Gotham notes, II
Jun. 12th, 2011 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cryowizardDominie Bogardus, for one, was furious that Kieft “permitted the officers and soldiers to perform all kinds of noisy plays during the sermon, near and around the church, rolling ninepins, bowling, dancing, singing, leaping, and other profane exercises.” (Kieft, in turn, accused Bogardus of frequently delivering his Sunday sermon in a drunken stupor.)
***
New Amsterdam’s first known Jewish residents, two traders from Holland named Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, arrived in the summer of 1654. A little while later, around the beginning of September, they were joined by twenty-three exhausted refugees from Brazil. Mostly Sephardim, the newcomers—four couples, two widows, and thirteen children—had been trying to get to Holland since Recife fell to the Portuguese the previous January. After their first ship was captured by Spanish pirates, they were rescued by a French privateer, which then took them to New Amsterdam.
***
Stuyvesant let it be known that he wanted no Jews in New Amsterdam. “Their usual usury and deceitful business towards the Christians” made them undesirable colonists, he explained to his superiors in the company.
***
Megapolensis told the Classis of Amsterdam, “it would create a still greater confusion, if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here.” After all, he grumbled, “These people have no other God than the Mammon of unrighteousness, and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property.”
***
The next year (1657) he reluctantly admitted the Jews to full citizenship in New Netherland. Although neither he nor the company was ready to let them build their synagogue, they were allowed to worship in a private house on the corner of the Heere Gracht (Broad Street) and Slyck Steegh (Mill Lane). Asser Levy, one of the Recife refugees, pressured Stuyvesant for even more extensive civil rights. He eventually won the right to serve in the militia, to engage in retail trade, to be licensed as a butcher, and to own a house—the first Jew to do so in New Amsterdam or anywhere in North America.
***
After a number of appeals for clemency from the shocked inhabitants of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant deported the unfortunate Hodgson to Rhode Island—“a place of errors and enthusiasts,” Megapolensis explained.
***
Stuyvesant now issued a proclamation that any ship bringing a Quaker into New Netherland would be confiscated and anyone caught harboring a Quaker would pay a stiff fine. In December 1657 thirty-one residents of Flushing signed an eloquent defense of religious toleration—known ever after as the Flushing Remonstrance—declaring that they couldn’t in good conscience abide by such regulations. Remember, they said, that in the Netherlands, the “law of love, peace and libertie” extended even to “Jews, Turks and Egyptians.” Dismissing the Remonstrance as a “seditious, mutinous and detestable letter of defiance,” Stuyvesant ordered the arrest of the town’s officials.
***
“We derive our authority from God and the West India Company,” he thundered, “not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects.”
***
Stuyvesant’s expectation of obedience from the residents of New Amsterdam quickly ran up against their own expectation, derived from conventional Dutch practice, of a proper municipal government. The Netherlands had no landed aristocracy to speak of, urban capital dominated its agricultural production, and a decentralized political system ensured the power of merchant oligarchies over its cities. So the more Stuyvesant insisted on his authority, the more he was resented—above all among the colony’s burgeoning merchant elite. “Our great Muscovy Duke,” they called him (behind his back).
***
Breuckelen, chartered by Kieft in 1646, was somewhat larger and less well defended. Dominie Henricus Selyns, who arrived there in 1660 to preach the gospel, counted 134 people in thirty-one households, predominately Dutch, scattered along what is now Fulton Street, not far from the ferry landing—“an ugly little village with the church in the middle of the road,” he said
***
Then, in 1660, after a decade of Puritan rule, Parliament restored the Stuarts to the throne. Charles II, the new king, was a cordial and witty man, conciliatory by temperament and conviction. Trailed by mistresses and illegitimate children—his court nicknamed him “Old Rowley” after one of the stallions in the royal stud—he would give his country twenty-five years of jolly sexual intrigue, extravagant private entertainments, and baroque scandals. When Parliament refused him enough money to pay for it all, he accepted secret bribes from Louis XIV of France.
***
Landholders in the colony would be his (Duke Of York's) tenants, obliged to pay him an annual quitrent in lieu of personal service. He decided who could trade with his colony, and he could impose duties on its imports and exports. Nowhere else in British America were the rights and privileges of colonists so limited, or those of government so vast.
***
New Amsterdam’s first known Jewish residents, two traders from Holland named Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, arrived in the summer of 1654. A little while later, around the beginning of September, they were joined by twenty-three exhausted refugees from Brazil. Mostly Sephardim, the newcomers—four couples, two widows, and thirteen children—had been trying to get to Holland since Recife fell to the Portuguese the previous January. After their first ship was captured by Spanish pirates, they were rescued by a French privateer, which then took them to New Amsterdam.
***
Stuyvesant let it be known that he wanted no Jews in New Amsterdam. “Their usual usury and deceitful business towards the Christians” made them undesirable colonists, he explained to his superiors in the company.
***
Megapolensis told the Classis of Amsterdam, “it would create a still greater confusion, if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here.” After all, he grumbled, “These people have no other God than the Mammon of unrighteousness, and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property.”
***
The next year (1657) he reluctantly admitted the Jews to full citizenship in New Netherland. Although neither he nor the company was ready to let them build their synagogue, they were allowed to worship in a private house on the corner of the Heere Gracht (Broad Street) and Slyck Steegh (Mill Lane). Asser Levy, one of the Recife refugees, pressured Stuyvesant for even more extensive civil rights. He eventually won the right to serve in the militia, to engage in retail trade, to be licensed as a butcher, and to own a house—the first Jew to do so in New Amsterdam or anywhere in North America.
***
After a number of appeals for clemency from the shocked inhabitants of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant deported the unfortunate Hodgson to Rhode Island—“a place of errors and enthusiasts,” Megapolensis explained.
***
Stuyvesant now issued a proclamation that any ship bringing a Quaker into New Netherland would be confiscated and anyone caught harboring a Quaker would pay a stiff fine. In December 1657 thirty-one residents of Flushing signed an eloquent defense of religious toleration—known ever after as the Flushing Remonstrance—declaring that they couldn’t in good conscience abide by such regulations. Remember, they said, that in the Netherlands, the “law of love, peace and libertie” extended even to “Jews, Turks and Egyptians.” Dismissing the Remonstrance as a “seditious, mutinous and detestable letter of defiance,” Stuyvesant ordered the arrest of the town’s officials.
***
“We derive our authority from God and the West India Company,” he thundered, “not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects.”
***
Stuyvesant’s expectation of obedience from the residents of New Amsterdam quickly ran up against their own expectation, derived from conventional Dutch practice, of a proper municipal government. The Netherlands had no landed aristocracy to speak of, urban capital dominated its agricultural production, and a decentralized political system ensured the power of merchant oligarchies over its cities. So the more Stuyvesant insisted on his authority, the more he was resented—above all among the colony’s burgeoning merchant elite. “Our great Muscovy Duke,” they called him (behind his back).
***
Breuckelen, chartered by Kieft in 1646, was somewhat larger and less well defended. Dominie Henricus Selyns, who arrived there in 1660 to preach the gospel, counted 134 people in thirty-one households, predominately Dutch, scattered along what is now Fulton Street, not far from the ferry landing—“an ugly little village with the church in the middle of the road,” he said
***
Then, in 1660, after a decade of Puritan rule, Parliament restored the Stuarts to the throne. Charles II, the new king, was a cordial and witty man, conciliatory by temperament and conviction. Trailed by mistresses and illegitimate children—his court nicknamed him “Old Rowley” after one of the stallions in the royal stud—he would give his country twenty-five years of jolly sexual intrigue, extravagant private entertainments, and baroque scandals. When Parliament refused him enough money to pay for it all, he accepted secret bribes from Louis XIV of France.
***
Landholders in the colony would be his (Duke Of York's) tenants, obliged to pay him an annual quitrent in lieu of personal service. He decided who could trade with his colony, and he could impose duties on its imports and exports. Nowhere else in British America were the rights and privileges of colonists so limited, or those of government so vast.