The occupation of Maryland dates from the year 1634. The period of bold and half-desperate adventure in making plantations along the coast was past. To men of sanguine temper and sufficient fortune and influence at court, it was now a matter of very promising and not too risky speculation. To George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, one of the most interesting characters at the court of James I., the business had peculiar fascination. He was in both the New England Company and the Virginia Company, and after the charter of the latter was revoked he was one of the Provisional Council for the government of Virginia. Nothing daunted by the ill luck of these companies, he tried colonizing on his account in 1620, in what was represented to him as the genial soil and climate of Newfoundland. Sending good money after bad, he was glad to get out of this venture at the end of nine years with a loss of thirty thousand pounds. In 1629 he sent home his children, and with a lady and servants and forty of his surviving colonists sailed for Jamestown, where his reception at the hands of the council and of his old Oxford fellow-student, Governor Pott, was not cordial. He could hardly have expected that it would be. He was a recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church, with a convert"s zeal for proselyting, and he was of the court party. Thus he was in antagonism to the Puritan colony both in politics and in religion. A formidable disturbing element he and his company would have been in the already unquiet community. The authorities of the colony were equal to the emergency. In answer to his lordship"s announcement of his purpose "to plant and dwell," they gave him welcome to do so on the same terms with themselves, and proceeded to tender him the oath of supremacy, the taking of which was flatly against his Roman principles. Baltimore suggested a mitigated form of the oath, which he was willing to take; but the authorities "could not imagine that so much lat.i.tude was left for them to decline from the prescribed form"; and his lordship sailed back to England, leaving in Virginia, in token of his intention to return, his servants and "his lady," who, by the way, was not the lawful wife of this conscientious and religious gentleman.
Returned to London, he at once set in motion the powerful influences at his command to secure a charter for a tract of land south of the James River, and when this was defeated by the energetic opposition of the friends of Virginia, he succeeded in securing a grant of land north and east of the Potomac, with a charter bestowing on him and his heirs "the most ample rights and privileges ever conferred by a sovereign of England."[55:1] The protest of Virginia that it was an invasion of the former grant to that colony was unavailing. The free-handed generosity with which the Stuarts were in the habit of giving away what did not belong to them rarely allowed itself to be embarra.s.sed by the fear of giving the same thing twice over to different parties.
The first Lord Baltimore died three months before the charter of Maryland received the great seal, but his son Cecilius took up the business with energy and great liberality of investment. The cost of fitting out the first emigration was estimated at not less than forty thousand pounds. The company consisted of "three hundred laboring men, well provided in all things," headed by Leonard and George Calvert, brothers of the lord proprietor, "with very near twenty other gentlemen of very good fashion." Two earnest Jesuit priests were quietly added to the expedition as it pa.s.sed the Isle of Wight, but in general it was a Protestant emigration under Catholic patronage. It was stipulated in the charter that all liege subjects of the English king might freely transport themselves and their families to Maryland. To discriminate against any religious body in England would have been for the proprietor to limit his hope of rapid colonization and revenue and to embroil himself with political enemies at home. His own and his father"s intimate acquaintance with failure in the planting of Virginia and of Newfoundland had taught him what not to do in such enterprises. If the proprietor meant to succeed (and he _did_ mean to) he was shut up without alternative to the policy of impartial non-interference with religious differences among his colonists, and the promotion of mutual forbearance among sects. Lord Baltimore may not have been a profound political philosopher nor a prophet of the coming era of religious liberty, but he was an adroit courtier, like his father before him, and he was a man of practical good sense engaged in an enormous land speculation in which his whole fortune was embarked, and he was not in the least disposed to allow his religious predilections to interfere with business. Nothing would have brought speedier ruin to his enterprise than to have it suspected, as his enemies were always ready to allege, that it was governed in the interest of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a suspicion he took the most effective means of averting.
He kept his promises to his colonists in this matter in good faith, and had his reward in the notable prosperity of his colony.[57:1]
The two priests of the first Maryland company began their work with characteristic earnestness and diligence. Finding no immediate access to the Indians, they gave the more constant attention to their own countrymen, both Catholic and Protestant, and were soon able to give thanks that by G.o.d"s blessing on their labors almost all the Protestants of that year"s arrival had been converted, besides many others. In 1640 the first-fruits of their mission work among the savages were gathered in; the chief of an Indian village on the Potomac nearly opposite Mount Vernon, and his wife and child, were baptized with solemn pomp, in which the governor and secretary of the colony took part.
The first start of the Maryland colony was of a sort to give promise of feuds and border strifes with the neighbor colony of Virginia, and the promise was abundantly fulfilled. The conflict over boundary questions came to b.l.o.o.d.y collisions by land and sea. It is needless to say that religious differences were at once drawn into the dispute. The vigorous proselytism of the Jesuit fathers, the only Christian ministers in the colony, under the patronage of the lord proprietor was of course reported to London by the Virginians; and in December, 1641, the House of Commons, then on the brink of open rupture with the king, presented a remonstrance to Charles at Hampton Court, complaining that he had permitted "another state, molded within this state, independent in government, contrary in interest and affection, secretly corrupting the ignorant or negligent professors of religion, and clearly uniting themselves against such." Lord Baltimore, perceiving that his property rights were coming into jeopardy, wrote to the too zealous priests, warning them that they were under English law and were not to expect from him "any more or other privileges, exemptions, or immunities for their lands, persons, or goods than is allowed by his Majesty or officers to like persons in England." He annulled the grants of land made to the missionaries by certain Indian chiefs, which they affected to hold as the property of their order, and confirmed for his colony the law of mortmain. In his not unreasonable anxiety for the tenure of his estate, he went further still; he had the Jesuits removed from the charge of the missions, to be replaced by seculars, and only receded from this severe measure when the Jesuit order acceded to his terms. The pious and venerable Father White records in his journal that "occasion of suffering has not been wanting from those from whom rather it was proper to expect aid and protection, who, too intent upon their own affairs, have not feared to violate the immunities of the church."[59:1]
But the zeal of the Calverts for religious liberty and equality was manifested not only by curbing the Jesuits, but by encouraging their most strenuous opponents. It was in the year 1643, when the strength of Puritanism both in England and in New England was proved, that the Calverts made overtures, although in vain, to secure an immigration from Ma.s.sachusetts. A few years later the opportunity occurred of strengthening their own colony with an accession of Puritans, and at the same time of weakening Virginia. The st.u.r.dy and prosperous Puritan colony on the Nansemond River were driven by the churlish behavior of Governor Berkeley to seek a more congenial residence, and were induced to settle on the Severn at a place which they called Providence, but which was destined, under the name of Annapolis, to become the capital of the future State. It was manifestly not merely a coincidence that Lord Baltimore appointed a Protestant governor, William Stone, and commended to the Maryland a.s.sembly, in 1649, the enacting of "an Act concerning Religion," drawn upon the lines of the Ordinance of Toleration adopted by the Puritan House of Commons at the height of its authority, in 1647.[59:2] How potent was the influence of this transplanted Nansemond church is largely shown in the eventful civil history of the colony. When, in 1655, the lord proprietor"s governor was so imprudent as to set an armed force in the field, under the colors of Lord Baltimore, in opposition to the parliamentary commissioners, it was the planters of the Severn who marched under the flag of the commonwealth of England, and put them to rout, and executed some of their leaders for treason. When at last articles of agreement were signed between the commissioners and Lord Baltimore, one of the conditions exacted from his lordship was a pledge that he would never consent to the repeal of the Act of Toleration adopted in 1649 under the influence of the Puritan colony and its pastor, Thomas Harrison.
In the turbulence of the colony during and after the civil wars of England, there becomes more and more manifest a growing spirit of fanaticism, especially in the form of antipopery crusading. While Jacobite intrigues or wars with France were in progress it was easy for demagogues to cast upon the Catholics the suspicion of disloyalty and of complicity with the public enemy. The numerical unimportance of the Catholics of Maryland was insufficient to guard them from such suspicions; for it had soon become obvious that the colony of the Catholic lord was to be anything but a Catholic colony. The Jesuit mission had languished; the progress of settlement, and what there had been of religious life and teaching, had brought no strength to the Catholic cause. In 1676 a Church of England minister, John Yeo, writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury of the craving lack of ministers, excepting among the Catholics and the Quakers, "not doubting but his Grace may so prevail with Lord Baltimore that a maintenance for a Protestant ministry may be established." The Bishop of London, echoing this complaint, speaks of the "total want of ministers and divine worship, except among those of the Romish belief, who, "tis conjectured, does not amount to one of a hundred of the people." To which his lordship replies that all sects are tolerated and protected, but that it would be impossible to induce the a.s.sembly to consent to a law that shall oblige any sect to maintain other ministers than its own. The bishop"s figures were doubtless at fault; but Lord Baltimore himself writes that the nonconformists outnumber the Catholics and those of the Church of England together about three to one, and that the churchmen are much more numerous than the Catholics.
After the Revolution of 1688 it is not strange that a like movement was set on foot in Maryland. The "beneficent despotism" of the Calverts, notwithstanding every concession on their part, was ended for the time by the efforts of an "a.s.sociation for the Defense of the Protestant Religion," and Maryland became a royal colony. Under the new regime it was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the petty minority of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. The Church of England became in name the official church of the colony, but two parties so remotely unlike as the Catholics and the Quakers combined successfully to defeat more serious encroachments on religious liberty.
The attempt to maintain the church of a small minority by taxes extorted by a foreign government from the whole people had the same effect in Maryland as in Ireland: it tended to make both church and government odious. The efforts of Dr. Thomas Bray, commissary of the Bishop of London, a man of true apostolic fervor, accomplished little in withstanding the downward tendency of the provincial establishment. The demoralized and undisciplined clergy resisted the attempt of the provincial government to abate the scandal of their lives, and the people resisted the attempt to introduce a bishop. The body thus set before the people as the official representative of the religion of Christ "was perhaps as contemptible an ecclesiastical organization as history can show," having "all the vices of the Virginian church, without one of its safeguards or redeeming qualities."[62:1] The most hopeful sign in the morning sky of the eighteenth century was to be found in the growth of the Society of Friends and the swelling of the current of the Scotch-Irish immigration. And yet we shall have proof that the life-work of Commissary Bray, although he went back discouraged from his labors in Maryland and although this colony took little direct benefit from his efforts in England, was destined to have great results in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in America; for he was the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Carolinas, North and South, had been the scene of the earliest attempts at Protestant colonization in America. The Huguenot enterprise at Beaufort, on Port Royal harbor, was planted in 1562 under the auspices of Coligny, and came to a speedy and unhappy end. The costly and disastrous experiment of Sir Walter Raleigh was begun in 1584 on Roanoke Island, and lasted not many months. But the actual occupation of the region was late and slow. When, after the Restoration, Charles II.
took up the idea of paying his political debts with free and easy cessions of American lands, Clarendon, Albemarle, and Shaftesbury were among the first and luckiest in the scramble. When the representatives of themselves and their partners arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism, the "Fundamental Const.i.tutions," contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury and John Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity and was growing into a state. The region adjoining Virginia was peopled by Puritans from the Nansemond country, vexed with the paltry persecutions of Governor Berkeley, and later by fugitives from the b.l.o.o.d.y revenge which he delighted to inflict on those who had been involved in the righteous rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon. These had been joined by insolvent debtors not a few. Adventurers from New England settled on the Cape Fear River for a lumber trade, and kept the various plantations in communication with the rest of the world by their coasting craft plying to Boston. Dissatisfied companies from Barbadoes seeking a less torrid climate next arrived. Thus the region was settled in the first instance at second hand from older colonies. To these came settlers direct from England, such emigrants as the proprietors could persuade to the undertaking, and such as were impelled by the evil state of England in the last days of the Stuarts, or drawn by the promise of religious liberty.
South Carolina, on the other hand, was settled direct from Europe, first by cargoes of emigrants shipped on speculation by the great real-estate "operators" who had at heart not only the creation of a gorgeous aristocracy in the West, but also the realization of fat dividends on their heavy ventures. Members of the dominant politico-religious party in England were attracted to a country in which they were still to be regarded before the law as of the "only true and orthodox" church; and religious dissenters gladly accepted the offer of toleration and freedom, even without the a.s.surance of equality. One of the most notable contributions to the new colony was a company of dissenters from Somersetshire, led by Joseph Blake, brother to Cromwell"s ill.u.s.trious admiral. Among these were some of the earliest American Baptists; and there is clear evidence of connection between their arrival and the coming, in 1684, of a Baptist church from the Ma.s.sachusetts Colony, under the pastorate of William Screven. This planting was destined to have an important influence both on the religious and on the civil history of the colony. Very early there came two ship-loads of Dutch Calvinists from New York, dissatisfied with the domineering of their English victors. But more important than the rest was that sudden outflow of French Huguenots, representing not only religious fidelity and devotion, but all those personal and social virtues that most strengthen the foundations of a state, which set westward upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This, with the later influx of the Scotch-Irish, profoundly marked the character of South Carolina.
The great names in her history are generally either French or Scotch.
It ought to have been plain to the proprietors, in their monstrous conceit of political wisdom, that communities so const.i.tuted should have been the last on which to impose the uniformity of an established church. John Locke did see this, but was overruled. The Church of England was established in name, but for long years had only this shadow of existence. We need not, however, infer from the absence of organized church and official clergy among the rude and turbulent pioneers of North Carolina that the kingdom of G.o.d was not among them, even from the beginning. But not until the year 1672 do we find manifestation of it such as history can recognize. In that year came William Edmundson, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," bringing his testimony of the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The honest man, who had not thought it reasonable in the Christians of Ma.s.sachusetts to be offended at one"s sitting in the steeple-house with his hat on, found it an evidence that "they had little or no religion"
when the rough woodsmen of Carolina beguiled the silent moments of the Friends" devotions by smoking their pipes; and yet he declares that he found them "a tender people." Converts were won to the society, and a quarterly meeting was established. Within a few months followed George Fox, uttering his deep convictions in a voice of singular persuasiveness and power, that reached the hearts of both high and low. And he too declared that he had found the people "generally tender and open," and rejoiced to have made among them "a little entrance for truth." The church of Christ had been begun. As yet there had been neither baptism nor sacramental supper; these outward and visible signs were absent; but inward and spiritual grace was there, and the thing signified is greater than the sign. The influence diffused itself like leaven. Within a decade the society was extended through both the Carolinas and became the princ.i.p.al form of organized Christianity. It was reckoned in 1710 to include one seventh of the population of North Carolina.[65:1]
The attempt of a foreign proprietary government to establish by law the church of an inconsiderable and not preeminently respectable minority had little effect except to exasperate and alienate the settlers. Down to the end of the seventeenth century the official church in North Carolina gave no sign of life. In South Carolina almost twenty years pa.s.sed before it was represented by a single clergyman. The first manifestation of church life seems to have been in the meetings on the banks of the Cooper and the Santee, in which the French refugees worshiped their fathers" G.o.d with the psalms of Marot and Beza.
But with the eighteenth century begins a better era for the English church in the Carolinas. The story of the founding and the work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, taken in connection with its antecedents and its results, belongs to this history, not only as showing the influence of European Christianity upon America, but also as indicating the reaction of America upon Europe.
In an important sense the organization of religious societies which is characteristic of modern Christendom is of American origin. The labors of John Eliot among the Indians of New England stirred so deep an interest in the hearts of English Christians that in 1649 an ordinance was pa.s.sed by the Long Parliament creating a corporation to be called "The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England"; and a general collection made under Cromwell"s direction produced nearly twelve thousand pounds, from the income of which missionaries were maintained among some of the Northern tribes of Indians. With the downfall of the Commonwealth the corporation became defunct; but through the influence of the saintly Richard Baxter, whose tender interest in the work of Eliot is witnessed by a touching pa.s.sage in his writings, the charter was revived in 1662, with Robert Boyle for president and patron. It was largely through his generosity that Eliot was enabled to publish his Indian Bible. This society, "The New England Company," as it is called, is still extant--the oldest of Protestant missionary societies.[66:1]
It is to that Dr. Thomas Bray who returned in 1700 to England from his thankless and discouraging work as commissary in Maryland of the Bishop of London, that the Church of England owes a large debt of grat.i.tude for having taken away the reproach of her barrenness. Already his zeal had laid the foundations on which was reared the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. In 1701 he had the satisfaction of attending the first meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which for nearly three quarters of a century, sometimes in the spirit of a narrow sectarianism, but not seldom in a more excellent way, devoted its main strength to missions in the American colonies. Its missionaries, men of a far different character from the miserable inc.u.mbents of parishes in Maryland and Virginia, were among the first preachers of the gospel in the Carolinas. Within the years 1702-40 there served under the commission of this society in North Carolina nine missionaries, in South Carolina thirty-five.[67:1]
But the zeal of these good men was sorely enc.u.mbered with the armor of Saul. Too much favorable legislation and patronizing from a foreign proprietary government, too arrogant a tone of superiority on the part of official friends, attempts to enforce conformity by imposing disabilities on other sects--these were among the chief occasions of the continual collision between the people and the colonial governments, which culminated in the struggle for independence. By the time that struggle began the established church in the Carolinas was ready to vanish away.
FOOTNOTES:
[55:1] W. H. Browne, "Maryland" (in American Commonwealths), p. 18.
[57:1] This seems to be the whole explanation of the curious paradox that the first experiment of religious liberty and equality before the law among all Christian sects should have been made apparently under the auspices of that denomination which alone at the present day continues to maintain in theory that it is the duty of civil government to enforce sound doctrine by pains and penalties. We would not grudge the amplest recognition of Lord Baltimore"s faith or magnanimity or political wisdom; but we have failed to find evidence of his rising above the plane of the smart real-estate speculator, willing to be all things to all men, if so he might realize on his investments. Happily, he was clear-sighted enough to perceive that his own interest was involved in the liberty, contentment, and prosperity of his colonists.
Mr. E. D. Neill, who has excelled other writers in patient and exact study of the original sources of this part of colonial history, characterizes Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, as "one whose whole life was pa.s.sed in self-aggrandizement, first deserting Father White, then Charles I., and making friends of Puritans and republicans to secure the rentals of the province of Maryland, and never contributing a penny for a church or school-house" ("English Colonization of America," p. 258).
[59:1] Browne, pp. 54-57; Neill, _op. cit._, pp. 270-274.
[59:2] The act of Parliament provided full religious liberty for dissenters from the established order, save only "so as nothing be done by them to the disturbance of the peace of the kingdom."
[62:1] H. C. Lodge, "British Colonies in America," pp. 119-124, with authorities cited. The severe characterization seems to be sustained by the evidence.
[65:1] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 237.
[66:1] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 2, 3; "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xvi., p. 514.
[67:1] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 849, 850.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DUTCH CALVINIST COLONY ON THE HUDSON AND THE SWEDISH LUTHERAN COLONY ON THE DELAWARE--THEY BOTH FALL UNDER THE SHADOW OF GREAT BRITAIN.
When the Englishman Henry Hudson, in the Dutch East India Company"s ship, the "Half-moon," in September, 1609, sailed up "the River of Mountains" as far as the site of Albany, looking for the northwest pa.s.sage to China, the English settlement at Jamestown was in the third year of its half-perishing existence. More than thirteen years were yet to pa.s.s before the Pilgrims from England by way of Holland should make their landing on Plymouth Rock.
But we are not at liberty to a.s.sign so early a date to the Dutch settlement of New York, and still less to the church. There was a prompt reaching out, on the part of the immensely enterprising Dutch merchants, after the lucrative trade in peltries; there was a plying to and fro of trading-vessels, and there were trading-posts established on Manhattan Island and at the head of navigation on the Hudson, or North River, and on the South River, or Delaware. Not until the great Dutch West India Company had secured its monopoly of trade and perfected its organization, in 1623, was there a beginning of colonization. In that year a company of Walloons, or French-speaking Hollanders, was planted near Albany, and later arrivals were settled on the Delaware, on Long Island, and on Manhattan. At length, in 1626, came Peter Minuit with an ample commission from the all-powerful Company, who organized something like a system of civil government comprehending all the settlements.
Evidences of prosperity and growing wealth began to multiply. But one is impressed with the merely secular and commercial character of the enterprise and with the tardy and feeble signs of religious life in the colony. In 1626, when the settlement of Manhattan had grown to a village of thirty houses and two hundred souls, there arrived two official "sick-visitors," who undertook some of the public duties of a pastor. On Sundays, in the loft over the horse-mill, they would read from the Scriptures and the creeds. And two years later, in 1628, the village, numbering now about two hundred and seventy souls, gave a grateful welcome to Jonas Michaelius, minister of the gospel. He rejoiced to gather no less than fifty communicants at the first celebration of the Lord"s Supper, and to organize them into a church according to the Reformed discipline. The two elders were the governor and the Company"s storekeeper, men of honest report who had served in like functions in churches of the fatherland. The records of this period are scanty; the very fact of this beginning of a church and the presence of a minister in the colony had faded out of history until restored by the recent discovery of a letter of the forgotten Michaelius.[69:1]
The sagacious men in control of the Dutch West India Company were quick to recognize that weakness in their enterprise which in the splendid colonial attempt of the French proved ultimately to be fatal. Their settlements were almost exclusively devoted to the lucrative trade with the Indians and were not taking root in the soil. With all its advantages, the Dutch colony could not compete with New England.[70:1]
To meet this difficulty an expedient was adopted which was not long in beginning to plague the inventors. A vast tract of territory, with feudal rights and privileges, was offered to any man settling a colony of fifty persons. The disputes which soon arose between these powerful va.s.sals and the sovereign Company had for one effect the recall of Peter Minuit from his position of governor. Never again was the unlucky colony to have so competent and worthy a head as this discarded elder of the church. Nevertheless the scheme was not altogether a failure.
In 1633 arrived a new pastor, Everard Bogardus, in the same ship with a schoolmaster--the first in the colony--and the new governor, Van Twiller. The governor was incompetent and corrupt, and the minister was faithful and plain-spoken; what could result but conflict? During Van Twiller"s five years of mismanagement, nevertheless, the church emerged from the mill-loft and was installed in a barn-like meeting-house of wood. During the equally wretched administration of Kieft, the governor, listening to the reproaches of a guest, who quoted the example of New England, where the people were wont to build a fine church as soon as they had houses for themselves, was incited to build a stone church within the fort. There seems to have been little else that he did for the kingdom of heaven. Pastor Bogardus is ent.i.tled to the respect of later ages for the chronic quarrel that he kept up with the worthless representatives of the Company. At length his righteous rebuke of an atrociously wicked ma.s.sacre of neighboring Indians perpetrated by Kieft brought matters to a head. The two antagonists sailed in the same ship, in 1647, to lay their dispute before the authorities in Holland, the Company and the cla.s.sis. The case went to a higher court. The ship was cast away and both the parties were drowned.
Meanwhile the patroon Van Rensselaer, on his great manor near Albany, showed some sense of his duty to the souls of the people whom he had brought out into the wilderness. He built a church and put into the pastoral charge over his subjects one who, under his travestied name of Megapolensis, has obtained a good report as a faithful minister of Jesus Christ. It was he who saved Father Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, from imminent torture and death among the Mohawks, and befriended him, and saw him safely off for Europe. This is one honorable instance, out of not a few, of personal respect and kindness shown to members of the Roman clergy and the Jesuit society by men who held these organizations in the severest reprobation. To his Jesuit brother he was drawn by a peculiarly strong bond of fellowship, for the two were fellow-laborers in the gospel to the red men. For Domine Megapolensis is claimed[71:1]
the high honor of being the first Protestant missionary to the Indians.
In 1647, to the joy of all the colonists, arrived a new governor, Peter Stuyvesant, not too late to save from utter ruin the colony that had suffered everything short of ruin from the incompetency and wickedness of Kieft. About the time that immigration into New England ceased with the triumph of the Puritan party in England, there began to be a distinct current of population setting toward the Hudson River colony.
The West India Company had been among the first of the speculators in American lands to discover that a system of narrow monopoly is not the best nurse for a colony; too late to save itself from ultimate bankruptcy, it removed some of the barriers of trade, and at once population began to flow in from other colonies, Virginia and New England. Besides those who were attracted by the great business advantages of the Dutch colony, there came some from Ma.s.sachusetts, driven thence by the policy of exclusiveness in religious opinion deliberately adopted there. Ordinances were set forth a.s.suring to several such companies "liberty of conscience, according to the custom and manner of Holland." Growing prosperously in numbers, the colony grew in that cosmopolitan diversity of sects and races which went on increasing with its years. As early as 1644 Father Jogues was told by the governor that there were persons of eighteen different languages at Manhattan, including Calvinists, Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists (here called Mennonists), etc. No jealousy seems to have arisen over this multiplication of sects until, in 1652, the Dutch Lutherans, who had been attendants at the Dutch Reformed Church, presented a respectful pet.i.tion that they might be permitted to have their own pastor and church. Denied by Governor Stuyvesant, the request was presented to the Company and to the States-General. The two Reformed pastors used the most strenuous endeavors through the cla.s.sis of Amsterdam to defeat the pet.i.tion, under the fear that the concession of this privilege would tend to the diminution of their congregation. This resistance was successfully maintained until at last the pet.i.tioners were able to obtain from the Roman Catholic Duke of York the religious freedom which Dutch Calvinism had failed to give them.
Started thus in the wrong direction, it was easy for the colonial government to go from bad to worse. At a time when the entire force of Dutch clergy in the colony numbered only four, they were most unapostolically zealous to prevent any good from being done by "unauthorized conventicles and the preaching of unqualified persons,"
and procured the pa.s.sing of an ordinance forbidding these under penalty of fine and imprisonment. The mild remonstrances of the Company, which was eager to get settlers without nice inquiries as to their religious opinions, had little effect to restrain the enterprising orthodoxy of Peter Stuyvesant. The activity of the Quakers among the Long Island towns stirred him to new energy. Not only visiting missionaries, but quiet dwellers at home, were subjected to severe and ignominious punishments. The persecution was kept up until one of the banished Friends, John Bowne, reached Amsterdam and laid the case before the Company. This enlightened body promptly shortened the days of tribulation by a letter to the superserviceable Stuyvesant, conceived in a most commercial spirit. It suggested to him that it was doubtful whether further persecution was expedient, unless it was desired to check the growth of population, which at that stage of the enterprise ought rather to be encouraged. No man, they said, ought to be molested so long as he disturbed neither his neighbors nor the government. "This maxim has always been the guide of the magistrates of this city, and the consequence has been that from every land people have flocked to this asylum. Tread thus in their steps, and we doubt not you will be blessed."
The stewardship of the interests of the kingdom of Christ in the New Netherlands was about to be taken away from the Dutch West India Company and the cla.s.sis of Amsterdam. It will hardly be claimed by any that the account of their stewardship was a glorious one. The supply of ministers of the gospel had been tardy, inconstant, and scanty. At the time when the Dutch ministers were most active in hindering the work of others, there were only four of themselves in a vast territory with a rapidly increasing population. The clearest sign of spiritual life in the first generation of the colony is to be found in the righteous quarrel of Domine Bogardus with the malignant Kieft, and the large Christian brotherly kindness, the laborious mission work among the Indians, and the long-sustained pastoral faithfulness of Domine Megapolensis.
Doubtless there is a record in heaven of faithful living and serving of many true disciples among this people, whose names are unknown on earth; but in writing history it is only with earthly memorials that we have to do. The records of the Dutch regime present few indications of such religious activity on the part of the colonists as would show that they regarded religion otherwise than as something to be imported from Holland at the expense of the Company.
A studious and elegant writer, Mr. Douglas Campbell, has presented in two ample and interesting volumes[74:1] the evidence in favor of his thesis that the characteristic inst.i.tutions established by the Puritans in New England were derived, directly or indirectly, not from England, but from Holland. One of the gravest answers to an argument which contains so much to command respect is found in the history of the New Netherlands. In the early records of no one of the American colonies is there less manifestation of the Puritan characteristics than in the records of the colony that was absolutely and exclusively under Dutch control and made up chiefly of Dutch settlers. Nineteen years from the beginning of the colony there was only one church in the whole extent of it; at the end of thirty years there were only two churches. After ten years of settlement the first schoolmaster arrived; and after thirty-six years a Latin school was begun, for want of which up to that time young men seeking a cla.s.sical education had had to go to Boston for it. In no colony does there appear less of local self-government or of central representative government, less of civil liberty, or even of the aspiration for it. The contrast between the character of this colony and the heroic antecedents of the Dutch in Holland is astonishing and inexplicable. The sordid government of a trading corporation doubtless tended to depress the moral tone of the community, but this was an evil common to many of the colonies. Ordinances, frequently renewed, for the prevention of disorder and brawling on Sunday and for restricting the sale of strong drinks, show how prevalent and obstinate were these evils. In 1648 it is boldly a.s.serted in the preamble to a new law that one fourth of the houses in New Amsterdam were devoted to the sale of strong drink. Not a hopeful beginning for a young commonwealth.
Before bidding a willing good-bye to the Dutch regime of the New Netherlands, it remains to tell the story of another colony, begun under happy auspices, but so short-lived that its rise and fall are a mere episode in the history of the Dutch colony.
As early as 1630, under the feudal concessions of the Dutch West India Company, extensive tracts had been taken on the South River, or Delaware, and, after purchase from the Indians, settled by a colony under the conduct of the best of all the Dutch leaders, De Vries.
Quarrels with the Indians arose, and at the end of a twelvemonth the colony was extinguished in blood. The land seemed to be left free for other occupants.
Years before, the great Gustavus Adolphus had pondered and decided on an enterprise of colonization in America.[76:1] The exigencies of the Thirty Years" War delayed the execution of his plan, but after the fatal day of Lutzen the project resumed by the fit successor of Gustavus in the government of Sweden, the Chancellor Oxenstiern. Peter Minuit, who had been rejected from his place as the first governor of New Amsterdam, tendered to the Swedes the aid of his experience and approved wisdom; and in the end of the year 1637, against the protest of Governor Kieft, the strong foundations of a Swedish Lutheran colony were laid on the banks of the Delaware. A new purchase was made of the Indians (who had as little scruple as the Stuart kings about disposing of the same land twice over to different parties), including the lands from the mouth of the bay to the falls near Trenton. A fort was built where now stands the city of Wilmington, and under the protection of its walls Christian worship was begun by the first pastor, Torkillus. Strong reinforcements arrived in 1643, with the energetic Governor Printz and that man of "unwearied zeal in always propagating the love of G.o.d," the Rev. John Campanius, who through faith has obtained a good report by his brief most laborious ministry both to his fellow-countrymen and to the Delaware Indians.
The governor fixed his residence at Tinic.u.m, now almost included within the vast circ.u.mference of Philadelphia, and there, forty years before the arrival of William Penn, Campanius preached the gospel of peace in two languages, to the red men and to the white.