lack of servants was also quite generally felt; there were a few black slaves, chiefly from Barbadoes, worth about £30 a head. The principal exports were furs, lumber, tar, and bolted flour; which paid for £50,000 of manufactured goods imported from England. There were no beggars in the province, but of all poor and disabled persons due care was taken. There were twenty churches - Reformed Dutch, Lutheran, Independent, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, and Jew-all self-supporting; but there was a scarcity of ministers, which was an inconvenience in respect of funerals, weddings, and christenings.1 The scarcity of clergymen led the way to an interesting development. We have already seen that the Reformed Dutch Church in New York accepted ordination at the hands of an English bishop as sufficient qualification for the ministry; but this was not enough. The methods of the 1 New York Colonial Documents, iii. 245, 260–262. of an inde Dutch Church must be expanded to fit the occasion. In 1678 Laurentius van Gaasbeeck was sent out to be minister at Esopus, under the authority of the Classis, or supreme eccle- Formation siastical body, of Amsterdam. Before pendent his arrival the spiritual interests of Eso- Classis. pus were cared for temporarily by Petrus Tesschenmaeker, a young graduate of Utrecht, who had lately come over. Tesschenmaeker was a bachelor of divinity, but had not been ordained. Upon the arrival of the new dominie at Esopus, this young man received a call to the church at Newcastle on the Delaware, which furthermore requested that he might be ordained without the cumbrous formality of crossing the ocean to Holland. Hereupon Andros directed Nieuwenhuysen with any three or more clergymen to form themselves into a Classis, and after duly examining Tesschenmaeker to ordain him if they saw fit. This was done, the action of the New York dominies was approved by the Classis of Amsterdam, and thus in a most pleasant and sensible fashion was the Dutch Church in America made practically independent of the fatherland.1 The insufficiency of revenue was to a great extent remedied by the ordinances con- The flour cerning the bolting of flour. First it was monopoly. ordered that all flour for exportation should be bolted and duly inspected and the barrels properly marked before they could be shipped. Then it 1 Dankers and Sluyter's Journal, iii. 222; Book of General Entries, xxxii. 61; Demarest, History of the Reformed Dutch Church, p. 183. |