Who Should Rule at Home?: Confronting the Elite in British New York City 9781501708046

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WHO SHOULD RULE AT HOME?

  Plan of the City of New-York and Its Environs to Greenwich, on the North or Hudsons River. . . . [the A Montresor Plan]. This engraving by Peter Andrews of the plan of New York City that surveyor John Montresor made in 1767 shows the extent of urban development in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, the New York Public Library. Image ID 54179. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

WHO SHOULD RULE AT HOME? CO N F R O N T I N G T H E ELITE IN BRITISH N E W YO R K  C I TY

Joyce D. Goodfriend

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2017 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goodfriend, Joyce D., author. Title: Who should rule at home? : confronting the elite in British New York City / Joyce D. Goodfriend. Description: Ithaca ; London : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016037978 (print) | LCCN 2016039365 (ebook) | ISBN 9780801451270 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501708039 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501708046 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions— 18th century. | British—New York (State)—New York— History—18th century. | Social classes—New York (State)—New York—History—18th century. Classification: LCC F128.4 .G64 2017 (print) | LCC F128.4 (ebook) | DDC 974.7/02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037978 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cover illustration: John Durand, The Rapalje Children, 1768. Oil on canvas. With permission of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Mrs. Eliza J. Watson in memory of her husband, John Jay Watson, 1946.201. Background: Bill of sale for an enslaved person named Brett, dated June 1764. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, the New York Public Library.

To the memory of my father A proud New Yorker

Contents

Preface ix

I ntroduction: The Pan-ethnic Elite and the Problem of Cultural Authority

1

Part One:   The Indigestible Dutch

1. The Crystallization of an Anti-Dutch Narrative

11

2. From Nation to Linguistic Community

45

Part Two:   Pious Commoners

3.  George Whitefield Awakens New York City 4.  Becoming Religious Consumers

79 110

Pa rt Three:   Defiant Dependents

5.  “Master of the House”?

145

6.  Attached to the Household

172

7.  Sabotaging the Civilizers

198

Conclusion: Tipping the Cultural Scales Notes 241 Index 287

233

Preface

As I was completing this book, a British New Yorker named Alexander Hamilton captured the popular imagination. As portrayed on the musical stage, Hamilton was a forward looking American entrepreneur eager to shed the encumbrances of a royalist society. That this young immigrant from the West Indies had quickly insinuated himself into the local gentry was conveniently obscured in the show, no doubt in recognition of the truth that Americans were bound to recoil at a hero who shared the elitist values of his privileged contemporaries. Our mental separation from the vanished world of British New Yorkers causes us to accentuate the influence of men whose birth and connections set them over the rest of the urban populace. They remain a breed apart, known only vaguely through their splendid portraits and finely crafted possessions ensconced in Manhattan’s museums. Because twenty-first-century Americans lack an intuitive sense of how a society premised on rank actually functioned, it is easy to believe that members of the elite effortlessly imposed their views on their less exalted neighbors. Yet a bounty of evidence culled from a wide range of documents, familiar and obscure, has led me to a less sanguine estimate of gentlemen’s capacity to control the minds of the people they considered inferiors. The ubiquity of oppositional voices—individual as well as collective—and the multiple points of contention that emerged during more than a century of British dominion suggest that it was not at all uncommon for ordinary New Yorkers to press their presumed betters to cede cultural ground. Long before Trinity Church severed its ties to the Church of England and King’s College changed its name to Columbia, privileged New Yorkers found their claims to cultural authority being challenged by people far removed from polite circles. In short, the struggle over “who should rule at home,” to use Carl Becker’s famous phrase, commenced well before New Yorkers were caught up in the events that culminated in independence. This book aims to complicate the history of British New York City in fruitful ways by bringing to light the panorama of contests—some petty, some ix

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life altering, none inconsequential—that, in retrospect, are recognizable as antecedents and accompaniments of the patently political acts that figure so prominently in accounts of the coming of the American Revolution in New York. During the years that I have been working on this book, I benefited from an Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University and a Cunningham Research Residency at the New York State Library. I appreciate this support. I am also grateful to librarians and staff members at the following institutions for their assistance in accessing materials from their collections: the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the First Baptist Church of New York, the Collegiate Churches of New York, the Holland Society of New York, the New York State Library, the New York State Archives, the Albany Institute of Art and History, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, the Princeton Theological Seminary Library, the Gardner Sage Library of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Hartford Seminary Library, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Rauner Special Collections at the Dartmouth College Library. Among the individuals who have advanced this project by supplying information, contributing expertise, and offering advice are Pat Bonomi, John Coakley, John Dixon, Firth Fabend, Willem Frijhoff, Russell Gasero, Will Gravely, Sara Gronim, Jaap Jacobs, Wim Klooster, Ned Landsman, Dirk Mouw, Rob Naborn, Paul Otto, James Raven, Annette Stott, Frank Sypher, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, and David Voorhees. At Cornell University Press, my editor Michael McGandy has been infinitely patient as he has worked with me to shape and polish the manuscript. Managing editor Ange Romeo-Hall and acquisitions assistant Bethany Wasik contributed their talents to the production of the book. A special thank you goes to Billy Smith and Simon Middleton who read the manuscript for Cornell. I am happy to count them as old friends. The University of Denver supported my work through a Professional Development grant and a subvention for the book’s publication. Thanks to associate dean Ingrid Tague and history department chair Susan Schulten for their efforts in my behalf over the years. I am honored that the New York State Historical Association selected this book as the winner of the 2016 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize.

WHO SHOULD RULE AT HOME?

Introduction The Pan-ethnic Elite and the Problem of Cultural Authority

When Esther Singleton penned Social New York under the Georges, 1714–1776 in 1902, she took for granted that those whom she called “the prosperous class” belonged at the center of the city’s eighteenth-century history. In a text laden with lavish descriptions of the homes, furnishings, paintings, silver, china, and apparel of gentlemen and ladies and embellished with images of family heirlooms, she documented and implicitly endorsed the Anglophile tastes of New York’s elite. Not one to complicate her narrative with the concerns of the great majority of city dwellers, white and black, she pointedly remarked at the outset of her book that “the lowly side of life in Manhattan has been entirely neglected, my aim having been to exhibit the opulent and fashionable life that revolved around Fort George.”1 When enslaved Africans appear in her book, they do so as virtually inanimate accessories to the lives of the well-to-do. Subsequent historians of British New York, though not as outspoken in discounting the experiences of ordinary residents, have tended to follow Singleton in assigning elite New Yorkers the leading roles in the city’s history. In works far more rigorous than Singleton’s anecdotal compendium, scholars have scrutinized top-ranking New Yorkers’ commercial endeavors—legal and illegal—their intellectual forays, and most of all, their political activities. An array of studies centered on the competition for formal political power

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chronicles the triumphs and travails of the local elite as they sparred with royal governors and vied with each other for power. Although middling men are not uniformly relegated to the wings in these works, those at the proscenium invariably are men of privilege. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, another line of inquiry into early New York’s history gathered momentum, one whose aim was to insert the stories of artisans, unskilled laborers, servants, and, most prominently, enslaved men and women into a narrative heretofore largely devoted to the political elite. In light of European New Yorkers’ heavy investment in African slavery and the dramatic episodes of the slave revolt of 1712 and the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741, such a turn was long overdue and clearly justified. But scholars working in this vein, preoccupied with documenting (or disproving) overt resistance to slavery in New York, have tended to treat less visible manifestations of enslaved men and women’s seditious behavior tangentially. Essential as this ample body of literature is for understanding the perspectives of both the powerful and the powerless in eighteenth-century British New York, it falls short of offering a history of domination and subordination in the city that moves beyond the formal structures of power to consider what has been called the “microsociology of power.”2 From this perspective, the minutiae of negotiations on mundane matters take on weight in determining the efficacy of cultural authority. Exploring the interpersonal dynamics underlying problematic social transactions between members of the elite and people of lesser status reveals traces of submerged alternative discourses that lay behind the actions of individuals far from the levers of power. Excavating even fragments of these discourses makes possible a more balanced view of the nature of coexistence in this diverse urban setting. This book opens a window on unexplored dimensions of power relations in eighteenth-century New York City by zeroing in on sites where the elite’s cultural authority was brought into question. Gentlemen at the top of the social hierarchy, endowed with wealth and fortified by lineage, never doubted that they were entitled to orient the cultural compass for everyone around them. But in a city where the usual sources of social cohesion—a common language, uniform folk traditions, and shared historical memories—were scant, they found it necessary to certify their status as persons of distinction qualified to dictate cultural norms. If the motley nature of the port society’s population was not enough to cause men of privilege to unite behind an English cultural front, then their own variegated roots gave them an added incentive to distance themselves from their European heritage and exalt their Englishness. Investing in the code of politeness that was the touchstone of

I N T R O D U C T I O N     3

gentility in Georgian Anglo-America was the key to cultural dominion in New York. No better example of the transmutation of the city’s pan-ethnic elite exists than James De Lancey, the premier politician of British New York. His Huguenot father Étienne (Stephen) De Lancey, an exile from France, had immigrated to the city in the late seventeenth century. His mother, Anne Van Cortlandt, belonged to a prominent Dutch family with a history dating back to New Amsterdam. Anne Heathcote, his wife, was the daughter of Caleb Heathcote, a migrant from England who had acquired a landed estate in Westchester County and risen to political eminence in the colony. James De Lancey’s brother Oliver eloped with Phila Franks, the daughter of merchant Jacob Franks, a pillar of New York’s Jewish community. In its multiple strands, De Lancey’s biography encapsulated New York’s singular demographic history. Yet De Lancey was so successful in camouflaging his diverse origins and connections that Patricia Bonomi accurately described him as “a true Anglo-American,” someone who “managed to blend two cultures—provincial and metropolitan.”3 As a genteel Englishman, De Lancey looked askance on fellow city dwellers’ attempts to sustain their ancestral cultures by preserving their native tongues. High-ranking New Yorkers inhabited an exclusive universe where their families put into practice the precepts of politeness delineated by the English gentry. In beautifully appointed Georgian town homes and country estates north of the city, they enjoyed a life of comfort and ease amid fine furnishings, well-stocked libraries, and an array of luxury items imported from En­ gland or handcrafted in current English styles by city artisans. Taking their cues from the English gentry, leading New York families purchased a variety of objects bespeaking their status. Between 1757 and the 1770s, merchant James Beekman purchased two riding chaises, a “charriot,” a phaeton, and a “beautifully painted” coach. The “door panels and the front and rear of the body of the coach bore the family coat of arms.” In 1762, a leather-covered cradle with brass nails was custom made for an infant of the Brinckerhoff family. On it are displayed the family initials and the date 1762. The home of attorney James Duane and his wife, Mary, boasted “ ‘elegant’ paper hangings, ‘spotted rugs,’ graceful chandeliers, plate glass mirrors, a harpsichord, and a well filled library.” Between 1761 and 1763, James Beekman, in addition to buying a mahogany table, eight mahogany chairs, and a new desk, paid artist Lawrence Kilburn ten pounds each for “Drawing myne and my Wife Picture” and also for “Gilding” fourteen other pictures.4 Adorning their persons with the latest fashions was of critical importance to denizens of the polite world. Accordingly, local tradesmen went out of

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Figure 1.  James De Lancey purchased this desk and secretary in 1753. An exquisite example of English craftsmanship, it was a fitting adornment for a gentleman’s home. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of James De Lancey Verplanck and John Bayard Rodgers Verplanck, 1939, Accession Number 39.184.1a, b.

their way to please affluent New Yorkers with refined tastes. A peruke maker named William De Witt catered to gentlemen such as Samuel Bayard and William Livingston, as well as Oliver De Lancey, who “acquired a wardrobe of wigs” in the early 1740s. Bookseller Garret Noel had genteel parents in mind

I N T R O D U C T I O N     5

when he placed an elaborate advertisement in the New-York Mercury in December 1762 stating that “according to his Annual Custom, he has provided a very large Assortment of Books for the Entertainment and Improvement of Youth . . . as proper Presents at CHRISTMAS and NEW YEAR.” Among the volumes enumerated were several “Gilt Books, very Instructive and Amusing, being full of Pictures,” among which were “The Lilleputian Magazine, or the Young Gentleman and Ladies Library” and “The Polite Academy, or Instructions for a genteel Behaviour and polite Address in Masters and Misses.”5 With a staff of servants and slaves at their beck and call, ladies and gentlemen devoted their leisure hours to suitable amusements in spaces cordoned off from the rest of the urban populace—social clubs, the theater, concerts and dancing assemblies, as well as New York’s versions of London’s pleasure gardens, Vauxhall and Ranelagh.6 Insulating themselves in polite social spaces, however, did not absolve gentlemen from the responsibility of holding other city dwellers to genteel standards. Along with privilege came the duty to wield cultural authority over people lower on the social scale. Collectively and individually, in formal and informal ways, the self-declared gentlemen who dominated New York City’s social, economic, and political landscape spelled out the terms on which artisans, laborers, women, children, servants, and slaves were expected to conduct their lives. Virtually unassailable in their roles as merchants, lawyers, aldermen, and judges, men of privilege had every reason to believe that their ascendancy extended to the cultural realm. Although instances of ambitious men emulating their betters in hopes of insinuating themselves into polite circles might suggest that the values of the elite were filtering down, such moments were inherently ambiguous. Commoners of modest standing imitated gentlemen and ladies primarily by purchasing luxury consumer goods such as the “large gilt framed pictures and the Mahogany tea table” owned by widow Teuntie Byvanck in 1749 or the silver watch and chain and seal and the silver-hilted sword belonging to painter and glazier Raphael Goelet.7 While such acquisitions reflect a desire for objects associated with refinement, they do not prove that people of limited means wished to appropriate the entire corpus of genteel values. The same might be said for shopkeepers who displayed a veneer of civility in order to attract genteel customers but did not aspire to be paragons of gentility themselves. Ordinary eighteenth-century New Yorkers had no real prospect of dislodging the mantle of privilege that enveloped their high-ranking neighbors. Schooled in the protocols of deference, they refrained from questioning the wisdom of men who presumed to be their cultural guardians, even if they disagreed with some of their notions. However, when issues of deep

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concern came to the surface, prudence gave way as undistinguished men and women boldly aired their views and demonstrated they had the mettle to act on them. Commoners’ challenges to elite directives were situational and episodic, the product of particular grievances, and reflected no consistent ideological position and concealed no radical social agenda. Still, engaging in antiauthoritarian action and even extracting concessions from social superiors were liberating experiences for undistinguished city residents, allowing them to ­visualize the elite as fallible human beings not immune to pressure from below. Self-assertion put commoners at risk of reprisal, but it gave them a glimpse of a world where their own cultural preferences mattered. A fine-grained picture of the contours of cultural authority in eighteenthcentury British New York must recognize the resourcefulness of ordinary men and women who had the temerity to repudiate or circumvent the elite’s blueprint for their lives. Whether enunciating contrary opinions, engaging in purposeful action, breaching standards of propriety, intruding into restricted spaces, or striking out on alternative paths that skirted the sites where gentlemen held sway, a variety of urban dwellers tested elite power, not in a grand way, but with sufficient force to expose the fragility of the elite’s cultural authority. In the chapters that follow, I stitch together multiple strands of evidence, each bearing on the efforts of gentlemen to set and enforce cultural norms and the responses they encountered from persons of lesser rank. While devoting considerable time to delineating the viewpoint of those who enjoyed the advantages of wealth, education, and social position, I make a special effort to recover the perspectives of actors outside polite circles. The book’s center of gravity is the process of contestation itself, the standoffs, confrontations, clashes, interventions, negotiations, and compromises that took place as New Yorkers experimented with ways to reconcile the genteel ideals of the Anglophiles at the top of the urban social hierarchy with the clashing values of Dutch traditionalists, religiously inspired artisans, wives, servants, the poor, and the enslaved. The book is divided into three parts that correspond with major sites where the cultural authority of the elite came under siege. Part I, “The Indigestible Dutch,” probes the consequences of New York’s distinctive prehistory—its Dutch origins and its seizure by the English after forty years of Dutch control—for its evolution in the eighteenth century. Long after New Netherland had ceased to exist as a political reality it persisted as a cultural reality.8 In the port city of New York, formerly New Amsterdam, the impress of Dutch institutions on residents was not easily erased as habits of thought

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and patterns of behavior remained entrenched even after any sense of belonging to the “Dutch nation” faded. Chapter 1, “The Crystallization of an Anti-Dutch Narrative,” traces the enduring confusion about the persistence of local Dutch culture in British New York to the English penmen who fabricated a historical narrative that demeaned the local Dutch and undermined the validity of their claims to cultural legitimacy. Chapter 2, “From Nation to Linguistic Community,” focuses on the adaptive strategies of ordinary Dutch New Yorkers who disputed the elite’s cultural authority. Caricatured as retro­ grade in a potent discourse of decline fashioned by educated men with Anglophone sympathies, they acted to safeguard their native tongue by invigorating Dutch print culture and defending Dutch-language worship in the Dutch Reformed Church. Part II, “Pious Commoners,” features men and women who made known that, at least in the religious setting, they no longer were willing to abide by the decisions of gentlemen. Chapter 3, “George Whitefield awakens New York City,” argues that Whitefield’s message of the “new Birth” came to resonate among a variety of New Yorkers, including adherents of the orthodox Dutch Reformed and Anglican Churches. Whitefield’s moral authority, augmented by his charismatic preaching, emboldened city dwellers to challenge doctrines and practices they deemed inauthentic and to dispense with the counsel of men of stature in their churches. Chapter 4, “Becoming Religious Consumers,” documents how ordinary men and women transposed the consumer mentality engendered in New York City’s burgeoning marketplace to the religious sphere. As the palette of urban religious institutions broadened, churchgoers became adept at comparison shopping between preachers and theologies. When it came to claiming the prerogative of defining rules for wives, indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and the lower sorts in general, economically independent men, however minimal their assets, stood on the same cultural ground with gentlemen as beneficiaries of white male privilege. Part III of this book, “Defiant Dependents,” examines the responses of subordinated groups to the white men who held cultural power over them. Chapter 5, “Master of the House”?, brings to light the underlying tension in r­ elationships predicated on the gendered distribution of cultural power by exposing the actions of artisans’ wives who, far from submissive, engaged in actions that amounted to “self-divorce.” In the intimate setting of the household, white indentured servants seized the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with their masters’ conception of suitable servile behavior. Animated by the prospect of eventual independence in a society where being white was an incalculable advantage, more than a few young men and women under

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indentures conspired to run away. Chapter 6, “Attached to the Household,” explores the options available to enslaved domestic workers who were denied autonomy and the sanctity of family. Incrementally amassing tiny opportunities for self-realization or plunging into the city’s interracial underworld was enough for many, but despair led some to flee or to commit acts of violence against whites or themselves. Genteel New Yorkers were not oblivious of the plight of those who lived at the margins of urban society, but the charitable endeavors they championed were directed less toward relieving want than toward instilling Christian humility in those beyond the pale, whether the dregs of the urban population, enslaved African Americans, or Native Americans far afield. Chapter 7, “Sabotaging the Civilizers,” explores lowly city dwellers’ efforts to confound their purported benefactors, whether by thumbing their nose at cardinal points of civility, indulging their appetites at the city’s taverns and brothels, or intruding into the exclusive spaces of the well-to-do. The book’s conclusion speculates on the ramifications of the small-scale cultural confrontations between New York’s commoners and gentlemen as the war of words between Americans and Britons escalated during the years leading up to the American Revolution. Having already tested the limits of the elite’s cultural authority, ordinary New Yorkers were poised to enter the political fray as active players just as the men of privilege with whom they had sparred were growing accustomed to people of lesser rank voicing their opinions on the questions of the day. Gentlemen may not yet have been ready to welcome commoners to their social circles, but they now were on the verge of cultivating their political support.

Pa rt O n e

The Indigestible Dutch

Ch a p ter   1

The Crystallization of an Anti-Dutch Narrative

The triumphalist rendering of the city’s seventeenth-century history propagated by generations of Anglophiles has implanted an aura of inevitability around the transfer of New Amsterdam into English hands and the conversion of New Amsterdam’s burghers into En­ glishmen. Yet the English invasion of New Netherland in 1664, far from constituting a decisive change for Manhattan’s residents, inaugurated a prolonged stage in their history that was colored by uncertainty and trepidation. Between 1664 and 1674, urban dwellers witnessed three changes in government that were the byproduct of the ongoing rivalry between the Netherlands and England. In August 1664, New Netherland was seized by the English, only to revert to Dutch control between July 1673 and November 1674, at which time the colony was returned to English hands. New Amsterdam became New York City, which became New Orange, which again became New York City.1 Nor did the final change of sovereignty from the Dutch to the English in 1674 bring an enduring calm. In 1688, three years after the colony’s proprietor, the Duke of York, became King James II, New York was incorporated into the Dominion of New England, a regional frame of government that diminished local authority and undercut the fragile moorings that had anchored residents’ lives. Mounting concern in England over James II’s Catholicism reverberated on the American side of the Atlantic. With the influx of persecuted French Protestants 11

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fleeing Louis XIV’s France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 putting a local face on the Catholic menace, Dutch New Yorkers were primed to defend their Protestant faith when they learned that James II had been ousted from the throne and replaced by William and Mary. Once Jacob Leisler, a Calvinist merchant, claimed the reins of government in the name of the new Protestant monarchs, the incipient divisions in the city came to the forefront as popular understandings of events in England, colored by a fierce attachment to Protestant values, clashed with the more Erastian views of the local elite. The subsequent suppression of Leisler and his followers by newly installed English officials, acting in concert with Leisler’s leading adversaries, failed to dampen the fervor of Leisler’s supporters and ushered in a generation of oppositional politics that suffused church life and social relations. As rulers and rules kept changing, seventeenth-century New Yorkers were forced to define and redefine themselves in an era marked by indeterminacy. Alterations in government fostered instability, but the sense of contingency that pervaded the lives of city dwellers arose primarily from competing claims to cultural authority. In a society in which common denominators were in short supply, the absence of an overarching cultural framework to support debate and contain conflict left people of diverse cultural backgrounds struggling to coexist. Many former New Netherlanders continued to look at the world through a Dutch lens, unwilling to validate the culture of those who had seized their city. Newcomers from England entering this largely Dutch world oscillated between accommodation to Dutch customs and self-righteous assertions of Englishness. French refugees, ironically, found themselves in a position to shift the center of gravity in the city’s volatile political climate. Historians of this tumultuous era in New York’s history have viewed the process of cultural change through the lens of politics, taking at face value the ethnic categories deployed by contemporaries. But these ethnic categories were invented and reinvented by political actors aiming to produce a version of history that would suit their partisan ends. The intensity of the anti-Catholic rhetoric employed by Jacob Leisler and his backers, who considered themselves above all good Protestants, leaves little doubt of their preference for sorting people according to their religious identities. By contrast, Leisler’s adversaries did not hesitate to brand his supporters as Dutch malcontents, and once they had gained the power to tell the story, they swiftly substituted ethnic for religious categories. Building an anti-Dutch narrative was the next step, as English authorities embarked on the cultural work necessary to subordinate city dwellers who, despite submitting to English rule, still

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considered themselves Dutch. In the wake of Leisler’s Rebellion, the English rulers of New York and their allies launched a multidimensional cultural offensive aimed at weakening the grip of Dutch culture on the city’s longtime residents. In the process, New York City’s Dutch culture was transformed from an alternative culture to an oppositional culture. Mutability rather than permanence was the watchword of the years from 1664 to 1674 as both Dutch and English residents of Manhattan were forced to accommodate to “conquerors,” the Dutch doing so twice. Soon after the takeover, the ire of former New Netherlanders was aroused when soldiers from the English garrison “committed here within this City great insolences and insults towards divers Burghers and inhabitants.” Dutch townspeople, however offended, anticipated a quick reverse of military fortunes in the ongoing conflict between England and the United Provinces. In July 1665, Governor Richard Nicolls noted that “the Dutch here . . . have long hoped for and expected De Ruyter [a Dutch admiral].” Nicolls cautioned a subordinate at Albany not to be surprised at comments in this vein: “Let not your Eares bee abused with private Storyes, of the Dutch being disaffected to the English, for generally wee cannot expect they love us.” Elaborating on this theme in April 1666, Nicolls admitted that “at this present during the Warres with Holland we cannot expect the good affections of the Dutch here to the English.” Fear that the Dutch would ridicule them caused the city’s English rulers to conceal a shortage of money and goods. “We carry it on as well as we can, desiring not to let the people know that we are any way straightned; which to know, would cause some to rejoice, & insult.” The unease of English newcomers at the prospect of the Dutch recapturing New York was palpable. Encircled by unfriendly Dutch residents, they considered their position precarious and insisted that the governor remain to shield them. “The Towne & Country cry out they will leave their dwellings if they cannot stay mee from going to Boston,” Nicolls reported, “such are their apprehensions of a Dutch invasion” and the presumed retribution to be visited on them by the city’s Dutch population.2 Former New Amsterdammers did not cease to think of themselves as Dutch because they had acquiesced to English rule. In 1668, Domine (minister of the Dutch Reformed Church) Samuel Megapolensis complained that the manner in which his salary was collected—going around from house to house—was “unpleasant and degrading, and altogether unusual in our Dutch nation.” Megapolensis’s conviction that he was still a member of the “Dutch nation” was shared by former director-general Petrus (Peter) Stuyvesant, who in 1667 defined the new status of his colonial compatriots as “the Dutch

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nation (now his Royall High[n]esse most faithfull and obedient subjects).” Members of the city’s Common Council in a c. 1669 address to the Duke of York characterized themselves as “being for the most part Dutch borne (but now His Ma[jes]ties faithfull and loyal subjects)” and made a point of noting that the English government’s allowance of free trade with Holland “did encouradge most of ye dutch nation to remaine.” This notion of a hybrid identity—Dutch descent but English subject—seemingly was adopted by the King’s Council in London, which, in 1668, referred to “his Ma[jes]ties sworn subjects of the Dutch nation, inhabitants of New Yorke, in America.”3 Signs of amity between members of the two nations impressed one En­ glish official in 1669. “There is good correspondence kept between the En­ glish and Dutch, and to keep it the closer, sixteen (ten Dutch and 6 English) have had a constant meeting at each others houses in turnes, twice every week in winter, and now in summer once; they meet at six at night and part about eight or nine.” Dutch women and men marched side by side with their English counterparts in 1671 in the stately funeral procession for Governor Francis Lovelace’s nephew, signifying that the new rulers approved of parity between English and Dutch city dwellers. Lovelace was attentive to the needs of the local Dutch community, ordering the mayor to have a proclamation “publiquely read both in the English & Dutch Tongues. . . . and afterwards . . . affixed in the most publique places of the Citty” in 1668. In 1671, he empowered the elders and deacons of the city’s Dutch Reformed church “to make a Rate or Taxe amongst ye Inhabitants, and those that shall frequent ye Church” for the support of the minister, clerk, officers, and the poor, as well as the repair of the church building. In 1673, he endorsed the idea of “a Fast proposed by the Dutch Domine,” declaring that “noe particular but a Gen[er] all ffast shall bee Celebrated in this City.”4 Despite such fragmentary evidence of harmonious relations between Dutch and English, the appearance of a Dutch fleet in the vicinity of New York in July 1673 sparked a swell of patriotic feeling among former New Amsterdammers. Instantly, the residue of nearly a decade of English rule melted as the “Dutch in the Towne being all Armed Incouraged them [to a] storme,” and, as Captain John Manning, who was in charge during Governor Lovelace’s absence, recalled that “while they stormed ingaged that we should [not] look over our Workes and they were about 400 Armed Men.” Animated by feelings of loyalty to a fatherland some had never seen, the city’s many Dutch residents rejoiced at the prospect of the restoration of Dutch rule. The conflict now playing out in New York had erupted in Europe in 1672 when England, in company with France, had invaded the Netherlands. These hostilities soon had repercussions across the Atlantic, as a Dutch fleet sailing in American

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Figure 2.  This view of New Amsterdam as it appeared in 1673 was incorporated into the mapmaker Peter Schenk’s Hecatompolis, published in Amsterdam in 1702. Courtesy of the Maps of Bert Twaalfhoven, from the Collections of Fordham University Libraries, Identifier FUNY-05194.

waters in 1673 seized on New York as a target of opportunity and recaptured the colony with virtually no resistance. The new Dutch rulers, acting in the name of the States General, revalidated the status of the Dutch residents of the city they dubbed New Orange. Those English who chose to remain in New Orange and retain their property were required to take a special oath to the States General of the United Provinces and the Prince of Orange.5 Yet there was no mistaking the precarious position of the reconquered colony. As New Orange’s burgomasters and schepens explained to the Dutch commanders on September 6, 1673, “Our enemies [the English and their French allies] by whom we . . . are encompassed round about on all sides . . . will doubtless endeavor . . . to reduce this place under England so soon as they hear that we are again left to ourselves; our weakness and condition being as well known to them as to ourselves since they have had now 9 years’ command over us.” Given the colony’s exposed position, it was not surprising that “some [have been] so bold as to say already that something else will again be seen before Christmas, and that the King of England will never suffer the Dutch to remain and sit down here in the centre of all his dominions to his serious prejudice in many respects,

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so that we are inevitably to expect a visit from our malevolent neighbors of old, now our bitter enemies unless they be prevented . . . by your valiant prowess and accompanying force.”6 The realities of imperial politics soon became evident. Whatever measures were taken by the province’s Dutch military rulers to avert attack by the En­ glish were in vain, as diplomats in Europe relinquished the fruits of the Dutch military venture as they negotiated the Treaty of Westminster, which ended the third (and final) Anglo-Dutch War in 1674. When Connecticut residents Isaac Melyn and John Sharpe, both of whom had ties to the city, made their way to New Orange in the spring of 1674 to spread the news of the colony’s restoration to English control in advance of official notification, the Dutch governor-general, Anthony Colve, had them placed in the dungeon of Fort William Henry. Melyn, a Dutchman, who spoke to “a multitude of his Countrymen” and inflamed their passions against the States General, was labeled an “unfaithfull Judasly and treacherous travaillor,” but he escaped execution after shifting blame to Sharpe, and instead was put to hard labor on the city’s defenses. Sharpe was banished from the city, his sentence being “Publisht . . . with great solemnity Ringing the Townehouse bell 3 tymes and the major part of the Towne congregated together” to witness it.7 Staging a spectacle that would deflect the burghers’ anger at their betrayal onto an out-of-place Englishman instead of the Dutch diplomats who had sealed the colony’s fate did not save the colony’s Dutch rulers from the vituperation of an enraged community when it became known that the territory had been ceded back to the English. Realizing that their welfare had been sacrificed to imperial goals, the city’s residents, in Sharpe’s words, “belch[ed] forth their curses and execration against the Prince of Orange and States of Holland, the Dutch Admiralls who tooke it, and their taskmaster the Governour.” They vowed not to “surrender, but keepe it by fighting soe long as they can stand with one Legg and fight with one hand.” Dismay at the outcome of an episode that had begun with high hopes of the resumption of Dutch rule prompted some burghers to sever their ties to the city when a second English takeover became imminent. “During the last four weeks,” the Dutch minister Wilhelmus Nieuwenhuisen wrote on July 26, 1674, “in apprehension of a change in governors, certain of our members have moved away.”8 Return to the Netherlands remained an option, but it did not become a reality for the great majority of local residents, whose long-standing ties to the community took precedence over feelings of attachment to patria. Yet the exacting terms of submission mandated by the new governor, Edmund Andros—specifically an oath requiring the populace to be prepared

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to take up arms in behalf of England against their fatherland—seemed too much to bear. Several wealthy Dutch merchants asked that they not to be “pressed to abjure all natural affection towards our own nation,” explaining that they “object[ed] to swearing lightly what nature and love for our own nation forbid.” Andros dealt with the recalcitrant merchants severely, confiscating their property, and even went so far as to imprison Nicholas Bayard, Petrus Stuyvesant’s nephew, to drive home the necessity of allegiance to the new English government. The governor’s draconian measures, “the unprecedented proceedings against the inhabitants in connection with the change in government,” had “excited the hatred and contempt of the rulers against the subjects.” Shaken by these events, many former residents of New Amsterdam were poised to uproot themselves from their longtime home. Domine Nieuwenhuisen confided that “I should not be surprised if a large portion of the Dutch citizens should be led to break up here and remove.”9 The ultimate submission of the contentious merchants not only established English authority definitively, but also paved the way for what turned out to be a cozy relationship between a Dutch-speaking governor, who had resided in the Netherlands during his youth, and merchants who had much to gain from accommodating to the new English regime. Andros would not budge on the issue of loyalty, but he was more than willing to offer lucrative opportunities to his Dutch friends, even to the point of alienating En­ glish merchants keen to carve out a niche in New York. English newcomers such as Anglican chaplain Charles Wooley, who served in New York between 1678 and 1680, believed that the local Dutch had been reconciled to English rule. He found the city’s “inhabitants, both English and Dutch very civil and courteous,” adding that “I cannot say that I observed any swearing or quarrelling, but was easily reconciled and recanted by a mild rebuke.” Imperial bureaucrat Edward Randolph also accented the harmony that prevailed in New York when Andros was governor. “I observed the English & Dutch lived very quiet, & in Freindship.”10 But the alliance forged between Andros and the Dutch elite caused ordinary Dutch residents to become suspicious of wealthy Dutch merchants such as Frederick Philipse who had become intimates of Andros. “He and the governor were one,” observed a Dutch visitor, presumably echoing the gossip of the streets. At a minimum, Dutch commoners still nurtured grudges against the English occupiers, a sentiment that surfaced in 1679 when members of the night watch were accused of beating Englishmen and yelling “Slay the English dogs.” Although Andros’s overtures to the city’s Dutch favored the wealthy few, the thrust of his policy was to treat everyone in an evenhanded way. Looking back on his career in New York, Andros felt proud that “equall

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justice and countenance [were] given to all the inhabitants, merchants, sojourners, Traders or Strangers, without respect of persons, nation or quality w’soever.” The city’s Common Council, in lockstep with the governor, also sought to minimize discord between English and Dutch, warning the constables of the penalties that awaited “whosoever Shall presume to make any quarrel upon the watch upon the account of being of different nations.”11 However genuine his desire to improve relations between the Dutch holdovers and the English newcomers, Andros was also committed to making New York into an English city. Reshaping the urban landscape had begun under Governor Nicolls, who had ordered a well to be built in the fort, and then exulted that it was “beyond the Imagination of the Dutch, who would [not] beleeve it till they saw it finisht, which produces very good water.” In 1679, a visitor from the Netherlands commented, “There is a well of fine water dug in the fort by the English, contrary to the opinion of the Dutch, who supposed the fort was built on rock, and had therefore never attempted any such thing.” The English also made alterations to the renamed Fort James, closing the gate on the water side and making a battery there, with a false gate. Over the gate on the land side, which opened on Broadway, they placed the “the arms of the Duke of York.” Before the city hall they installed the king’s arms. Dotting the city with emblems of English sovereignty went hand in hand with erasing the signatures of Dutch urban life, from filling in the canal the Dutch called the Heere Graft to giving the city’s streets English names. At the same time, the municipal government was cast on the English model, English laws took precedence, and English weights and measures were put into practice.12 However visible, the legal, physical, and symbolic changes implemented by the English may not have counted for much in a city where the Dutch were ubiquitous and the rhythms of daily life still reflected Dutch sensibilities. Though privileged by virtue of their connection to the ruling power, English immigrants were vastly outnumbered by Dutch men and women in the streets, the taverns, and the markets and likely felt psychologically overwhelmed by those who were, in theory, a conquered people. To them, New York clearly did not resemble an English society but “seemed rather like a conquered Foreign Province held by the terrour of a Garrison, than an English Colony, possessed and settled by people of our own Nation.”13 Sundays offer a particularly telling example of the Dutch cast of what was nominally an English city in 1680. The Dutch monopoly of sacred space was conspicuous. Close to 450 people gathered at the Dutch Reformed church in the fort to hear lengthy Dutch-language sermons by Domine Nieuwenhuisen in the morning and afternoon, and a small congregation of Dutch Lutherans also held worship services. By contrast, there were “not above twenty-five or

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thirty people” present at Anglican worship, which consisted of “the reading of all their prayers and ceremonies out of the prayer book,” followed by the Anglican chaplain preaching a brief sermon, which he read out of “a little book in his hand.” The only other option for English-speaking worshippers was to sit in silence in the small Quaker meeting. New York City’s Sabbath calendar was set by the Dutch Reformed. As Domine Henricus Selyns explained in 1683, the “English service is after my morning service, and the French service is after my afternoon service.”14 Without a building of its own or a great many followers, and compelled to adhere to a Dutch timetable, the local Church of England was only a pale replica of its metropolitan counterparts. The failure of New York’s English rulers to translate their power into cultural dominion meant that Dutch New Yorkers could be subjects of the English crown without jettisoning their cultural heritage. Even as urban economic and political institutions increasingly conformed to English models, the imprint of English culture on the city’s Dutch denizens remained slight. The great majority of Dutch men and women persisted in speaking Dutch, perpetuating Dutch customs, consuming Dutch foods, and worshipping in time-honored ways in the Dutch Reformed Church. In this familiar, yet altered, environment, they carved out a hybrid identity that allowed them to participate in the civic order yet retain a sense of their distinctiveness as a people. This fictive corporate identity was encapsulated in the commonly used term “the Dutch nation.” In 1680, New York’s Dutch Reformed ministers chose their words with precision when they described the position of their constituents. “We are in a foreign country, and also governed by the English nation.”15 The unmistakable implication was that the Dutch in America still possessed a distinct collective identity. With the Dutch firmly planted on center stage, the city’s English immigrants lost patience as they waited in the wings for commercial opportunities to open up. Incensed at Governor Andros’s preferment of Dutch traders, several merchants used their influence in England in 1680 to engineer Andros’s recall and to compel him to answer charges that included “yor favoring Dutchmen before English in trade, or makeing by Laws hurtfull to ye English in generall.” Though vindicated, Andros was not sent back to New York, and it thus fell to his successor, Thomas Dongan, to grapple with the problem of reproducing English culture in a city where, according to Virginian William Byrd, who visited in 1685, “the inhabitants are about [6/8] Dutch the remainder French & English.” Troubled by the limited inroads the English had made in the colony, Dongan recommended that “a more equal ballance may be kept here between his Ma[jes]tys naturall born subjects and foreigners which latter are the most prevailing part of this Government.” With far

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too few immigrants from the British Isles arriving, Dongan’s solution to New York’s demographic imbalance was “adding to this Govermt the neighboring English Colonys.”16 This suggestion was soon to be implemented when New York was joined to the Dominion of New England in 1688. Although Governor Dongan was able to establish key English institutions in New York—an elected Assembly in 1683 and a charter for municipal government along English lines in 1686—he faced a major stumbling block in the fact that “here bee not many of the Church of England,” as he reported in 1687. Doubtless embarrassed that the English were obliged to conduct their worship in the Dutch Reformed church, he had urged city dwellers to erect a separate house of worship for the Church of England. “The Great Church which serves both the English [and] the Dutch is within the Fort which is found to bee very inconvenient therefore I desire that there may bee an order for their building an other ground already being layd out for that purpose [and] they wanting not money in Store wherewithall to build it.”17 But Dongan’s credibility as a spokesman for the Church of England in New York was already undercut by his identity as an Irishman and a Catholic. With the approval of the Catholic Duke of York, who would become King James II in 1685, Dongan had created a Catholic infrastructure in the city, fitting out a chapel in the fort, employing Catholic priests, and founding a Jesuit school. These developments appeared ominous to Dutch Reformed residents such as merchant Oloff Stevenszen van Cortlandt, who in 1683 confided to his daughter, “It is said that the Beeltsnyder [image carver] is making an altar—they intend to build a popish church over it.” While the number of professed Catholics in the city remained tiny, the fact that a cadre of officials and well-to-do merchants, not to mention Dutch minister Henricus Selyns, opted to close their eyes to the Catholic beachhead in the city caused alarm to Protestant stalwarts in the Dutch Reformed congregation.18 Consternation at the entrenchment of a Romanizing elite that had sanctioned Catholic institutions turned into palpable fears of an international conspiracy against Protestantism as refugees from France began pouring into the city in the years surrounding the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Anxiety over what John Murrin has called “the menace of Louis XIV” deepened with the influx of scores of his victims.19 Living in proximity to people who had experienced at first hand the assaults of Catholics honed Dutch New Yorkers’ identity as Reformed Protestants. Contributing to the intensification of Protestant feeling among the city’s Dutch in the 1680s were the ongoing efforts of reformers in the Netherlands to bring religious practices into closer conformity to the word of God. These Dutch Pietists, proponents of the Nadere Reformatie (further Reformation),

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had initiated a search for the essence of Protestantism that reverberated on the American side of the Atlantic. In the years since 1664, the Reformed Church had emerged as the physical and spiritual center of the Dutch nation in New York. Apart from a small number of residents who adhered to the Lutheran faith, Dutch New Yorkers subscribed to a common core of religious beliefs associated with Reformed Protestantism. Domine Selyns, who earlier had served with distinction in New Netherland, took over the flourishing congregation in 1682. Preaching “twice on [the] Sabbath and once on each Wednesday,” offering catechetical instruction to hundreds of young people, and shoring up church discipline, Selyns exulted at the fruits of his labors, noting that “my audiences continually increased.” By his own measure, New York City’s Dutch Reformed congregation boasted 556 communicants (members) in 1686 and even more hearers.20 Yet Selyns’s litany of accomplishments, his celebratory tone, and particularly his assertion that “our religious services are held with quietness, without any annoyances” mask his abiding concern with “discord in matters of religion.” As one who prized unity within his flock, he agonized over the possibility that the church would be “overtaken” with “schisms and soul destroying doctrines from without.” Selyns had reached New York at a time when, in his own words, “God’s church [had] suffered considerable harm” from the extended visit of Labadist missionaries Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, who had “disturbed many by holding up the Reformed Church in a suspicious light.” Although he minimized the numbers of Labadists—radical Pietists—who had separated from the Reformed church, and insisted that “most of those who had ceased attending church services, upon my arrival returned, and now come to the Lord’s Table,” Selyns conceded that the Labadists still constituted a splinter group. “[They] generally attend my morning and afternoon services on Sundays, but after that they meet by themselves.”21 Danckaerts and Sluyter’s return to New York in 1683 en route to establishing a colony in Maryland rekindled Selyns’s antipathy toward these sectarians, who still made a point of attending Reformed worship. He charged that “in order to lay the ground-work for a schism, they began holding meetings with closed doors, and to rail out against the church and consistory, as Sodom and Egypt, and saying they must separate from the church.” In alerting the Amsterdam classis (the governing body of the Reformed Church) that “certain ones have sought to disturb some of the simple minded . . . and to ensnare them by feigned piety and ambiguous words,” Selyns, in essence, was acknowledging the appeal of the Labadist message to members of his flock.22 As a man who expected unwavering loyalty from those to whom he ministered, Selyns did not take kindly to congregants questioning his teachings.

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His preoccupation with the insidious threat of growing disaffection among his flock was evident in 1685, when he admitted that his church had experienced “certain defections and increase of errors.”23 The ferment in the city’s Dutch Reformed congregation was traceable to the heated dialogue under way in the Netherlands between Cocceians (after their leader Johannes Cocceius) like Selyns, who endorsed a form of church practice that legitimated cooperation with the rulers of the state and tolerance of other religions, and Voetians, followers of the theologian Gisbertus Voetius, who placed piety over formalism and criticized the Cocceians for their laxity in enforcing Reformed doctrine, as well as their cosmopolitan outlook. The lightning rod for the dispute in New York was Jacobus Koelman, a leading Voetian who was being courted by admirers in New Castle, who frankly acknowledged that he “usually does not observe the printed forms of prayers or holydays.” To Selyns, Koelman epitomized all the tendencies in Dutch church life that he abhorred. Noting that Koelman held “separate conventicles” and “spoke more or less against the forms,” Selyns cautioned that “it would be difficult to persuade him to administer Baptism and the Communion according to those forms.” Selyns presumably transmitted his opinion of Koelman to his elders and deacons, who dutifully represented Koelman as “a schismatic [who] holds separate meetings” and urged that he be prevented from coming so as to “keep the church free from divisions, and to preserve its unity.”24 Koelman ultimately was deterred from crossing the Atlantic, but the danger of Pietists infiltrating the Reformed community remained uppermost in Selyns’s mind. Encounters with several zealous Pietist preachers who were seeking a foothold in the environs of New York City heightened Selyns’s resolve to stand against men he denigrated as “only tailors or shoemakers or cobblers” and whose beliefs he considered subversive of church order. “They speak against the church, public prayer, and the liturgy of the church. They say we are Coelmanists, catechize, have private exercises and special prayers; and almost say that the public prayers are spurious.” Selyns saw it as his duty to put the faithful on guard. “True believers are grieved at these things,” he intoned, “and look forward to very great troubles therefrom to the church of God.”25 If Selyns anguished over the appearance of Dutch Pietist preachers in New York, he was far from critical of newly arrived Huguenot clergymen. When Pierre Daillé began preaching in the city in 1683, Selyns praised him as “full of zeal, learning and piety. Exiled for the sake of his religion, he now devotes himself here to the cause of Christ with untiring energy.” Nor did Selyns express concern at the entrenchment of a refugee community in the city. “Our French ministerial brethren are doing well,” he noted in 1688. “Their

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congregations grow not a little almost daily, because of the continual arrival of French (Protestant) refugees.” Selyns’s overriding interest, however, was securing the status of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York City, so he was careful not to embrace the ardent anti-Catholicism of the Huguenots. Rather, he cultivated good relations with the Catholic Governor Dongan, whom he complimented as “a person of knowledge, refinement and modesty.” Sounding proud, he related that “I have had the pleasure of receiving a call from him, and I have the privilege of calling on him whenever I desire.”26 Strict Protestants were apprehensive about Selyns’s ties to Dongan and his allies among the Dutch elite, whose countenancing of Catholic worship in the city was seen as repudiating the values at the heart of the Reformed faith. But what forced New York’s committed Dutch Protestants to confront their worst fears was the birth of a son to James II in June 1688. A Catholic heir to the throne had now displaced James’s Protestant daughters. The previous April, on being apprised of the queen’s pregnancy, Governor Dongan had commanded that “public thanks and solemn prayers be offered up to Almighty God” for “this great blessing.” When news finally came of the auspicious event, Edmund Andros, who headed the Dominion of New England into which New York had been incorporated, sponsored a local celebration. He “invited all that would come to drinke the princes health. . . . All the Great Gunns in the fort were fired volleyes of Small Shott from his Ma[jes]ties two Companyes answearing them: and then all the shipps in the harbour fired off their Gunns: the people every where drinking and crying out God save the Prince of Wales. During this entertainm[en]t in the fort a very larg Bonfire was made before the fort Gate. . . . The next day a publick day of thanks Giving was ordered to be kept . . . at New York the next Sunday.”27 The rejoicing of local leaders, including prominent Dutchmen, at a turn of events that endangered the Protestant faith sent chills through the many city dwellers who cherished the hope that a purer form of religious practice would soon emerge. As if Domine Selyns’s proclamation of thanksgiving for the queen’s pregnancy were not enough, Dutch Reformed congregants recoiled “at the celebrating of the Prince of Wales’s birth.” Stephanus Van Cort­ landt, then mayor of New York City, “sacrificed his hat, peruke ettc. although professing the Reformed Religion.” Years later, some strict Dutch Reformed recollected that the order to celebrate the prince’s birth was “obeyed with altogether too much joy, and even with evidences of unbounded gladness by those who were at the head of our own church affairs.”28 By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, New York City’s population was divided over the legitimacy of rulers whose policies ran counter to the thrust of the Reformation. With the bulk of New Yorkers preoccupied with defending

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Protestantism against Catholicism, the contest between Dutch and English cultures receded in significance. In England, anti-Dutch sentiment had lessened as hostility toward the French began to increase in the 1670s.29 As concerns over religious issues came to the fore in New York, the English cultural project stalled. Whether one was Protestant or Catholic now mattered more than whether one was Dutch or English. One’s “nation” was far less important than one’s religion. The expulsion of James II from the English throne in 1688 and the installation of the Dutch Prince William of Orange and his wife Mary as ­sovereigns of England in the “Glorious Revolution” resonated with a distinctive timbre in New York, a place where old-timers still nurtured emotional ties to the Netherlands. Jacob Leisler capitalized on the unsettled situation to affirm the Calvinist beliefs of large numbers of local residents. As one who embraced the ideas of the Nadere Reformatie, Leisler inspired not only the majority of the city’s Dutch population but also some among the English and the French to take action against men whose tolerance of Catholics stamped them as implacable enemies. With Leisler at their head, self-proclaimed true Protestants moved to root out all Catholic sympathizers in the city. Brandishing the label “papist” as if it were a weapon, they acted to rid New York of such evil people and dismantle the apparatus of Roman Catholic worship installed by Dongan. Soon after seizing control of the city, Leisler declared his intent to “have some papists disarmed & also those Idolls destroyed which we heare our dailly still worshipped.”30 He also set about ousting men known to have supported the previous regime tied to James II. Not content to remove only acknowledged Catholics such as collector Matthew Plowman from office, Leisler cast a much wider net, bringing under scrutiny a host of people who claimed to be Protestant yet who, in his eyes, had been attracted to Catholic ideas, among them official favorites Nicholas Bayard and Stephanus van Cortlandt. In August 1689, Leisler informed King William and Queen Mary that “I watch no less upon their [Bayard and van Cortlandt’s] conduct, as to them and severall other peculiar persons, who, under the aparance of the functions of the Protestant Religion, remain still affected to the Papist, which are here in greater number than in whole New England.” Alexander Innes, the Anglican chaplain in New York since 1686, described by one of Leisler’s associates as “by outward pretence a Protestant but in effect a meere papist,” also came under attack. “Mr Ennis the late English Minister[,] lately departed from this place with

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testimony of the Dutch and French minister,” Leisler asserted, “has since been known to be of opinion contrary to our religion, whereof I have testimony in good forme.” Two men who had been in a boat with Innes claimed he said that “the Jesuits were good people, that he believed in the doctrine of purgatory, that the Catholic Romish religion was the best religion, that all that left it were heretics, that the common people should not be allowed the Scripture and that auricular confession was a necessity.”31 But the chief target of Leisler’s antipathy was Dutch Reformed minister Henricus Selyns, whom he denounced for departing from Reformed teachings and publicly opposing his cause. The question of religious identity assumed paramount importance in Leisler’s New York. Unless a man vociferously avowed support for the Protestant cause as embodied in King William and Queen Mary, he was subject to harassment or imprisonment. In this climate, Leisler’s archrivals, Nicholas Bayard and Stephanus van Cortlandt, found it expedient to have Domine ­Selyns certify that “they were born of Protestant parents, . . . baptized and educated by them in the Reformed church and schools; frequented public worship, and bound . . . themselves by the sacrament of the Eucharist to preserve and protect the true faith.”32 Locked in a power struggle with a man whom they viewed as a usurper, Leisler’s adversaries had no choice but to accept the terms of debate that he had set. Because the coordinates of cultural identity in New York City had shifted to a religious plane, what mattered most was whether one was a true Protestant or instead endorsed religious toleration for all, even Catholics. Leisler’s Protestant crusade was halted after two years when former members of the New York elite regained their positions of influence in the new English administration of Governor Henry Sloughter. The arrest and trial of Leisler, his chief assistant, Jacob Milborne, as well as others in his inner circle, polarized the city’s population. Leisler’s enemies controlled the judicial process—they collected evidence, they mistranslated English documents into Dutch, they picked an all-English jury—and after getting the verdict they hoped for, persuaded a reluctant Governor Sloughter to order Leisler’s and Milborne’s executions. The public hanging on May 16, 1691, further inflamed feelings on both sides. Those who had suffered from Leisler’s policies were eager to inflict the maximum punishment on one whom they regarded as a persecutor. For his backers, Leisler was transformed into a martyr. Put to death at the hands of the new English administration, Leisler emerged as a sacrificial victim for the Protestant cause, an image etched deeply in the minds of contemporaries by his inspiring speech at the gallows and the large crowd’s singing of the 79th Psalm, “a bitter lamentation and an unmistakable rebuke

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to Jacob Leisler’s enemies.”33 The passions of the Leislerians were not easily extinguished. New Yorkers who had hastened Leisler’s downfall refrained from attacking what he and his comrades had stood for—William III and the Protestant cause. Anti-Catholicism had become a cornerstone of official policy after James II’s ouster, and Leisler’s opponents judiciously went on record to affirm that they were good Protestants and supported the Glorious Revolution and the Protestant succession. To publicly declare that one was a Catholic or a Jacobite in this atmosphere was political suicide. When news of “a horrid conspiracy against His Majesty’s sacred person” reached New York in the spring of 1696, Governor Benjamin Fletcher, a Tory who had cast his lot with Leisler’s adversaries upon taking up his post in 1692, stood as a staunch supporter of King William III. Acting swiftly, he ordered “military expressions of joy for His Maj[es]ty’s safety,” proclaimed “a publick day of thanksgiving,” and required New York’s male residents to sign an Association Oath. Compliance was nearly universal. “There is but one Gent: in the City has refused,” Fletcher reported with satisfaction; “he is a Roman Catholick, and had made application unto me.” Soon after, the governor admitted that “there are several Quakers in the City of New York from a pretence of tendernesse of conscience and aversion to the carnall weapon will not sign the Association nor take an oath. I have given orders to release them.” Following instructions, he sent the Lords of Trade “a list of the Roman Catholicks, and reputed Papists in New Yorke who are all disarmed and obliged to give bond with surety for their good behaviour or be confined in prison.”34 Purging the city’s few remaining Catholics—ten men, according to the list submitted by the mayor—was in no way as significant as asking New Yorkers to publicly acknowledge their loyalty to King William. The Association Oath rolls reveal that 676 men (66 percent of the 1,019 white men counted in the 1698 census) signed the oath, including two Jews who signed in Hebrew, and at least one free black. This virtual community of subjects loyal to the Protestant monarch materialized on “a day of thanksgiving for the great and happy deliverance of His Maj[es]ty and his Kingdom of England which,” Fletcher noted, “was cheerfully observed throughout the Govern[men]t.”35 This singular moment in time did not dissolve the enmity between the city’s warring factions, but it did demonstrate the potency of anti-Catholicism as an instrument for uniting New Yorkers in the years following the Glorious Revolution. A 1691 law guaranteeing liberty of conscience for New Yorkers stipulated that “noething herein mentioned . . . shall extend to give Liberty for any persons of the Romish religion to exercise their manor of

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worship.” In 1700, “An act against Jesuits and popish preists” banished “all and every Jesuit and Seminary Preist missionary or Ecclesiasticall person made or ordained by any Authority . . . derived . . . from the Pope or see of Rome” from the colony. The same year, the Whig governor, Lord Bellomont, confident that he had the support of city dwellers, made an example of mutinous Irish soldiers, whom he excoriated as “the very scum of the army in Ireland and several Irish Papists amongst ’em.”36 Taking a stand against the Catholic menace, whether in the form of conspirators against King William or immiserated Irish soldiers, was a sure means of paving common cultural ground. New Yorkers of all sorts periodically repudiated Catholicism by swearing an oath such as the one signed in 1705 by the justices, aldermen, and assistants. This Protestant declaration rejected transubstantiation and characterized other Catholic beliefs as superstitious and idolatrous.37 The act of oath-taking formalized inchoate feelings and indelibly etched city dwellers’ prejudices into a binding statement of belief reinforcing the anti-Catholicism that became the bedrock of eighteenth-century New Yorkers’ outlook on the world. The practice persisted until the 1770s. But if Leisler’s foes had found it expedient to concede the importance of religious identity and to prove beyond a doubt their commitment to Protestantism and the Protestant succession following the Glorious Revolution, this did not mean that they accorded matters of faith a high priority. Having been vulnerable to charges of being too sympathetic to Catholics during the reign of James II, they had every reason to direct attention away from religion to what today would be called ethnicity. Cultural issues now were politicized to a degree unknown in Andros’s New York. In the aftermath of Leisler’s Rebellion, the fact that New Yorkers were, in the words of Governor Fletcher, “a mixt People and of different Perswasions in Religion” became a matter of increasing concern. In 1696, William Nicoll and Chidley Brooke estimated that “the Inhabitants in the Town of New York are one half Dutch, a quarter part French Protestants, and a Quarter part En­glish,” a far from ideal situation as Charles Lodwyck, an Anglicized Dutchman, had pointed out in 1692, when he pronounced New York City “too great a mixture of nations,” and, most troubling, “English ye least part.” The exotic elements of local Dutch culture may have fascinated Bostonians Dr. Benjamin Bullivant and Sarah Kemble Knight, who visited the city at the turn of the eighteenth century, but the priority of New York’s English rulers was to extirpate these traces of the previous regime and to refashion the city into a society in which Dutch culture no longer had priority of place.38 Recruiting

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English immigrants was not enough. Victory in the struggle over cultural authority in the city depended on convincing the Dutch, not to mention other foreigners, of the superiority of English ways. What was called for was a massive cultural offensive aimed at weakening the hold of Dutch culture on the city’s longtime residents. For the English, attaining greater cultural weight hinged on embedding English institutions in local society. In the 1690s, the colony’s legal system was overhauled and a Supreme Court on the English model implanted. Equally important, steps were taken to alter the peripheral position of the Anglican Church. The centrality of the Church of England in a truly English society was axiomatic to local Anglican leaders, who in 1699 bewailed the fact that “the English nation for above Thirty Yeares has been possessed of these Countreys without any place for public worship of Almighty God, in this City, except the Chapel in the Fort built by the Dutch so that though the English grew numerous, the government in their hands and the national laws took place, yet for want of a Temple for the public worship according to the English Church, this seemed rather like a conquered Foreign Province held by the terrour of a Garrison, than an English Colony, possessed and settled by people of our own Nation.”39 Governor Fletcher, working in tandem with a coterie of well-to-do Anglicans, underwrote the construction of Trinity Church, destined to stand as a symbol of Anglican supremacy to all urban dwellers, and engineered the passage of the Ministry Act, which assured the establishment of the Church of England in the city. To secure the acquiescence of Dutch Reformed leaders in the privileging of Anglicanism in the city, Fletcher struck a covert bargain with them. In 1696, the Dutch Reformed Church was granted a charter that placed it on a sound legal foundation and ensured that church property acquired through gifts and inheritance was safe. The opening of Trinity Church in 1697 with William Vesey, a forceful spokesman for the Anglican cause, as rector began to shift the religious balance in the city away from the Dutch. The status of the Church of England was further enhanced by the commencement of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) mission in New York shortly after 1700. Through its sponsorship of a Charity School for poor children of all European backgrounds, as well as a school for enslaved and free blacks taught by the celebrated Huguenot convert Elias Neau, the SPG fostered the spread of Anglican beliefs and the English language.40 Reweaving New York’s cultural tapestry also entailed calibrating the calendar of celebrations to an English rhythm. During the 1690s, public displays commemorating important English anniversaries were used to drum

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up pro-English sentiment. In 1699, Lord Bellomont selected several dates on the English calendar—King William’s birthday, the anniversary of his being proclaimed king, and the day of his coronation—as occasions to parade the city regiment. He viewed this as “a usefull peice of ceremony because it helps to affect the people to the King and puts ’em in mind of their duty to him.” In 1700, the city’s Common Council, taking a cue from Bellomont, ordered provision for bonfires on November 4 and 5, “being the birth day of Our sovereign Lord King William” and “Gun powder Treason [Guy Fawkes Day].”41 The dissemination of English culture in New York received a large boost from the inauguration of printing. Prior to the 1690s, the city did not have its own press, and, indeed, Governor Andros had made a point of opposing the introduction of printing to the colony. King James II had spelled out this policy in his instructions to Governor Dongan in 1686. “For as much as great inconvenience may arise by the liberty of printing within our province of New York; you are to provide by all necessary Orders that noe person keep any press for printing, nor that any book, pamphlet or other matters whatsoever bee printed without your especial leave & license first obtained.” Neither the Dutch nor the English possessed a means of transmitting important texts other than circulating writings in manuscript. When printer William Bradford transferred his press from Philadelphia to New York City in 1693, a critical advantage passed to the English, since controlling access to print communication was vital to molding cultural norms. Governor Fletcher, recognizing the benefits of having a printer closely aligned with the government, employed Bradford as New York’s official printer.42 By gaining control over the pulpit, the schoolroom, and the press, the English seemingly had secured a decisive advantage in the cultural arena. Yet loosening the hold of Dutch culture on the city’s longtime residents in the poisoned atmosphere of the 1690s and early 1700s was no simple matter. Most of the city’s Dutch men and women inhabited a separate cultural universe, entry to which was controlled by language. This distinct cultural space functioned as a cocoon of sorts, allowing Dutch city dwellers to limit their exposure to English culture. When, on April 20, 1702, Hannah, the wife of anti-Leislerian tavern keeper John Hutchins, who was being prosecuted for treason, complained that “the ‘pannel’ of the jury which is to try him . . . all are of ‘Dutch Extraction,’ ” persons unacquainted with the English language, and also “strangers” to her husband’s “life and Conversation,” and asked that the jury consist of “Englishmen or at least [of persons] of English Extraction,” men who may “properly be said to be of his neighbourhood,” she bore witness to the chasm that separated New York’s Dutch and English worlds at the turn of the eighteenth century.43

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The cultural breach between the Dutch and English in New York City was compounded by political alienation, since many Dutch believed that English officials were responsible for Leisler’s death. In 1694, goldsmith John Windower declared that “he would stand up for Jacobus Leisler while he had a drop of blood in his body,” adding that “their should be others hanged in a short time to Ballance the said Leisler & Milborne.” Leisler’s supporters yearned for vengeance. In 1692, Gerrit Duyckins (Duycking) allegedly stated, “It is our day now there is a day comming these Rogues have murdered Milborne & Leisler & will shortly be hanged for it. . . . I hope to see them all hanged by the heels.”44 With feelings running this high among the Dutch, English cultural initiatives seemed likely to fail. In the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1690s, leading New Yorkers moved to supplant the lenient cultural policy toward the Dutch that had served well when English rule was in its infancy and the primary goal was to stabilize the new colony and extract profits from it. Trusting cultural change to time—waiting for more English immigrants to put down roots in the city and the next generation of Dutch to absorb English ways—now seemed a deeply flawed policy. Accommodation was no longer viable. Mollifying the Dutch had reinforced their sense of collective identity and embedded a variant of Dutch culture in the city. It was now necessary to pressure Dutch New Yorkers to acknowledge the supremacy of English culture. No longer could they be permitted to offer a cultural alternative to English ways. No longer could New Amsterdam remain a living legacy. Forcing the Dutch into the role of cultural outsiders in their native city hinged on shattering the solidarity of their community and undermining its members’ confidence in their shared identity as citizens of a fictive “Dutch nation.” English authorities found a rationale for launching a drive to discredit the Dutch in the widespread participation of Dutch residents in Leisler’s Rebellion. By politicizing the cultural issue in an overt and sinister way, they aimed to extinguish any claims the Dutch could make to cultural legitimacy in English New York. The seeds of the new approach were planted during the rebellion and its immediate aftermath. Soon city dwellers of Dutch ancestry realized that the English had inflected their national identification with a new meaning. There ensued a meditation on the term “the Dutch nation—for thus are we designated here—although we have been so badly rewarded therefor.”45 Maligning Leisler’s Dutch followers as rabble and scum marked them as contemptible. William Nicolls referred to Leisler as a “despot backt by the insipid mobile’s [mob]” and described his associates as “a pack of ignorant, scandalous, false, [malitious] impudent, impertinent rascals.” Emphasis

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was placed on the Dutch ancestry of Leisler’s supporters. Nicholas Bayard, Leisler’s archrival, portrayed them as “a parcel of ignorant and innocent people, almost none but of the Dutch Nation.” They had been “delude[d] and ensnare[d]” by “a notion being put in many of there heads that by a Voate of Parliament, all Chartres and Priviledges where to be restored to all places of the Dominions, and they be put in the same state as they were in the year 1660. And by consequence this Governm[en]t to be restored to the Dutch, and therefore no orders from the authority or Crowne of England, but only from his Royall Highnesse the Prince of Orange would serve their terms.” On June 7, 1689, Mathew Plowman, a member of the regime deposed by Leisler, and a Catholic to boot, spoke of “theese rebellious Dutchmen” and voiced regret that English forces had not prevented “ye burgars cuming in but like Dutchmen once theire foot then theire whole Bodyes & now arbitrary: ye Sivill powar thay doe what tay [they] please with & for his Maj[es]ties revenues.” Governor Henry Sloughter, who had been sent from En­gland in 1691 to restore order in New York, also stressed the Dutch makeup of Leisler’s constituency. “Leisler and his complices . . . daily i­nsinuated by writing and discourse to the people especially of the Dutch nation” that the newly appointed officials were “enemyes to King William and Queen Mary.”46 Impugning one’s political enemies as lower class was commonplace in seventeenth-century society, where wealth and power were assumed to go hand in hand. People with little estate and status who grabbed for power were seen as violating a law of nature. But singling out the national identity of one’s foes was out of the ordinary. Leisler’s defenders objected to the definition of his movement as an ethnic one. “Our Enemies have endeavoured all they can to misrepresent us and load us with Reproach by terming our . . . proceedings a Dutch Ploott because in deed three quarter Parts of the Inhabitants are descended from the Dutch and speak that language.”47 Leisler’s own biography puts the lie to these accusations. He was not born in the Netherlands, and neither was his chief lieutenant, Jacob Milborne, who was an Englishman. Other key figures in his inner circle, such as Robert Walters and Samuel Edsall, were English, and his daughters all married Englishmen. Leisler adopted the English language in his letters and admired English laws. To show his identification with English ways, Leisler appropriated En­ glish cultural forms such as holidays, advising the governor of Barbados that “the 4th Novem[ber] being the birth day of our gracious King which we did solemnise with bonefires & rosting one ox & c. the fifth was gun pouder treason which also we did solemnise with bonefires & burning the pope.”48 Leisler’s lack of antipathy toward the English notwithstanding, his opponents

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seized on the fact that the majority of his supporters were Dutch to condemn his deeds. Belittling Leisler’s movement as an outpouring of bitterness by Dutchmen excluded from the halls of power was a way not only of subverting it but also degrading the Dutch. Governor Fletcher embellished this ethnic strategy in the 1690s by using it as a pretext for creating an English party centered in the Anglican Church and figuratively casting out all who did not belong to it. According to Fletcher’s successor, Lord Bellomont, “the late Governor made advantage to divide the people by supposing a Dutch and English interest to be different here, and therefore under the notion of a Church of England, to be put in opposition to the Dutch and French churches established here, he supported a few rascally English who are a scandal to their nation and the Protestant Religion, and here great opposers to the Protestant Religion.” Bellomont rued the consequences for Dutch New Yorkers, excoriating the men “who joyned with him [Fletcher] in the worst methods of gaine and severely used the Dutch, except some few Merchants, whose trade he favored, who ought to have an equal benefit of the English Govern[men]t.” Judge William Atwood, another far from impartial observer given his ties to the Leislerians, lambasted the “English and Church Party” for their exclusionary principles. “The whole Land, except their little Flock, is accounted Heathenish; all of the Dutch Church, the English in the Several Counties, who are generally of that Church, in which Mr. Vesey was bred [Dissenters on Long Island and elsewhere in the colony], and even the Chief of their own Faction, the French.”49 Fletcher’s differentiation of New Yorkers along ethnic lines, with English Anglicans positioned at the pinnacle of society and everyone else relegated to a lower status, in practice privileged the English, the French, and the pro-English Dutch elite, while demeaning Dutch commoners who had sided with Leisler at the time of England’s Glorious Revolution. Partitioning New York’s political world in this manner laid the groundwork for a version of the city’s recent history that humbled the Dutch and undermined their ability to compete with the English for social power and cultural authority. By conflating the Leislerians and the Dutch, the anti-Leislerians were able to achieve both political and cultural ends. The narrative they crafted drew attention to the cultural deficits of their political foes, thereby creating a platform for devaluing Dutchness.50 The architects of this new narrative set their sights on three goals— subordinating religious issues to ethnic ones, implanting the notion of an ethnic hierarchy that would facilitate invidious comparisons, and interpreting the history of the decades since England’s invasion of New Netherland in 1664 in a way that undermined the moral authority of the local Dutch and deprecated

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their political choices. Since they were vulnerable to criticism because of their amicable relations with the minions of a Catholic king, anti-Leislerians downplayed religious issues in their retelling of the city’s history. Though quick to affirm their Protestant identity and their loyalty to the Protestant monarchs William and Mary at the time of the revolution, they wished to circumvent questions of religious identity after the frenzy of accusations against suspected Catholics. Designating Huguenot newcomers as French rather than as refugees allowed them to obscure Catholic persecution in France. Ignoring the religious reasons for the French immigration to New York adroitly subverted the Leislerian story line centered on the cosmic struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Another tactic anti-Leislerians used to deflate the pretensions of their foes was to puncture the aura of religiosity with which Leislerians surrounded themselves. A contemporary poet went beyond just speculating on the venal motives of Lieutenant Governor Nanfan, a top Leislerian purported to be an exemplar of religious virtue. Turning the tables on the Leislerians, this writer hinted that Nanfan, dubbed “a fawning sycophant,” was irresolute enough in his principles to be seduced by Catholicism. Cunning and Rogue enough to embroyle mankind Devout he Seems as tho Religion was His aim, but gold would make him go to Mass.51 Projecting Catholicism onto Nanfan was the ultimate form of verbal revenge. Most commonly, anti-Leislerians injected ethnic tags into their discourse, labeling individuals and groups as they described their actions. Classifying people as Dutch, English, and French was not merely a taxonomic strategy, but a means of imputing cultural traits to them. When Governor Cornbury asserted in 1703 that “there are very many good men among the English inhabitants of this place [province], many among the French, and some among the Dutch,” he was, in essence, constructing an ethnic hierarchy.52 He assumed the superiority of the English, but the ranking of the French above the Dutch deliberately exposed the Dutch to mockery and censure. Hurling invective at Dutch New Yorkers or, at a minimum, stereotyping them in unflattering ways sprang from xenophobic impulses, which were hardly uncommon in the Anglo-American world. Even though his wife was English, William, the Prince of Orange, was the target of anti-Dutch sentiment when he was placed on the English throne in 1688. This hostility made its way across the Atlantic. Emboldened by great quantities of alcohol consumed during the celebration of the quintessential English holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, in 1701, New York innkeeper Roger Baker allegedly proclaimed

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“King William is but a Dutch King, and a Nose of Wax and no longer King than we please.”53 Although he claimed not to remember uttering these words, the inebriated innkeeper nonetheless raised a question that must have perplexed countless other Englishmen: Why do we owe loyalty to a king who is actually a Dutch prince? If King William was a foreigner, then, by definition, his stature was less than an Englishman’s. Dutch New Yorkers also were susceptible to defamation on the grounds of their foreign background and associations. “The people of New York were a conquered people,” declared Lieutenant Governor Nicholson, “and could not expect the same rights as English people.” But subjugated peoples could pose a danger, especially when they raised the specter of foreign intervention in New York affairs. In 1692, Gerrit Duycking, seeking deliverance for the Leislerians, boasted that “his friends had wrote to Holland to the states [States General] that they have sent one of the states to the King to tell him that if he did not take care of them they would & that the King was very Angry & approved of Leislers actions.” Englishmen did not take such statements as empty bravado in an era when the king of England was a Dutch prince. John Usher, a visitor to the city from New Hampshire in 1698, did not stop at reviling the Dutch as “a Boorish sort of People.” He painted the city’s Dutch as far more menacing. “If oppertuneity presents [Dutch New Yorkers] would Sacrifice the English, would through of [throw off] the Crown of England and goe over to the Dutch.”54 The major thrust of the verbal assault on New York’s Dutch in the 1690s and 1700s centered on their alleged ignorance and especially their lack of proficiency in the English language. The reality that many Dutch New Yorkers still clung to their native tongue thirty years after the English seizure of the colony vexed colonial authorities, who now were determined to turn the linguistic limitations of Dutch city dwellers into a political liability. In the early years of English rule, officials facilitated the participation in civic life of those whose native language was Dutch. Following his predecessor’s lead, Governor Lovelace had “found [it] requisite and convenient that there should be a Dutch Publique Notary in this Citty or one very well Verst and understanding in that Language.” Lovelace also ordered that his proclamations be “publiquely read both in the English and Dutch Tongues” and be “affixed in the most publique places of the Citty.” Such leniency evaporated in the hostile climate of the Leisler trials, when a Dutch-speaking defendant was humiliated by the court. “They began to cry out in great confusion that I should speak English,” he recounted. Denied an interpreter, he continued to speak in Dutch, whereupon “the Judge asked what I had said. But this Kortland [Stephanus van Cortlandt, an anti-Leislerian] translated in a very mischievous

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false and perverted manner.” By the 1690s, Dutch New Yorkers without facility in English were left in the dark by Governor Fletcher’s official proclamations, only one of which was printed in Dutch.55 An even more nefarious strategy soon materialized—holding up Dutch residents’ inability to speak English as a sign of their mental shortcomings. In New York, “Dutch” became a catchword for retrogressive ideas and inapt behavior. Conveying an impression of the Dutch as slow-witted because they lacked fluency in English effectively stigmatized them. Lord Cornbury denigrated the province’s Dutch officeholders as “men extreamly ignorant of all things few of them understanding the English tongue much less the laws.” Assimilated Dutchmen, taking their cues from their English friends, seized on this facet of cultural difference. Nicholas Bayard derided Hendrick Kuyler (Cuyler), “whoos weaknesse in the English language is evident to all, and owned by himself.” Even Lord Bellomont, who, for partisan reasons favored Dutch New Yorkers, conceded that “those that are honest of the Dutch, being formerly kept out of imployment and business are very ignorant, and can neither speak nor write proper English.” He was less restrained in his comments on the three Dutch candidates aligned with the so-called English party in the 1699 municipal election. “Johannes Van Kipp, Rip Van Dam, and Jacobus Van Courtlandt, the names speak Dutch and the men scarce can speak English.”56 Bellomont’s disparagement of the city’s Dutch speaks volumes about the prevalence of anti-Dutch stereotypes in English culture. Ridiculing the Dutch remained a staple of discourse in New York even after the controversies of the Leisler era had subsided. Androboros: A Biographical Farce in Three Acts, a play penned by Governor Robert Hunter in 1714 with the express purpose of exposing the faults of the colony’s political leaders, included two inept Dutch characters, Doodlesack (Abraham Lakerman) and Cobus ( Jacobus van Corlandt), who are made to speak in a hybrid of Dutch and English. As late as the 1730s, stamping the Dutch as backward retained a certain cachet among elite New Yorkers. In a 1734 letter to her son, Abigail Franks, the wife of a well-to-do Jewish merchant, referred to “our ignorant Dutch members” of the Assembly. Alexander Malcolm, a schoolmaster employed in the city in 1738, bemoaned his fate. “Damned alas! to the Slavery of Teaching Latin and Greek to the Cubs of a Stupid ungrateful purse proud Race of Dutch Men.”57 Linguistic blunders, coupled with political ineptitude, figuratively banished the Dutch to the outer reaches of New York society, even as the growing number of French speakers were welcomed. Tellingly, French newcomers’ ignorance of English did not tarnish their standing in the eyes of those who were fabricating the anti-Leisler narrative. What qualified the

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refugees for a position above the Dutch in New York’s ethnic hierarchy was neither their religious beliefs nor their Frenchness per se, but simply their political acumen. The perception that they had, for the most part, allied with the English in the Leislerian crisis warranted their elevation to most favored status among the non-English. The continuing immigration of Huguenots fleeing persecution in Louis XIV’s France during the 1680s and 1690s substantively shaped New York’s development. French Protestants quickly found a niche in the city’s economic life, their participation in society eased by Governor Fletcher’s willingness to grant them denization and naturalization. Large numbers of Huguenot men registered for the freemanship, eighty-four between 1687 and 1700 and another fifty-nine between 1701 and 1710. The rapid expansion of the exile community was graphically displayed in the evolution of the Église Françoise à la Nouvelle York. Just a few years after it opened in 1688, the church’s seating capacity had to be enlarged by the addition of a gallery. Described in 1697 as “a wooden building, with a gallery, a handsome pulpit, & a seate for the gouvernor,” the French church had grown too small to hold the congregation by 1703, necessitating the construction of a new edifice in 1704.58 As their ranks swelled, the city’s French Protestants wasted no time in capitalizing on their potential influence in the unstable political climate. Initially assembling for worship under the Reverend Pierre Daillé, whose sympathy for Leisler’s religious views influenced some in his flock, the refugees gravitated toward the anti-Leisler camp. Gratitude to English benefactors who had facilitated their transplantation to the colonies loomed large in Huguenots’ decision to uphold the authority of the king in the face of Leisler. Claiming that “the King had invited the French Protestants in his kingdome, promising them that their lives should be sweet to them,” a refugee who settled outside the city asserted that “the King had promised to maintain them if they should want . . . and that here being the King’s Authority, they did demand the same, because they wanted.” This tirade before Leisler was punctuated with “the words Le Roy le veut [the king wills it].”59 Although Huguenots shared the Reformed tradition with the Dutch, divisions in the city’s Dutch Reformed congregation over the merits of the Leislerian cause, and especially Domine Henricus Selyns’s virulent opposition to Leisler, complicated the choices available to the refugees, whose Calvinist precepts were grounds for condemning Leisler as a usurper of power. Some Huguenots sided with Leisler, but the majority evidently followed D ­ aillé’s successor, Pierre Peiret, into the anti-Leisler camp, since French names consistently appeared in substantial numbers on anti-Leislerian petitions during the ensuing years of political conflict. Peiret’s authoritative voice is

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discernible in a 1702 letter in which the minister and elders of the French congregation praised Lord Cornbury as the instrument of the province’s deliverance from “the cruel oppression of a group of people who had converted to tyranny the authority placed in their hands.” Their “flock was on the eve of a grievous scattering, since the last Assembly had resolved, at the instigation of the principal officers, to prosecute our Pastor as a factious person, because having had certain intelligence of your Excellency’s departure from England, he had prayed God in our public prayers to preserve your Excellency.”60 The most powerful men in the French community also stood against Leisler. Merchant Elie Boudinot, formerly of La Rochelle, directly challenged Leisler’s authority, boasting to “severall persones in company” at his house that “he had affronted the Lieutenant Governor Leisler by putting his finger in his nose, and then pointed at the said Lieutenant Governor and that the said Lieutenant Governor asked him why he mocked him, and that he had answered may I not clean my nose and is my nose not my own and that he had done the same again before his face.” An elder in the city’s French church, Boudinot unquestionably was a religious man. The depth of his faith emerges from his 1700 will, in which he noted that he had been “constrained to abandon my country, to escape continual persecution, which I received for profession of the Gospel.” His hope was “if it should please God, as I Pray with all my heart,” that “the liberty of our Holy Religion should be re-established in France.” Yet Boudinot stood with Nicholas Bayard and others whom Leisler accused of sedition for being involved in “an Intended Plott discovered by a letter of Nicholas Bayard.” With Leislerians again in power in 1702, Boudinot assisted Bayard in procuring signers to addresses to the king that were critical of New York’s government.61 Leisler grasped the significance of Huguenot interference with his cause, chronicling an instance “when som franch heer by their Il Caridge provoket the piple Whereby the war [they were] Stierd up to vs Severite to prevent some off the franch their arogants who ar hir In greth number en thinke It is now ther teime.” With a note of foreboding, Leisler added, “We ar distrost at ouer bak and In ouer Bossm.” Governor Bellomont, who had thrown his weight behind the Leislerians in New York’s political maelstrom, did not conceal his resentment of the political clout of the Huguenots during the city election in 1699, noting that “the French here are very factious and their number considerable.” Incensed at their alliance with the anti-Leislerians, he fumed that they were “so insolent as to boast they had turn’d the scale and could ballance the interests as they pleased.”62 What exasperated Bellomont was music to the ears of those bent on writing the French into the story of recent events. Lord Cornbury was eager to

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commend New York’s French for their loyalty. When he endorsed the French congregation’s project of building a larger church in 1703, he specified that “they had behaved themselves always well towards the Govern[men]t.” In agreeing to lay the cornerstone for their new church building on July 1, 1704, the governor made visible his approval of the political choice the city’s French had made. As he explained the following year, “the French have during the disorders which have hapned here formerly always espoused the interest of the English.”63 Remaining loyal to the crown not only entitled the French to a preferred spot on the ethnic ladder; it landed them a pivotal role in the drama of New York City’s recent history, which was now recast in a tripartite form. Weaving the French into a story line that heretofore had revolved around the interplay of the English and Dutch was a strategic move for English leaders keen to establish their cultural authority. Structuring the narrative of New York’s history in terms of three major groups minimized the importance of the Dutch by showing that two groups, the English and the French, were arrayed against Leisler. In effect, the Dutch were demoted from their role as the sole competitors of the English, the position they had occupied ever since the 1664 “conquest.” Replacing the binary framework that had encapsulated New York’s history with a tripartite form enabled the anti-Leislerians to cast recent French immigrants in a key role in the evolving drama—allies of the English. This tactic shifted the perspective not only on the past but on the present. Instead of being protagonists, the Dutch were relegated to featured players in a scenario that magnified the role of the English, even though the latter’s numbers in New York City remained small as the seventeenth century drew to a close. Now, because they were in league with the French, the English could claim to be the dominant force in city affairs. For the English, valorizing the French ensured the political allegiance of the French, but, more important, it made the Dutch look bad by comparison. Although the new narrative was embroidered with other elements, the plot revolved around the failings, malicious propensities, and misdeeds of Dutch New Yorkers. The demonization of the Dutch was most fully realized in Lord Cornbury’s 1705 rendition of New York’s past, which traced the roots of Dutch New Yorkers’ tendency to challenge English authority to their actions at the time of the Dutch recapture of the city in 1673. Cornbury placed blame squarely on New York’s Dutch residents. When severall “Dutch men of warr returning from the West Indies toward Europe” came near the city in search of wood and water, they were urged by local Dutch people to capture it. According to Cornbury, “several of the Dutch inhabitants here gave them notice that this place was ill provided, that the Gouvernor was not in the place, and

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that if they would but appear before it they might take it with great ease.” This was not just a tale from the distant past, Cornbury implied; “some of the same men are still living in this City and enjoy good estates.”64 Portraying the Dutch as inclined to be disloyal left the impression that they were unsuitable to be subjects of the crown. Cornbury singled out two leading Leislerians, Dr. Samuel Staats and Abraham Gouverneur, as irreconcilable “Enemies to an English Government.” In 1702, a satire had circulated privately among anti-Leislerians caricaturing Gouverneur as “a gogle Eyed Serpent from Batavia Sprung” and Staats as “a Low Duch Quack no better than an asse.” Cornbury related that at the time New York’s Dutch residents were required to take oaths to England, Staats had gone to Holland “rather than endeavour to make himself an Englishman.” Staats would “never cease his endeavours, till he brings this to be a Dutch Govern[men]t again if he can.”65 The lesson was clear. Men who promoted their “Dutchness” in a competitive way were anathema to New York’s rulers. The critique of “Dutchness” that anti-Leislerians developed accented the republican tendencies of people originating in the Netherlands. The Dutch Republic was a perfect foil for boosters of the English monarchy, since it exemplified all the failings of a government without a king at its head. Stigmatizing New York’s Dutch as republicans tapped into a vein of antirepublican discourse that could be traced back to royalist encounters with the Puritans during England’s Civil War. In August 1689, John Tuder belittled the governing body that Leisler had created, alleging that this “Comitee of safety, as they terme themselves” contained “not two men of sence.” But Tuder’s sharpest barbs were reserved for the political ancestry of the Leislerians. “The greates Olleverians that were in the Govern[men]t are made Committee men,” he asserted, adding “some of them openly saying there had been no legall King in England since Ollivers days.” Fifteen years later, a member of Cornbury’s administration again raised the specter of republicanism. “There are some Republican spirits amongst us, some that retain the Leven of the late factions and disorders.”66Tainting Dutch Leislerians with the sins of the well-hated Puritans made sense in the context of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history. Conjuring up an image of the Leislerians as the “Black” party also tapped into a reservoir of negative associations in New York City, where African slavery had deep roots by the turn of the eighteenth century. Elite New Yorkers, among them prominent anti-Leislerians, owned slaves. Merchant Frederick Philipse figured prominently in the slave trade, initiating voyages to Madagascar and transporting large cargoes of slaves to New York. The number of enslaved Africans in the city climbed from 630 (14 percent of the population)

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in 1703, the year after a yellow fever epidemic had decimated the ranks of both black and white New Yorkers, toward 970 in 1712, when they constituted 17 percent of the urban population.67 Judge William Atwood’s scathing attack on the English Party—the antiLeislerians—made much of “their usual way, of calling all who are not engag’d in that Party, Blacks; the whole Land, except their little Flock, is accounted Heathenish.” Equating the defective spiritual condition of New York’s non-Christian enslaved blacks with the reprehensible moral qualities ascribed to the Leislerians was a surefire way of eliciting an emotional response from city dwellers already primed to think in racial terms. Color-coding New York’s political factions—black for Leislerians and, by implication, white for anti-Leislerians—was becoming standard practice in a society in which racial categories were increasingly applied. In 1698, Leisler’s supporters noted that Leisler had been called a “black dog.” Lord Cornbury embraced this proto-racial political terminology in May 1703, when he alluded to “the People that are called here the Black party,” intimating that this was a popular epithet. He clarified the meaning of this label when he referred to “those who are called here by the name of the Black party, some of which will never be reconciled to an English Govern[men]t, nor to an English Governour, unless they can find one who will betray the English Laws and interest to the Dutch.” In 1769, old-time residents of the city told a visiting Swiss man that “Leisler people were called Black people and Bayard’s White people.”68 The Black party, the Leislerians, the Dutch—the words were interchangeable, but their purpose was certain. Anyone whose politics were not acceptable to the English administration was considered objectionable. But what if a Dutchman made political choices that pleased the antiLeislerians, as did members of the city’s Dutch elite? Not surprisingly, he was exempted from the aspersions customarily reserved for his countrymen. Witness Cornbury’s affinity for “most of the considerable men among the Dutch,” whom he grouped with the “English [and] the Generality of the French” as “the people that have been oppressed these last four years.”69 In short, it was possible to be ethnically Dutch but on the correct side of the political fence. A feat of semantic legerdemain could transform a politically astute Dutchman into an Englishman. In New York’s social world, then, being Dutch was less a matter of lineage than a state of mind. In Cornbury’s words, New York’s numerous Dutch “are not Dutch by nation only but by inclination.” Cultural identity was not solely a consequence of descent. It was also a matter of choice. A Dutch person, notwithstanding his background, could will himself into being English, as did anti-Leislerian leader Nicholas Bayard, who reviled Leisler’s partisans as

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“a parcel of ignorant and innocent people, almost none but of the Dutch nation.” When he was put on trial for treason, Bayard complained to the judge about the Dutch jurors’ ignorance of English, asserting that “scarcely one of them is able to say the Lord’s Prayer in the English tongue and much less to comprehend the matters of Law.”70 Having come to consider himself English, Bayard was at pains to disassociate himself from his countrymen. If the meaning of “Dutchness” was in the eye of the beholder, then so was the meaning of “Englishness.” Once the practice of ethnic labeling was inaugurated in New York, Leislerians hastened to use it to their advantage. In 1702, Lieutenant Governor Nanfan and his Leislerian councilors deliberately employed the same tactics their opponents had initiated by portraying the followers of this “factious party” as men who were not English in the true sense of the word. Their first move was to impugn the “the head of [the party] . . . one Coll Bayard of foreign birth a man never easy under an English Government.” Smearing Bayard as a foreigner was easier than maligning the rank and file of the anti-Leislerians, most of whom were of English descent. Leading Leislerians highlighted a crucial distinction among the English, alleging that “few of the English inhabitants of this Province in comparison with the true English subjects who inhabit it joyn with them and the most are Soldiers inveigled by false pretences, common seamen, sojourners boys and such as have been only passengers.” Differentiating between “English inhabitants” and “true English subjects” was an exercise in political, not genealogical discrimination. Well aware that Leisler’s opponents were not exclusively English, the Leislerians focused on the blemishes of the other camp’s “Dutch and French men, of which many are aliens.”71 Using “alien” as a term of abuse was turning the tables on foes who had seized on the fact of Jacob Leisler’s foreign birth to condemn him and had used the knowledge that other Dutch Leislerians were not native New Yorkers to disqualify them from participating in the political process. When Bayard was placed on trial for treason in 1702, his attorney charged that “Andries Marshalk, one of the Petty Jury, is an Alien, and of Forreign birth, born in Zeeland, and came over into this Province in the Year 1684 and that Jacobus Goelet, the fore-man of the Jury, is also an Alien.” In May 1690, a group of leading English, Dutch, and French men had petitioned King William and Queen Mary requesting relief from “the burthen of Slavery and Arbitrary Power executed over us by the Enraged fury of some ill men among us.” This catastrophe, they asserted, had come about at “the sole will of an insolent Alien (he being none of your Majesties naturall born subject) assisted by some few, whom we can give no better name then a Rabble, those who formerly were scarce thought fit to bear the meanest Offices amongst us.”72 Among the

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signatories were Elie Boudinot, Gabriel Boyteu, and John Barberie, all elders of the French church, along with their minister Pierre Peiret. These recently arrived refugees from France had the temerity to brand Jacob Leisler, who had lived in the city for thirty years, an alien, and, for good measure, to assail his assistants as unfit to rule because of their lowly social position. Branded as aliens, foreigners, Dutch, or the Black party, Leislerians were sullied by a battery of labels that diverted attention from their core religious beliefs. Backers of Leisler’s cause singled out Domine Selyns for abetting their enemies, charging that he “did not fail to do anything which he believed would further exasperate the people, and [that he] repeated from the pulpit everything which the grossest partisanship could suggest.” And once Leisler had been executed, Selyns did nothing to heal the divide in the church. The Leislerians’ animus toward Selyns knew no bounds. He, along with certain other Reformed clergy, were portrayed as “Popish Trumpets” who had “noise[d] in our Ears with their accursed breath, that we ought patiently to hold our Protestant Throats to be cut by the Command of a Popish King.” These ministers had used their “wicked Eloquence” in the pulpit “to tell these Captains of our Temporal Salvation [Leisler and his associates] to their faces, that being faithful to their God, their Country, and their Laws, in the defence of the Holy Protestant Religion, and the Rights and Liberties of English men, and their thankful declaring for the most glorious Prince upon Earth their Deliverer: was the blackest of Treason and Rebellion.” To show their contempt for Selyns, they pointedly refused to take Communion from him. In 1698 “only about one tenth enjoyed the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”73 Embittered at Selyns’s purported treachery, Leisler’s supporters nevertheless were not about to sever their ties to the Reformed church. Rather, they joined the congregation in record numbers in the 1690s so as to make their opinions count among the laity. Carrying weight in church circles was critical to transforming New York City’s Dutch church into a site for the authentic practice of the Reformed faith and, more broadly, elevating the Protestant cause. Buoyed by a 1695 parliamentary decision to reverse the attainders of Leisler and Milborne, four years after the two men had been hanged, beheaded, and buried ignominiously at the gallows, New Yorkers who had yearned ever since for the restitution of their leaders’ reputation at last achieved their goal when the newly arrived governor, Lord Bellomont, offered his opinion that any Act of Parliament was an English law and as such “ought to be respected as sacred.” Given that “the relations of Mr Leisler and Mr Milbourne desired leave to take up the bodies that had been buried near the gallows and give them Christian burial in the Dutch Church,” Bellomont gave permission for Leisler and Milborne to be reburied in New York City’s Dutch Reformed Church.

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Conscious that the Leislerians now held sway, the congregation’s officers adopted a politic stance. “Pressed by both parties in the congregation, and very much desir[ing] to preserve peace and quiet in our church,” they concluded that “we cannot consent [to burying Leisler and Milborne in the Dutch church]; but also we shall not hinder it.”74 On October 20, 1698, with “a great concourse of people . . . (1200 ’tis said)” in attendance, “the remains of Commander Jacob Leisler and of Jacob Milbourne . . . were exhumed, and interred again with great pomp under our (new) Dutch Church (in Garden street). Their weapons and armorial ensigns of honor were there (in the Church) hung up, and thus, as far as possible their honor was restored to them.”75 The solemnity of the moment could not disguise the jubilation felt by the throngs of people who had waited so long for vindication. The long-delayed funeral was the capstone to a crusade that had gathered force during years of repression. To inter Leisler in the church was to reconsecrate it to the kind of Protestantism that champions of his cause contended had been lost sight of during Selyns’s tenure. As they symbolically recaptured the church for Leisler, they fortified themselves for the ongoing struggle against their adversaries in the city and in the wider world. During the few years of Governor Bellomont’s administration, Leisler’s successors reinvigorated the campaign against Catholics. In October 1698, a number of Leislerians signed an association of Protestants against Roman Catholics. On January 23, 1702, not long after Bellomont’s death, over forty men of the Dutch Reformed church, including the minister, signed a Dutch-language document affirming their identity as Protestants and their opposition to the false doctrine of the Antichrist. Most significantly, spokesmen for the strict Protestants in the church went on record with a version of New York’s recent history consonant with their view that religion played a determinative role in human affairs. They recalled the “anxiety and terror which we experienced during the last year of the reign of ex-King James.” Alarmed at the “arbitrary measures taken for the establishment of the Papacy in England” and the success the dragonnades (Louis XIV’s policy of billeting soldiers with Protestant families) had made in France, they saw links to ominous occurrences in New York, the establishment of a school by the Jesuits “under color of teaching Latin to the youth” and the fact that “some of our best citizens had begun to send their children” to this school. The birth of the Prince of Wales ( James II’s son) in 1688 was interpreted as “a deathly stab at the Protestant religion in England, and . . . over here.” They rejoiced at news that “the Prince of Orange . . . had entered England with a mighty army to deliver the country from oppression and Popery” and “the people of . . . Boston had . . . declared themselves for the Prince of Orange.” Venturing

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deep into the past to capture the historical significance of the moment, they declared that “the ancestors of the new King [William] had delivered our fathers from the Spanish yoke, and his Royal Highness (a descendant) had now arisen to rescue the Kingdom of England from Popery and oppression.”76 In reviewing the events associated with Leisler’s accession to power and his reception in New York, they placed blame for the tragedy squarely on the magistrates and Dutch church leaders and anointed Domine Selyns the arch-villain of the story. Any chance the Leislerians’ version of New York’s history would prevail was crushed when their political ally Lord Bellomont died in 1701 after only three years in office. Deprived of a patron, they saw their religious-based narrative consigned to oblivion. In its place, the ethnic narrative endorsed by Cornbury flourished and achieved its definitive form. Linking “Dutchness” with base status, ineptness, and disloyalty served the purposes of city leaders who had despaired of ruling a city still marching to a Dutch drummer. In turn-of-the-century New York City, ethnic tags became weapons in a partisan conflict that was not between “nations,” but between factions divided on political and ideological grounds. The ideological underpinnings of the ethnic vocabulary that crystallized in the waning years of the seventeenth century remained incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Not long after his arrival in 1701, the colony’s new attorney general, Samson Shelton Broughton, was genuinely puzzled by the city’s political divisions. “I finde two very opposite parties amongst this people, all equally the King’s subjects, yet want to be distinguished for nation sake. And I cannot discern a more material ground of their difference than that; tho many allegations are on both sides.”77 New York’s complex political alignments defied easy explanation. Classifying people along ethnic lines was a sophisticated tool in a verbal arsenal that drew power from New York’s historical experience, its contemporary social composition, and its fabricators’ capacity for invention. The customary emphasis on the politics of the vitriolic contest between Leislerians and anti-Leislerians that stretched from 1689 to 1710 has obscured the intensifying cultural assault against New York City’s Dutch during this era. English cultural authority was imposed on Dutch New Yorkers through an officially sanctioned campaign against “Dutchness” that exacted a heavy toll because of its malicious tone and political repercussions. Vanquishing the fictive “Dutch nation” in New York accelerated the Dutch retreat from the public stage, but it did not obliterate Dutch culture in the city. The residue of Dutch culture would continue to influence the city’s history until the Revolutionary era.

Ch ap ter   2

From Nation to Linguistic Community

The ascendance of English polite culture in early eighteenth-century New York City and its embrace by high-ranking Dutch and French families have fostered the impression that the values of the elite were unanimously endorsed by those lower down on the social scale. Since most white city residents lacked the wherewithal to become gentlemen and ladies, they were left to position themselves in relation to the guideposts erected by their social superiors. While the ambitious were apt to emulate models of gentility in hopes of inching their way across the cultural threshold, others merely borrowed selectively from the elements of polite culture that appealed to them. Still others, primarily non-English artisans and laborers, in tandem with their wives, spurned the gentry’s cultural directives and, when pressed, voiced objections to them. To residents of foreign birth or ancestry, the verities on which English people set great store remained alien. Clinging to their own customs and languages was a way of staking a claim to cultural autonomy in the social spaces where most of their time was spent—the family, the neighborhood, and the church. In these familiar domains, men and women of limited means conducted their lives in tune with standards not at all consonant with the benchmarks set by those at the center of power and influence. The cultural divide in New York society was amplified by the urban elite’s embrace of the cosmopolitan outlook typical of participants in the Republic 45

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of Letters.1 The gentry’s frame of reference transcended the particularities of place or group, which were subordinated to the unities of breeding and taste. How one performed in society and how well one pleased one’s peers was deemed of greater significance than proving loyalty to an ancestral group. Being urbane mandated severing the ties of tradition and climbing to a higher plane, a supra-ethnic space where a person’s identity was predicated on the exemplification of genteel virtues rather than attachment to a particular heritage. By contrast, the non-English commoners who prized fidelity to the ways of the past found little to admire in the constellation of values associated with gentility. They deplored the attenuation of communal ties as circles of friendship superseded webs of kin. For them, the coordinates of cultural identity remained fixed in family, church, and ethnic community. When educated and powerful men mounted initiatives aimed at reshaping their values in a polite mold, traditionalists expressed their outrage in exaggerated rhetoric. Appalled at Anglophile gentlemen’s indifference to the sacred memories that imparted meaning to life over the generations, socially anonymous defenders of tradition ardently parried the cultural thrusts of their social betters. As they took on the role of crusaders, dreams of restoring the way things had been mixed with animus against the privileged few who esteemed the niceties of conduct above immemorial truths. What brought New Yorkers of differing cultural orientations into open conflict was the issue of the language used in worship. Churches were one of the few places in the city where people of different ranks routinely interacted and where the voices of ordinary people might be heard. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, New York’s Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian congregations were embroiled in heated battles centering on language and the cultural values represented by language. These contests, though situated in the ecclesiastical realm, had ramifications that extended far beyond the pulpit and the pews. In a city ruled by Englishmen, speaking Dutch was a token of defiance, a tacit affirmation of a forfeited national identity. Here, where Dutch lineage no longer counted, communicating in the ancestral tongue was a way of validating one’s culture. On Sundays, when worship in the Dutch Reformed and Dutch Lutheran churches was conducted in their native language, Dutch speakers not only believed they were communing authentically with God, but also felt part of a diasporic Dutch nation that was thriving despite the impositions of English authorities.

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The size and persistence of eighteenth-century New York City’s Dutch speech community have eluded historians. The virtual erasure of Dutch speakers is of a piece with the broader neglect of the city’s non-English speakers. Novelist Pete Hamill’s image of the cacophony on the “main street of Babel” where “the signs above shops spoke English” captures the essence of New York in the mid-eighteenth century. “Here were all the nations of the earth, their languages drifting through the soggy air, or cleaving passages between the nouns and verbs of English.” This multilingual concourse consistently has been rendered invisible in historical representations of the eighteenth-century city that assume that the ubiquity of English in civic affairs made it impossible for other speech communities to flourish. Notwithstanding the English language’s official status in British New York, the port society’s defining feature was a lack of a universal tongue. Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Gaelic, not to mention various African languages, could be heard in what was supposedly an English city. In the minds of those who prized proficiency in English, the discord was heightened by the accented speech of immigrants from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Advertisements for runaway servants refer to men such as John McIntaylor, who “speaks broad Scotch and very bad English,” and James Keys, “an Irish-man [who] has the Brogue on his Tongue.” In 1751, New York’s Chief Justice James De Lancey prognosticated that “in a few years all foreign languages will go out and English will prevail, as it can be observed among the youth of foreign nationalities that they are forgetting their mother tongue and learning English without any compulsion.”2 But De Lancey underestimated the tenacity of the city’s non-English speakers. The multiplying numbers of Germans arriving in New York beginning in the 1740s had little knowledge of English vocabulary or English discursive modes and minimal acquaintance with the Dutch language. In the city’s small Lutheran congregation, a spokesman for these immigrants made known in 1742 that “the Germans, members and strangers (non-members), desired German services at some time, or on Sundays.” The handful of Dutchmen who governed the congregation refused, insisting that German newcomers abide by local traditions, which meant learning Dutch: “Our church owes its existence to the gifts of our sainted ancestors who were Dutchmen and who kept us united with God from generation to generation through the Dutch language.” Minister Michael Knoll was inclined to make concessions to the immigrants and conduct some services in German, but when the Germans spurned the token German services offered by Knoll and demanded more sweeping linguistic changes, Dutch old-timers responded vehemently. “Those foreigners, though few in number and contributing little or nothing toward

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the support of religion wanted to force our Dutch members, also few in number, to introduce the use of nothing but German.”3 Feeling marginalized in the Dutch Lutheran congregation, the Germans directed their animus against the tiny group of older men who dictated church policy, contending that these elders and deacons “are proud and say, ‘Ours is a Dutch, not a German church.’ ” Not only that, but “they call the Germans mere servants and will have none of them in the church council.” Far from denying their humble status, the discontented Germans described their constituency as “very many ancient people as well as young ones, most of them poor.” In 1749, doubtless emboldened by an itinerant preacher who encouraged them to defy church authorities, they broke away from the city’s old Lutheran church and founded a separate congregation with its own minister. Dutch Lutheran leaders were still seething in 1754, when they spoke of the “revenge church,” which the seceders filled with “the free and easy-going rabble, just to attract a large crowd.” Regarding “the group which separated from the old church [as] just about the greatest disgrace to our holy religion,” they apprised church authorities in Hamburg of the cavalier attitude of the “separated group” toward the Amsterdam church constitution and the Augsburg Confession. Nevertheless, the German Lutheran congregation flourished in New York City, and local dignitaries were present when the new building was dedicated in 1767.4 Lutheran church leaders in 1742 had sought to persuade German newcomers to adapt to local Dutch-language traditions by holding up the example of “the people of the Reformed church, where there are many Germans [who] do not venture to request [services in German], despite the fact that their services are held in a vulgar Dutch which is difficult to understand.” But these Dutch Lutherans were oblivious to the quandary in which German Reformed immigrants had found themselves. Those who “understood the Netherland language attached themselves to the Dutch Reformed church of New York. Those who understood only German were obliged to attend the Lutheran church or be deprived of Gospel preaching altogether. This deplorable condition induced them to attempt to organize a Reformed church of their own, in which services should be conducted in the German language.” On December 20, 1758, “About forty members, male and female, presented a request for dismission from [the Dutch Reformed congregation], in order that being High Dutch, and a High Dutch minister having been called here, they might join the same by certificate.”5 Once they had the numbers and resources to sustain an independent church life, the German Reformed peacefully separated from the Dutch Reformed church.

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What German immigrants from various regions and religious backgrounds had in common in New York was the German language. Reading German-language newspapers and books printed in Pennsylvania enabled them to renew their acquaintance with their native tongue. During the hotly contested municipal election campaign of 1769, outsiders perceived German speakers as a linguistic community and hence a political bloc. Competing candidates issued broadsides written in German.6 The most significant group of non-English speakers in the city consisted of third- and fourth-generation Dutch New Yorkers, the great majority of whom had never been in the Netherlands. In contrast to their brethren, whose facility in the English language led them to confine their usage of Dutch to commercial dealings and communications with Dutch kinfolk in the countryside or overseas, these men and women persisted in speaking, reading, and writing in the Dutch language. Elizabeth Romme, using what Judge Daniel Horsmanden called “female Dutch,” penned a note to her husband who had left the city to escape questioning in connection with the alleged slave conspiracy in 1741.7 This loyal wife’s intimate correspondence written in her everyday language concealed her thoughts from prying English officials. For urban men and women such as the Rommes, English was likely a second language and often one in which they had minimal facility. At home, at work, in church, and in the neighborhood, they, like most of their rural counterparts, communicated in their native tongue. Their transactions, their quarrels, and their prayers, all were enunciated in Dutch, and, not least, their memories were stored in the Dutch language. Although their ears grew accustomed to the sound of English, the language of their overlords still seemed an alien tongue. The tenacity with which many Dutch commoners held to their native language—even as it diverged from the Dutch spoken in the Netherlands—did not escape the notice of influential New Yorkers. In the midst of the hotly contested election of 1768, politicians courting the vote of the city’s Dutch-speakers arranged to print a Dutch version of “A Kick for the Whipper by Sir Isaac Foot,” a partisan essay, in the New-York Gazette. In February 1775, when the printer of the New-York Journal published the “whole proceedings of the continental congress, held in Philadelphia in September and October 1774,” he alerted readers that his edition included “the principal parts, translated into Low Dutch.” Improbable as it may seem in light of the fact that English had long been “the language where power . . . resided,” Dutch remained a living language in New York City long after members of the elite assumed it would be displaced by English.8 Why, then, despite unambiguous evidence that the linguistic Anglicization of New York’s Dutch was neither inexorable nor swift, has a scenario

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that portrays the Dutch language as well on its way to extinction in New York City by the mid-eighteenth century become so entrenched? Simply put, the actual record of Dutch speakers and readers in the eighteenth century has been drowned out by what I call a “discourse of decline,” a dismissive way of talking about the chances of survival for the Dutch language in eighteenth-century New York City. Understanding the eighteenth-century roots of this discourse and how thoroughly it has been woven into historical accounts by church scribes as well as scholars is crucial to recovering the story of Dutch cultural survival in the eighteenth-century city. So pervasive has been the notion that the Dutch language rapidly became a relic of a vanished past that little significance has been attached to local Dutch imprints, the inclusion of Dutch-language items in local newspapers, and the importation of Dutch books, and almost no significance at all to the men and women who might have read these works. However, once we begin to question this long-accepted trajectory of ineluctable linguistic adaptation, a line of thinking that implicitly assumes that learning English necessarily meant abandoning Dutch, conceiving of language retention as a means of challenging En­ glish cultural authority becomes plausible. Most of what we know about the segment of the city’s Dutch population that persisted in speaking and reading Dutch comes from the forum of Dutch Reformed Church politics, where people from artisan and laboring families vigorously contested the elite’s initiative to introduce English preaching in a protracted dispute that began in the 1740s and lasted well beyond 1764, when the first English sermon was delivered in the church. This bitter clash over the language of worship exposed a fundamental cleavage in the city’s Dutch community that became more visible after the death of the irenic Domine Gualterus Du Bois in 1751. What was at stake was nothing less than the meaning of being Dutch in eighteenth-century New York City. Descendants of New Netherland families who coveted a place in British society recast Dutch identity in a mold that muted the differences between Dutch and English. While some switched their allegiance to the Church of England, others sought to reinvigorate their ancestral church by supplementing Dutch preaching with English, and sponsoring English translations of foundational texts. Men and women who “pray[ed] that no change or intermingling of languages be allowed in their house of worship” sought to block these proposals, vowing to “protect our church in its doctrine and its language, as far as lies in our power.”9 To combat their fellow congregants’ claim that language and faith were inseparable, the promoters of English-language worship crafted a series of arguments aimed not only at demolishing their adversaries’ position but also at discrediting New York’s Dutch speakers. This emerging discourse of

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decline carried weight among adherents of the Reformed church as well as outsiders, making it easier to repudiate the historic place of the Dutch language in the city. Grounded in the expectation that the city’s changing demography and the patent advantages of fluency in English would lead to the rapid displacement of Dutch, the discourse of decline seemed credible. Eighteenth-century New Yorkers of Dutch origins had every reason to gravitate to English, given its widespread use in government and commerce. As early as the 1720s, even the leading men in the Dutch Reformed congregation admitted that “it is very necessary to be versed in this common language of the people [English], in order properly to carry on one’s temporal calling.” Two decades later (in 1747), Domine Johannes Ritzema remarked that English “is ever more natural to our inhabitants and even to the members of our congregation.”10 But the unstated corollary of this theory was that learning English would automatically lead to discarding Dutch. For those near to or at the top of the social pyramid the logic was indisputable. Prominent Dutch traders, anxious to secure their families’ position in the new mercantile environment, took steps to prepare their sons for life in the English Atlantic world. In 1703, Johannes De Peyster, writing to his brother in Dutch, proudly reported on the progress of his nine-year-old son [Johannes Jr.] in learning English in Boston. “English comes more fluently and easier to him than Dutch. [You] would be surprised should you hear him converse in English. . . . He spells and reads fluently besides saying the English prayers and catechism.” Perceiving that mastery of the English language was the prerequisite to economic success, political influence, and social standing in New York, ambitious parents saw no reason to school their children in Dutch. “The Dutch tongue Declines fast amongst Us Especially with the Young people,” merchant Cornelius Van Horne noted in 1743. “And All Affairs are transacted in English and that Language prevails Generally Amongst Us.” In 1748, Domine Du Bois observed that “the Dutch language is gradually, more and more being neglected,” effectively endorsing the position of the “several [who] begin to speak of calling a minister, after my death, to preach in the English language, but in accordance with our manner and doctrine.”11 Gentlemen such as James De Lancey, who had predicted that “in a few years all foreign languages will go out and English will prevail,” pictured an English juggernaut rolling over foreign tongues, a view shared by attorney William Livingston, who asserted in 1754 that “every foreign language, however generally practiced and understood for a time, must, at length, be neglected and forgotten. Thus it is with the Dutch tongue, which though once the common dialect of this province, is now scarcely understood, except by its more

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ancient inhabitants.” In linking fluency in Dutch to old age, Livingston seized on a generational motif that resonated among other witnesses to New York’s evolving culture. Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist who visited the colony at midcentury, noted that “In New York [City] were . . . many homes in which Dutch was commonly spoken, especially by the elderly people. The majority, however, who were of Dutch descent, were succumbing to the English language. The younger generation scarcely ever spoke anything but English.” Lutheran minister Michael Christian Knoll was even more dogmatic when he declared in 1749 that “as late as 20 years ago most everything was still Dutch,” but “since that time everything seems to have turned to English.” Knoll’s successor Henry Muhlenberg wavered in his assessment of young New Yorkers’ language practices, maintaining in May 1751 that “the Dutch children forget their mother tongue and learn English,” but admitting a month later, in June 1751, that “the Dutch young people are just as fluent in English as in their mother tongue.”12 The matter was far from settled, even if the authors of the discourse of decline thought otherwise. The wisdom of abandoning their native language may have seemed obvious to well-off Dutchmen keen to elevate their status, but people of privilege erred in assuming that ordinary Dutch New Yorkers would passively follow their lead. To the contrary, the pace of language shift among many Dutch New Yorkers of modest means was glacial, a point that exponents of the discourse of decline conceded in 1764, when they depicted defenders of Dutch in the Reformed church debate as “stiffnecked” and “amenable to no power of reason.”13 Overarching the discourse of decline was the concern that the obduracy of the Dutch partisans was jeopardizing the church’s standing in the city by causing young people who could not understand Dutch to transfer their allegiance to congregations that featured English-speaking ministers. “We have daily the mortification to see the offspring of the wealthiest members of our congregation leave our divine worship.” The defection of these scions of the best Dutch families was sapping the ancestral church of its most precious human resources. “Our congregation . . . for some years past, has been a nursery for all the English denominations of Christians in this city, and those chiefly from our principal people, whereby most men now in power belong to other congregations, though lineally descended from Dutch parents.”14 For William Livingston, whose goal was to increase the political influence of New York’s Dissenters vis-à-vis the Anglicans, the Dutch Reformed church’s failure to institute English-language worship blocked the forging of a critical alliance between the Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed that could have substantially negated the power of the Anglicans.

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Political considerations were integral to the discourse of decline, but writing in this vein also tapped into another set of concerns centered on the cachet attached to English as a polite language. Attorney William Smith Jr.’s assertion that “our common speech [in New York City] is extremely corrupt, and the evidences of a bad taste, both as to thought and language, are visible in all our proceedings, publick and private,” resonated with the Dutch Reformed church leaders charged with recruiting the new English-speaking minister in 1763. Committed to hiring an exemplar of cultivated language, they stipulated that the candidate be “a man with a strong audible voice, clear and distinct in his speech. He must be a good orator, used to elegant language, acquainted with men and books,” and, importantly, “his English dialect [must be] pure and untainted, without any brogue of other languages.” So important was correct English speech to these acculturated Dutchmen that they declared that “in the present case [the] assistance [of the Amsterdam Classis] cannot be of much service, as we presume they are not sufficient masters of the English language to judge the properties of English speech.”15 By the mid-eighteenth century, the sons and daughters of New York’s elite families and those who emulated them took for granted that the languages of gentility were English and French. Fashion dictated that those who aspired to the requisite degree of polish should patronize one of the city’s many French schoolmasters, men who shaped their advertisements in a manner calculated to appeal to those in quest of refinement. To those who wished to count themselves among the lettered, the notion of studying Dutch (one or two Dutch schools were advertised in the newspapers) bordered on the absurd. As recently as 1713, Anglican chaplain John Sharpe had suggested that one of the benefits of living in New York City was “learning both Dutch & French which are very useful accomplishments to scholars, as well as to travelers or traders.” But the subtext of the discourse of decline was that the Dutch language, as it was spoken in New York City, had no place in polite society. Contrasting “the common Barbarous Dutch spoken in our families” with “the studied and Ornamented Style of the pulpit,” William Livingston noted that “the Generality of our People, that are well enough acquainted with the former, are almost totally ignorant of the latter.” In “the discourse of cultivated language” current in the eighteenth century, R. G. Grillo explains, “the word ‘barbarous’ and its derivatives was one of the commonest epithets employed in Britain and France by speakers of the dominant languages and dialects to refer both to subordinate languages themselves and their speakers.”16 The implication of comments like Livingston’s was that the Dutch heard in New York City resembled a dialect typical of lower-class people. In a society where

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speaking English was regarded as the foundation of civility, speaking Dutch was considered a sign of backwardness. The elite’s campaign for an eloquent English minister was premised on cosmopolitan values. The seventy-three men and fourteen women who in 1754 petitioned for English preaching contended that the language of worship was a matter of indifference. Assailing the advocates of Dutch for their “indiscreet zeal for a particular language,” they framed their demand as “a change of nothing but the Language, of which there have been long ago and still are, Instances among our own churches in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, [and] several other Parts of Holland.” Their position ultimately was upheld in 1763 by the ministers of the Amsterdam Classis, who advised the Dutch loyalists that “their special zeal for maintaining the use of the (Dutch) language . . . might be praiseworthy . . . if one was to understand by it only the retention of the clearness of expression of thought of that language, in reference to [the] pure Scriptural doctrine.” But “if you mean only the external utterances of that language,—this is of small consequence indeed.” The lesson was that “the inner language of the heart is always the same—the language of Canaan.”17 Once English preaching was a fait accompli in the city’s Reformed church, the power to tell the story of the decades-long quarrel over language passed definitively to men nurtured on the tenets of the discourse of decline. Barely a trace of the continuing rift between Dutch speakers and the Anglicized majority in postrevolutionary New York City surfaced in the early annals of the church. Neither the forced retirement of the church’s two old Dutch ministers, Lambertus De Ronde and Johannes Ritzema, in 1784 in spite of the pleadings of the Dutch-speaking remnant, nor the subsequent reversal of church policy to appease this small but insistent Dutch constituency by hiring Rev. Gerardus A. Kuypers to preach in Dutch in the Garden Street Church (which he did until 1803), captured much attention from clerical authors primed to present the eradication of the church’s ancestral language as a positive development. In the version of the language debate that appeared in mid-nineteenth-century Reformed church histories, partisans of English were portrayed as progressive while supporters of Dutch were characterized as retrograde. “As we look at this period in the lapse of time,” Thomas De Witt reflected in 1856, “we are disposed to wonder at the blind prejudice which actuated [the opponents to the introduction of English preaching]. But when we consider how deeply is the feeling of attachments to old customs, associations, and even language, lodged in the human mind, we will be led rather to deplore than to wonder.” David Demarest, writing in the same year, chided

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the members of the Dutch party for their selfishness. “Unquestionably, these people were ardently attached to their Church, but they grievously mistook her true policy. . . . They were not required to abandon [their own language], but only to consent to the introduction of the English language for the benefit of those who preferred it. The sacrifice of prejudice and feeling should have been cheerfully made, and the measures of the consistory have been submitted to.” Early twentieth-century academic studies of the language problem took their cue from these works, accentuating the merits of the English party and belittling the partisans of Dutch.18 The notion of the rapid obsolescence of Dutch in New York City embodied in the “discourse of decline” was as much an instrument to further linguistic change as a neutral appraisal of the language practices of eighteenth-century Dutch New Yorkers. It is imperative, then, to ask why many Dutch New Yorkers were so reluctant to relinquish their native tongue. In 1668, Jeremias van Rensselaer, the great Hudson Valley landholder, articulated what must have nettled virtually all Dutch New Netherlanders caught in the English imperial web. “Now it seems that it has pleased the Lord [to ordain] that we must learn English,” he confided to his mother in Amsterdam. “The worst of it all is that we have already for nearly four years been under this jurisdiction and that as yet I have learned so little. The reason is that one has no liking for it.” Other Dutch men and women who experienced the late seventeenth-century fluctuations in government also recoiled at the prospect of learning English. All that could be said of the wealthy widow Cornelia De Peyster after living in English New York for more than half a century was that she “did understand some English words, and but few, but she could not understand a whole discourse or not a whole sentence.” Even prominent men long exposed to English kept Dutch as their first language well into the eighteenth century. Speaking of “two Ancient Dutch Gentlemen, one of about sixty, and the other nigh or above 70 years of age,” in 1729, Lewis Morris remarked that “they never were perfect masters of the English tongue, nor never will be; and if they understood the common discourse, ’tis as much as they do.”19 Although economic advancement ostensibly hinged on fluency in English, scores of ordinary Dutch city dwellers, likely the occupants of the “many homes in which Dutch was commonly spoken,” balked at following the lead of those who readily adapted to the altered linguistic environment. As late as the 1760s, a Dutch speech community persisted in the city, forming the backbone of the party in the Dutch Reformed church that clashed with advocates of English-language preaching.

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One reason why the descendants of New Netherlanders held on to the Dutch language in eighteenth-century New York City relates to the clustering of Dutch families of modest means in relatively homogeneous neighborhoods, where older houses and furnishings perpetuated a Dutch ambience and Dutch was customarily heard on the streets. Analysis of 1703 census data shows Dutch New Yorkers clustering in the North Ward and, to an extent, the West Ward. Evidence of residential patterns in succeeding decades is less precise, but the comments of midcentury visitors on the prominence of Dutch-style housing in the urban landscape suggest that Dutch neighborhoods endured. “Not any of the Modern houses are built with the Gable End to the Street as was formerly the fashion amongst the old Dutch settlers,” James Birket remarked in 1750. But this traveler from Antigua quickly added, “Notwithstanding there Still remains too many of the Old Dutch houses which prevents its Appearing to Advantage.” Thomas Pownall, who reached New York in 1753, was less judgmental as he charted the city’s evolution from “a Dutch Town called Nieu-Amsterdam” where “All the Houses & Public Buildings were of Dutch Taste.” A keen observer of New York’s architectural evolution, Pownall pointed out that “since it came into the hands of the En­ glish New Churches & New Houses have been built in a more modern taste & many of the Gabel-ends of ye old houses, just as is done in Holland, have been new fronted in the Italian stile.” Despite the efforts of these modernizers—one can speculate that most were not Dutch—“the City however still retains the general appearance of a Dutch-town with its row of Gabel-ends & the rows of Trees on the sides of the Streets.”20 The Dutch neighborhood was an insulated environment where huisvrouws could share recipes and remedies and tell tales of people and events long past. At their work sites nearby, Dutchmen exchanged not only the tricks of the trade but the lore of the community. These oral traditions, the social memory of the city’s Dutch community, were transmitted in the local version of Dutch. Although genteel critics were quick to point out that the Dutch spoken in New York City had deviated appreciably from metropolitan standards, to those who conversed in it all that mattered was that it was the language of their revered ancestors. In effect, the Dutch neighborhood functioned as a “language nest,” a late twentieth-century term coined by advocates of language immersion as a method for resuscitating moribund languages. Several defamation cases brought to the Mayor’s Court between 1713 and 1728 were premised on the fact that an insult uttered in Dutch would be comprehensible to bystanders. In 1718, Benjamin Wincope (Wynkoop) accused Jacobus Roosevelt of tarnishing his reputation by speaking false and scandalous Dutch words “in the presence and hearing of many faithfull Subjects of our . . . King

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the Dutch language then well understanding.”21 Insulated from contact with speakers of the dominant language, residents daily reinforced their facility in Dutch. Equally important in sustaining the Dutch tongue in eighteenth-century New York City was the spatial separation of members of the Dutch Reformed congregation after services commenced in the new church on Nassau Street in 1731. For the first three decades of the eighteenth century, Dutch New Yorkers had gathered on Sundays at the Garden Street Church (which had opened in 1693) to listen to the sermons of Gualterus Du Bois, a minister whose talent for peacemaking had healed the breaches of the Leisler era and restored the vitality of the city’s Dutch religious community. Opening a spacious new church building to accommodate the “many excellent men and women . . . lacking seats in the church” did not mark the beginning of a new congregation, because a system was put in place for the ministers to rotate between the churches and for one consistory to deal with the administration of both churches.22 Even though the congregation was envisioned as a whole, this collegiate system was something of a fiction, since different men were appointed as choristers and bell ringers in the Garden Street Church, referred to as the Old Church, and the Nassau Street Church, referred to as the New Church. More importantly, the fact that seats were sold in each building implied that families who purchased seats or pews in a particular building would regularly attend worship there. The audience in each church was essentially fixed. The ministers circulated, but the people did not. Therefore, though nominally part of the same congregation, each group of church attendees began to develop a distinct corporate identity. Traditionalists gravitated to the Old Church in Garden Street to hear the time-honored formulas repeated and the old prayers intoned, while more cosmopolitan Dutch New Yorkers were attracted to the New Church, which boasted architectural elements such as a tower and a spire that were associated with genteel values. The developing self-consciousness of those who attended the Garden Street Church was evident in congregational records as early as December 1731, when it was ordered that “after the roof of the Old church is glazed, the Church Masters shall see that the Old Church is furnished with a new roof, provided the direction thereof is left entirely to their folks.” Additionally, “many in the Old Church, both men and women, complain that they are compelled to sit too close to each other.” By 1747, less than twenty years after the spatial bifurcation of the congregation, the divergent opinions of the city’s Dutch Reformed became public knowledge when an anonymous newspaper essayist using the initials Z.Z., claiming to speak for “men of some Parts, . . . well affected Members of the Dutch Church in this City,” asserted that “the

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division of our Body, to repair to two seperate [sic] Places of Worship, had long been and still continued to be, a great occasion of our weekly Diminution.” The remedy was clear. “To prevent the Decay of our church,” this spokesman for the congregation’s “considerable Men” proposed that “the old Building be thrown down, and the Ground sold” and that galleries be raised in the “New Building to which the whole congregation are to resort, and Worship.” The goal, as he spelled it out, was “to Assemble our whole Body, to recieve [sic] the Same Instruction, and to Communicate after the Manner of the Apostles and Primitive Christians, at one common Table, together and with one Accord.”23 When the essayist had broached this idea to loyal attenders of the Garden Street Church—he called them “Persons of weak Sentiments, but strong Bigotry”—they “declared, it would be a Prostitution of a Place so long sacred.” He was quick to belittle their “Prejudice that stones are, or can be vested with Sanctity and Holiness,” but both he and they knew that the nub of the issue was that “our Congregation is made up of two Parts, one of which, do not understand a sermon but in Dutch, and the other no Part of the Administration in that Language.”24 The plan to level the old structure and assemble the entire congregation in the 1731 building pivoted on introducing English preaching and gradually exposing the children of the old guard to it. Retaining the old building thus became crucial to those devoted to Dutch religious traditions. Concentrating their numbers at one site gave them a platform for expressing their views on church affairs and enabled them to act as a bloc in opposing innovations in language and church practice. The continuing stream of Dutch-speaking migrants from New York’s environs also contributed to the perpetuation of the Dutch language in the city. When Scotsman Hugh Simm settled in Albany in 1774, he was struck by the fact that “dutch is the Common language in this place.” The city, he remarked, had “300 inhabitants mostly Dutch which Speak their own language.” Accustomed to conversing in Dutch, newcomers from Albany, the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and northern New Jersey surely played a role in deterring Dutch city dwellers from entering the English cultural orbit.25 Whether ambitious young men or new brides, recent migrants regularly mingled with longtime Dutch city residents. Their fidelity to traditional ways served as a brake on Anglicization. While infusions from the countryside, neighborhood havens, and a stronghold in the Garden Street Church all contributed to the surprising vitality of the Dutch language in the eighteenth century, it was continuing exposure to Dutch print culture that sustained fourth- and fifth-generation Dutch New Yorkers’ partiality for the language that had come down in their families.

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Dutch oral communication in New York City was grounded in a vibrant transatlantic print culture centered in Amsterdam, which enjoyed a reputation as “the bookshop of the world.” Reading was a fixture of daily life among urban dwellers in the early modern Netherlands, which boasted a high rate of literacy, especially among Protestants. In eighteenth-century New York City’s Protestant society, with a majority of white residents literate, the preponderance of books issuing from the presses and imported from elsewhere were in English, a language largely unintelligible to many with roots in the Netherlands.26 Nonetheless, Dutch commoners craved reading material in their native language. Immersing themselves in the rhythms of a language rooted in a distant place and time, far from being an exercise in nostalgia, was a means of rejuvenation in an increasingly alien environment. This pleasure was not easily surrendered. To satisfy their appetite for texts in their native language, Dutch New Yorkers first turned to family Bibles and other religious works that their immigrant ancestors had passed down in the family. With books at a premium in the late seventeenth century, local readers whose books fell into disrepair might have turned to a former apprentice of a well-known printer in Middelburg in Zeeland who “sometimes bound old books, and was the only bookbinder in the country” in the 1670s. The importance attached to old volumes emerges in wills such as that of cordwainer Evert Van Hook, who in 1711 bequeathed his “Great Dutch Bible [folio bible in the Statenvertaling, the 1637 translation of the Bible into the Dutch vernacular]” to his eldest son, his “Great Book of Emanuel de Meter” to another son, and his “Great Marturas Book” to his daughter.27 Yet the demand for reading material in Dutch could not be satisfied by books already circulating in the colony. On occasion, local residents requested persons in the Netherlands to procure certain volumes for them. Labadist Jasper Danckaerts sent Bibles from Amsterdam to two men he had befriended during his sojourn in New York City in 1679. In 1696, Domine Henricus Selyns related that his correspondent “had sent us [Rev. Van Zuuren and Selyns] a package containing published books. This was undoubtedly done in Frederick Philipszen’s little barkentine, which was captured by the French. I suffered a private loss in this in that I had sent for goods and books.”28 In the late 1670s, merchant Margriet Hardenbroek imported Dutch books from Amsterdam, and Arnoldus De La Grange kept a “little shop” in the city where there were “plenty of books,” among them his personal favorites, “two of the elder Brakel, one of which was, De Trappen des Geestelycken Levens . . . [and] another written by a Scotchman . . . and translated by Domine

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Koelman”29 City traders continued to import Dutch-language books—mostly religious works and schoolbooks—from overseas decades after the Dutch colony had been placed under English rule. In 1702, the shop goods of recently deceased merchant Peter Jacobs Marius included 140 small Dutch books.30 Schoolteacher Abraham De La Noy, who doubled as a trader, had a vast collection of Dutch schoolbooks, including multiple copies of catechism books, songbooks, “Books of Cortimus,” and the “Golden trumpet,” in stock when he died in 1702. The 1702 inventory of Samuel Mynderts, who immigrated to New York City from Utrecht around 1686 with his wife and daughter, and who had two brothers in Utrecht, included four dozen alphabet books, seven dozen catechisms, and twenty-two copies of “France Tyranny” and “Speigle of Youth.” Among the items appraisers found in Gertye Splinter’s shop in 1722 were “52 small Dutch Childrens School Books.”31 Concerned that parents “have now for some years neglected to have their children receive instruction in the Netherlandish tongue,” Dutch church leaders admonished their brethren in 1726 that “all our hearts must be impressed with the necessity of instructing the young in the Dutch language” and hired a Dutch schoolmaster to teach the city’s Dutch children.32 If, prior to printer William Bradford’s arrival in 1693, Dutch and English New Yorkers were equally disadvantaged in not having access to locally produced books, Bradford’s setting up shop in the city marked a crucial shift in the city’s cultural landscape. From this moment on, the English enjoyed a monopoly of New York’s print culture, a development whose significance the learned Dutch Reformed minister and poet Henricus Selyns grasped when lamenting the lack of bona fide printing outlets for Dutch authors in New York in 1696. “One has no occasion here to publish and to make anything known in print as our printer understands nothing but the English language.” Imperfections in the Dutch imprints produced by Bradford, his student and successor John Peter Zenger, and later printers continued to displease educated Dutchmen accustomed to the high quality of printing in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the city’s printers attempted to accommodate New York’s Dutch readers by producing works in their native tongue. Hendrik Edelman’s Dutch-American Bibliography identifies ninety-two Dutch-language books and broadsides that were printed in New York between 1693 and 1774, though we lack information on how many copies of each were issued or who bought them.33 Although these Dutch-language imprints amounted to only a fraction of the English books published in the city during this period, their numbers do not tell the whole story. The steady stream of locally published works in Dutch documents the ongoing demand for reading material in what had once been the colony’s common tongue.

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All seven of New York’s major printers, only one of whom—Henricus De Foreest—descended from a New Netherland family, readily tapped into this market and issued works in Dutch.34 William Bradford, James Parker, William Weyman, and John Holt, all of English background, and Hugh Gaine, an Irishman, published books in the Dutch language, mostly polemical works at the heart of theological controversies among both Dutch Reformed and Lutherans, other religious works, and Dutch-language almanacs. As these printers were men outside the Dutch community, the incentive to produce books in what was to them a foreign language lay in the potentially lucrative market of Dutch readers in the city and beyond. The key figures in Dutch publishing in eighteenth-century New York City were Henricus De Foreest and John Peter Zenger, both of whom had ties to the Dutch Reformed church. Zenger, a German immigrant who had arrived in the city as a boy, married in the church in 1722, joined the congregation the following year, and also became church organist. De Foreest was baptized in the city’s Dutch Reformed church in 1712, married there in 1734, and had at least one child baptized there.35 Both printers produced works in the English language, but Dutch imprints formed 19 percent of Zenger’s total output (sixteen of eighty-six works) and almost 30 percent of De Foreest’s (at least thirteen books in Dutch of forty-four total works printed). Between 1725 and 1729, the young Zenger, no doubt grateful for the business, printed a series of works on religious subjects commissioned by Dutch clergymen and laymen eager to disseminate their ideas. For the many Dutch men and women whose view of the world was framed in a religious vocabulary, the medium of print was critical to understanding theological and ecclesiastical issues. In 1730, Zenger, already a veteran of Dutch publishing, teamed up with Jacobus Goelet Jr., the son of a late seventeenth-century Dutch immigrant stationer, to print a Dutch-language edition of the sermons of Albany minister Petrus Henricus Van Driessen titled De Heerlykheit der Gernade, to which Jacobus Goelet appended a spiritual poem of his own composition. Goelet, perhaps at the instigation of mathematics teacher and Groningen native Pieter Venema, probably induced Zenger to reprint in 1736 a controversial 1718 pamphlet penned by Reformed ministers in Groningen attacking Jacob Ten Cate, who was said to be influenced by the seventeenth-century mystic Annette Bourignon.36 As the only New York printer from a culturally Dutch background, De Foreest was especially attuned to the crosscurrents in the mid-eighteenth-century Dutch community. Perhaps embittered by the travails of his father, Barent De Foreest, who served as the Dutch Reformed church schoolmaster from 1725 to 1732, or possibly spurred by his wife, whose father was an English mariner

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(her mother was Dutch), he may have empathized with congregants who favored accommodating English speakers. This may explain why, even though he accepted printing jobs for church officials, he published Z.Z.’s manifesto in favor of the English language on the front page of the New-York Evening Post in 1747 and in 1748 reprinted an English translation done in the Netherlands of “the whole book of Forms and the Lithurgy [sic] of the Dutch Reformed Church,” a volume that he advertised in his newspaper over a period of eleven months. Still, De Foreest never lost sight of the congregation’s many Dutch speakers, issuing the Predik-beurten der predikanten, van de Nederduytsche Gemeente, the preaching schedule for the city’s Dutch Reformed clergy.37 De Foreest’s most important Dutch works were the 1751 inaugural sermon of the church’s new domine, Lambertus De Ronde, De Gekruicigde Christus, Als Het Voornaamste Toeleg Van Gods Getrouwe Kruisgesanten, in Hunne Prediking, which included a preface by the venerable Gualterus Du Bois, and soon after De Ronde’s funeral sermon for Du Bois, De Ware Gedagt’nis, Gelovige Navolging En Salig Uiteinde, Van Getrouwe Voorgangers,Verklaart en Toegepast, in Ene Lykrede. De Foreest counted on a network of Dutch shopkeepers to sell these publications. On March 18, 1751, readers of the New-York Evening Post were alerted that De Gekruicigde Christus was “Just Gedruckt en Te Bekomen [just printed and available] by Abraham Van Wyck, Jores Brinkerhoff, Mrs. Klopper, and Wedu Rutgers. Prys 2 Schellingen.” On November 4, 1751, H. De Foreest Boekdrukker announced his intention of printing De Ronde’s funeral sermon for Du Bois at the “prys 1 schelling en 8 penningen.” On April 20, 1752, this volume was “te bekomen by Abraham Van Wyk, Abraham Leffers, Joris Brinkerhoff, and the author.”38 Zenger and De Foreest published Dutch-language almanacs, as did other New York printers. Counterparts of the English almanacs that were a staple in eighteenth-century New York households, these annual compendiums of vital information, secular and religious, included material of interest to those with roots in the Netherlands.39 In November 1741, Zenger and Jacobus Goelet Jr. advertised a Nederduitsche Almanack voor het Jaar 1742, which sold for “6 Peningen het stuk of 3s 6d het Dozyn”—six pennies a piece, or 3 shillings, 6 pence a dozen—a price nearly every Dutch family could afford. De Foreest issued a Dutch-language almanac every year from 1744 to 1752. In some years, two versions of a Dutch almanac appeared. Although few Dutch almanacs are extant, owing to the ephemeral nature of the genre, newspaper advertisements suggest that they remained popular until the eve of the Revolution. On the first page of the New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury for December 12, 1774, Hugh Gaine announced the publication of a “Low-Dutch Almanack” for the year 1775.

Figure 3.  Title Page of De Ware Gedagt’nis, Gelovige Navolging, En Salig Uiteinde van Getrouwe Voorgangers, Verklaart en Toegepast, in Ene Lykrede . . . Door Lambertus De Ronde, Predikant te New-York. In 1752, Lambertus De Ronde’s funeral sermon for Rev. Gualterus Du Bois, the widely respected minister of the city’s Dutch Reformed church, was printed in the native language of New York’s many Dutch readers. Source: Readex (Readex.com) a division of NewsBank Inc. ©2002: American Antiquarian Society and NewsBank, Inc.

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However grateful New York’s Dutch speakers were for locally printed works in their native tongue, they were stymied by the lack of a Dutch-language newspaper in the city. Given the crucial role the ethnic press has played in sustaining cultural identity in America, the fact that all of colonial New York’s newspapers, beginning with William Bradford’s New-York Gazette in 1725, were printed in the English language foreclosed a crucial medium of communication to the city’s Dutch readers. At best, these readers occasionally found Dutch-language items in the interstices of English newspaper columns. Most often, these were advertisements for Dutch publications, such as the one Hugh Gaine placed in the New-York Mercury in April and May 1755. “Tegenwoordig in het Licht, en te be komen by Garrat Noel, in Dock Street, Robert McAlpine, in Hanover-Square, de Drukker deeses, Een Zamenspraak tusschen een boere onderling en een Predikant, over de Tegenwoordige staat van de Neder Duitsche Kerk , in dit gedeelte van America [A Conversation between a farm laborer and a preacher about the present status of the Dutch Reformed Church in this part of America].40 In 1751, De Foreest’s New-York Evening Post printed in Dutch an account of the sermons preached by the city’s domines on the occasion of the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and, more importantly, an obituary for the widely respected minister of New York City’s Dutch Reformed church, Gualterus Du Bois. When Du Bois died in October 1751, both De Foreest and James Parker, publisher of the New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, honored the revered cleric. Parker filled the entire right-hand column of his two-column front page with a literary-style poem memorializing the venerable clergyman. De Foreest, who traced his ancestors back to New Netherland, knew better than Parker, a transplanted New Jerseyite with New England roots, that many of Domine Du Bois’s most ardent admirers did not comprehend English poetry or prose. Consequently, he published two versions of the minister’s obituary in the New-York Evening Post, one in Dutch, which highlighted the clergyman’s pastoral work, and one in English, which extolled his genteel virtues.41 Notwithstanding the Dutch-language volumes intermittently issued by local printers, and the snatches of Dutch text that occasionally appeared amid the sea of English words on newspaper pages, the asymmetrical shape of New York’s print landscape had long been set. To quench their thirst for works in their own language, Dutch readers had to rely on volumes imported from the Netherlands. With English culture encroaching on Dutch precincts, replenishing local stocks of Dutch literature fell to the city’s merchants. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the major purveyor of Dutch books in the city was Jacobus Goelet Jr., the man who earlier had partnered with printer John Peter Zenger to issue various works in the Dutch

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language. With Zenger’s death in 1746, Goelet’s career as a publishing entrepreneur came to a halt. But in the role of bookseller he continued to make Dutch-language works available to New Yorkers. In 1756, when he was in his late sixties, Goelet was the vendor of what was advertised as a “A Dutch Elogium, on the Death of the Reverend Mr. Antonius Curtenius, late Pastor of the Dutch Reformed Churches in King’s County on Long Island.” Domine Curtenius had become a part of Goelet’s family circle after marrying the widow of Goelet’s brother Philip in 1751. The bonds between the Goelets and the Curteniuses were reinforced in 1754 when Peter T. Curtenius, the minister’s son, formed a mercantile partnership with his stepbrother Isaac Goelet, taking over the business run by John Dies, the husband of Jannetie, Jacobus Goelet Jr.’s daughter. In 1755, Peter T. Curtenius married Catherine Goelet, his stepsister and the goddaughter of Jacobus Goelet Jr. Antonius Curtenius’s death the following year transformed Jacobus, the sole surviving Goelet brother of his generation, into the paterfamilias. It was likely at his urging that Peter Curtenius, who by 1760 was established at the Sign of the Golden Anvil and Hammer as an ironmonger, added a sideline in Dutch-language books. In December 1761, Curtenius advertised “Dutch Bibles, testaments and sundry sorts of small school books.” But it was the elderly Goelet’s decision to terminate his business as a bookseller that thrust Curtenius into the role of New York City’s major vendor of Dutch books. In November 1763, after touting the “compleat Assortment of Ironmongery, Cutlery, and Braising Ware” in his shop, Curtenius noted that “at the same place may be had—All the different Sorts of Dutch Books, formerly kept by Mr. Jacob Goelet, who is removed into the country.” Having acquired Goelet’s stock, Curtenius enumerated sixty Dutch titles that were available and noted that these were “behalven nog verscheyden soorten meer die hier niet genoemt zyn”—besides still various sorts more that are not named here.42 Convinced that the market in Dutch books would remain profitable, Curtenius ordered additional volumes from the Netherlands. In September 1765, he mentioned that a variety of goods had arrived in “the Brig Catherine, Capt; Lawrence, from Amsterdam,” including “Dutch Folio and Quarto Bibles, Testaments, and Psalm Books, in coarse and fine Print; a few Lutheran Bibles and Testaments, in Quarto and Octavo; and a great variety of Hymns, Catechise, Prayer, School, and other Books, by the most approved authors.” Thereafter, his advertisements referred to Dutch books being available “as usual.” In 1771, he listed “Dutch folio and pocket bibles, testaments and psalm books, Lutheren bibles and testaments, translated from Luther’s German bible into low dutch, hymns and prayer books, school and other Dutch books as usual.” Curtenius also began dealing in used Dutch-language volumes. At the end of a lengthy list

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of commodities “lately imported from Europe” in 1773, he noted “ALSO Dutch Bibles, testaments and psalm books and sundry other Dutch books, some of them second hand, which last will be sold at half price.”43 Curtenius may have been New York’s largest importer of Dutch books printed in the Netherlands in the 1760s and 1770s, but he was not the only local merchant who retailed Dutch-language volumes during the quarter-century before the American Revolution. At least seven other city merchants or shopkeepers active after 1750—Philip Livingston, Daniel Crommelin, Cornelius C. Wynkoop, Lodewick Bamper, Peter Low, Cornelius Clopper, and Nicholas Bogert, men largely, but not exclusively, of Dutch ancestry—calculated that there were enough customers for Dutch-language books to warrant importing or stocking them.44 Traders typically advertised Dutch books among a variety of unrelated items, since the limited market for Dutch-language books precluded specialized Dutch booksellers. Family Bibles, the repository of births, marriages, and deaths, were the mainstay of the colonial Dutch book trade. Since only one child could inherit the Great Dutch Bible, the supply of Dutch Bibles in New York had to be continually replenished to meet the needs of successive generations. Cornelius C. Wynkoop offered “large Dutch Bibles with plates,” Lodewick Bamper advertised “large Dutch Bibles with copper plates,” Peter Low listed “Kinder bybel” among the titles he merchandised, and Peter Curtenius specified “Gerformeerde [Reformed] en Lutherse Bybles . . . in Quarto and Octavo, fyn and gros Druck [fine and coarse print].” Testaments and psalm books, smaller volumes that worshippers carried with them to church, were also in continuous demand and were advertised by most of these merchants. Catechisms and children’s schoolbooks also were regularly imported. A Dutch schoolbook titled Trap der Jeugd (Stairway for Youth) inscribed by Catharina Haring in 1742 is extant, as are several other catechisms, complete with the scrawls of their youthful owners. In the 1760s, Peter Low advertised “Cathechismus, and andere Schoolboeken,” and Peter Curtenius listed “Schrifteurlijke Schoolboekjes, A.B. Boekjes, [and] Catechismus” among books for sale.45 Devotional and theological works predominated among the Dutch books imported by New York’s dealers, but occasional references to other volumes suggest that local Dutch readers were acquainted with the vast array of literary, philosophical, religious, medical, legal, and geographical texts issuing from the presses of the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. In 1747 there appeared an advertisement for a “Catalogue of a choice Parcel of French and Dutch Books” to be sold by “Publick Vendue” at the house of James Aarding. A variety of Dutch titles were listed—C. de Bruyns reizens; Groot algemeen

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Historis Wordenbook Eerste Deel; Halmas Woordenbook; Beschryvinge Van Suriname; Beginselen Van Euclides; Natuurkundige Verbandel Van Swangere Vromoe; J. Hubner’s Oude & Nieuwe Geographie; Duytslandsr Oudbeeden; Werdadige Konst; Britannische ryk in America; and Algemeene Historie. Shopkeeper Lodewick Bamper offered “Testaments, Psalm-Books, and sundry Sorts of other Dutch books” (1762), and Nicholas Bogert sold “Dutch Folio Bibles, and other Dutch Books” (1768), but the titles of these “other Dutch Books” were not specified. Advertisements by Low and Curtenius in 1764 and 1765 mention books by the famous Dutch author Jacob Cats—“Cats trowing [marriage]” and “[Cats] Spiegel van de uude en niewen Tydt [Mirror of old and new times]”—as well as “Sewels Wegwyzer na de Engelsche Taal [Sewels Guide to the English Language].”46 Curtenius and Low, along with other local merchants and printers, continued to cater to the city’s Dutch readers in the 1760s and 1770s, but these bilingual entrepreneurs had concluded it was futile to preserve Dutch as the language of worship in the city’s Dutch Reformed church since English was destined to be the common language of New Yorkers. They both cast their lot with the English party in the Dutch Reformed church conflict. Low served on the committee for printing the English-language psalm books and also translated Abraham Hellenbroek’s popular Dutch catechism. Curtenius pledged twenty pounds to the fund for building the third Dutch church designated solely for English preaching.47 On April 15, 1764, not long after Peter Curtenius advertised the over sixty Dutch books for sale in his shop, Archibald Laidlie, a Scottish-born and educated minister who had served a congregation in the Netherlands, delivered his inaugural sermon in English in New York City’s Dutch Reformed church to “the great satisfaction of a large congregation.” His accession to the pulpit marked the triumph of the advocates of English-language preaching and set in motion a rapid transformation of church practice that included the translation of the catechism and the psalms into English as well as the introduction of evangelical preaching. Within a few years, a second minister, John Henry Livingston, was called to preach in English, and a new church erected to accommodate all those who now flocked to hear Dutch Reformed worship in the English language. Buoyed by the congregation’s remarkable increase in numbers and prestige in a few short years, the English party felt vindicated in tracing the church’s ills to the partisans of the Dutch language. “Had the En­glish language been timely introduced in the public service,” wrote John Henry Livingston in 1772, “how many of our chief  & largest families wo’d have been preserved among us? had . . . vigorous effectual methods been pursued to

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educate divines from amongst ourselves who co’d have served in the English language & been an ornament in the learned world as well as the Church, how large, how numerous, how flourishing sho’d we at this day have been?”48 Still, the disgruntled partisans of Dutch remained wedded to their beliefs, unrepentant and unconvinced that English-language worship was beneficial to the congregation, not to mention legal in terms of the rules of church governance. They fulminated against those who they felt had betrayed them and were not at all reticent about airing their grievances. In 1765, they complained that “the large ‘New Dutch Church’ is, inside and out, most sumptuously fitted up, while the old building [the Garden Street Church] is left to decay, just for the purpose of having the upper hand.” Two years later, they contended that “the Dutch School is not taken Care of by the Rulers to the total Ruin of the Dutch education.” Their search for allies in their fight even led Dutch partisans across denominational lines to enlist the support of Samuel Auchmuty, the rector of Trinity Church. Auchmuty presented the Dutch party’s grievances to his superiors in London, highlighting the “smart opposition from the Original Dutch Descendants” to the installation of an English-speaking minister in their church. Sympathetic to the plight of people he considered victims of Presbyterian machinations, Auchmuty seemed inclined to favor their strategy. “They think that if his Lordship of London [the bishop of London] would use his good offices with the Classis of Amsterdam, that they should have Justice done them.”49 Dutch New Yorkers who cherished tradition in the church were sensible of the power of print. In 1765, the “Commissioners of the Dutch party,” Abel Hardenbroek, Jacobus Stoutenburgh, and Huybert van Wagenen, sent the Amsterdam Classis “two printed booklets, to set forth more clearly their mind and utterances; and how, as they think, matters ought to be in the church.” But these men exhibited a surprising flexibility in the matter of language outside the ecclesiastical domain. When a situation arose in August 1771 in which they wished to affirm their corporate identity, they did not hesitate to express themselves in English. Abel Hardenbroek and John Tiebout “in Behalf of many others” inserted a letter of welcome to Governor Tryon in English in the New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury that specified that they were “unfortunately disjoin’d by a religious Dispute from some of our Brethren of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in this City.”50 To convince the large urban audience that they were the authentic Dutchmen, it was necessary to communicate in English. What it meant to be Dutch in British New York City was the dominant theme of an ambitious work in English published by Jacobus Stoutenburgh, one of the Dutch party leaders, in 1764. A SHORT DETAIL, OF THE CHURCH,

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At the time of the Apostles: Withall shewing how far we are degenerated from them: With a Christian Admonition, to heal this lamentable Breach again among us, if we hope to receive a Blessing from God, though rooted in biblical exegesis, distills the ideas at the core of the Dutch party’s thinking, giving a good sense of the buried alternative discourse of the partisans of the Dutch language.51 In this polemical work, Stoutenburgh raised in capitals the fundamental issue of Dutch cultural identity in English New York City by questioning what differentiated the Dutch from the English. In an environment increasingly shaped by English values and ideals, descendants of New Netherlanders faced the possibility that their birthright would no longer have currency in the city founded by their ancestors. To Stoutenburgh, who set great store by customary understandings of what distinguished the Dutch from the English, the position of the English party seemed preposterous. If distinctions between Dutch and English were a matter of indifference, as the English faction claimed, what made a person Dutch? He took the English party to task for trying to drain all meaning out of being Dutch. “They say that English is Dutch and Dutch is English; this is a strange Saying to us, which we cannot as yet apprehend.” For traditionalists, this blurring of the line between Dutch and English was anathema. Being Dutch was unique. Yet since Stoutenburgh’s objective was to win over members of the congregation’s English faction, he wrote his book in the language they preferred. Perhaps the supreme irony is that Stoutenburgh’s defense of the Dutch was grounded in the “rights” language of the Anglo-American revolutionary debate. “Now I ask my friends, where is the Dutch Right? Ye say the Church is Dutch, yea the whole ordering of it is Dutch, and the Rights of the Dutch shall always be preserved undisturbed, mean while those who are Dutch and who come forth to maintain and preserve the Dutch Rights may not be favoured so much, as to have Rulers in the Old-Church to their Liking, or own Choice; therefore, I ask again, Dutchman, where is your Right? Answer, I know not; Neither do I; well then I conclude and say, adieu Right.”52 Jacobus Stoutenburgh, in all probability, had never been to the Netherlands, and neither had most of the men and women who mobilized to keep Dutch the sole language of worship in their church. Speaking for a segment of the city’s Dutch population that aspired not to refinement but to godliness, Stoutenburgh set about reinventing the meaning of Dutchness in a space no longer resembling a Dutch city and at a time when loyalty to the British empire was assumed. Perpetuating Dutch culture in this environment required extreme measures such as using an English vocabulary to promote Dutch ideals. Earlier, Jacobus Goelet Jr. had staked out a similar position, though he chose to align himself with the Anglicizers in the Dutch Reformed church.

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Goelet’s youthful career as a sea captain in the 1710s and 1720s had brought him to Amsterdam. His admiration for things Dutch sparked by his journeys abroad, he set out to burnish the links between descendants of New Netherland families and their ancestral home by providing Dutch New Yorkers with books in their native tongue. Alone as a bookseller and in partnership with printer John Peter Zenger, he labored to sustain Dutchness in British New York City. At midcentury, however, Goelet began to steer a different course. As a man well versed in both the Dutch and English tongues and clearly capable of navigating the city’s cultural crosscurrents, Goelet could envision the English language as a conduit for cultivating pride in Dutch heritage. In 1754, he not only signed the petition in favor of English preaching in the Dutch Reformed church, but accepted an appointment as New York colony’s official translator of Dutch records. To ensure the place of the New Netherland Dutch in historical memory, he prepared a digest of the early Dutch records in English and also furnished William Smith with translations of Dutch documents for his 1757 history of the colony. Goelet, though still a seller of Dutch books, had come to believe that the best way to safeguard the legacy of the New Netherland Dutch was to capture it in translation.53 Both Jacobus Stoutenburgh and Jacobus Goelet realized that they could not live in a hermetically sealed Dutch world in British New York City, but neither man was prepared to dispense with the Dutch language. Perhaps the most instructive case of a Dutch New Yorker suspended between the city’s competing languages was that of Dutch Reformed minister Lambertus De Ronde, whose identification as the champion of the city’s Dutch speakers in the church dispute has obscured his forays into the English world of letters.54 Although De Ronde was a relative newcomer to the city when the church quarrel unfolded, the vexations he experienced as a Dutch-speaking religious leader in a cultural milieu dominated by Englishmen likely struck a chord among local Dutch families who had been wrestling for generations with the linguistic consequences of New Netherland’s transfer to English rule. A native of the Netherlands, De Ronde clearly was at home in the Dutch language, and he must have been pleased to find that Dutch readers were numerous enough in New York City to warrant publication of both his 1751 inaugural sermon and his 1752 tribute to Domine Gualterus Du Bois. Yet the consensus building for English preaching among the congregational elite no doubt gave him pause, since he too aspired to make a mark in his new home and craved the esteem of the region’s Anglo-American clergymen. Given the cogency of the case for adapting to the English language in this British-ruled city and the course of church politics, De Ronde eventually decided to “learn a language, against which I had an antipathy for twelve or

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thirteen years.” Something of a linguist—he had composed “some current pieces [Loop stukken] of Divine Truth, in Dutch and Negro-English,” while serving in Surinam—De Ronde, by his own account, quickly attained competence in English.55 To demonstrate his facility in the preferred language of the church’s leading men, De Ronde began to use English in his teaching and noted that he “had over eighty catechumens (in English)” before Laidlie reached New York. Still, when he published his first book in English, A System: Containing the Principles of the Christian Religion, Suitable to the Heidelberg Catechism, in 1763 he was forthright in declaring that his English prose might not measure up to the standards of native speakers. He characterized his book as “a bold Undertaking, by a person so little versed in the English language” that “it would be Presumption to pretend to write it with Ease and Elegance.” Scaling down his pretensions, he announced that his purpose was “to express my Sentiments intelligibly in a Work . . . designed, rather to adorn the Mind with divine Truths, than to please the Imagination with the Flowers of Rhetorick.” Once embarked on a literary career in English, De Ronde seemingly warmed to the task, mentioning in 1764 that “I am also at present writing little Tracts in the English language.”56 When De Ronde ventured beyond the Dutch Reformed church to preach in English, however, he was rebuffed by the church’s elders and deacons, who mocked the “passion which he has for preaching English, for which he is not in the least qualified” and deplored the fact that “this has led him to hold En­ glish services in private houses; and subsequently he went also to New Jersey, to preach in Presbyterian churches there.”57 When the consistory put an end to these practices, as well as to his catechism classes in English, De Ronde registered his grievances with the Amsterdam Classis and defended his activities, underscoring the appreciative audiences for his English-language preaching. De Ronde, though fluent in English, may have been unable to shed a telltale accent. Whatever the reason, congregational leaders made clear their preference for an authentic native speaker whose polite English was equal to that of the ministers of other city churches. Taken aback by the scorn heaped on him, De Ronde was sent reeling by the consistory’s order that he preach only in Dutch. “Am I not to be allowed to preach the Gospel in this English tongue as well as in the Dutch? . . . am I only a Dutch speaking minister,” he railed. “Well, [I] do, indeed, preach in Dutch; yet, as a fact, I am able to speak, preach or write, in whichever language I choose.”58 The admiration De Ronde received from his Dutch-speaking flock did not compensate for his marginalization in his own church. To salvage his self-respect, the embattled preacher turned to outsiders who could attest not

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only to his mastery of the English tongue but also to his contributions to theology. The second of his two books in English, The True Spiritual Religion, published in 1767, was aimed at English readers. In the preface, he stated that the pressing need to revive “the languishing cause of vital Christianity and substantial piety” caused him to “compose this treatise and communicate it to the American world in that language which is more universally understood.” Cloaking himself in the garb of one who eschewed the artificiality of contemporary prose, De Ronde informed prospective readers that “flowers of rethorick [sic], fine style, fancy, wit, and such other ornaments” were “more than my skill in the English language, could produce.” In a self-effacing tone, he avowed that “my intention is by no means to fill men’s head with notions, but to quicken and influence their affections.”59 Hoping that the approbation of English-speaking clergymen would enhance his reputation, De Ronde highlighted the fact that David Bostwick, the city’s Presbyterian minister, had been “a beloved and intimate friend of mine,” and, even more, this “highly educated, godly and faithful pastor” had “recommended my ‘System of Truth’ to many, as being conformable in all respects to the ‘Confession of Faith’ of the pure Protestant Church.” De Ronde corresponded in English with New England cleric Eleazer Wheelock in 1765 on making a collection in the Dutch Reformed congregation for Wheelock’s Indian school, and expressed his pride in becoming a member of the circle of those committed to “promot[ing] the Kingdom of Christ among the Heathen Nations of North America.” Informing Wheelock that he “had the pleasure of enjoying the company of the Rev’d Nathaniel Whitaker at my house relating to me the present state of the indians affaires,” he reported that he “offered my Self to him, even as I still do to you.” Presuming that Wheelock admired his writing, De Ronde related in 1769 that he had sent him “my Book Spiritual Religion for which you have been so kind as to Subscribe.”60 Although highly educated and adorned with the mantle of religious authority, Lambertus De Ronde was unable to advance the cause of biculturalism in the polarized climate of the Dutch Reformed congregation in the 1760s and 1770s. His story stands as a poignant reminder of the gulf that separated the descendants of what once had been the city’s Dutch “nation.” For those who asked “Whose heart does not chafe when he hears of the humiliation offered to the Dutch in this city? and that too, by our brothers and kinsmen?” defending their native tongue was not a frivolous gesture, a matter of substituting one vocabulary for another.61 To read texts in Dutch—whether those texts were produced locally or imported from the Netherlands—was to reinvigorate ties to transatlantic Dutch print culture. To worship in Dutch was to preserve a unique connection to the sacred.

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As recollections of Dutch customs and lore faded for many, the writings of distant countrymen and the intonations of Dutch-speaking ministers stoked their memory, providing an illusory sense of continuity in the midst of massive change. Only by comprehending the depth of feeling that underlay Dutch partisans’ animus toward the gentlemen who they felt had shattered the core of Dutch cultural identity in New York City can we explain their boldness in resisting the linguistic policies of church leaders to whom they had deferred in the past. Breathing life into a language that had been branded illegitimate by social superiors was, at heart, a subversive act, a way to defy the polite promoters of the enveloping English culture, whether people of Dutch ancestry or Britons. The Dutch Reformed commoners who mobilized to oppose English-language preaching in their church did not deliberately set out to undermine church leaders’ cultural authority, but they soon found themselves engaged in a struggle for influence with their social betters in the congregation. Driven by passion for what they deemed a divinely sanctioned cause, they refused to cede ground to men whose rank normally entitled them to govern both in and out of church. What began as a debate about language metamorphosed into a political contest between a vocal minority committed to maintaining an orthodoxy centered on Dutch-language preaching and their Anglicized coreligionists, who favored worship in English conducted by the new moderate evangelical ministers, Archibald Laidlie and John Henry Livingston. Unsuccessful in forestalling English preaching, the partisans of Dutch nevertheless demonstrated their resourcefulness in mounting a spirited campaign to thwart the designs of the Anglicized elite. They petitioned, they took direct action, they entreated the Anglican minister of Trinity Church to intervene on their behalf, and they hired English lawyers to take their case to the colony’s Supreme Court. In compelling the consistory to engage with them on these issues, Dutch-speaking commoners made clear that it was in their power to curtail gentlemen’s cultural authority in the church setting. A similar message had been transmitted to the principal men of New York’s Presbyterian Church in the early 1750s by an equally undistinguished group of men who also were convinced that a particular form of language was linked to the expression of faith.62 In this case, the actors were Scots, some fairly recent immigrants to the city, who venerated Francis Rous’s version of the psalms for its literalness. Uppermost in their minds was ensuring that the psalms sung during worship were true to the word of God as set forth in the Bible. When the congregation’s trustees moved to replace Rous’s standard

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Scottish text with Dissenter Isaac Watts’s polite rendering of the psalms, the Scots formed a “Scotch Presbyterian Society” in protest. The trustees, who spoke for the church’s leading men, characterized the Scottish psalms as “Low flat and mean” and were convinced that the beauty of the language in Watts’s psalms would enhance devotion. Introducing a “New Version of the Psalms into the Public Worship” they “thought [was] proper . . . in this age of taste and Refinement.” The Scotch Presbyterian Society questioned the rationale for this decision, charging that the trustees had acted “to gratify Mr Lawyer Smith and the richer Gentlemen of the Congregation.”63 A dispute ostensibly about sacred music swiftly acquired a social dimension. Excluded from leadership roles in the Wall Street Presbyterian Church by virtue of their modest social standing, adherents of the Scotch Presbyterian Society boldly contested the authority of the gentlemen who normally dominated congregational affairs. Lawyers and merchants were called to account by a baker, a dairyman, a bookbinder and bookseller, two tailors, four men who practiced crafts associated with the sea, a peddler who became an innkeeper, and a laborer. For their part, Presbyterian Church leaders were troubled less by these men’s social status than by their insubordinate behavior and their transgression of standards of propriety. Elder David Van Horne, a prominent merchant, spelled out the congregational elite’s grievances against the upstart Scots, laying particular emphasis on their unruly conduct. Accusing tailor Peter Clarke, the group’s ringleader, of being “an Incendiary in our Church, and as living disorderly in his family,” Van Horne claimed that “a Person of undoubted Creditt in our Church” had heard Clarke threaten that “if they made a change of the Version [of the psalms] he would make a faction in the Church” and also call “the Revd Mr pemberton Pope and Bishop and his Trustees Cardinals.” Contending that it was common knowledge that “[Clarke’s] own Wife complains of his Conduct toward her,” Van Horne condemned as contemptible the tailor’s tactics in garnering support for his position. He had “run from house to house to the neglect of his Business to get people to sign his remonstrance . . . stoping People in the street and with all Emotions of a Man hurried away by the Impetuousity of his Passion . . . endeavouring to beget and foment dissatisfaction . . . against the proposed Change of the Version [of the psalms], as also towards Mr Pemberton.”64 Van Horne’s indictment of Clarke and, by extension, other dissident Scots, centered on the fact that emotion was the mainspring of their actions. As exponents of the rule of reason in human affairs, the elite recoiled at the display of passion by the lowly Scots. Compounding their offense was their departure from the code of deference, which the gentlemen expected to remain in force even during such a dispute. Assailing the Scots for failing to

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use “their superiours . . . with decency,” Elder Van Horne cited the fact that in their remonstrance the Scots had used “abusive Language,” referring to the members of the Session as “base persons.” Driving home his point, he disclosed that “when they found we took notice of such their Language they were willing to Apoligize for it, and say they did not intend such a word,” but he insisted that there was incontrovertible evidence that they had deliberately chosen to “[apply] such a scurrelous word to us.”65 By acting as if they were on the same social plane as high-ranking men, and raising their voices in the congregation, members of the Scotch Presbyterian Society pushed men accustomed to having their word taken as law to debate with them on major issues of church policy The immediate effect of the controversy over the psalms was the resignation of the church’s well-respected minister, Ebenezer Pemberton, who declared “I am not form’d to Preach the Gospel of peace in the fire of Contention,” adding by way of explanation, “Neither my Temper nor Religion qualify me to ingage in a Scene of Uninterrupted Cavelling and Disputing.” During the ensuing acrimonious dispute over calling a new minister, those loyal to the traditions of the Church of Scotland embellished their critique of past practices in the Wall Street congregation, alleging that the “Church Doors were always open to receive the worst Wretches in the place to full Membership; Prayerless persons to the abusing of Ordinances; even glorying in our shame: seeking a Multitude of Members, but little caring whether they were Religious ones or not.” Calling into question the effectiveness of the church’s ministry, they confessed their “gross ignorance of the sound and saving principles of the Oracles of God.”66 Clashing views on language sundered the Wall Street Presbyterian congregation, with the leading gentlemen stipulating polite speech and the practice of social graces as requirements for the new preacher, while the Scots, accompanied by committed evangelicals, gave priority to piety over manners. The permutations of this conflict were many, but ultimately the chasm separating the two sides could not be bridged. Unwilling to modify their stance on the psalms, the dissident Scots left the congregation and founded a small, but vital, Scotch Seceder Church with links to the Anti-Burgher Synod of the Secession Church in Scotland. Their struggle to perpetuate the Scottish version of the psalms was dismissed by congregational leader William Smith Jr., author of the first history of New York colony, as “trifling contentions kindled by the bigotry and ignorance of the lower sort of People.”67 The genesis of the dispute in the city’s Presbyterian church was similar to that of the conflict in the Dutch Reformed church, but its outcome differed. The partisans of Dutch remained in the Dutch Reformed orbit, sequestered

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in the Garden Street Church where they listened to Lambertus De Ronde’s Dutch-language sermons and continued to proclaim their corporate identity into the 1770s. The most visible sign of their disaffection from the clergy and lay leaders of the city’s Dutch Reformed church, all stalwart supporters of the American Revolution, was their decision to become Loyalists, remain in New York City during the British occupation, and worship in a rump congregation under the benevolent eye of the Church of England.

Pa rt T w o

Pious Commoners

Ch a p ter   3

George Whitefield Awakens New York City

Dutch and Scottish churchgoers for whom language was the repository of social memory resisted rapidly and forcefully when the linguistic underpinnings of their faith were threatened by elite proponents of polite English. These impassioned defenders of time-honored ways of worship were not the only New Yorkers to contest the initiatives of genteel congregational rulers. Ordinary men and women, emboldened by English evangelist George Whitefield’s stinging critique of unregenerate ministers and self-righteous elders, began to chart their own path to salvation. Artisans and laborers pressed for a seat at the congregational table and mustered the courage to question the sagacity of those who sat at its head. As they gained the confidence to render their personal verdicts on spiritual issues, the tethers that bound them to their social betters thinned. In a process akin to that experienced by Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterian traditionalists, devotees of George Whitefield’s brand of Christianity overcame ingrained habits and embraced novel religious ideas. When questions of faith came to the fore, the code of deference that anchored social relations in eighteenth-century New York City became a casualty. George Whitefield’s impact on New York City has consistently been deemed negligible by historians who hold up the evangelist’s record in Boston and Philadelphia as a standard of comparison. The famed preacher’s most recent biographer insists that “New York would always be one of the 79

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toughest cities in America for Whitefield to reach.”1 Undeniably, New York was not the most promising site for an evangelical revival as the fourth decade of the eighteenth century began, since its main religious institutions, the Church of England and the Dutch Reformed Church, were bastions of orthodoxy that barred Whitefield from their pulpits. The Presbyterians, the one group to welcome the English evangelist, as well as congregations of Lutherans, Quakers, and French Huguenots, all were small and undistinguished. Given the city’s distinctive religious configuration and, in particular, the lack of a strong Dissenting presence, residents were not likely to be receptive to the message of the new birth. Curiosity drew throngs of people to Whitefield’s preaching, especially when he spoke out of doors, but the effects of his appearances in 1739 and 1740 seemingly were ephemeral. Focusing on Whitefield’s earliest sojourns in the city forecloses inquiry into the cumulative effects of his multiple visits to New York and obscures what was the climax of his preaching odyssey there, the dramatic spike of religious concern in 1764. We should take seriously the claims of contemporaries that during his seven-week stretch of preaching from December 1763 to January 1764, George Whitefield sparked a religious awakening that touched New Yorkers of all backgrounds. Although Whitefield’s words struck a chord among many during his earlier bouts of preaching in the city, it was not until a quarter century after he first set foot there in 1739 that the celebrated itinerant ignited what a variety of observers categorized as a genuine religious revival that attracted crowds of commoners as well as members of the elite. “I have often received good Intelligence of the agreable [sic] Effects of divine Influence upon the Minds of many People in the City of New-York,” wrote Samuel Buell, the minister credited with the spiritual awakening at Easthampton, Long Island, in 1764. “I am informed that very many of the Inhabitants of that Metropolis belonging to various Congregations, hopefully share largely in the special Blessings of this Day, of the Out-pouring of the Holy Spirit.”2 Other witnesses’ testimony, Whitefield’s own comments, the animadversions of the Anglican clergy, and a retrospective account by a Methodist missionary lend substance to Buell’s assertion and confirm New York City’s part in the extraordinary expression of faith that spread through Long Island, New England, and New Jersey in 1764 and 1765. As a matter of record, George Whitefield preached in the city on at least a dozen occasions between 1739 and 1770, sometimes for long stretches. Holding forth in the fields and in the Presbyterian meetinghouse, he commanded large audiences encompassing a cross section of city dwellers. Accounts of his preaching interspersed with letters, poems, and even heated exchanges over

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his merits filled the newspapers. Local editions of his works, even some in Dutch, were printed, and booksellers advertised volumes of his writings published elsewhere. Not long after a black-bordered notice of Whitefield’s death appeared in the local press on October 8, 1770, readers were alerted that there was “Just published, and sold at the New-Printing Office in Beaver-Street An ELEGAIC POEM, on the Death of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield, Wrote by Phillis, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Mr Wheatley of Boston. She has been but 9 Years in this Country from Africa.” On October 29, 1770, bookseller Garret Noel advertised “The two First Parts of the Life of the late Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, written by himself. . . . Also . . . Mr. Whitefield’s Collection of Hymns, The Thirteenth Edition.” John Holt reprinted the sermon John Wesley delivered in London on the death of Whitefield. In the wake of Whitefield’s death, Patience Wright’s wax museum displayed a figure of the evangelist created by Rachel Wells, the proprietor’s sister. After a fire devastated the establishment in 1771, it was considered newsworthy that this wax figure survived. A Rhode Island college student who visited the waxworks in 1772 commented that the representations “appear very natural: especially Whitefield, who ’tho dead, seemeth to live.”3 George Whitefield’s influence on New Yorkers is best measured by considering the entire compass of his career as it intersected with the city’s evolving religious life. It took a quarter of a century for the celebrated evangelist to draw a large and enthusiastic audience, but eventually Whitefield was able to gain the trust of a wide swath of the urban population. New York’s unprece­ dented religious stirring in 1764, whatever its connections to the larger wave of religious enthusiasm simultaneously engulfing adjacent areas, marked a watershed in the city’s religious history. By the time of Whitefield’s final stopover on Manhattan in the summer of 1770, Archibald Laidlie had inaugurated evangelical preaching in English in the Dutch Reformed church, and John Gano, described in 1763 by Presbyterian David Bostwick as “a very warm popular preacher, a man of undoubted piety & uncommon zeal as well as extraordinary pulpit talents,” was holding forth in the Baptist Church. Evangelical John Rodgers had taken over the Presbyterian pulpit, and the Methodists were tapping into the current of religious feeling running through the city. Additionally, New York had become a magnet for a stream of irregular preachers eager to win city dwellers over to their particular version of religious truth. In significant measure, George Whitefield’s intervention in New York’s religious affairs sparked this transformation, turning a city that had been inhospitable terrain for religious innovation into a site where, as one visitor put it, “all religions are tolerated . . . without the least restraint upon any one’s conscience.”4

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Explaining Whitefield’s effect on religious practice in New York City begins with elucidating his ties to local Presbyterians. Other than when he spoke in the fields, Whitefield preached only in the Presbyterian meetinghouse, which served as his home base whenever he visited New York. Soon after he arrived in the city in November 1739, Whitefield met with the rector of Trinity Church, an implacable foe of evangelical preachers. William Vesey’s resentment was palpable, Whitefield noting that “before I asked him for the use of his pulpit, [he] denied it.” At the conclusion of the interview, Vesey sarcastically addressed Thomas Noble, the Presbyterian merchant who accompanied Whitefield: “Mr. Noble, as you sent for this gentlemen, so I desire you to find him a pulpit.” Barred not only from the Church of En­gland but also the Dutch Reformed church, Whitefield was invited to preach in the meetinghouse by Presbyterians who sensed the affinity between his teachings and their own beliefs. Whitefield simply noted “I thought it my duty to accept the kind offer made me by Mr. Pemberton and his friends.”5 George Whitefield’s initial appearances in New York City were a boon to the Presbyterian congregation. In April 1740, Whitefield’s companion and publicist William Seward, then at New Brunswick, New Jersey, reported that he “Met Mr. Noble from New York, a zealous Promoter of our Lord’s Kingdom,” who informed him that “their Society was increased at New York from Seventy to One hundred and Seventy, and were daily increasing.” On May 20, 1741, Dr. John Nichols, a respected lay leader of the Presbyterian congregation, joyfully reported that “many [had] been, within these four or five Months, under strong Convictions, and not a few, we have great hope, savingly converted to the Lord Jesus Christ.” Churchgoers multiplied. “Our little Church is generally full, so that we stand in need of Galleries.” When Whitefield returned to the city in 1745, the New-York Evening Post reported that “he never Preached one Sermon, but the Meeting-House Dores and Windows was so full, that the People themselves were Astonished to see so vast an Audience.” Writing on October 2, 1747, New Jersey governor Jonathan Belcher recounted that “I met and Imbrac’d dear Mr Whitfield at N York and heard him preach at Mr Pemberton’s Meeting house the Forenoon and Evening of the Lords day where thousands flockt to hear him.” Belcher doubtless was engaging in hyperbole, but it was common knowledge that Whitefield attracted large crowds. With the ranks of listeners swelling the congregation, the Presbyterian meetinghouse on Wall Street had to be enlarged in 1748. “Divine services are held three times on Sundays—morning, afternoon, and evening,” Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg noted in 1751. “Great emphasis is put upon real Christianity,” and the audience was “eager to hear it.”6

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Although a bitter dispute over the psalms divided the Presbyterians in the 1750s, the congregation recovered under Ebenezer Pemberton’s successor, David Bostwick, who began preaching in 1756. A late eighteenth-century biographical source claimed that “about twelve or fourteen hundred souls composed the congregation under Mr. Bostwick’s pastoral care.” Following Bostwick’s death in 1763, the congregation prospered under the ministry of John Rodgers, so much so that subscriptions were gathered for a new church later known as the Brick Church—which opened on New Year’s Day, 1768. By 1769, the congregation boasted 386 members, including 6 identified as Negroes.7 Whitefield not only was instrumental in stimulating the congregation’s growth, but also in lending it a luster that was enhanced by the visibility of prominent adherents such as William Livingston and also William Smith Jr., who emerged as spokesman for the increasingly influential Dissenting interest in New York’s provincial politics. In short, George Whitefield put the Presbyterian Church on the map in New York City. During his association with New York’s Presbyterian Church, Whitefield forged close personal ties with the congregation’s leading men, who stood as his sponsors and were folded into his network of correspondents. Whitefield’s earliest local backer, merchant Thomas Noble, whom Whitefield called a “spiritual man,” traveled with him or joined him on numerous occasions, corresponded with him regularly, and supplied funds for his endeavors. After Noble defected to the Moravians, Whitefield cultivated other friends in New York, including attorney William Smith Sr. and merchants David Van Horne and Peter Van Brugh Livingston. A meeting in Smith’s home between Whitefield and Jonathan Arnold, the SPG missionary on Staten Island, ended disastrously after Arnold, an ardent critic of Whitefield and author of inflammatory newspaper articles about him, sought unsuccessfully to provoke the evangelist into a debate. The incident so disturbed the devout Smith that he took up his pen to defend Whitefield and excoriate Arnold’s tactics. A generation later his son, William Smith Jr., drafted a letter to Whitfield in which he expressed his “Thanks for your Labours amongst us” and gave his “Testimony in Favor of your Manner of preaching.” The younger Smith boldly proffered advice to the famed evangelist on how to reach the masses. “Theology has its technical Terms & the Scriptures have their figures—It is natural for the divine to use both. But as Mankind in general understand Neither may I hint at the Utility of [sometimes?] avoiding the one and explaining the other.”8 Whitefield’s closest New York friend was David Van Horne, a prominent merchant who provided the evangelist with comfortable lodgings whenever he was in the city. In July 1746, shortly before leaving Philadelphia,

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Whitefield informed a correspondent that “I shall be at Mr. David Van-horns in New-York.” Van Horne, who referred to the famed evangelist as “my friend Mr. Whitefield who perhaps I esteem above all others,” took pains to assure him in April 1754 that “if I should be from home when You Come to this City my house and ye Best Intertainments of it are Yours while here . . . you’ll in Such Case find an affectionate freind in my D[ea]r. wife.” Writing to Elizabeth Whitefield in September 1754, Van Horne reported that “we have been Refreshed with the company of your D[ea]r. Yoke fellow [husband] who has at Different time[s] Spent about 15 days with us.” Whitefield’s ties to the Van Hornes were well known, and they endured over the years. In 1760, Presbyterian minister David Bostwick confided to another clergyman that “Mr. David van horne is an intimate Correspondent of Mr. Whitefield.” When Whitefield wrote wealthy New York Presbyterian Peter Van Brugh Livingston in February 1766, wishing “my Dear never to be forgotten New York friends much very much joy,” he added, “I hope to write D[ea]r Mr Vanhorn by other Ships.” In August 1773, Methodist missionary Joseph Pilmore recorded that he had “a kind invitation to dine with Mr. Van Horn, the gentleman who used to entertain Dear Mr Whitefield.”9 Whitefield participated in the life of the city’s Presbyterian congregation during the winter of 1763–64, preaching “two Charity Sermons: the one on occasion of the annual collection for the Poor of the Presbyterian Church, in which double the Sum was collected that ever was upon like Occasion; the other was for the Benefit of Mr. Wheelock’s Indian School at Lebanon [Connecticut], in New-England, for which he collected (notwithstanding the present Prejudices of many People against the Indians) the sum of 120 £.” In June 1764, Whitefield “assisted . . . at the Communion in the Presbyterian Church.” Sermons were preached in both of New York’s Presbyterian Churches in October 1770 on the “mournful Occasion of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield’s death. . . . John Rodgers took as his text Matthew xxv.21, which passage of scripture he applied with great Propriety to the Character and Reward of that eminent Servant of Christ. The Rev. Mr. Treat also took proper Notice of this melancholy event.”10 George Whitefield made his home among Presbyterians in New York, but he had admirers among those attached to the city’s large Anglican and Dutch Reformed congregations. The fact that the clergy of these churches shut their doors to the English evangelist has led historians to suppose that churchgoers’ opinions of him paralleled those of their ministers. But Whitefield’s mesmerizing performances kindled concern across a broad spectrum of New York’s populace, generating a thirst for evangelical preaching that extended to the precincts of the Dutch Reformed church and the Church of England. The

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famed itinerant complicated the histories of these citadels of orthodoxy, motivating congregants whose spiritual hunger was unrequited by the formal mode of preaching to push for reforms or to leave and join new religious fellowships such as the Moravians, the Baptists, or later the Methodists.11 Whitefield did not make a secret of his distaste for what he termed the “legal sermons” he heard in Trinity Church during his initial visits to the city, and Anglican clergymen around New York reciprocated, branding him an “enthusiast.” Thomas Colgan, the SPG missionary at Jamaica, Long Island, portrayed “the notorious Mr. Whitfield [sic]” as the head of a band of “itinerant enthusiastical teachers” who were spreading such “pernicious tenets” as “false & erroneous opinions concerning the doctrine of Regeneration as tend to the destruction of true religion & of a holy and virtuous life.” Colgan claimed that “the true spirit of Christianity . . . is to be found in a more sober, rational Scheme, than that delivered to mankind by Mr. Whitfield, that Arch Enthusiast, and his adherents.” Anglicans’ trepidation that Whitefield’s message might stir up a normally compliant populace took on added meaning in New York City with its large population of enslaved Africans. Richard Charlton, the SPG catechist of Negroes, planted the idea of Whitefield’s culpability for the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741, which he called the “wicked plot . . . set on foot here,” adding disingenuously, “not that I sho’d think Mr. Whitefield to be so extreamly wicked as to promote destruction of this City, with its inhabitants.”12 In Rector William Vesey’s eyes, lowly parishioners were not only impressionable but lacked the intelligence and the temerity to challenge his proscription of Whitefield from Trinity Church. In earlier decades, however, commoners had found ways to express their opinions of their rector. On the night of Shrove Tuesday in February 1713, Vesey had reported that “wicked and sacrilegious . . . persons . . . broke into the North window of the steeple of [Trinity] Church, and broke down the window of the Vestry Room did cutt or tare of the sleeve of one of the surplices that was in the said Roome, and did rend and tare another to pieces, and not being contented with that, did carry the same surplices with several Common prayer Bookes & psalm Bookes into the Church yard, and . . . left their ordure on the Sacred Vestment, as the greatest outrage, and most Villainous indignity they cou’d offer to the Church of England and her holy Priesthood, & in defiance of God and all Religion.”13 Far from being a holiday prank, this desecration of a sacred site constituted an unseemly salvo in the ongoing feud between Vesey and Governor Robert Hunter. Ostensibly solicitous of the spiritual welfare of English soldiers who had difficulty hearing the sermon because they were forced to stand during services at Trinity, Hunter, an unbending critic of Vesey’s High Church views,

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contrived an alternate venue for Anglican worship in the fort by refurbishing the chapel, which had been consigned by his predecessors to nonreligious uses, and ordering chaplain John Sharpe to conduct services there.14 Infuriated by the decline in listeners, Vesey and one of his supporters claimed that Hunter’s action had precipitated a schism in the city’s Anglican church. Hunter, whose challenge to Vesey’s authority in ecclesiastical matters was part of a broader transatlantic dispute between Whigs and Tories, disliked Trinity’s rector so intensely that he crafted a witty play called Androborus, which satirized the minister and his allies. Although the adversarial relationship between Hunter and Vesey and their well-to-do supporters has been carefully analyzed, the disaffection of ordinary parishioners with their high-handed minister who catered to the congregation’s elite has been overlooked. The contempt some New Yorkers felt for Vesey is evident in depositions taken after the incident. The rector and his vestry indeed acknowledged that “there are some Busey mockers & scoffers of Religion, who Ridicule both sacred things & Orders by their profane Lampoons thereby vilifying the Ministers of Christ.”15 The defilers of Trinity Church were not acting as agents for Hunter and his circle, who would not have risked their reputations by inciting lowly men to commit such a vile deed, but the perpetrators, who never were identified by authorities investigating the matter, likely were buoyed by the ongoing feud between Hunter and Vesey and seized the occasion of Shrove Tuesday, a moment on the traditional calendar when popular unruliness was anticipated, to express their own strong feelings about the way the rector conducted worship and administered pastoral care. Hostility to Vesey and his autocratic ways likely simmered long after this episode, but opportunities for ordinary Anglicans to communicate their dissatisfaction with their overbearing minister were few. When an officially discredited Scottish Anglican named Alexander Campbell arrived on the scene in the early 1730s, he was welcomed by frustrated parishioners. Campbell “baptizes and marry as he pleases,” Vesey reported to the SPG in 1733. It has been suggested that Campbell’s lack of an official position, coupled with his notoriety as a critic of Vesey and other prominent Anglicans, “endeared him all the more to some New Yorkers.” Notwithstanding the Scotsman’s unsavory reputation for carrying himself loosely with alcohol and women, Campbell’s popular style of politics, as well as his verbal attacks on Vesey, proved irresistible to city dwellers fed up with the imperious rector. Campbell let fly a barrage of charges against Vesey in two pamphlets issued in 1732, A True and Just Vindication of Mr. Alexander Campbell and A Supplement to the Vindication of Mr. Alex. Campbell.16 Perhaps the Scottish minister’s supporters seized this moment to air their own complaints about Vesey.

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At a minimum, the events of 1713 and 1732–33 establish the presence of discontented parishioners, some of whom may have viewed the rector’s refusal to allow Whitefield to preach in Trinity Church as all the more reason to sample the itinerant’s evangelical brand of Anglicanism. In November 1739, Whitefield “was told by several persons, that the constables of the town had been placed at the door of the English Church, lest my adherents, encouraged by me, should break it open and take it by force.” Dutch Reformed minister Henricus Boel asserted that denying Whitefield access to a pulpit was “approved . . . by the most respectable of the Episcopal Church with their ministers,” implying that Anglicans with less impeccable social standing were amenable to Whitefield’s preaching. When William Vesey died in 1746, fulsome tributes appeared in the city’s best-known newspapers, but the obituary printed in Henricus De Foreest’s Dutch-oriented New-York Evening Post made clear that the long-serving rector was not without detractors in Trinity Church. After noting that Vesey had been “a Preacher of the Gospel for this Fiftey Years,” De Foreest asserted that “his Death is much Lamented by most of his congregation.”17 If Vesey was not universally esteemed by his parishioners, then it is reasonable to conclude that not all of New York’s Anglicans concurred with the rector’s stance against Whitefield. On July 21, 1746, George Whitefield informed a supporter that “To morrow God willing I go to New-York. Mr. Vesey the Commissary is dead.” Whitefield’s terse notation of his adversary’s death in no way suggests that he planned his itinerary to take advantage of the vacuum in Trinity’s pulpit. Nevertheless, the thirst for evangelical preaching that was building during Vesey’s final years as a result of Whitefield’s appearances in the city in 1739, 1740, and 1745 soon was to be allayed by the new rector, Henry Barclay, a man reputed “to have been a fine awakened preacher when he was stationed above Albany among the Indians.” Whether the consequence of temperament or conviction, Barclay’s sensitivity to the feelings of ordinary New Yorkers disposed him to placate the city’s expanding constituency of evangelical Anglicans.18 At the least, admirers of Whitefield now could hope that what they heard from the pulpit would reflect evangelical themes. Not long after Barclay assumed his post, residents of Montgomerie Ward, a neighborhood populated largely by workingmen’s families, requested that a “Chapel of Ease” be constructed in a location convenient to their dwellings. Their desire for their own chapel may also have stemmed from their discomfort at the alterations that had transformed Trinity Church into a showcase for refined worship. In 1737, this flagship of the Church of England had been enlarged and now was 148 feet long, including the tower and chancel, and 72 feet wide. In 1741, the vestry mandated that “the organ pipes be gilded with gold

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Leaf ” and that the wardens order from England “a new Sett of Furniture for the Communion Table, pulpit and Reading Desk: of the best English Crimson Flower Damask: with a plain silk ffringe Lining and Tassels.” New York’s first historian, the Presbyterian William Smith Jr., marveled at Trinity’s interior. “The church is, within ornamented beyond any other place of publick Worship amongst us. The Head of the Chancel is adorned with an Altar-piece, and opposite to it, at the other End of the Building, is the Organ. The Tops of the Pillars which support the Galleries, are decked with the gilt Busts of Angels winged. From the ceiling are suspended two Glass Branches, and on the Walls hang the Arms of some of its principal Benefactors.”19 St. George’s Chapel, which opened in 1752, was described by an early church historian as “a very neat edifice . . . faced with hewn stone, and tiled. It was ninety-two feet in length, exclusive of the chancel, and seventy-five feet in breadth.” The 175-foot-high steeple contained a “fine large bell which cost £88 3s 2d.” Philadelphian Hannah Callender, who visited the city a few years after the church was erected, described it as “a neat plain building [with] pretty palisadoes and trees planted round it, from the Steeple there is a full view of York.” The contrast between this simpler and smaller structure and Trinity Church, which Callender characterized as “a rich church” and British observer Thomas Pownall portrayed as “a very large plain brick Building, but within as spacious commodious & handsome a Place of Worship as I ever saw belonging to a private Parish,” was obvious. Anglicans of modest means were to be steered to St. George’s Chapel, where a church committee had been instructed to “assign such pews as they should think convenient to be Free pews, and have the word free painted on the door of each of the said free pews.”20 Henry Barclay’s penchant for coddling ordinary parishioners, and more particularly the fact that he was amenable to gratifying congregants’ wishes for evangelical-style preaching, dismayed his assistant and eventual successor, Samuel Auchmuty, who was convinced that George Whitefield drew most of his support from people of low rank. Not mincing words, he declared in July 1754 that “Whitefield is here, ranting away every Evening in the [Presbyterian] Meeting House, yesterday he held forth there three times. His audience hitherto has consisted chiefly of the Dregs of the City.”21 If humble ­Anglicans were among the “Dregs of the City” who savored Whitefield’s words and subsequently clamored for evangelical preaching, then it fell to Barclay to appease them. In 1759, King’s College president Samuel Johnson described Barclay as “a very considerable divine and a very prudent and laborious minister.” The New-York Gazette struck another note when it first reported that Barclay had

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died on August 20, 1764, commenting that the rector’s death was “an irreparable Loss to the Poor and Needy.” Whoever penned Barclay’s obituary in the New-York Mercury of August 27, 1764, was determined to shield the late minister from charges of excess by carefully choosing words that situated him in the middle of the road. “Substantial Piety and Devotion, animated by warm Zeal, for the Sprit of true Christianity, preserved him from the folly of Enthusiasm on the one Side, and the Danger of Superstition on the other; He walked in all the Ways of Virtue and Holiness, without that Noise, peculiar to those, who have only the Form without the Power of doing it.” Yet Samuel Auchmuty was exasperated at Barclay’s willingness to cater to the increasingly vocal commoners of St. George’s Chapel who manifested a preference for evangelical preaching. “Indulgence which they have been used to will not do,” wrote Auchmuty in December 1764. “Poor Dr. Barclay’s goodness has been of no service to us in that respect; however he meant well.”22 Wittingly or not, Barclay had contributed to the identification of St. George’s Chapel as a gathering place for Anglicans with evangelical sympathies, the very people primed to respond when George Whitefield commenced a lengthy round of preaching in the city in December 1763. In contrast to Trinity Church, where Vesey gave little quarter to evangelical Anglicans, the Dutch Reformed church on the eve of Whitefield’s first visit to the city was openly divided over the merits of Pietism, the Continental variant of evangelicalism. The catalyst for this split in the congregation was Theodore Jacobus Frelinghuysen, a Pietistic preacher who stopped in New York in 1720 en route to the Raritan Valley in New Jersey, where he soon gained fame for precipitating a religious awakening. A man who did not scruple to speak truth to clerical authorities, Frelinghuysen immediately offended the city’s orthodox ministers by condemning the mirror that hung on the wall in Gualterus Du Bois’s home as a sign of vanity.23 By unabashedly articulating his Pietistic views, Frelinghuysen unleashed a heated debate among the region’s Dutch Reformed clergy and laity over his style of ministry, enmeshing city churchgoers in an emotional war of words pitting both clerical and lay advocates of Pietistic preaching against defenders of orthodoxy, a conflict that was fresh in everyone’s mind at the time Whitefield appeared in New York City in 1739. From the outset, Henricus Boel, the “epitome of all the formalistic, legalistic, and anti-pietistic modes of the time,” was highly critical of Frelinghuysen’s approach to religion, and over the years he found continuing grounds for opposing the Pietistic preacher. The fact that Boel’s bête noir, Frelinghuysen, had admitted Whitefield into his pulpit in New Jersey only deepened Boel’s

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antipathy toward the English evangelist, whom he had forbidden to preach in the city’s Dutch Reformed church. Boel was incensed when he learned that his senior colleague, Du Bois, not only had made his peace with Frelinghuysen but had agreed to join him on the platform when Whitefield preached outdoors in 1740. “It happened that domine Du Bois, and domine Frelinghuysen, (the latter having allowed Mr. Whitefield, to preach to his congregation at Raritan), and the dissenting minister here [Ebenezer Pemberton], went in company with Mr. Whitefield out of the city of New York, into the open fields, to hear him preach. They also went up with him on the stage erected for him, and sat down behind him.” By ostensibly endorsing Whitefield, the revered elder cleric bestowed on him a degree of legitimacy that opened the door for Dutch men and women to attend his preaching.24 As Boel saw it, Du Bois had exacerbated the divisions in the Dutch Reformed church by allying with Whitefield, Frelinghuysen, and Pemberton. “This was to the gratification of many in the congregation who were embittered against domine Boel.” Presuming that his enemies in the congregation had taken Du Bois’s validation of the English evangelist to heart, Boel was at pains to rationalize his decision to prohibit Whitefield from entering the church’s pulpit. “In this step I was approved by the . . . [missing in original text] calmly reflecting, and by the majority, as well as by the most respectable of the Episcopal Church with their ministers.” Seizing on the fact that when “[Whitefield] came here in 1739–40, [he] was rejected by the Episcopal minister here, domine Vesey, who was commissary, over all the churches in this province,” Boel claimed a precedent for his actions. “He was refused permission by me . . . to preach in the Dutch Church in New York, as being against the charter, as he did not belong to us.” Boel’s personal reasons for rejecting Whitefield then emerged. “This was also done on account of his fanaticism. He was afterward found inclined toward the Herrenhutters [Herrnhuters or Moravians], and to other irregular movements; and lastly because he was condemned by the English Bishop, and rejected by the Episcopal Church here.”25 In linking Whitefield to the Moravians, Boel was associating him with a Pietistic sect known for antinomian views, exotic practices such as love feasts and washing of the feet, and the empowering of women. The Herrnhuters, as they were called in Europe, had come under the fire of Dutch Reformed clergymen in the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam Classis had alerted both Du Bois and Boel to the menace posed by Moravians migrating to America, furnishing them with tracts detailing the church’s objections to these sectarians.26 Although Moravians had been active in the city for several years, Du Bois assured authorities in Amsterdam in 1741 that although some Herrnhuters “have put in appearance here, . . . they have as yet but little influence, except

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Figure 4.  Dutch Reformed minister Henricus Boel (c. 1688–1754). Boel was highly critical of evangelical preacher George Whitefield as well as the Moravians. Boel’s views did not sit well with many in his congregation. Artotype by E. Bierstadt. Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York. Courtesy of the Collegiate Churches of New York.

among the followers of Venema, and some Independents.” Pieter Venema, baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in Groningen, was a schoolmaster specializing in mathematics who had published a work on algebra in the Netherlands in 1714. In New York, he produced a Dutch-language mathematics book that was “Gedruckt voor [printed for] Jacob Goelet, by de Oude Slip, by

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J. Peter Zenger” in 1730. Venema’s irregular religious views—he was one of a small group of New Yorkers who attended a meeting held by a Moravian emissary in 1736—coupled with his ties to bookseller Goelet and printer Zenger, New York’s primary suppliers of Dutch texts critical of Reformed orthodoxy, placed him in Du Bois’s cross-hairs.27 Attributing the turmoil in his congregation to the “artful misleadings of Peter Venema, a crafty free-thinker of Groeningen, who had previously been a Reader and Schoolmaster just outside that city,” Du Bois set himself to curbing Venema’s influence, but had to concede that “some still adhere to him. Among these is Jacob Goelet, who with his conventicles, endeavors to do all possible harm to our Church.” What Du Bois failed to mention was that Goelet and Zenger had teamed up to provide New Yorkers with Dutch versions of George Whitefield’s writings: Intercession Every Christian’s Duty: A Sermon preach’d by George Whitefield appeared in Dutch translation as VOORBIDDING een ieder Christen’s Plicht, vertoont in een PREDICATIE door GEORGE WHITEFIELD, A.B. & c. Next came De Wyze and Dwaaze Maagden. Vertoont in een Predicatie Door George Whitefield, also “Gedruket en te koop by J. Peter Zenger, en Jacobus Goelet.”28 While Du Bois directed his animus toward Goelet and Venema, Boel enlisted in the anti-Moravian crusade under way in the Netherlands. Thanking Amsterdam Reformed church leaders for the “faithful and special warning of the Classis to watchfulness against the Herrenhutters,” he asserted that “we remain prepared to oppose all efforts from within or without, by Herrenhutters.” Boel’s was far from the only voice trumpeting the dangers presented by these sectarians. In 1742, noted Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent came to New York to deliver three impassioned sermons denouncing the Moravians. Local Presbyterian minister Ebenezer Pemberton chimed in the following year, confiding to an English colleague that the Moravians are “evidently endeavouring to draw off the affections of the people from the soundest and most zealous ministers in these parts.” In 1744, fears that Moravian missionaries in Dutchess County were encouraging Indians to side with the French against Britain in the war that had just broken out moved the province’s governor to urge the Assembly to enact a temporary law providing that “no Vagrant Preacher, Moravian or Disguised Papist, shall Preach or Teach Either in Publick or Private without first takeing the Oaths appointed by this Act.” New York politicians’ excessive zeal against the Moravians, who scrupled to take oaths, stemmed from their apprehension that Catholic preachers in the guise of Moravians were infiltrating New York at a time when memories of the presumed collaboration between Catholics and enslaved Africans in the alleged 1741 conspiracy were still fresh. Even though they predicated their policy on

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their “Abhorrence [of] the base Designs of his Majesty’s Enemies, to invade his Kingdoms, and excite Revolts and Disturbances among his Subjects in Favour of a Popish Pretender,” the New Yorkers behind the anti-Moravian vendetta soon discovered that their actions did not sit well with the Board of Trade.29 When the British Parliament recognized the Moravian Church as “an antient Protestant Episcopal Church” in 1749 and granted its members concessions with respect to military service and oath taking, New Yorkers were not mollified. In September 1750, “three awakened Englishmen from the Presbyterian congregation,” concerned that the Moravians “were holding meetings in a private house in New York and were gaining a large following,” divulged that they “deplored the fact that [Moravian leader] Count Zinzendorf and his followers had made use of so much intrigue and snaky crookedness with the authorities in London in order to bring about a law for the free exercise of their Plan in America to the great detriment of many souls.” Moravians’ success in currying the favor of influential men in England also disturbed Trinity rector Henry Barclay, who “expressed his surprise” that “[persons of rank and] scholars in London had so easily believed these people.” Yet Moravian worship in public was about to become a reality in New York City, since, as the colony’s chief justice James De Lancey explained in May 1751, “the Moravians, or Zinzendorfers, had handed in a petition to build a church or meeting-house which had been granted to them because, according to a recent act of Parliament, they must be tolerated.” Once the Moravian church had opened in 1752, Presbyterian intellectual William Livingston defended the rights of its followers in an essay titled “A Vindication of the MORAVIANS, against the Aspersions of their Enemies.” Although “all he insist[ed] upon, is, that if their external Conduct be moral and unexceptional, they have a Right to enjoy their Principles, be they what they will,” Livingston was “branded with the opprobrious Language of Rascal, Scoundrel, Atheist, Deist, [and] Mocker of Things Sacred” for daring to question the dogmatism of the orthodox clergy.30 Still unnerved by the prospect of Moravian proselytizers in their midst, local clergymen remained on guard. In July 1753, Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg reported hearing that “the Zinzendorfers were attracting a large following in New York” and that “two respected awakened members of our little congregation in New York have gone over to the Zinzendorfers because they learned that I would not accept the call there.” These defectors told Johann Albert Weygand, Muhlenberg’s successor, that “they found food for their souls among the Zinzendorfers, which made Mr. Weygand weep.” But by far the most fervent critic of the Moravians was Dutch Reformed minister Henricus Boel. Characterized as “an exceedingly warlike champion out of the preceding century,” Boel carried on the anti-Moravian campaign with

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vigor, regularly inveighing against the detested sectarians from his pulpit. In a June 12, 1752, conversation with Muhlenberg, Boel “mentioned that the Zinzendorfers dedicated their original rebuilt church last Sunday, that they used every conceivable kind of musical instrument, and that they succeeded as a consequence in attracting a great crowd of the Nethinim [pretended people of faith], etc.” According to Muhlenberg, Boel had “publicly warned his congregation [not to go] and told them of the danger.” The city’s Moravians despised Boel and, seemingly with satisfaction, recorded in their congregational diary that shortly after he preached against the Moravians on June 23, 1754, he was felled by illness and died.31 Boel’s outspoken defense of orthodoxy, not to mention his tirades against the Moravians, alienated Dutch Reformed congregants, so much so that his obituary in the New-York Mercury disclosed the fact that because Boel had “cautioned the Congregation to be beware of false Doctrines and ruinous principles of some of the religious sects of this city he was charged with zeal and bigotry by some.” Lutheran Muhlenberg censured Boel for fostering divisions in his congregation. “Scholarly as the man may be, he still is said to have the very least applause because the people complain that they cannot understand him when he preaches ordinarily, and on the other hand they say he is too harsh and loud when he falls into a passion over various personalities and vicious sins.” Boel’s denunciation of George Whitefield because he was “inclined toward the Herrenhutters” also struck the wrong note, since Whitefield had long since disassociated himself from the Moravians. Boel’s sudden death in 1754 cleared the way for seventy-three men and fourteen women from the congregation’s most prominent families to petition for En­ glish preaching. In this same year, a Dutch-language translation of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon True Grace, distinguished from the experience of devils was published in the city, perhaps to convince tradition-minded Dutch of the merits of evangelical Protestantism.32 The reorientation of New York City’s religious life was well under way by the time Whitefield returned to the city in June 1754, after an absence of almost a decade. A retrospective account of his preaching in the Presbyterian meetinghouse penned by Helena Kortright Brasher, who was sixteen at the time of the sermons, vividly depicts the atmosphere in the sanctuary as well as the lasting impression Whitefield made on her.33 Raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and allowed by her widowed mother, a shopkeeper, to engage in “genteel amusements,” Helena nevertheless expressed curiosity about the famed evangelist to a serious-minded Presbyterian young man, who offered to escort her to the evening sermon. She knew that New Yorkers held strong opinions on Whitefield and “recollected to have heard my mother and

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brother . . . often in warm debate about the preacher.” Reluctant to embarrass her peers by attending Whitefield’s preaching, she looked around the crowded meetinghouse with trepidation only to find that “to my great joy I beheld a very respectable audience, the first people in the City and many of my very particular friends and acquaintances.” Calling Whitefield “the great good man,” she recalled that “when he gave out the psalm his voice his attitude his graceful figure all served as so many enchantments, and my heart and soul appeared in raptures, but when he prayed I was sure man never prayed like him.” Helena listened attentively as he preached on a text from Timothy and “was all eye all ear” and “when he applyed the subject and brought it home to the conscience of the hearers . . . I was so affected as not to be able to hold up my head.” Present at Whitefield’s final appearance in New York the next evening, Helena was practically overcome. “This sermon was to me more powerful— my heart and soul was penetrated. I could not restrain my tears.” Asked by her mother to explain the reason for “the change in my carriage and behavior” after witnessing Whitefield’s performance, Helena confessed that she “had been to hear Mr. Whitefield and his preaching had affected me and exceedingly I regretted his departure.” Relieved to learn that Whitefield was “a great favorite of [her mother’s],” the teenaged girl hoped to find “comfort by going to hear the different preachers of the City but to my great disappointment the powerfull preacher was not to be found.” If Helena Kortright Brasher’s encounter with Whitefield is any guide, New Yorkers exposed to the famed evangelist’s ideas became less satisfied with old religious verities and found reason to ask questions, even if answers were not always easy to find. That Whitefield touched a greater number of city dwellers in 1754 than in previous visits certainly was David Van Horne’s opinion. “It is Surprizeing to see how People of all Denominations Love to hear the Powerfull Preaching of the Gospell & how the serious are Enliven’d by it.” Since “the Prejudices of People have very much Subsided and Manny who were Enemies now Either approve his preaching or Confess they believe him a Good Man that Sincerely Intends ye good of Mankind,” Van Horne concluded that “Mr Whitefield has more friends In New York then Ever.” Local memories of the evangelist’s endeavors in the city shared with Methodist newcomer Thomas Taylor years later confirmed how special the summer of 1754 had been. “There was little either of the form or power of [religion] till Mr. Whitefield came over thirty years ago [1739],” Taylor related in 1768; “and even after his first and second visit there appeared but little fruit of his labours. But during his visit fourteen or fifteen years ago [1754] there was a considerable shaking among the dry bones. Divers were savingly converted.”34

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A seismic shift in New York City’s religious landscape was under way by the time George Whitefield entered on what was to be his longest and most influential preaching stint in the city in December 1763. Two new evangelical preachers had embarked on successful ministries. John Mason, sent by the Anti-Burgher Synod of the Secession Church in Scotland, began preaching to the Scotch Presbyterian congregation, mainly composed of people who had seceded from the Wall Street Presbyterian Church, in June 1761. By 1768, the fruits of Mason’s labors were evident when a new stone edifice was built to accommodate the expanding membership. Mason’s doctrinal rigidity limited the Seceders’ appeal, but this was not the case with John Gano, who held forth in the pulpit of the new Baptist meetinghouse on Gold Street after it opened in 1760. By all accounts an exceptional preacher, Gano began drawing new members, not a few from the faltering Wall Street Presbyterian Church. “We have a fine Babptist [sic] minister already settled here, and is much followed,” Presbyterian Nathaniel Hazard wrote in June 1761. “[He] draws almost all the religious sort of people from every denomination after him; he preaches a great deal like a very honest man & as yet appears to hold very good sentiments chiefly.” Gano was so successful in gaining followers that the meetinghouse had to be enlarged in 1763. Renowned Baptist leader Isaac Backus declared that Gano’s preaching “seems to be as much admired as Mr. Whitefields.”35 As these small evangelically inclined congregations were coming into their own, New York’s three largest churches stood on the verge of major changes in their ministries. Within the space of nine months, all three experienced turnover in the pulpit. On December 18, 1763, George Whitefield reported that David Bostwick, the widely respected Presbyterian minister, “is now with God.”36 Scotsman Archibald Laidlie, who had been called to the Dutch Reformed pulpit, began preaching in New York City in April 1764 during the interval between Bostwick’s death and that of Trinity Church rector Henry Barclay, who succumbed to illness in August 1764. In each of these congregations, new lines of authority had to be drawn in an atmosphere of intensifying religious seeking. At this moment of singular discontinuity, if not disarray, in the city’s foremost churches, ingrained religious habits faltered, increasing New Yorkers’ susceptibility to Whitefield’s words. Sensing that this was a propitious time to communicate his message of the “new birth” to all city residents, the famed evangelist launched an extended round of preaching that lasted from December 1, 1763, until January 23, 1764. Whitefield spoke to an audience whose flirtation with material possessions was being put to the test in the economic downturn following the conclusion of the French and

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Indian War. Arousing unprecedented religious excitement among people of all backgrounds, Whitefield set in motion a revival that yielded greater harvests among New Yorkers than ever seen before and whose effects were unmistakable. The flame that Whitefield ignited was kept ablaze by Archibald Laidlie, whose inspired preaching, begun not long after Whitefield concluded his seven-week-long stint in the city, proved a tonic to the Anglicized Dutch in his congregation. With evangelical-style preaching in the English language firmly in place, the balance of power in the Dutch Reformed congregation shifted definitively. The defenders of orthodoxy who clung to the Dutch language did not surrender gracefully, but the majority of congregants now had more in common with the city’s mainstream Presbyterians than with their traditionalist brethren. To seal the church’s new evangelical orientation, congregational leaders called another English-speaking evangelical minister, John Henry Livingston, a man who traced his own spiritual transformation as a youth of eighteen to hearing Whitefield preach on a passage from Psalm 40. Almost immediately, the congregation formulated plans to construct another house of worship to accommodate the expanding number of auditors. The North Dutch Reformed Church, tellingly referred to not many years later as “the fine north church of the English Dutch,” opened in 1769. Almost at the same time, the Wall Street Presbyterian Church was welcoming John Rodgers, another evangelical cleric whose boyhood experience of listening to Whitefield in Philadelphia had led to his conversion.37 Rodgers reinvigorated the congregation and presided over the opening of the Brick Presbyterian Church in 1768. The confluence of factors that produced New York City’s version of a religious revival in 1764 in turn fertilized the ground for Methodist preaching, which commenced in 1766. New York had turned into an inviting destination for a stream of irregular preachers eager to convince city dwellers of the veracity of a variety of religious truths. The year 1764 was remarkable in New York’s religious annals, according to Methodist Thomas Taylor, who in 1768 penned a narrative of Whitefield’s exploits in New York City. The work of conversion “was much increased in his last journey, about four years since [1764], when his words were really as a hammer and as a fire. Most part of the adults were stirred up, great numbers pricked to the heart, and by a judgment of charity several found peace and joy in believing. The consequence of this work was, that the churches were crowded and subscriptions raised for building new ones. Mr. Whitefield’s

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example provoked most of the ministers to a much greater degree of earnestness. And by the multitudes of people young and old, rich and poor, flocking to the churches, religion became an honourable profession—There was no outward cross to be taken up therein. Nay, a person who could not speak about the grace of God and the new birth was esteemed unfit for genteel company.”38 Whitefield himself was convinced that he had finally made a breakthrough in New York. “Today I begin here,” he wrote on December 1, 1763, soon adding, “Persons of all denominations seem to be athirst.” By December 8, the evangelist was preaching three times a week and was jubilant. “Such a flocking of all ranks, I never before saw at New-York. A great many have been to see me, and several come to me in the evening as it should seem, to hear something of the kingdom of God.” With mounting satisfaction, he reported on December 16, 1763, that “every day the thirst for hearing the word increases, and the better sort come home to hear more of it.” Whitefield amplified his point. “Prejudices in this place have most strangely subsided. The better sort flock as eagerly as the common people, and are fond of coming for private gospel conversation.” On January 12, 1764, after almost a month and a half of preaching to New Yorkers, Whitefield still could write, “Congregations continue very large, and I trust saving impressions are made upon many.” The renowned evangelist remained in the city for about ten days, deterred by the heat from traveling south, and then returned for another extended stay in the summer of 1764. “I have preached twice lately in the fields, and we sat under the blessed Redeemer’s shadow with great delight,” he recounted on August 8, 1764.39 Whitefield’s magnetism even enticed orthodox Dutch Reformed minister Lambertus De Ronde, who confided to a Connecticut minister on January 15, 1764, that “the Revrd Mr. Whitefield has been here a good while in town & is still—has preached several times,” adding with a hint of pride, “I have been very often in his company.” To Trinity’s rector, Samuel Auchmuty, this was the height of absurdity. “De Rhonda is turned new Light, has been down to the Jersey Commencement, preached in the Dissenting Meeting House and is elected one of their Governors—For which excursion & his ill treatment of his Congregation, they have stop’d twenty-five pounds of his salary, and declare they will not pay it to him unless he acknowledges he has done wrong in running away, & commencing Presbyterian.” Auchmuty was merciless in his judgment of De Ronde, calling him “a poor miserable, vain ignorant weathercock, and a very bad one.”40 Whitefield’s sojourn in New York was lauded as a saga of success by the New-York Mercury on January 23, 1764. “He has spent 7 weeks with us,

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preaching twice a week, to more general Acceptance than ever; and been treated with great Respect by many of the Gentlemen and Merchants of this place. . . . In his last sermon he took a very affectionate leave of the People of this City, who were extremely affected by it, and expressed great concern at his departure.” Even an Anglican critic acknowledged the impact the evangelist had on New Yorkers. “We have had a long visit from Mr. Whitfield [sic] in this colony, where he has preached frequently, especially in the City of New York and on this Island [Long Island], & I am sorry to say he has had more influence than formerly & I fear has done a great deal of mischief.”41 Evangelical ministers swiftly authenticated the spirit of religious renewal pervading the city. Hezekiah Smith, who preached in the Baptist meetinghouse in March 1764, felt that “surely God is wonderfully at work in New York. Christians are refreshed, and sinners are awakened, crying out ‘What must I do to be saved?’ ” Baptist leader Isaac Backus, who heard the news from Smith and also from James Manning, confided that “he had very late intelligence of a very great work of conviction and conversion that now is going on and increasing in parts of N. Jersey, and also in the city of New York.” For ministers who envisioned themselves as part of an evangelical enterprise spanning the Atlantic, the outbreak of religious fervor in New York was welcome evidence of the wave of revival spreading through the Northeast in 1764–1765.42 But regional and transatlantic currents of religious emotion do not fully explain the unprecedented susceptibility of a broad range of New Yorkers to Whitefield’s message in 1764. The distinctiveness of the New York case emerges most vividly in the untold tale of the city’s evangelical Anglicans who persevered over the years in efforts to bring a “Whitefieldian” to preach in their church. A story long occluded by a denominational narrative that fosters an image of Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel as opulent settings for genteel worship, the sub rosa conflict among city Anglicans over Whitefield’s merits reveals the elite’s vulnerability to challenges to their cultural authority. Despite being concentrated in St. George’s Chapel, Anglican New Yorkers who savored evangelical preaching had far less weight in the parish than did those of a similar mind in the Dutch Reformed congregation. Having had to settle for the semblance of an evangelical minister in the form of Henry Barclay, they surely were elated at the opportunity to hear Whitefield’s exhortations during his long winter preaching tour. Buoyed by the celebrated itinerant’s appearance in their midst, evangelical Anglicans relished the prospect of a true “Whitefieldian” entering their pulpit when signs of Barclay’s declining health became evident. “Dr. Barclay seldom goes out but on Sundays,” Auchmuty reported on March 5, 1764. “He is in a poor way but I believe does not think so.”43 By

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the time Whitefield again reached New York on June 24, 1764, parishioners surely sensed the gravity of Barclay’s condition, and his death on August 20, 1764, could not have come as a surprise. During this summer, with Whitefield preaching on and off in the city while conducting forays to Long Island, some evangelical Anglicans commenced a campaign for a new minister conversant with Whitefield’s methods. We know of their actions from an October 17, 1764, letter penned by an SPG missionary in Pennsylvania named Hugh Neill, who dutifully alerted his superiors in England to the threat posed by evangelical Anglicans, whom he referred to as Methodists. “Every means is made use of to fill up the Churches of Philadelphia and New York with Methodist preachers. . . . The Methodists in New York, upon the death of Dr. Barclay, wrote for Mr. Duche [Jacob Duché of Philadelphia, an Anglican minister known to support Whitefield], either to come himself or recommend a minister to them who was a sound Whitfilian. Mr. Duche sent them Mr. Inglis from Dover, a gentleman who had been approved of by Mr. Whitefield in his public Sermons, and received vast applause from all his followers. He was instantly chosen assistant to Mr. Auchmuty.”44 New York’s evangelical Anglicans likely were emboldened by what had happened in Philadelphia in 1759 when William Macclennachan, an evangelical preacher who had recently converted from Presbyterianism to the Church of England, skyrocketed to popularity among Philadelphia’s Anglicans. His supporters petitioned to have him appointed assistant minister at Christ Church, setting off a lengthy dispute between clergy and laity that culminated in the secession of a sizable group of parishioners and the formation of an evangelical Anglican Church named St. Paul’s. According to Frederick V. Mills Sr., “McClenachan . . . was decidedly influenced by Whitefield” and “the nucleus of the congregation was comprised of former constituents of Christ [Church] and St. Peter’s who favored evangelical religion.” Philadelphia’s Anglican clergy drew a sobering lesson from this episode and acceded to the evangelical laity’s demand that Whitefield be allowed to preach in St. Peter’s.45 Called to New York on the eve of Barclay’s death to fill in as a preacher, Charles Inglis reportedly delivered a sermon at Trinity Church on Sunday, August 26, 1764, in which he proclaimed “I glory in being called a Methodist, for I am not ashamed of the cross of Christ.” Allegedly as a result of this performance, “the more evangelical of the Trinity congregation were so enthusiastic over his preaching” that they supposedly influenced the vestry to offer Inglis the position of assistant minister that would be vacated by Samuel Auchmuty, who had just been designated as rector of Trinity Church. Flattered by the vestry’s offer, Inglis accepted the appointment with gratitude,

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but upon returning home to Dover, Delaware, he faced the illness and death of his wife in childbirth, followed by the loss of his twin daughters. This, on top of the pleas of his parishioners in Dover, persuaded him to stay in Delaware, and he traveled to New York in December 1764 to decline the offer in person. Auchmuty did not disguise his contempt for the New Yorkers who supported Whitefield when he recounted the course of events. “Since my last Mr. Inglis has been here, and to the great mortification of a few tailors, cobblers, etc. etc. has absolutely refused to leave his mission [in Delaware] till it is provided for. When that will be is uncertain. In short he has altered his mind, and has no inclination to remove. I hope he will continue always in the same mind.”46 But a few months later, Inglis changed his mind. “He now seems very willing to come among us,” Auchmuty wrote on April 13, 1765. “His adopting the principles and cant of the Methodists has made part of my Congregation fond of him, and pressing for his settlement here; but as I look forward I imagine the foolish heat that they now glow with, would, even if he were here, soon subside. The better part of my Congregation are averse to his coming. The common people are fond of it.” Auchmuty made no attempt to conceal the divisions in the parish. In late summer 1765, Inglis preached at the church in New York while Auchmuty was in Boston. When Auchmuty returned, Inglis informed him that “he waited for me, and was now determined to settle among us, provided it was agreeable to me.” Auchmuty responded coolly. “I told him that I would have nothing to do in the Affair, but if he was chose by the Vestry & came, I would do everything I could to make his life easy, if his behavior should be such as I liked. The vestry met, & he agreed to come to us in Novr.” The rector’s overriding concern was preventing Inglis from proceeding down the evangelical path. “I inquired how he behaved in my Absence, & had the pleasure to find even from [Myles] Cooper, that no exceptions could be taken to his Conduct, or his preaching. I begin to think we shall make a clever Fellow of him. He has repeatedly assured me that he will be directed and governed entirely by me. Upon the whole I believe I shall have no reason to repent his coming. His Enthusiastic turn is pretty well worn off.”47 This scenario suggests that, contrary to the standard narrative, “Whitefieldians” did wield power in New York City’s Anglican Church in the mid-1760s following Henry Barclay’s death. The contest over Inglis’s appointment as assistant minister as revealed in Auchmuty’s correspondence makes clear that evangelical Anglicans were a force to be reckoned with in New York City during the years between Whitefield’s triumphant tour of 1764 and his final visit to the city in 1770.

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In 1754, Auchmuty had voiced his opinion that Whitefield’s preaching resonated primarily with “the dregs of the city.” A decade later, he still was convinced that those who were swayed by Whitefield’s preaching were creatures of emotion who lacked the critical faculties necessary to recognize the implausible elements of the evangelist’s scheme. Carefully stipulating that “the people I mean belong to the Chapel only,” he confided to Anglican elder statesman Samuel Johnson in December 1764, “You can’t think how very good and pious our boys and low life people are grown. We can match any of your new light in New England.”48 For Auchmuty, reason played a vital role in the apprehension of religious truth, and so he was appalled when the educated, overcome by their passions, succumbed to the evangelist’s entreaties. In the wake of Whitefield’s sojourns in the city in 1764, some King’s College students assumed the posture of evangelicals and resisted the instruction of Myles Cooper, the Anglican head of the college, who, along with Auchmuty, found Whitefield repugnant. “I confess that I never did like him; nor believe I ever shall,” Cooper wrote in January 1764. “I hold him and his followers in most sovereign contempt; looking upon him as a common disturber of the peace of the Church; and upon the major part of his disciples as knaves or madmen.” On October 26, 1764, Auchmuty insisted that “our congregations are still very large and numerous, and in spight of Scot[c]h true blue presbyterian Eloquence at the Dutch Ch[urc]h, Morning & Evening, and the poison Whitefield has sown among a few Young Fools belonging to our Congregation, such as Master Johnny [Cooke?] that petite master, the wise & sagacious Stephen Delancy, and the two Mulligans, brought up by the Ch[urc]h at the Charity School, (pardon me for mentioning such insignificant Names) wretches that will not hear Cooper as he is not converted—I say, in spight of those Knaves & Fools, the CH[urc]h dayly increases & ever will here, while prudence & Resolution are made use of.” Cooper used sarcasm to disparage his students’ intellectual abilities as well as those of the Methodists. “As for mental food, at a Commencement—or in a Methodist-meetinghouse,” he informed another Anglican college president in April 1770, “I know you have too much Experience to expect it; and therefore you will not be disappointed.”49 Auchmuty may have disdained the evangelicals in his congregation who admired Whitefield, but he could not ignore the inroads they had made in the Church of England’s domain. It was imperative to develop a strategy to control them. “I make myself very easy and tell them my mind very freely; and as they are of no consequence I neither care for, nor concern myself much with them. They towards me behave with great complaisance and at a proper distance I am determined to keep them.” Speculating sardonically on whether

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assistant minister John Ogilvie, who had been appointed after Inglis initially decided not to come, qualified as someone able to satisfy this demanding group, he mused, “Ogilvie is no great favorite with them, tho’—inter nos—his nonsense will I believe suit them better than mine. We shall finally manage them well eno’.”50 In his first sermon after becoming Trinity’s rector, delivered both at Trinity and at St. George’s Chapel, Auchmuty addressed potential agitators directly. “I have too good an opinion of you, my B[rethre]n to think [that] you will add to the Difficulty & toilsomeness of our Duty by . . . unreasonable expectations.” To be certain that his auditors understood that he expected them to adhere to Anglican orthodoxy, Auchmuty portrayed Barclay as one who had not departed from foundational principles. “The honble regard & [the] generous & affectionate treatment [that] my excellent Predecessor (now With God) who was your most faithful servant for Jesus’ sake, always experienced from you, is [the] best assurance to me [that] you are indeed able to endure sound doctrine.”51 In a tone both mocking and threatening, Auchmuty staked out his position. Over the next decade, Auchmuty minimized the significance of the multiplying critiques of his regime by disgruntled parishioners. He hinted at the persisting cracks in his ecclesiastical edifice in May 1767. “We had not the least Altercation last Easter Tuesday.—Everything managed without a Shadow of opposition, as I would have it,” he wrote Richard Peters, his Anglican colleague in Philadelphia. “My Congregation is very quiet, & increasing fast—Our New Chapel is quit[e] full, and we shall soon want another. Not a pew to be let in either of the Churches.” In May 1770, he informed Peters “with pleasure . . . as you may well suppose,” that “last Easter Sunday at the Old Church I had no less than 360 communicants—At St George’s the Sunday following 186—and at St Paul’s the Sunday after 170. . . . The Church here increases very fast, and I flatter myself the labors of my worthy assistants & my own are usefully bestowed.”52 Yet even as he was fostering the impression that he had the upper hand over disaffected parishioners, Auchmuty was not oblivious to the cumulative effect that Whitefield’s preaching had had on commoners attached to the Church of England. “We have given young Provost a call as an assistant preacher only with a salary of two hun[dre]d P[er]annum,” Auchmuty informed Samuel Johnson in January 1767, glossing over the opposition of some parishioners to the selection of Samuel Provoost. “It’s agreeable to the sensible people among us, but not to the Saints, who grow more and more insignificant.” Ridiculing the new minister’s critics as “Saints” may have boosted Auchmuty’s morale, but suggesting that their influence in the church was waning was a colossal

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error. It may have been within Auchmuty’s power to temper Charles Inglis’s “enthusiastic bent,” but the sudden popularity of the message delivered by newly arrived Methodists left him at a loss. Philip Embury, one of a group of John Wesley’s disciples from Ireland, began to preach in 1766 and soon was joined by Captain Thomas Webb, a retired British army officer who attracted many listeners. “One Lieut Web . . . has commenced preaching,” Auchmuty wrote in the spring of 1767. “The Man is turn’d mad & does a good deal of mischief about the Country. . . . I shall not be surprized if he lays aside his Red Coat, & endeavors to get into holy orders, which would be another affliction to the Clergy here.” Fearful that Webb’s exhortations would seduce local Anglicans, Auchmuty aimed to discredit him by charging that he “has been a notorious Debauchee, but is now converted & inspired. He goes preaching all over the Country, is an illiterate, impudent wretch.”53 Methodists quickly gained a foothold in the city as crowds gathered at the John Street Chapel, which opened in 1768. Richard Boardman, writing in November 1769, informed John Wesley that “about a third part of those who attend the preaching get in; the rest are glad to hear without.” In 1771, Auchmuty conceded that Methodists were a menace to his congregation. “We still continue in peace & quietness in the Church—are increasing fast, and live in harmony, mutual love, and Friendship; and have a very fair prospect of continuing so, unless an inundation of methodists should hereafter, (as they profess themselves Church people) give us some future Disturbance, which I confess, I am a little suspicious may be the case. At present I treat with them with great tenderness, by which means, I keep them within decent bounds. This method I am convinced is the only way to prevent their being very troublesome indeed.” Auchmuty’s concern that Methodists might subvert his ministry intensified as he surveyed the impact they were having on other city congregations. “They are a thorn in Ladleys [Laidlie’s] side and draw off numbers of his Hearers—The Dissenters of all Denominations already are thin’d & feel their influence.” From the Anglican point of view, neither did it bode well that Methodist Joseph Pilmore made a point of deferring to Whitefield when the latter visited the city in 1770. Pilmore decided “not [to] preach in our chapel” at the time Whitefield was to speak and “left the people at liberty to hear that most excellent Minister of Jesus Christ.”54 It fell to Samuel Provoost to face the brunt of the evangelical onslaught in the city’s Anglican Church. When the young cleric returned to New York in 1769 after a trip to Ireland to visit his wife’s relatives, he complained about “the bigotry and enthusiasm that generally prevail here among people of all denominations” and remarked that “even the Church, particularly the lower members of it, is not free from the general infection.” The changed

Figure 5.  British army officer Thomas Webb, pictured in this 1825 engraving, was zealous in spreading the Methodist message in New York City. Courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, the New York Public Library. “Capt. T. Webb preaching in the barracks of N. York. View of the First Methodist Church in John St. New York—the first erected in America 1768.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Issued c. 1825, Amos F. Collector.

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mood of churchgoers stemmed not only from the lasting impressions made by Whitefield’s preaching but also from the responses Methodists elicited in city dwellers. Stunned by this resistance to his teachings, Provoost emphasized the adverse effects of popular evangelicalism on his auditors. Anatomizing his dealings with parishioners, he laid bare the altered relationship between laity and clergy in New York in the wake of Whitefield’s visits and the Methodist incursion. “I made it a point to preach the plain doctrine of religion and morality in the manner I found them enforced by the most eminent divines of the Church of England. This brought an accusation against me by those people [evangelicals], that I was endeavoring to sap the foundations of Christianity, which they imagined to consist in the doctrines of absolute predestination and reprobation, placing such unbounded confidence in the merits of Christ as to think their own endeavors quite unnecessary, and not in the least available to salvation; and consigning to everlasting destruction all who happen to differ from them in the most trivial matters.”55 Whitefield’s message, compounded by Methodist teachings, had moved common people from customary acquiescence to the moralistic doctrines of orthodox Anglicans to spirited advocacy of a more experiential form of religion. At an impasse, Provoost consoled himself by calling to mind his allies among the congregation’s elite, emphasizing that “I was . . . happy enough to be supported by many of the principal persons of New York.” But the displeasure of ordinary Anglicans who balked at subsidizing preaching they considered flawed almost certainly contributed to the difficulties he encountered in securing financial support for his position. While the vestry claimed that it was their vexation at the young minister’s backing of the American side in the escalating imperial crisis that caused them to base Provoost’s stipend on “what can be raised by subscription only” (an arrangement they soon discontinued), the negative impression Provoost had made on evangelical Anglicans doubtless entered into their decision to dispense with his subscription fund, thereby hastening his resignation in May 1771.56 On the surface, the conduct of worship in New York City’s Anglican churches was unaffected by the opposition of low-ranking Anglicans to the content of Provoost’s and, by extension, Auchmuty’s, Inglis’s, and Ogilvie’s sermons. Still, parishioners remained susceptible to the ideas of anyone resembling an Anglican evangelical. When Bernard Page, who had been appointed to serve in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, instead came to New York in 1773, he found fertile ground for launching an independent Anglican congregation. Page’s duplicity in securing ordination and his subsequent unseemly

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behavior outraged Pennsylvania Anglican William Smith. “He never went near the people on Susquehannah but on his arrival immediately set up a separate Preacher in New York without any Regard to Order or the Establishment there.” The account of Page’s splinter church found in Rector Morgan Dix’s 1898 Trinity parish history adhered to this narrative line. Dix, described by one scholar as “a man who eminently personified clerical authority,” masked the unrest in the congregation on the eve of the Revolution, characterizing Page’s “attempt to organize a congregation of the Church of En­gland without reference to the parish” as a “schismatical business.” Yet this renowned clergyman acknowledged that in 1774 “a number of people gathered together in a room in Horse and Cart Street . . . and decided on a lottery to raise money for the purchase of a site and the erection of a church.” One New York newspaper printed a notice of this proposed lottery “for raising the sum of 600£. towards purchasing a piece of ground and erecting a church thereon, for the congregation of the Church of En­gland which now most inconveniently assembles in Horse and Cart Street.” Dix then ended the story abruptly. “It does not appear that the lottery was ever drawn, and the congregation presently vanished.” Admittedly, few clues to the makeup of the congregation exist. Widow Ann Smith, obviously an admirer of Page, named the “Trustees, Managers or Directors of the Independent Church of England in New York City, known by the name Christ Church, lately withdrawn from the Church of England, and now under the pastoral care of the Reverend Barnard Page,” as beneficiary of half her estate “if both her sons died.” On the other hand, carman James Van Brockle, likely speaking for members upset over the minister’s mistreatment of the congregation in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, carried on a public debate with Page in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer.57 The lesson Morgan Dix extracted from the episode was that the breakaway congregation “consisted probably of dissentient members of the parish church or of St. George’s Chapel, who desired to obliterate the distinction between Establishment and the Nonconformists, and may have been imbued with the revolutionary spirit of the times, which was now growing rapidly day by day.”58 But Bernard Page’s checkered career and his controversial reputation notwithstanding, the short-lived “Independent Church of England in New York City, known by the name Christ Church, lately withdrawn from the Church of England, and now under the pastoral care of the Reverend Barnard Page” symbolizes the deepening chasm in Trinity parish on the eve of the Revolution. Even as Samuel Auchmuty confidently told his superiors in England that “the members of the Church here are very numerous, wealthy and in high

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esteem and attached to me,” he was sitting on a powder keg poised to explode in the increasingly charged political atmosphere. In 1769, he conceded the presence of dissident voices in the parish by noting that the sermon he had preached on the king’s birthday “has been found too loyal for some Liberty Boys, that call themselves Churchmen.” When a letter of Auchmuty to Captain John Montresor condemning the “rascally Whig Mob” in New York City came to light in a broadside, an Anglican critic identified as C.J. voiced the mounting sentiment against the rector in a 1775 pamphlet titled A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Auchmuty, which “was hawked about the Streets of New York,” as one reader noted in his copy. Trinity’s rector was roundly criticized for bringing the Church of England into disrepute by holding partisan views that offended members of his flock. “Many of your Parishioners formerly considered you as a peaceably [sic] Man, heartily attached to the Church, and one who did not meddle with Politicks; they attended your Preaching with Pleasure . . . but since your Letter has made its appearance, their opinion of you is vastly changed; they consider you as holding Sentiments unfriendly to American Freedom, and yet as being of so mean and dastardly a spirit as not to dare avow them openly.” C.J. pondered the outcome of Auchmuty’s treachery. “The next probable Consequence, is, that the Church will suffer. Dissatisfaction will thin our Congregations, while those of the Dissenters will increase in Proportion to our Loss.” Speaking for Anglicans whose sympathies lay with the resistance movement, C.J. admonished Auchmuty, “Sir, you should have remembered that many of your own Parishioners formed a part of that ‘rascally Whig Mob’ and they certainly deserve better Treatment from you than opprobrious Epithets, and scurrilous Reflections.”59 Myles Cooper, the Anglican president of King’s College, felt the wrath of New Yorkers who despised Loyalist Anglican clerics in a more dramatic fashion. In August 1775, so an account penned by a Loyalist judge ran, “a select party of republicans, of which John Smith and Joshua Hett Smith were the two most forward, collected together in the evening at a public house, and after swallowing a proper dose of Madeira, set off about midnight with a full design of seizing the Rev. Dr. Cooper . . . in his bed, of shaving his head, cutting off his ears, slitting his nose, stripping him naked, and turning him adrift (as the expression was).” A timely warning from a student who overheard these plans allowed Cooper to take flight.60 The frontal assault on Trinity’s rector and the aborted attack on the Anglican head of King’s College were engendered by these officials’ staunch defense of church and king—both favored the creation of an American bishop—as well as their antipathy toward Americans engaged in resisting royal authority. Imperial politics drove a wedge into New York City’s Anglican community,

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but it was disaffection with a mode of preaching that failed to address their spiritual needs that disposed churchgoers, especially those of modest social standing, to enter the city’s religious marketplace. The questioning of authority in the ecclesiastical realm initiated by George Whitefield and perpetuated by an array of evangelically inclined preachers reverberated throughout the city, heralding a new relationship between leaders and led in many congregations, one that meshed with the consumer-like approach to religion that took hold in mid-eighteenth-century New York City.

Ch a p ter   4

Becoming Religious Consumers

If deviation from the traditional language of worship brought dissatisfied artisans to openly oppose the innovations of gentlemen, and George Whitefield’s dissemination of evangelical ideas furnished New Yorkers with intellectual armament to criticize orthodox clergymen, then it was New York’s consumer revolution that primed churchgoers to cross the threshold between cultural dependence and independence. Learning to think as consumers began in the world of commerce as men and women ventured into shops with a striking assortment of goods, some of local manufacture, but most imported from London and beyond. Beginning in the 1740s and accelerating in subsequent decades, weekly newspapers featured advertisements concocted to stimulate cravings for a host of items. As city dwellers scanned pages filled with inventories of a widening array of commodities, their appetite for consumer goods mounted. In Hanover Square, which by the 1750s had emerged as New York’s premier shopping district, as well as other store-lined streets, residents perfected their ability to judge the quality of merchandise as they weighed which items best suited them.1 Groomed to behave in ways foreshadowing those of modern consumers, they unwittingly were preparing themselves to think similarly when it came to evaluating the skills of preachers in expounding spiritual truths. Discerning shoppers turned into discriminating churchgoers.

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The transformation of New Yorkers into consumers coincided with the reshaping of the city’s religious landscape. New York’s emergence as a marketplace in which shopkeepers vied with each other for customers was paralleled by a little-known efflorescence in the religious sphere. Well into the third decade of the eighteenth century, the city’s religious life was organized primarily along linguistic lines.2 The great majority of the Dutch-speaking population attended the Dutch Reformed church, where they listened to long sermons in their native tongue. A few Dutch adhered to the Lutheran church, where worship also was conducted in Dutch. French Protestant immigrants (Huguenots) who began arriving in New York in the 1680s and whose numbers crested just after the turn of the eighteenth century spent Sundays at the Église Françoise à la Nouvelle York, built in 1704 to accommodate the expanding refugee congregation. English and Scots were distributed among Trinity Church (the local arm of the Church of En­gland), the Presbyterian church, founded in 1716, and small Arminian Baptist and Quaker meetings. The opening of the Mill Street Synagogue in 1730 provided a permanent home for New York’s Jewish community, composed of both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. New York may have boasted eight religious institutions in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but this did not qualify it as a religious marketplace. With the exception of a small number of ambitious Dutch and French men whose desire to mingle with the Anglican elite at Trinity Church drove them to master English, residents were limited to worshipping where they could comprehend the language of preaching. Linguistic barriers essentially precluded listening to sermons at churches other than one’s own. Native English speakers, many of them recent immigrants, lacked any incentive to learn Dutch or French for religious worship, though they did have latitude to choose between the city’s four houses of worship where services were conducted in English. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, churches proliferated in the city, and competition for adherents intensified. By 1771, the population of almost twenty-two thousand was served by eighteen congregations representing thirteen different religious persuasions, including a variety of Protestants—Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Huguenot (French Reformed), Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Moravians, German Lutheran, German Reformed, Scottish (Seceder) Presbyterians, and Methodists—as well as Jews.3 For ordinary New Yorkers, now well-schooled as consumers, multiplying religious choices heralded an era in which individuals felt free to forsake their old religious ties and join with those whose notions of religious practice seemed more authentic to them. No longer merely receptacles for

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gentlemen’s instructions, New York churchgoers were poised to declare spiritual independence. As we have seen, some critics of the ecclesiastical status quo engaged congregational elites head-on by pressing for Dutch-language preaching, traditional Scottish psalms, or an evangelically inflected Anglicanism. But confronting men of privilege was not the only recourse for New Yorkers frustrated with the routine practice of religion. Those wary of becoming entangled in church politics might fill the perceived void by intensifying personal devotion. Regimes of Bible reading and prayer, at times coupled with private meetings of like-minded individuals, elevated spiritual awareness and had the potential to become a springboard to action. Not all New Yorkers who felt unfulfilled by formal worship resolved their malaise by turning inward. Some took to sifting through the strands of contemporary Protestant discourse—sermons, theological treatises, and polemical works—so as to equip themselves to form opinions on controversial issues. The next step might be attending meetings where advocates of particular doctrines made their case. Exposure to a variety of ideas in print and in person instilled laypeople with the confidence to compare theological perspectives. The crucial question to resolve was which set of teachings to follow. As Presbyterian merchant Nathaniel Hazard put it in November 1764, not long after George Whitefield’s lengthy sojourns in the city, “We are still in an unsettled state in our congregation here; where we shall land, the Lord only knows. Thoughtfulness about religion still continues here: But the difficulty of fixing on which is the Right one, continues.”4 Sampling preachers’ wares, a sure sign of a consumer-like temperament, was often the prelude to transferring from one congregation to another. Acting on one’s religious preferences by aligning with a new congregation signaled a change in attitude toward authority in the church setting, as clergymen came to be regarded as fallible. For a minority of churchgoers, dissatisfaction with the preaching in mainstream religious institutions led to affiliation with small groups of faithful men and women who created new sacred sites where congregants were not bound by the rules of gentlemen. Liberated from forms of worship they considered stultifying, these venturesome New Yorkers found comfort in the embrace of a community of believers. With auditors imbued with a consumer mentality and new churches proliferating in the decades after 1740, the men who filled the city’s pulpits found themselves vying with each other for followers. Caught up in New York’s emerging religious marketplace, ministers and high-ranking laymen no longer could dismiss ordinary churchgoers as impotent. As competition

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for an audience on Sundays accelerated, the privileged few who directed the affairs of the city’s major congregations yielded cultural ground to their social inferiors. Pursuing spiritual enrichment through personal devotion or intensive reading of religious literature did not always betoken disillusionment with formal worship. Neither did communing with godly friends, as Presbyterian John Smith’s description of an intimate gathering held on December 28, 1764, makes clear. “I had the pleasure of [Nathaniel Hazard’s] company at my house with another religious acquaintance we spent the Evening very Agreeably together, Encouraging each other in our Christian Course. Mr. Hazard appeared remarkably pleased & in high spirits in the Cause of God.” Conversing in this manner had a salutary effect on the devout Presbyterian merchant. “I dont know that I Ever saw him more Engaged in talking & rejoycing in the Glorious way of salvation as is Sett forth in the gospel.” Female New Yorkers such as Moravian convert Judith Gasherie Brasier hosted close friends in her chamber for “prayer, reading and singing.” Brasier’s daughter-in-law, struck by the resemblance of this meeting to formal religious services, called it “a little Church.”5 Circles of friends who assembled to amplify their spiritual soundings were not the only informal religious meetings in mid-eighteenth-century New York City. Private gatherings also originated in response to the perceived shortcomings of official worship. In 1752, “a pious English merchant” who had grown dissatisfied with the preaching in the Presbyterian church “organized a small society . . . of fourteen or fifteen souls who meet in his home once a week for refreshment in simple prayer and for edification with God’s Word.” Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg recalled “I was fetched to the pious English merchant’s since he had several awakened souls at his home. They sang a Psalm, read a chapter from an edifying book and asked me to close with prayer.” City Lutherans also improvised gatherings on their own. In 1765, Muhlenberg related that “a number of awakened members of Brother Weygand’s congregation have been holding weekly devotional hours.” In 1767, Muhlenberg was taken to “the schoolhouse where a small group of awakened parishioners was assembled. Some of them had been awakened to a concern for their souls in the Evangelical Zion in London, others here. We conversed about matters which pertain to heart repentance and genuine godliness, and we sang and prayed, being somewhat cheered and edified.”6 A few lay-sponsored extramural religious gatherings exhibited a more clear-cut oppositional character. This likely was true of the “Whitefield

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meeting in a private house” observed by traveler James Birket in 1750, but it almost certainly was the case in the conventicle bookseller Jacob Goelet organized in 1741. The Calvinistic Baptists who assembled in two different private homes in the 1740s and 1750s and were sustained by periodic visits from Baptist ministers were, in essence, a nascent congregation.7 Meeting privately was a way for laypeople to register their discontent with the forms of worship available in New York City. Even if clergymen were welcomed at these gatherings, the impulse to join together for spiritual enrichment came from below. Realizing that grassroots assemblies could advance the cause of Protestant religion, several New York ministers initiated small discussion groups in which sets of congregants exchanged views on the Bible or religious topics in a hospitable environment. In 1765, Dutch Reformed cleric Archibald Laidlie organized “special meetings where women by themselves, and men and youths by themselves expound the Scriptures by turns, repeat prayers from memory, discuss questions of conscience, etc.” Although critical of his new colleague’s innovations, Domine Lambertus De Ronde was known “to speak & pray in English to a Private Society to very good acceptance.” Presbyterian minister John Rodgers “encouraged the establishment of private associations for prayer, in different parts of the congregation, which accordingly, soon after his arrival in New-York, were considerably multiplied, and which he countenanced by his presence, as often as his engagements permitted.”8 Supervised gatherings such as these satisfied laypeople’s urge to move beyond passive forms of worship, even though the lessons absorbed did not diverge from those propounded in the pulpit. Meetings initiated by the faithful themselves were more conducive to independent religious thought. In April 1773, “John Dewit, a very pious young Man was officiating as a Member of a religious Society, in a House on Cowfoot Hill. . . . After praying he gave out an Hymn, in singing which he accompanied the Society, then read a Chapter, took a Seat, and seemed very solemn; and as another Member was about concluding the Devotion with a Prayer, Mr. Dewit . . . dropped from his knees . . . [and] seemed entirely dead.”9 The young man’s sudden and mysterious demise inadvertently drew attention to a heretofore unknown religious society. This chance reference to a meeting of an unidentified religious group makes us wonder how many other groups of New Yorkers assembled for religious purposes without leaving a trace in the record. The metamorphosis of New Yorkers into religious consumers is difficult to trace on the individual level. Although fleeting glimpses of the spiritual

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dimensions of residents’ lives occasionally surface, city dwellers were not given to chronicling their religious exercises or recording the minutiae of their soul searching. The faithfulness of a Jewish New Yorker was captured by theologian Jonathan Edwards when he recalled that, during his brief ministry to New York’s Presbyterians in the 1720s, “he once lived for many months next to a Jew (the houses adjoining one to another), and had much opportunity to observe him; who appeared to me the devoutest person that ever I saw in my life; great part of his time being spent in acts of devotion, at his eastern window, which opened next to mine, seeming to be most earnestly engaged, not only in the daytime, but sometimes whole nights.”10 Still, a momentous event could cause a person to articulate his core religious beliefs. In October 1746, merchant Gerard G. Beekman unburdened himself to a commercial correspondent on the occasion of “the Loss of a Loving good Tempered wife a dear friend and Good Companion.” Conceding that “they are tryall [trials] too hard for human flesh to Stand under,” he bared his deepest thoughts. “It [is] not my doing but the hand of the Lord whose will must be done, and directs us to bear the most Seveare frowns of Providence with Patience and to submit ourselves to his will.” He then made clear what sustained him during this awful time. “The Greatest matter of Satisfaction to me is that I am perswad and Sattisfied that my dear friend is now at Rest with hur Dear Loard and redeemer and with that Assurance I Endeavour to make my Self intrly Easey, knowing She is out of a Troublsom world whare I find no True happiness is to be had.” Beekman also took comfort in his wife’s piety. “She was Extreemly willing to die and prayed if it was the will of god he would take hur to himself now[.] She was prepared to meet him.”11 On occasion, New Yorkers revealed an introspective side. In 1757, a well-todo widow named Anne Watts sought the counsel of Anglican Samuel Johnson, the president of King’s College, when she felt stymied in her personal search for salvation. “Tell me plainly of my faults and show me where I fail and what it is in me that is an obstacle to the sweet and powerful influence of Grace,” she pleaded, “and tell me what is the reason; and for what end it can be that I don’t know my person and performances are accepted. I desire I may not rest till I know they are.” One Lutheran woman proudly told her minister, Henry Muhlenberg, that during his absence “the Lord kept [the word of God] alive in her heart because she was diligent in her private reading of the Scriptures and gave place to the workings of the good Spirit.”12 New Yorkers may have been averse to documenting their musings on spirituality, but they did not lack interest in the issues being debated by contemporary religious writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the decades from the 1740s to the 1770s, city dwellers consumed the ideas of a diverse array

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of Protestant thinkers, thereby expanding their understanding of doctrinal issues and theological debates. Exposure to unfamiliar interpretations or innovative religious practices might begin and end on the printed page, but it also could spur action, whether attending the lecture of an itinerant preacher, worshipping at a different church, or even joining a new congregation. For some New Yorkers, religious reading was confined to the Bible, perhaps supplemented by a few standard devotional works. Yet judging from advertisements for religious titles in the local press, a ready audience existed for works promising insight into spiritual questions. Garret Noel, proprietor of one of the city’s best-known bookshops, regularly imported a variety of titles from England. His catalogs were designed to appeal to gentlemen who prized the rule of reason. A Catalogue of Books in History, Divinity, Law, Physic, Arts and Sciences, and the Several Parts of Polite Literature (1759) reflected an ordering principle that located divinity as just one sphere of knowledge. But Noel, a devout Presbyterian, also catered to New York readers with less cosmopolitan tastes. In November 1758, he ran an advertisement addressed “To all Religious Disposed Persons” in which he touted a selection of “pious books, lately imported the following which are in great esteem, and to be sold at the affixed low prices.” Nearly a decade later, Noel announced the sale of “very cheap religious books,” enumerating scores of titles and noting that he had in stock “a vast number of other Religious Books.”13 Other city booksellers such as Hugh Gaine and Samuel Loudon also advertised numerous volumes pertaining to religion. Who bought the religious books on sale in eighteenth-century New York City bookshops is a matter of conjecture. Writings on religious subjects doubtless predominated in the large book collections amassed by city ministers. When Ezra Stiles visited the “venerable Dutch Divine” Johannes Ritzema in Kinderhook, New York, in 1786, he noted that he “viewed his learned Library of I judge 1000 or 1200 Volumes.” A 1796 inventory of the books owned by Lambertus De Ronde, Ritzema’s former colleague in New York City, enumerates well over two hundred works on religion, the preponderance in Dutch, but some in English or Latin.14 Most of these titles must have been acquired before the Dutch Reformed cleric went into exile at the beginning of the American Revolution. Devotional and theological works were outnumbered by books on other topics in the private libraries of the city’s gentlemen. A sense of the reading preferences of elite New Yorkers comes from the titles purchased by prominent New Yorkers such as James De Lancey, James Alexander, John Murray, John Chambers, and Archibald Kennedy at the auction of Governor John Montgomerie’s library of well over one thousand volumes in

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1732. Composed mainly of works in English and French, this library included many “histories, travels, plays, verse and essays” but few religious works. Henry Lane, whose interest was belles lettres, acquired volumes by John Dryden, John Gay, John Oldham, Matthew Prior, and John Vanbrugh. Anthony Duane, an Anglican merchant, purchased Laurence Echard’s History of England, and Daniel Horsmanden bought an English translation of Engelbert Kaempfer’s History of Japan.15 The libraries of New York City gentlemen probably resembled that of Dutch Reformed merchant Dirck Brinckerhoff, who in 1772 left his son “all my English and Latin books, whether Law, History or Divinity.” The wives and daughters of these men had their own books as well. When Anglican clergyman Henry Barclay made his will in 1764, he specified that his wife Mary, a member of the Dutch Rutgers family, was to receive “all my printed books in the Low Dutch language.” Many of these books likely focused on religious topics. By contrast, Abigail Franks, the wife of merchant Jacob Franks, although true to her faith, shied away from didactic and devotional works. Her reading tastes, as documented in her correspondence of the 1730s and 1740s, were notably secular. She immersed herself in the writings of British authors such as Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, subscribed to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a literary journal, and also read Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. In the words of one scholar, “She lived passionately in a world of books with progressive ideas that shaped her thinking outside traditional ways.”16 If the libraries of New Yorkers at the top of the social scale reflected their cosmopolitan reading tastes, the far smaller assemblies of books found in the homes of less affluent city dwellers were likelier to feature volumes dealing with spiritual questions. A German joiner who belonged to Henry Muhlenberg’s congregation showed him several books that he had been given by a Lutheran minister in London. In 1773, a single woman named Mary Tiebout earmarked “a Book entitled the ‘Rise and Progress of religion in the Soul,’ ” a popular 1745 work by Dissenting clergyman Philip Doddridge, for her shopkeeper brother-in-law, who she believed would profit from its contents. Widow Rachel Smith stipulated in her 1757 will that “John Brewer, son of Jacob Brewer,” was to receive “my Sermon Book.”17 Whether this was a published collection of sermons or a book containing her own notes on sermons she had heard is unclear. The interest of ordinary men and women in works relating to religion was made clear when New York printers Hodge and Shober announced they would issue a posthumous edition of the Memoirs of the Life of George Whitefield by subscription in 1774. Since books published by subscription appeared

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only if enough buyers pledged to pay for them, the fact that over 450 people, at least 135 of them from New York City, agreed in advance to pay for this volume attests to the popular appeal of the famed evangelist’s message. Subscribers came from differing social ranks and practiced a variety of occupations, including carpenter, ship carpenter, cabinetmaker, blacksmith, pewterer, hatter, tallow chandler, painter, watchmaker, rope maker, bricklayer, tailor, shoemaker, cooper, baker, silversmith, engraver, coppersmith, schoolmaster, tinman, stonecutter, ironmonger, and merchant. Among the subscribers were nine women, one of whom was Mrs. Watts, perhaps the lady who had corresponded with Samuel Johnson. At least ten Baptists, including Mrs. Dorcas Betts, ordered this volume.18 For those city residents who had listened to George Whitefield speak, seeing his words on the printed page would have refreshed their memories of his impassioned preaching. In manifold ways and at different tempos, New Yorkers came to sense that they were fit judges of spiritual and ecclesiastical matters. Some freely articulated their dissatisfaction with the pronouncements of ministers and the policies of church elders. Others sundered their ties to churches whose doctrines were unpalatable. Individuals who were single-minded in contemplating the path to salvation were most likely to leave a record of their thoughts. A Quaker woman’s recollections of her time in New York highlighted her frustration with the religious example set by her master. Cheshire-born Elizabeth Ashbridge traveled to New York in 1732 and was indentured to a man whose perfunctory performance of daily prayers repulsed her. “My Master would seem to be a Very Religious Man, taking the Sacrament (so called), and used to Pray every Night in his Family, except when his Prayer Book was Lost, for he never Pray’d without it that I knew of.” This young servant woman’s scorn for the man who commanded her labor extended to the Anglican clerics who regularly visited his home. “My Master’s House used to be a place of Great resort of the Clergy. . . . Sometimes those that came out of the Country lodged there & their Evening Diversion used to be Cards & Singing Psalms to Almighty God.” Taking offense at “superficially righteous” men, as Ashbridge did, was a critical first step on a journey that involved severing connections to family religious traditions and affiliating with a controversial sect.19 The sometimes convoluted paths individuals took in their search for a religious community that would sustain their faith are discernible in the cases of several New Yorkers who were drawn to the Moravian faith. David Van Horne, the wealthy Presbyterian merchant whose close association with George Whitefield has been mentioned, came close to casting his lot with the Moravians. Raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and later a Presbyterian elder, Van Horne manifested a spiritual longing that first led him to

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Whitefield, who reciprocated his friendship by nurturing the merchant’s spiritual rebirth. “Oh that my Dear Mr. Vanhorn may give Him his whole heart without secretly keeping back the least part!” Whitefield wrote in 1746, and followed with the prayer that “your heart may eccho [sic] to his call, & that You may be enabled in a rapture of love with Thomas to say My Lord & My God!”20 Notwithstanding his admiration and affection for the famed evangelist, Van Horne was not encumbered by Whitefield’s opinion of the Moravians, asserting that “the Brethren here are far from justifying those things Mr. Whitefield charges on some of them at home” and adding “by writing against them what good will he due[;] will he not Strengthen deism.” Claiming the “Liberty to Judge and act for myself,” Van Horne came to the conclusion that the Moravians were exemplary Christians. As he explained to George Whitefield’s wife, “The more I am acquainted with the Brethren here . . . the better I like them. . . . Their preaching and Conversation of late has been very much blessed to me.” In fact, he declared, “I know here no People that adorn their Profession by a more Circumspect walk[,] by a more inoffensive and harmless Conversation.” Describing Moravians as “remarkable for their Religious Conduct and Attachment to a Crucified Saviour,” Van Horne disclosed that “one reason for my Esteem for ’em here is the simplicity of their Worship and Freedom from Ceremonys.”21 Although most in Van Horne’s social circle surely would have agreed with Presbyterian Obadiah Wells’s assessment that “Moravianism has, to a deplorable degree, infatuated that poor, unhappy gentleman,” Van Horne himself maintained that “I am not a Moravian and am not pleading for them only but for Every people however Dispisd that beleive the grand Doctrines of Christianity, the Deplorable Corruption of human nature and mans restoration by Christ and that adorn that profession by a suitable walk.” Swift to quash rumors that he would abandon his ties to the Presbyterian congregation, he made clear that “tho some People have of late thought we intended to leave his Church we have no such design.” Van Horne’s posture was decidedly ecumenical. Having “tested too much of this bitter Herb of prejudice,” he affirmed, “the more I find my heart enlarged with Love for Jesus the more I find it so turned towards his dispised Followers of every Denomination.” “While god gives me a house,” he assured Elizabeth Whitefield in 1754, “it Shall be open to him [George Whitefield], to you, & to Every peaceable Servant of Jesus Christ, by Whatever name distinguished.”22 Another Presbyterian merchant with strong ties to George Whitefield did sever his connection to the Presbyterian Church and become a Moravian. Thomas Noble, the famed evangelist’s earliest backer in New York, remained

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a trusted friend until he listened to Count Zinzendorf and followed his wife Mary into the city’s embryonic Moravian community. In December 1741, Noble confided that “I am more and more convinced in my heart that the Moravians are the dear children of God and do believe they Preach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Whitefield, alarmed at the path his disciple was taking, urged him to reconsider in February 1742. “Take heed that your getting acquainted with any new set of Christians, does not lead you insensibly to despise others of your old acquaintance.”23 When he was still a Presbyterian, Noble had been intent on spreading the evangelical message through the medium of print. Early in his career, he negotiated with Boston printer Daniel Henchman to have Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert, a seventeenth-century Puritan best seller, translated into Dutch for distribution in New York. Noble, who along with Henchman has been termed a “lay promoter of religious revival,” also placed orders for multiple copies of Whitefield’s Journals, as well as works by evangelical preachers Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Finley, with Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin in 1740 and 1741.24 Faith was the measure of all things for Noble, and when he purchased a slave later known as Andrew the Moor, he saw to it that this young African received a religious education. Andrew quickly learned to read after being sent to school and recalled that “I always had the N. Test. or another good book in my pack and read from it whenever I had the time and opportunity.” Initially, Andrew stayed in a corner when “Mr. Noble held morning and evening prayers with his family,” but “Mrs. Noble said one time that since our Savior had suffered and died as much for me as for them, I could be as blessed as them and I should pray with them, which I did. Impressed by the Nobles’ practice of Protestant Christianity, Andrew became a devoted Christian. “I often had a longing to be baptized,” he related, “and Mr. Whitefield once offered to baptize me but Mr. Noble refused.” It was the Moravian Brethren who lodged with Thomas Noble who astonished the boy by telling him that “our Savior had shed his blood for me and all black men and that He had as much love for me, and everyone, as for white people.”25 Although at first doubting this was true, Andrew soon accepted the Moravian faith and was permitted to move to the communal society in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1745. Merchant Thomas Noble’s devotion to Bible-based truth was ridiculed by New York attorney James Alexander, a cosmopolitan gentleman well versed in Enlightenment learning. Speculating on the author of an anonymous scientific publication in 1744, Alexander ruled out Noble as a candidate on account of his religiosity. “As our witts could not fix in any body that was likely, we thought of Mr Noble, but upon better thoughts, for as Stupid as it is, yet

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its beyond his sphere, as, his thoughts are Confined to the Scripture and the Sellings of Goods, & has no notion what an atmosphere & other words there used do mean.”26 David Van Horne and Thomas Noble pursued spiritual odysseys that led them away from conventional religious practice and even beyond George Whitefield. Their predilection for the Moravians not only set them apart from their well-to-do peers, but distinguished them from the majority of the city’s Moravian converts, who were women. In his 1757 history of New York, William Smith Jr. observed that the Moravian congregation “consist[ed] principally of female proselytes from other societies.” A 1754 roster of congregants arranged by gender and marital status confirms that 62 of the 102 individuals enumerated were women. Even more striking, the husbands of some female members were either not full members or were not in the congregation at all. Jane Boelen, one of the first New Yorkers to cast her lot with the Moravians, had married silversmith Hendrick Boelen on June 19, 1718, in the city’s Dutch Reformed church, where at least eight of their children were baptized. Jane had become a communicant of the Dutch Reformed church on May 27, 1717, and her husband on February 23, 1725. But as soon as the Moravians began expounding their beliefs in the city, Jane gravitated to the sect. She was present at meetings beginning in 1741 and was a member of the group by 1744. By 1751, her husband Hendrick was a contributor to a fund for the construction of a dwelling house for the pastor, but Hendrick’s status on the 1754 congregational roster was still that of an adherent. When he died in August 1755 at the age “58 yrs., 2 mo., 24 days,” he was interred in the “Burial Ground of the United Brethren.” Hendrick Boelen had followed his wife’s lead in religious matters, but he never attained a status commensurate with hers in the Moravian congregation. When “Sister Jane Boelen” died in August 1776, her funeral was conducted with dignity, even though minister Oswald Gustav Shewkirk conceded that “many people cannot be expected to attend funerals in these times.” He explained, “Those of our sisters that were yet in town mostly attended, and the rest were Sister Boelen’s neighbors. However, everything went orderly and to satisfaction. In the chapel, a discourse was kept on Isaiah [46:4]—‘even to your old age I am He.’ ”27 Jane Boelen had long ago made known that she was in command of her own religious life. For female New Yorkers taught to comply with the directives of male authorities, acting independently in the religious sphere was something new and risky. Yet women brought up in a variety of congregations braved denunciation by family members and ministers to find inspiration and sisterhood in the city’s fledgling Moravian community. Buoyed by a faith that recognized them as persons, and surrounded by fictive kin, they crossed entrenched

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gender lines. Bound in fellowship with people whose vision of the Christian life seemed sweet beyond measure, they savored the fruits of their spiritual makeover. The Moravian practice of composing a Lebenslauf or memoir toward the end of life allows us to trace the spiritual journeys of several female converts from New York City. What stands out in these autobiographical narratives are the women’s sense of the insufficiency of customary forms of church life and their joy at encountering a sect that validated emotional expressions of faith in a communal setting. Also evident in these recollections is the crucial role played by female spiritual mentors in guiding converts toward spiritual fulfillment. Martha Marriner Buninger, born in Rhode Island in 1723 to a mother from New England and a father born in “Old England,” was baptized by a Presbyterian minister. With her father presumed dead, her mother indentured seven-and-a-half-year-old Martha to a Quaker named Augustus Hix until the age of eighteen. After four years on Long Island, she moved with Hix, whom she described as “a good master [who] looked after me like his own child,” to New York City, where she served the remainder of her term. Apparently untouched by Quaker beliefs, she soon traveled to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she “came upon the awakened people and was awakened by them and stayed with them for three months.” Her experiences with this unidentified group opened Martha to the overtures of the Moravians. “The first feeling that I had of the Saviour and His bloody wound and that He had died for me too was in a Bible class, which Brother Noble held in New York.”28 Without elaborating on her religious transformation other than crediting Thomas Noble for introducing her to Moravian beliefs, Martha succinctly stated that “at that time I received an inclination to the brothers and sisters and soon became acquainted with Sister Boehler.” After “the Act against the Brethren” was passed in New York in 1744, she moved to Philadelphia and then to the Moravian community at Bethlehem. Without a family or a religious home, Martha was free to declare her preference for the doctrines of the Moravians. Other city women who decided to join the Moravian community faced opposition. Sarah Van Fleck (Van Vleck) Grube, the daughter of Thomas Noble’s chief clerk, Henry Van Vleck, stated that she was baptized into the Dutch Reformed Church where her father was an elder. One day when Domine Ritzema was preaching on a particular biblical passage, Sarah had an epiphany that convinced her that her spiritual needs were not being met in the family church. Embarking on her quest for a new faith, Sarah was conscious of the Moravians’ bad reputation in New York City in 1744. “I went to a Brethren’s meeting for the first time, but I was

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very scared that one of my relatives or friends would see me because at that time the Brethren were much despised, especially by the Reformed pastors.” Over a decade later, when she finally decided to join the Moravians, she felt compelled to account for her choice to men who assumed they had a right to dictate her religious beliefs. After it became obvious that Sarah no longer was participating in his congregation, the Dutch Reformed minister first sent his wife to find out why she had stopped attending, and then “the preacher came himself and testified to his pain that I wanted to leave his church.” Her two eldest brothers asked her “how I could justify leaving the church into which I had been born and raised and enjoyed Holy Communion.”29 They relented when they heard her answer. Moravian converts could pay a high emotional price for orienting themselves by their own spiritual compass, enduring the scorn of family members and the condemnation of church authorities. Catharine Kerney Brownfield suffered further reproaches from other awakened individuals when she elected to convert to the Moravian faith. “I was born [in] . . . 1716 in New York and baptized and raised in the Church of England, to which I remained faithful,” Catharine recounted in her memoir.30 After undergoing a conversion experience, she set off on a new path, even though it pained her that she “had saddened my dear parents greatly by leaving the church in which I had been raised.” Her first move was to embed herself in a community of similarly transformed people. “Without the knowledge of my parents, I now kept the company of awakened people.” But these pious friends were not charitable toward the Moravians. “Here I heard much against the Brethren, which affected me greatly, and I warned them not to speak about them like that.” Although Catharine had not yet had contact with the Moravians, she recalled that she “felt a secret love for them.” Intimidated, she remained in place. “The fear of offending those whom I considered to be eminent Christians kept me away from the Brethren for two years.” Finally, she conversed with the wife of a Moravian preacher. “I opened my heart to Sister Russmeyer, who was a true friend of the Brethren, and I decided not to believe the opinions of other people but to hear the Brethren myself.” Once Catharine had listened to Brother Owen Rice explain the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah, she knew that “they [the Moravians] are the p[eople] for hungry souls.” After visiting Bethlehem in 1744, she knew she had found her religious home. The critical part played by the wife of Moravian minister Albrecht Ludolph Russmeyer in confirming Catharine’s desire to join the group was not exceptional. Moravian sisters were instrumental in facilitating Margaretha Anton Edmonds’s religious makeover. Baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1721, Margaretha first “was awakened by Mr. Whitefield’s sermons.” On a

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subsequent “pleasure trip” she made to Albany, she recalled, “the dear Saviour led me to understand that the amusements that occurred were nothing but vain things” and made her aware of her shortcomings. “I then applied all my strength in order to receive a believer’s heart for my Saviour until I became convinced in another way in the Brethren’s sermons. In particular, Br. Greening’s English preaching and his and his wife’s cordial relationship with me were a blessing for my heart.” Further inspired by Brother Gambold and Brother Rice, Margaretha eventually “was able to give myself up to the Saviour, just the way I was, and He allowed me to find grace in His blood.” Once admitted to the congregation in New York in 1753, she again benefited from the comfort and counsel of a Moravian woman when “Sr. Anna Ramsberg came to us as our Choir Helper.” Margaretha attached great significance to her friendship with this sister. “I experienced many blessings for my heart in my open-hearted relationship with her. She also gently advised me to be patient, when I confessed to her my great desire for Holy Communion, and to wait for the dear Saviour’s own good time.” The moment finally came on Good Friday in 1754 when Margaretha enjoyed “the Holy Sacrament of His Body and Blood for the first time with the Congregation in New York.” Desirous of moving to the Moravian communal society in Bethlehem, Margaretha delayed because of her concern for her aunt Judith Brasier, “a very dear sister and also weak,” deciding to stay with her out of love until she went home (died). In February 1755, however, she was called to Bethlehem to marry one of the brethren and left New York for good.31 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was a beacon for New York’s Moravian converts. Animated by their new faith, they longed to behold the main communal society of the Moravians there. For some women, visiting was not enough, as a notation from May 10, 1744, made clear. “Today there arrived from New York [Mrs.] Vendover [Mary Wendover], Anna Boolen, Lydia Montagne, Eliz. Brazier [Brasier], the two last-named with the intention of remaining in the congregation. Anna’s heart, however, was so carried away that she could not be persuaded to leave Bethlehem again. All three of them now take Communion with the congregation.” It was not uncommon for women committed to the Moravian faith to travel together for religious purposes. On May 21, 1744, “the sisters Noble, Horsfield, and Hume came here [Bethlehem] for a visit from New York by way of Phila., where they had attended the great love feast.” No better illustration of the solidarity between women in the Moravian spiritual community exists than the bond between mothers and daughters. On August 5, 1744, “two sisters arrived from New York, namely Montagne and Brazier, to visit the congregation and their daughters.” Elizabeth Brasier, who had been baptized in New York City’s Dutch Reformed church in 1729,

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was the daughter of Judith Gasherie Brasier. The mothers’ stay extended to September 1, when “the two sisters from New York, Montagne and Brazier, again left here, rejoicing with all their hearts that they had perceived and felt the grace which the Lamb so richly bestows in Bethlehem.”32 For some women, becoming a Moravian was the ultimate stage in a long spiritual odyssey filled with questioning and reflection. At the age of sixty-six, Judith Gasherie Brasier, a woman with Huguenot forebears who was baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, New York, in 1700, penned a memoir in the Dutch language tracing her lifelong inner struggle. In her childhood she had experienced trials that opened up to her the possibility of faith but then left her unfulfilled. Leaving home at the age of seventeen, she traveled to New York City, where despite her desire to remain single, she met and married Luck [Lucas] Brasher [Brasier] in 1724.33 “To this period I had more trust in the Father than in the Son, but the Lord drew me powerfully through his grace and love night and day to his Son.” The young wife “began to attend the customary catechising with the congregation of the Reformed Church,” but she was “distressed and cast down especially as we reasoned about the doctrine of election of God.” Remembering that her grandmother, who had raised her as a young child, had “spoken of the existence of universal grace,” she meditated on how Jesus had “died for the ungodly.” In this period, she “sought the grace of my beloved Jesus, feeling my sins and iniquities.” At the age of thirty-six, she experienced a spiritual crisis when her thirty-nine-year-old husband, “her best friend,” died, leaving her with a seven-year-old daughter and a son of sixteen months. Plunged into sorrow, she felt that she had “no strength of my own to bring me under God’s hand.” At this point, “two or three months in the state of widowhood,” she had a mind-altering dream that left her with the understanding that the grace of God could only be obtained through the intercession of Jesus. “I saw that my good deeds could not help me, and that I must go to the Lord Jesus who in his time would free me from my sins.” Convinced that “through the grace of Jesus Christ shown to me I would receive help,” the widow was buoyed in her spiritual quest when George Whitefield, whom she called “a trustworthy proclaimer of the glad tidings of the universal grace of our Lord Jesus,” came to New York in 1740. Acknowledging that Whitefield “had many hearers and many were awakened by his publication of universal grace and the great necessity of our being born again and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost,” she still concluded that “I heard more of his entreaties than I profited by.” After some time, Judith Gasherie Brasier “became acquainted with the United Brethren [Moravians], and convinced in my heart that they had learned the same knowledge of the universal grace.” Distraught that they

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were being persecuted by New York authorities, she boldly told an officer of the Dutch Reformed congregation who had come to collect a customary church fee to “have my name erased from the church books,” explaining that “the cause of my leaving was that the course pursued by Christians following or persecuting Christians would fail of securing a blessing.” The widow’s spiritual journey now accelerated. “Under the preaching of Mr. Whitfield” on a text from Jeremiah, “I became convinced of the righteousness of our Lord Jesus and of the great sinfulness of my self-righteousness.” Soon she concluded, “Thus was I in the first days of grace comforted and strengthened both early and late.” At this point, Brasier cast her lot with the Moravians. “In the year 1741 I became a scholar of the United Brethren whom I loved for the work of the Lord. . . . They were to me as the salt of the earth and as the dew of heaven.” Still highly critical of herself, she noted that “I had much strife between the spirit and the flesh, and met with great resistance at first from my corrupted nature because at first I had been a member of the Reformed Church sixteen years without having in that period found peace: that made me irresolute in my soul.” But finally, in 1750, she was “received as a member of the community of United Brethren, and in the same year the Saviour gave me the grace to become a member of the Brotherhood by the will of God under the ministry of Brother Rice.” She was grateful for the “grace which the beloved Saviour let fall for the first time on my heart.” The image of Judith Gasherie Brasier ingrained in the memory of Helena Kortright, who in 1758 married Abraham Brasher [Brasier], the widow’s son, was of a physically impaired yet charismatic woman. Prefacing her observations with the assertion that in “her younger days she had been a very active stirring woman a great reader, had a very retentive memory which made her an agreeable companion,” the daughter-in-law noted that “the latter part of her life was entirely devoted to the exercise of religion[,] her company and conversation much sought after by all the pious of every denomination. Her infirm state of health prevented her meeting the people of God in the congregation, she always had her select friends at her house. Her chamber was a little Church. Prayer reading and singing her delight.”34 Judith Gasherie Brasier’s reflections, written during the period covered by her daughter-in-law’s recollections, reveal an individual who early embarked on a spiritual journey that took her from a church where she searched in vain for peace, to finding hope for salvation in the preaching of George Whitefield, to an eventual breakthrough to grace with the mediation of the Moravians. As a widow, she pursued her quest in a single-minded way until she felt the

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welcoming embrace of the Moravians. With a strong sense of purpose and a heightened awareness of the spiritual dimension of her life, Brasier abandoned a mainstream congregation and allied with a sectarian group that sustained her, even as it empowered her. Fortified by faith to bear witness against what they perceived as the misguided lessons of orthodox teachers, she and other New York Moravian converts can be considered the consummate religious consumers of their day. In no way typical of eighteenth-century city dwellers in their beliefs, they nevertheless showed other people of faith that it was possible to act on one’s convictions. “Because there is here perfect freedom of conscience for all, except Papists,” the venerable Dutch Reformed minister Gualterus Du Bois observed in 1741, “a spirit of confusion is ever blazing up more and more. Everybody may do what seems right in his own eyes, so long as he does not disturb the public peace. Hence so many conventicles exist. Hence so many are perplexed and misled; while others neglect or scoff at the divine service not to speak of those who, on various pretexts, entirely abstain from the Lord’s Supper.” Du Bois was the first in a line of New York ministers to ponder how their relationships with newly minted religious consumers would change in the city’s emerging religious marketplace. Lutheran Henry Muhlenberg considered ordinary people who acted without guidance from the elite to be malcontents. In 1751, he called a group of Germans in his congregation “poor, ignorant people who have no guardian or supervisor,” and alleged that “they want to build churches according to their own ideas with other people’s alms and pick up every vagabond who comes into the country with a black suit or vest . . . and sets himself up as a preacher.” Muhlenberg amplified his views the next year, asserting that “it is becoming fashionable, as it were, for every fool to set himself up as an authority and as such to apply his might to combating the Christian religion.” In this atmosphere, a minister was tempted to pander to his audience. Muhlenberg condemned one German minister who resorted to this tactic as “very confused in his preaching.” This man “had to use all his strength in making a loud noise with his voice and in uttering a rapid stream of words in order to gain the applause of the ignorant people.”35 In the face of intransigent Scottish workingmen demanding that Rous’s version of the Psalms be continued in the worship service, Presbyterian minister Ebenezer Pemberton abruptly resigned and took another post in Boston. “I am not form’d to Preach the Gospel of peace in the fire of Contention,” he declared. “Neither my Temper nor Religion qualify me to ingage in A Scene of Uninterrupted Cavelling and Disputing.” This highly respected

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Presbyterian minister would brook no challenge to his or his elders’ authority in church affairs. Pemberton’s departure created a vacuum in the pulpit that left his congregants vulnerable to the overtures of rival denominations. The “C[hurc]h of England Moravians Baptist and Dutch [churches] are waiting for our halting and to Snatch us up,” lamented Presbyterian church member John Robinson in 1754.36 The threat to the status quo posed by disgruntled churchgoers nettled clergymen who assumed that the authority vested in them as ordained ministers entitled them to the respect of their flock. Ordinary people now insisted on concessions regarding the conduct of worship. In January 1747, the consistory of the Dutch Reformed church presented a “friendly request, that the ministers henceforth, would not extend their discourses beyond fifty minutes, or at furthest an hour, so as to remove the complaints about long sermons, to increase the audience and hold the people together.” The demands brought to bear on church leaders escalated later that year when the issue of private baptism was raised. “The custom of the Church of England in this country is . . . to administer private baptisms where it is desired; and they are followed in this practice by the Presbyterians, in order to keep their congregations together. [In light of] the close connection by marriage of many of our people with those of other churches[,] [i]f they are denied (private) baptism, they threaten to leave our church and go to others.”37 Holding up practices in other churches as a standard to be met in their own congregation was a way to exert leverage on those who wielded cultural authority in the church setting. Of greater concern to clergymen than the pressure for alterations in church practices was the laity’s experimentation with unorthodox systems of belief. Lambertus De Ronde of the Dutch Reformed church expressed alarm in 1763 that members of his congregation were being exposed to irregular ideas by “various sects and seducers in our midst.” There are “many errorists among us,” he elaborated, “Moravians, Anabaptists, Arminians and others,” as well as “Antinomians and Fanatics, who have issued writings prepared in a very subtle way, and under the guise of Gospel truths. They came over from England, that breeding place of heresy, and are not only ministers, but others also.” Churchgoers were captivated by these dangerous religious ideas. “Their doctrines are very easy and pleasant to the flesh and have been already embraced by many of our own members.” For a man who conceived of a minister’s cultural authority as sacrosanct, the changes unfolding before his eyes were unprecedented. “I have now been stationed here for more than fifteen years,” he wrote in 1765, “and have never known of such things among us before. Everything has always gone on peaceably, but the times have now changed. I hear of novelties. There is much clamor about sudden conversions

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of those who attend these meetings which have been organized, but I fail to see any fruits.”38 De Ronde’s colleague Johannes Ritzema did not mince words in 1769 when he confided to Amsterdam church leaders, “To tell the truth, the spirit of fanaticism and independence makes fearful progress; Bible phraseology is no longer counted, by many as the expression of religious feelings, and people run from one church to another. In addition to our Third or North Church, and the Presbyterian church, a Scotch Seceder Church was built in this city during the past year. Another [the Methodist Chapel] was also built for a certain one-eyed, half-paid officer, by the name of Webb. In this anybody, except lawfully appointed ministers, is allowed to preach. An Anabaptist minister, a regular fanatic, also creates a great disturbance here.”39 To Ritzema, the unhinging of droves of New Yorkers from their religious moorings augured a crisis of religious authority. What ministerial champions of orthodoxy were witnessing was a reshuffling of the city’s churchgoing population that was undergirded by city dwellers’ incipient consumer mentality. In its most benign form, this entailed a rotation of worshippers among existing congregations. Commenting in March 1764 on the depletion of Presbyterian membership rolls after David Bostwick’s death, Lambertus De Ronde pointed out that “the Presbyterians have not yet called another minister—they differ very much in their opinions. In the meantime, the Seceders & Anabaptists increase.” Trinity’s new rector Samuel Auchmuty elaborated on the Dissenters’ woes in October 1764. With undisguised schadenfreude, he spelled out the consequences of the remaining Presbyterian minister’s deficiencies. “They have only poor Treat [Joseph Treat], who is not happy enough to please them—Even some of the Negro’s when he preaches come to Chh. [the Anglican church]. Many of their greatest & most zealous Ladies have left them & have joined themselves to Mastr Ladley [Laidlie], & are contented for the present to hear him preach his Scotch true Calvinistic Stuff, for two Hours upon a Stretch.”40 The debacle in the Presbyterian church showed that women and African Americans no longer felt bound to patronize an ordained minister who did not measure up to their standards. New Yorkers’ thirst for religious inspiration was not always quenched by the sermons emanating from familiar pulpits. City dwellers who eagerly anticipated the latest fashions from overseas also craved novelty in the religious sphere and, unsurprisingly, gravitated to the series of controversial preachers who passed through the city in the 1760s and 1770s. Scotsman Robert Sande­ man’s name was already familiar to New Yorkers conversant with British theological discourse for the “intellectualist view of faith” he had propounded

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in Letters on Theron and Aspasio (1757), a book that challenged the Calvinist position of Anglican James Hervey in his highly influential Theron and Aspasio (1755). “Sandeman had made a considerable Noise here—is condemn in totum by all ye Herveans, Seceders & there adherents,” Presbyterian minister David Bostwick related in March 1761, prior to launching into a critique of various contributions to the simmering theological debate. The opinions of Nathaniel Hazard, a member of Bostwick’s congregation, were more qualified. “As to Sandimans Scheme of Religion,” Hazard wrote in June 1761, “I esteem it verry short, and verry defective; but bad as it is, I think upon the whole it is at least as good, as those generally now in fashion; and in several respects if we allow the Bible as a standard to decide; I think it has the preference. Vizt. His Sentiments of the object of divine worship—his notion of Charity—the state of Man—free Grace & & appear to me to be more agreeable to the Bible than those now in vogue.” King’s College president Samuel Johnson expressed reservations about Hervey’s notions to Anne Watts in 1757, and in 1763 he noted that “the letters of one Sandeman on Theron and Aspatia [sic] are much in vogue with many and tend to much mischief.”41 When Sandeman finally materialized in New York on a Wednesday evening in February 1765 and spoke at the “New Play-House . . . to a larger Audience than the Place ever before was crowded with,” his listeners were not pleased. The report was that “he has not held forth since in public, the Usage this Itinerant met with in so refined a Place for the Idle and Wandering, having given him little Encouragement to attempt the Hum-bugging any sensible Auditory, by a too free Construction of any Part of the Divine Oracles.” Bookseller Garret Noel capitalized on the furor surrounding Sandeman, advertising a brace of works critical of the itinerating preacher—Palaemon’s Creed, reviewed and examined: wherein several gross and dangerous Errors, advanced by Mr. Sandeman, Author of Theron and Aspasio, are detected and refuted. . . . and Mr. Sandeman refuted by an old woman. . . .—and promising another volume called “A full, strong, and clear Refutation of Mr. Sandeman’s pernicious Doctrines By a Clergyman.”42 New Yorkers, having encountered Sandeman’s unorthodox views on and off the page, now were free to judge his merits for themselves. Several itinerants with dubious credentials forced their way into local pulpits, jeopardizing ministers’ control over their flocks and disrupting congregational life. John Murray, an English immigrant known as the founder of Universalism in America, recounted that in 1770 he was literally besieged “by people . . . anxious to hear something new, and from a new preacher.” He acquiesced and delivered “a discourse in the Baptist meeting-house.” Called back to New York several months later, Murray again preached in the Baptist meetinghouse, where “the congregations were very large.” Mesmerized by what they

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had heard, his listeners “went so far as to hand about a subscription-paper, for the purpose of building for me a house of public worship. It was completely filled in one day, when application was made to me to abide with them continually.” Murray’s rendering of his warm reception in New York bypassed the fact that, as Ezra Stiles put it, he “preached in Mr. Gano’s pulpit, but not at Mr. Gano’s Desire.” Baptist minister John Gano had confronted Murray with reports of his unsavory behavior in England, according to Stiles. Summing up the episode years later, Gano recollected that John Murray “for a little time, drew a few from my church, as well as from others.”43 In 1767, a Baptist preacher named Henry Dawson, fresh from London, “ingratiated himself into the favour of some of my church,” Gano remembered, “but understanding his character did not stand fair in the place from whence he came, I discountenanced any marks of respect which my people wished to shew him. This dissatisfied several, but the body of the church coincided with me.” The greatest threat to congregational harmony came from John Allen or “Junius Junior,” a contentious Baptist minister from London who in 1770 had published a provocative pamphlet titled The Spirit of Liberty. . . . before traveling to New York. Once there, he began “quarreling with Mr. Gano and the Baptists,” and when “asked for his Testimonials, he said he had none but what he carried in himself and this Book.” Angered by the “invectives . . . leveled against me,” Gano “in return, obtained from England an account of the man and his character at home, which satisfied my people that he did not possess much merit.”44 Between June 1773 and October 1774, a Presbyterian itinerant known as Mr. Peabody insinuated himself into several pulpits in and around New York. Peabody was not invited to preach in the city’s Anglican church, even though he had “visited and dined with the rector,” but “he had crowds to hear him in the French church,” and on the eve of his departure “the elders of the French church wept over him with much tenderness.” Peabody, however, was reproved by Dutch Reformed minister Archibald Laidlie, who told him to his face that “he appeared to be more taken up in reading Mr. Berridge’s Christian World Unmasked than the Bible.” Methodist Francis Asbury, suspicious of this man from the outset, at one point noted that “Mr. Peabody is going on in New York with his Antinomianism unmasked.” Asbury’s disdain for Peabody was evident in a sarcastic reference to “the celebrated Mr. Peabody . . . [who] detained us two hours, and had many devoted admirers. He spoke to the sinners with great words, but to little purpose.” Nevertheless, bowing to popular pressure, Asbury allowed the itinerant to preach in the Methodist chapel, even conceding that “perhaps [Peabody] felt himself under some obligation to come as near to our doctrine as his principles would admit of,

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and thereby give tolerable satisfaction.”45 With self-assured outsiders infiltrating the city’s pulpits, and residents making plain that they set little store by fixed church affiliations, the standing of entrenched ministers was imperiled and customary lines of authority obscured. New York City had reached a juncture where the certainties of the past were no longer predictive of the patterns of the future. As shopping for the best preacher became ever more natural to New Yorkers, ministers—the producers of “religious goods”—came to regard their colleagues as rivals. Just as city merchants vied with each other to entice customers, clergymen competed to attract larger audiences for their sermons. Concurrently, church governing bodies—vestry, consistory, and elders—began to operate from the premise that their institutions were engaged in a struggle for adherents that pitted one church against another. A print war originating in the pulpits of the Presbyterian and Baptist churches in the 1760s illustrates the intensity of denominational competition in the city. David Bostwick, Ebenezer Pemberton’s successor as minister of the Wall Street Presbyterian Church, watched as formerly loyal congregants were swayed by the rhetorical prowess of John Gano, the powerful evangelical preacher just beginning his career at the Baptist meetinghouse. The experience of losing members of his flock to this talented competitor was especially demoralizing, since the defections occurred just as Bostwick was sidelined by illness and his associate Joseph Treat was under criticism from congregants. Bostwick was not one to sugarcoat the truth, nor did he believe in denigrating Gano. “Several of ye middling and lower sort of People are going off to Seceders or Baptists but chiefly to the latter, who have a very warm popular preacher, a man of undoubted piety & uncommon zeal as well as extraordinary pulpit talents.” But he did fight back by composing a set of sermons defending infant baptism, a tactic designed to bolster Presbyterians’ confidence in their own doctrine. Determined to remain above the fray—he insisted that he was unwilling to “fix opprobrious epithets on different denominations”—Bostwick hoped that his adeptness at theological debate would score points in the contest with his rival. Lay leaders of the congregation turned to the medium of print to carry on the contest, since, as the compiler of the posthumous volume of Bostwick’s sermons put it, “the state of his own flock, from very obvious causes apparent to himself and many others rendered it absolutely necessary.”46 The publication of Bostwick’s sermons not long after his death in November 1763 unleashed a print war in the city. John Gano’s partisans arranged to publish a local edition of English Baptist John Gill’s A Reply to A defence of the

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divine right of infant-baptism by Peter Clark . . . in a letter to a friend at Boston in New England. To which are added, some strictures on a late treatise, called A fair and rational vindication of the right of infants to the ordinance of baptism. Written by David Bostwick. The issue was deemed significant enough that Trinity Church’s assistant minister, Charles Inglis, was urged by a leading Anglican cleric “to take the rough bull [Gill] by the horns—to draw tight upon him the strong cords of argumentation—and to return him when bound and gagged into the hands of his party.” Inglis’s rejoinder to Gill, An Essay on Infant Baptism, appeared in 1768.47 Bostwick’s intellectual approach to the problem of competition in the religious marketplace may have satisfied better-educated Presbyterians, but it probably failed to win back the sorts of people who had been moved by Gano’s impassioned preaching. In New York’s Protestant society, the religious products people consumed were sermons, or more precisely the delivery of sermons. Indeed, how a minister spoke may have been as important as what he said in a city whose residents had been exposed to the spellbinding oratory of George Whitefield. When the triumphant partisans of English-language preaching in the Dutch Reformed church issued a call to authorities in Amsterdam, they carefully stipulated that the ideal ministerial candidate should be “a man with a strong audible voice, clear and distinct in his speech. . . . a good orator, used to elegant language, acquainted with men and books, to be orthodox in his principles, of an unblemished character and affable in his behavior, whose piety is exemplary; in short, a truly godly man whose life and conversation may be worthy of imitation.” Tellingly, they also specified that “his English dialect [be] pure and untainted, without any brogue of other languages.” Hiring an articulate preacher was essential, since “there are several eminent preachers in this city, belonging to congregations who differ from us in worship.” What the church required was “a person every way qualified not only to edify ourselves, but by his piety, learning and eloquence to draw others.”48 Archibald Laidlie, the Scotsman selected for the position, fulfilled these requirements and more. His inaugural sermon, delivered before “a prodigious crowded Auditory” on April 15, 1764, received a glowing review in the New-York Gazette. He “[made] use of this Portion of Scripture, Knowing therefore the Terror of the Lord, we perswade Men; 2 Corinthians, Chap. V, Verse 11,—which he handled with great Judgment, and Energy. His Application was extremely suitable; and concluded with a Charge highly becoming a Divine as not being afraid of the Arm of Flesh in endeavouring to reconcile Divisions.” Despite Anglican Samuel Auchmuty’s jab at the “Scot[c]h true blue Presbyterian Eloquence at the Dut[c]h Ch[urch] Morning and Evening,” Laidlie’s talents were unmistakable. In 1767, his supporters exulted that “the work of

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the Lord, under the hands of Rev. Laidlie, is prospering so well that there is need of building a third church.” Clearly delighted, Laidlie wrote his brother in Scotland in 1773 that “God remarkably blessed my Labours, and made his Word preached the happy and effectual means of Converting many.” John Henry Livingston, the congregation’s second English-language preacher, remembered his senior colleague as “a very acceptable preacher; bold and authoritative, commanding respect, fear, and love.” A visitor to the city in 1774 ranked Laidlie far above his competitor in the Presbyterian church. “Heard parson treat [Joseph Treat] in the forenoon, and Mr. Ledlie [Archibald Laidlie] in afternoon,” wrote Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress. “I think the former much inferior to the latter.” Long after Laidlie had passed from the scene, it was revealed that Margaret Beekman Livingston “was awakened under the first sermon the Rev. Sadly [Laidlie] preached in the Reformed Low Dutch church in New York, . . . nor she alone, but six or eight other respectable women.”49 Laidlie’s prowess in the pulpit was legendary. The significance contemporaries attached to the performative aspects of the ministerial role was not lost on the men who were accountable to New York churchgoers. Lutheran Henry Muhlenberg, who at times preached in English, noted, “Here in the city I must bestow greater pains upon the English language because here the ears are more delicate and also because the English congregation has more delicate orators.” Methodist Richard Boardman’s appraisal was similar. “We have, in this city, some of the best Preachers (both in the English and Dutch Churches) that are in America.” Another Methodist, Francis Asbury, fearing that he could not measure up to urban standards, confided to his parents in 1772, “’Tis one great disadvantage to me I am not polite enough for the people,” adding “They deem me fit enough for the country, but not for the cities.” Well aware of the formidable competition facing preachers in New York, forty heads of families from the French church informed the Venerable Company of Pastors of Geneva in 1763 of their need for a “worthy minister” and particularly one with “talents of the pulpit which will contribute much to increase our church and make it flourish. The largest number of its members speak English, and if we have a poor preacher, we shall no doubt lose from them. On the contrary, a good preacher would certainly draw many who attend other churches.”50 For people of taste, eloquence was the sine qua non of a fine minister. The generous salaries and perquisites offered to talented pulpit orators make clear that local congregations saw themselves in an ongoing contest with each other. Presbyterians did not stint when it came to remuneration for John Rodgers, their eminent minister. In 1770, “the two united Presb. Chhs in N. York gave £250. to Dr. Rodgers and £150. and house to Mr. Treat. Mr Treats

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House cost them £600.” In 1763, Archibald Laidlie boasted to his brother that “My Stipend is about £ 200 Sterling . . . and they give besides a free house and a quantity of wood to burn.” In 1769, Trinity Church’s Samuel Auchmuty received £250 plus “a commodious & convenient dwelling house yard and garden.”51 Obtaining star-quality preachers was not enough to attract new worshippers or even to keep members in the fold if space was lacking for listeners. Under pressure to preserve their church’s standing, Trinity’s vestrymen stated bluntly in 1764 that Anglicans were “under a necessity of Building a third church at their own expence to accommodate [the increased number of worshippers] lest our Adversary’s [sic] for want of room with us should gain an advantage over us.” St. Paul’s Chapel, which opened in 1766 to great acclaim, was described in 1772 by Solomon Drowne as “a grand, magnificent building; at the Front are four large stone Columes, and over head the Immage of St Paul with a Bible under one Arm & a Sword in his Hand.” A few years later, Dr. Robert Honyman similarly depicted St. Paul’s as “a very elegant building, especially the Portico, which is supported by four Pillars, of a beautiful appearan[c]e,”—and added that “The inside is fully equal, or superior to the outside. The roof is supported by two rows of Fluted Pillars of the Corinthian order & upon the whole it is equal to the churches of London.”52 Mindful that the physical environment of worship was an integral part of the calculus of those shopping for a church, Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed leaders were equally keen to create a tasteful atmosphere for churchgoers and did not stint on expenditures when the need to accommodate their expanding congregations compelled them to construct the Brick Presbyterian Church and the North Dutch Reformed Church. Presbyterian merchant Samuel Broome divulged to minister Ezra Stiles of Newport, Rhode Island, in September 1770 that New York City’s Presbyterians had borrowed “near £4000 for building the new Meeting house.” According to one source, the North Dutch Church was built of uncut stone and “cost some £7100.” For those who placed a premium on the decorous conduct of worship in an aesthetically appropriate setting, the epitome of the ideal church may have been Trinity Church, described by Charles Inglis in 1776 as “a venerable edifice,” with “an excellent Organ which cost £850 Sterl. & was otherwise ornamented.”53 Building and beautifying churches as well as spending lavishly on ministers whose pulpit oratory was pleasing to the pillars of society did not spare New York’s Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, and Presbyterians from defections to smaller religious communities in which power was centered in persons of undistinguished social rank. Those who transferred their allegiance to

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Figure 6.  North Dutch Church, Fulton and William Streets, New York. The North Dutch Church where Archibald Laidlie held forth in the English language still stood in 1869 when Edward Lamson Henry completed this oil painting to commemorate its hundredth anniversary. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919). Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914. Accession Number 15.30.66.

congregations where elite guidance was absent were, in essence, repudiating customary models of leadership. By affiliating with the Moravians, Baptists, or Methodists, they were not only removing themselves from the surveillance of the gentlemen who presided over hierarchically arranged congregations,

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but disassociating themselves from polite worship with its emphasis on moral precepts over piety. Unfettered by the protocols of the city’s major churches, adherents of artisan-run congregations were reinventing the basis for cultural authority. The burgeoning of the Methodist community in the 1760s and 1770s represented the most conspicuous threat to organized religious life in British New York City.54 Methodist exhorters painstakingly evangelized residents by holding frequent and intense meetings where they offered an inspiring alternative to religion as usual. City dwellers, now fully vested in their role as consumers, crowded into these meetings, eager to experience this new variety of Protestantism. In this charged religious atmosphere, local church leaders hastened to find ways to limit the impact of a popular movement that made no claim to be a separate church. Methodist emissaries from England scrupulously tallied their successes in New York. In April 1768, Thomas Taylor informed John Wesley that Philip Embury, the immigrant from Ireland who had initiated Methodist preaching in the city in 1766, “has lately been more zealous than formerly, the consequence of which is that he is much more lively in preaching. . . . Great numbers of serious people came to hear God’s word as for their lives. And their numbers increased so fast that our house for this six weeks past would not contain half the people.” After the 1768 opening of the John Street Chapel, which seated seven hundred, Richard Boardman reported that “about a third part of those who attend the preaching get in; the rest are glad to hear it without.”55 New Yorkers who headed to the Methodist Chapel were faced with much more than another religious option. They were confronted with a stark choice between a mode of life anchored in the teachings of Jesus and a self-centered pattern of behavior—on exhibit in the city—that to Methodists embodied evil. Joseph Pilmore explained his “preaching morning and evening [on Monday and Tuesday] as on Sundays” by asserting, “How much better is this, than for them to be spending their time in pursute (pursuit) of vanity and wickedness.” Methodist leaders regularly juxtaposed images of joyful communal worship with references to the execrable practices of impious city residents. On Christmas Day 1770, when “the people heartily joined singing the high praises of the Incarnate Deity and ascribing glory to the Lamb,” Pilmore remarked, “How widely is this from the feasting and entertainment of the wicked.” The ritual of the Watch Night, first practiced in New York on New Year’s Eve in 1770, institutionalized the custom of concluding the old and beginning the New Year in devotion to God and thus magnified the differences between devout Methodists and well-off persons

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whose frivolous celebrations of the holiday marked them as unholy. Impiety also emanated from below. “The Mob threatened great things,” Pilmore reported, but “the Terrors of the Lord made them afraid.”56 Deploring the “pride of dress and luxury of every kind” that he observed in New York, Methodist preacher Thomas Rankin mused in 1773, “If the rich in this society were as much devoted to God as the poor are, we should see wonders done in this city.” Francis Asbury’s scathing indictment of a local body of worshippers tapped into the same critical vein. “A more gay and undevout congregation I have seldom seen—they were talking, laughing, bowing, and trifling both with God and their minister, as well as with their own unawakened souls.” Joseph Pilmore expressed skepticism about the depth of elite New Yorkers’ spiritual commitment. “The religion of Jesus is a favourite topic in New York,” he acknowledged in May 1770. “Many of the gay and polite speak much about grace and perseverance. But whether they would follow Christ ‘in sheep skins and goat skins,’ is a question I cannot affirm.” After attending the commencement orations of King’s College graduates in May 1771, Pilmore was quick to fault the values of the elite. “I heard nothing about faith in Christ! This is quite out of fashion in our day.”57 By disparaging the gentry’s stunted spiritual sense, Methodists such as Pilmore were impeaching the religious credentials of the men who ordinarily dominated church councils. Methodist spokesmen were sanguine about transforming ordinary city dwellers into believers and setting them on the path toward salvation. Sustained by their vision of an inclusive community of Christians comprising people of all ranks and colors, male and female, they set out to convince those estranged from church life that it was imperative to seek salvation. ­Following George Whitefield’s example of preaching out of doors, both Joseph Pil­ more and Francis Asbury spoke in the open on a number of occasions. “I took my stand in a convenient place near the city, where I published the truths of the Gospel to a vast multitude of attentive hearers,” Pilmore recounted in May 1770; and the following year, he noted, “I took my stand in the Fields again, and cryed to a listening multitude Repent and be converted that your iniquities may be blotted out.” Asbury also seized opportunities to reach out to non-churchgoers, preaching “behind the barracks to a number of soldiers and others” in July 1773, and in the Meadows on June 7 and June 12, 1774. On October 9, 1774, Asbury “went to preach in the Swamp, where we had many people and a good time,” and on October 17 he noted that “many people attended preaching in the Beekman’s Swamp.”58 Wesley’s disciples also were committed to bolstering the faith of those they brought into the fold, conducting worship twice a day and holding supplementary meetings with the constituent units of the Methodist community,

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the bands, the classes, and the Society. Pilmore as well as Asbury preached at 5 a.m. during the warmer months and then again in the evening. The practice of assembling for worship at dawn attracted a visiting Rhode Island college student. “This Morning very early while it is yet dark,” Solomon Drowne wrote in October 1772, “Timothy Harry & myself get up and go to the Methodist’s [sic] Meeting where we hear a Sermon from James 5 ch 16 ver. They meet every morning for public worship.” Joseph Pilmore nurtured a religious circle he discovered in 1771. “As I heard of some of the young men having appointed a meeting among themselves, I went ‘privately’ to hear how they proceeded and was glad to find them so clear in their judgment and so devout towards God.” He met with this group on a number of occasions. Among the Methodists, regular services open to the public were augmented by distinctive rituals restricted to members of the Methodist Society. The love feast, a practice adapted from the Moravians, was described by Pilmore as “a special season of love to the believers in general. They spoke freely of the goodness of God, while a profound awe and divine reverence seemed to sit upon every countenance.” The annual watch night was intended to “conclude the Old and begin the New Year, in the worship of God.”59 Pilmore, who like other city ministers made a point of tending to the spiritual needs of prisoners in the city jail, went further in February 1772 and accompanied a condemned man to the gallows, where after reading the 51st Psalm in a voice loud enough for bystanders to hear, he was given “liberty to pray” by the sheriff. Pilmore made much of the fact that “above seven thousand people stood all around me, and a great many of them were deeply affected while I called upon the Lord, and entreated him to have mercy on the dying man, and likewise on all poor ruined sinners.” Clearly elated that “thousands heard me in the fields who would never come to the Chapel,” he seemed even prouder that he had stood by the condemned man until the end “when all the Ministers in the City had forsaken him.”60 Pilmore’s investment in the spiritual potential of all human beings, no matter their social condition, also was manifest in his determination to bring the gospel to the poorhouse. He seemed genuinely delighted when he “found several lovers of Jesus” among the inmates of the poorhouse, though he did admit “’tis rather trying to find the heirs of Glory in such a situation.” Certain that being penniless was no barrier to being pious, he willingly befriended individuals in dire straits. One evening in February 1771, “after preaching, I had a number of people from the Poor-house to sup with me,” Pilmore wrote, adding that he “found more satisfaction in their conversation than that of the most refined & polite citizens who are strangers to God,” a comment in line with his dim view of the spiritual state of privileged New Yorkers.61

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Methodists extended a hand not only to the rootless and the unlucky, but to the outcasts of New York society, enslaved and free blacks. “The number of Blacks that attend the preaching affects me much,” Richard Boardman wrote in November 1769. Several months later, in May 1770, Pilmore related, “We have a number of black women, who meet together every week, many of whom are happy in the love of God.” The lesson was obvious to him. “This evinces the truth of the apostle’s assertion, that ‘God is no respecter of persons’; but in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him.” At the love feast in August 1771, Pilmore made note that “one of the poor Negroes declared her heart was so full of divine love that she could not express it, and many more of them were exceedingly happy in their minds.”62 With their message that social distinctions carried no weight in the spiritual realm, Methodists emboldened individuals of modest social standing to affirm their faith in public. In July 1771, Pilmore complied with the wishes of “one of our friends” and delivered a funeral sermon. “According to her dying request, [the deceased was] brought into the Chapel and a vast multitude attended, while I preached on the Text she had chosen.” Secure in the knowledge of her status in the community of believers, this woman confidently selected a biblical passage that held meaning for her. When two women told Pilmore in April 1772 that “God has lately spoke peace to their souls,” he vouched for the authenticity of their experience. “It was easy to disern the Spirit with which they spoke, their hearts seemed to be filled with love, and their mouths with the high praises of God.” At the “Quarterly Love-Feast” in August 1771, Pilmore related with satisfaction that people “spoke freely of the goodness of God.”63 In holding up the poor and the persecuted as exemplars of faith, Methodist preachers deployed their moral authority not only to censure the love of luxury that tainted the city’s polite society, but also to bring into question the logic of customary social arrangements. Their welcoming of persons of African descent into their religious community was even more subversive of established mores, since it destabilized the racial lines that served the interests of the powerful, not to mention other white residents, in a city with a large enslaved population. For New York City’s clergymen, the spectacle of churchgoers flocking to hear John Wesley’s disciples was especially distressing, since Methodist gains portended losses to their own congregations. Methodist plans to build “a wooden tabernacle”—the John Street Chapel—in 1768 generated heated clerical opposition to the group as “many ministers have cursed us in the name of the Lord, and labored with all their might to shut up their congregations from assisting us.” By 1771, Trinity’s rector Samuel Auchmuty anticipated that “an inundation of Methodists should hereafter, (as they profess

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themselves Church people) give us some future Disturbance, which I confess, I am a little suspicious may be the case.” To retain the loyalty of disaffected parishioners, he adopted a more compassionate stance. “At present I treat them [the Methodists] with great tenderness, by which means, I keep them within decent bounds. This method I am convinced is the only way to prevent their being very troublesome indeed.” In the contest with the city’s ardent Methodists, this staunch Anglican found himself on the same side as his longtime adversaries, Dutch Reformed minister Archibald Laidlie and the Dissenting clergy. “They [the Methodists] are a thorn in Ladleys side and draw of [f] numbers of his Hearers. The Dissenters of all Denominations already are thin’d & feel their influence.”64 Auchmuty’s report of Methodist inroads in the city’s major churches was corroborated by Pilmore in May 1770: “Our congregations are large, and we have the pious of most congregations to hear us, which makes the Presbyterian bigots mad.” A Methodist who surveyed New York City’s churches in 1769 and concluded that they contained very few Methodists, pointed out that “the Dutch Calvinist has preached against them [the Methodists].” Though unnamed, this likely was Johannes Ritzema, the minister who had vilified the Methodist chapel where “anybody, except lawfully appointed ministers is allowed to preach.” Agreeing with their pastor that Methodists constituted a menace to the congregation, a few of the Dutch Reformed laity filed a formal grievance. On April 29, 1771, the consistory received a paper from “several persons containing a complaint against some members as holding the errors of Arminians and adhering to the Methodists.” The committee appointed to investigate the matter, consisting of Domine Ritzema and Elder Brevoort, soon reported that “the charge of adhering to the doctrine of the Remonstrants was denied by the Parties.” On May 19, 1771, the report was accepted “by a majority of votes,” indicating that a few consistory members were in favor of pursuing the matter further. At this time, the accused members were named—Mr. Lupton, Mr. Matthews Ernst, and Mrs. Lawrence. Merchant William Lupton, already a major figure in New York City’s Methodist community along with his former military comrade Thomas Webb, had helped finance the construction of the John Street Chapel.65 With mounting evidence of churchgoers’ disaffection, jousting for adherents had become commonplace in New York’s religious arena. Well over a century ago, one of New York’s early historians, Martha Lamb, called attention to the “almost unparalleled growth of houses of worship in comparison to the population” in the 1760s, while also noting the “lavish outlay for religious uses.”66 Considering that the city’s religious structures

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numbered only ten prior to 1760 and that all but two of these buildings had been standing since 1730, this spate of church construction was remarkable. Congregations dominated by elites—those of St. Paul’s Chapel, the Brick Presbyterian Church, and the North Dutch Church—worshipped in spacious and fashionably ornamented edifices. Other urban religious communities, no less eager to attract churchgoers, fabricated more modest but no less welcoming structures—the Baptist, German Lutheran, and German Reformed churches along with the John Street Chapel of the Methodists. In 1768, Scottish Presbyterians replaced an earlier wooden structure with a new stone church. In addition, an older Dutch Reformed church was enlarged, as was the Baptist church built in 1760. The Dutch Lutheran church had been enlarged in 1758. Martha Lamb spotted this extraordinary alteration of New York City’s religious landscape but did not grasp the significance of the proliferation of congregations over a brief period of time. We can now see that what she was pointing to, without explaining, was the coming of age of the city’s religious marketplace. The transformation of residents into religious consumers had significant ramifications for the exercise of cultural authority in eighteenth-century New York City. As religious options multiplied and churchgoers became more peripatetic, fewer New Yorkers found themselves under the dominion of the gentlemen who customarily had conducted congregational affairs, and those who did were no longer reticent to enunciate their own views or press for changes. Securely in possession of their own sacred spaces, the members of artisan-dominated churches entrusted the leadership of their congregations to men committed to treating coreligionists as equals in a community of faith. Being a consumer in the religious setting was intoxicating and empowering. Commoners who shifted their allegiance from a congregation ruled by men of wealth and standing to one under the control of small business owners and artisans were challenging the ethos of subordination that underpinned urban society. In these new religious domains, unremarkable men and women claimed the right to weigh ideas for themselves and to summon ministers who embraced the doctrines they favored. If renouncing their ties to their former churches earned ordinary worshippers the contempt of orthodox ministers, they were rewarded with unprecedented latitude in setting the course of their religious lives. This was the substance of a freedom yet to be realized in the political sphere.

Ch a p ter   5

“Master of the House”?

In the litany of praise that embellished public notices of the deaths of prominent New York men, a trio of virtues distilled the ideal attributes of a head of household. Duncan Campbell, a drowning victim, was memorialized in August 1760 as “an affectionate husband, a tender parent, and a most indulgent master.” A few months earlier, lawyer Benjamin Nicoll had been extolled as a most excellent husband, father, and master. In 1762, Captain Thomas Barnes, Gentleman, was described as “a tender Husband, indulgent Father and kind Master.” The encomiums for merchant Jacob Walton, “a Gentleman of an unblameable Character” who died in 1749 “in the 47th Year of his Age,” went even further. “He was a dutiful Son, an affectionate Husband, a tender and indulgent Parent, a kind and humane Master, a sincere Friend, a good Christian, and a benevolent honest Man.”1 The patriarchal model that underlay such tributes, with its foundation in the English common law as laid out by William Blackstone, not only was central to the way an eighteenth-century New York gentleman defined himself, but it also resonated among men of less exalted rank. When New York’s newspapers highlighted these particular virtues in print, they were, in effect, encouraging other free males in the community to conduct their private lives as these exemplars of proper behavior had. Implicit in the concept of the hierarchical household was a corresponding set of cultural expectations for

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wives, servants, and slaves.2 Spelled out most fully for gentlemen’s wives, but applicable across city households, they were rooted in the fundamental idea that dependents were obliged to submit to the will of the master of the house and embrace his values unquestioningly. Men who assumed they were naturally superior beings felt entitled to impose their beliefs on those with whom they lived. Translating their social power into cultural power, they decreed what was appropriate behavior for those around them. In practice, masters could temper their commands with a quotient of kindness, especially when ties of affection moved them to satisfy the desires of their wives and children. But such concessions in no way diluted their authority. A master’s favors may have been dispensed with no reference to the views of his dependents, but the beneficiaries of a patriarch’s goodwill were anything but inert as they interacted with the man who controlled their lives. Lacking formal power, they became expert in the art of persuasion, cultivating amity as a stepping-stone to influence. Acting in their own behalf at opportune moments, they contested masters’ precepts in ways that make clear they had ideas of their own. Supplications couched in the language of deference might in reality be avowals of independence. Wives framed overtures to husbands in personalized ways that disguised their true objectives. Servants and slaves, more practiced in deception, might feign solicitude for a master’s welfare in hopes of better treatment. On a more liminal level, their unstated pleas for relief from the burdens of labor might elicit a measure of kindness. Consciously or not, masters took cues from their wives, servants, and slaves. Their liberality toward dependents was less the product of enlightened thinking than a response to the gambits of the adversaries among whom they lived. For some dependents, such negotiations, with their intricate exchanges and deliberate pacing, were not enough to rectify perceived injustices or to satisfy expectations. Whether animated by a master’s failure to live up to genteel ideals or mounting frustration with the entire household regime, both family members and unfree laborers at times contested their masters’ actions overtly, risking admonition or severe punishment. Usually, a dependent’s aim was to resolve a specific grievance or to stake a claim to a new privilege. Occasionally, the goal was more radical—to liberate oneself from the master’s domain—but in no instance were dependents’ efforts geared to overthrowing the patriarchal household. The unintended consequence of intermittent challenges to the city’s masters, however, was a thinning of their cultural authority. Examining the experiences of wives, servants, and slaves as they interacted with the propertied white men who defined the terms of their existence reveals the varied ways that dependents attained a measure of autonomy in

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Figure 7.  Merchant Charles Ward Apthorp was one of many elite New Yorkers who established country seats north of the city. The Apthorp mansion, built in 1764, appears desolate in this artotype photograph made by Edward Bierstadt in 1891, just before it was demolished. Courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, the New York Public Library. Image ID 53893, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

their lives and brings to light the vulnerability of New York City’s patriarchs to pressure from their dependents.

Wives The wives of New York City’s gentlemen had the least incentive to question their husband’s values. Comfortably ensconced in large homes filled with furniture of high quality and exquisite decorative objects, adorned in fashionable finery, entertained lavishly at social events, and catered to by servants and slaves, they had ample reason to be content with their situation. With a modicum of authority over their children, servants, and slaves, and the polite attention bestowed on them by their husbands, they had no outward cause to resist the role imposed on them. The duty to please their husbands seemed a small price to pay for the seemingly carefree existence they enjoyed in elegant surroundings.

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Tributes to deceased women in city newspapers codified the qualities of a perfect wife. When Elizabeth Bayard, wife of merchant Nicholas Bayard, died in 1755 in her fifty-second year, she was remembered as “a Lady, conspicuous for her amiable Disposition and exemplary Piety[,] Eminent for her affectionate Deportment to her Consort, and a Prudent Oeconomical Management of that Share of his Estate intrusted to her Care.” Prized as a loving companion and an efficient housewife, Elizabeth Bayard was additionally extolled as an ideal mother, filled with “Tenderness for her Children” and especially concerned for their education, being “sensible of the Importance of implanting religious Principles on their tender Minds.” In particular, “she assiduously devoted herself to inculcate in them, from their Infancy, divine Truths in their evangelical Purity.” This exemplary woman also displayed her fine qualities to those outside her family. “To her Servants she was remarkable for her Indulgence, and her Benevolence to them, under the least Indisposition, was unparalleled. In her friendship, she was sincere and undissembled.” Praise was lavished on Mrs. Bayard because “she adorned the several Relations of Life in a Manner becoming the Gentlewoman and a Christian.” Even further accolades were reserved for the charitableness of this lady whose “fortune enabled her to do much Good . . . in relieving the Indigent and Distressed, which she did most liberally, without regarding of what Party, religion or Country, they were.”3 Husbands took pride in the manifold virtues their wives exhibited, but they never wavered in their belief that the fundamental attribute of the ideal wife was submissiveness to her husband’s will. A wife’s virtues, however numerous, were insufficient if she failed to embrace her subordinate position in the marriage. As Elizabeth Colden embarked on her marriage to Peter De Lancey, she was counseled by her prominent father, Cadwallader Colden, to be “Dutyfull” to her husband. “Let your Dress your Conversation & the whole Business of your life be to please your Husband & to make him happy & you need not fail of being so your self.”4 Whether a marriage was blissful or not, a wife was supposed to acquiesce in her husband’s decisions. This dictum seeped down to lower levels in the social hierarchy where the comforts of domestic life were much scarcer. When a wife did not comply with her husband’s wishes, she was subject to admonishment. In polite society, this might be in the form of a reprimand, but among commoners it more likely was physical punishment. Husbands who carried correction to an extreme were subject to public censure, as was “one Murphy, a shoemaker of Division Street [who] was committed to gaol for beating and savagely abusing his wife, who died the same day at noon.” The newspaper, reflecting community opinion, painted Murphy as

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aberrant. “This catastrophe was occasioned by the outrage and barbarity of the monster, her husband” and had dire consequences as “their two children are sent for maintenance to the Poor-House.” Murphy may have been an anomaly, but husbands felt entitled to chastise wives who did not live up to their expectations. When one Friday night in February 1762 someone stole “One Pair of Silver Knee-buckles, marked L.S. one new Camblet Cloak, one Chintz Wrapper, one white Holland Apron, one Shirt marked L.S., together with a small Quantity of Money, taken out of his Chest” from the house of Lawrence Sweeny, the man who delivered the penny post in the city, Sweeney at first blamed his wife, but later changed his mind. In his words, “Having beat my Wife that Night, in order to make her know her Duty, she absconded, and I had at first accused her with the Theft, but since have had Reason to suspect some other Person of the Robbery.”5 Sweeny may have been contrite after realizing his wife was not responsible for the theft, but he surely felt justified in beating her when he believed she had not acted in his interest. What also emerges from Sweeny’s chronicle is that his wife did not agree with his pretension that as “master of the house” he was authorized to abuse her. Knowing she was falsely accused, she refused to be beaten and ran off. Wife beating was not uncommon in early America, although most episodes went unreported. Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Sweeny, neither of whose first names are given in newspaper accounts, likely were the tip of the iceberg in eighteenth-century New York City. Rare access to the interior life of a woman victimized by a husband who took it as his prerogative to inflict physical punishment on an undutiful wife comes from the case of Altye Sloan, who reacted to a train of abuse from her husband by standing up to him in print. In June 1771, house carpenter James Sloan alleged that his wife Altye “has in many Respects misbehaved, and without any just Cause eloped from me, wasting and embezzling my Substance,” adding, “And I have just Cause to apprehend that she will endeavor to run me in Debt.” Altye Sloan’s response was swift and to the point. “Whereas James Sloan . . . by and with the Advice of some dissolute Persons like himself, hath thought proper to advertise me his wife for adsconding [sic] from him, she takes this Method to inform the Public, that she neither has embezzled his Substance, nor eloped from him, he having turned her out of Doors, and has beat and abused her often Times, which she thinks is sufficient Cuase [sic] to abandon such an insolent Person as he is, and that she will not run him in Debt, nor pay any for him.”6 Not only was Altye Sloan unrepentant; she boldly denounced her husband as dissolute and insolent. Vigorously defending herself, she denied that she had taken his funds and run off. To the contrary, she declared that it was he who

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had kicked her out of the house, a deed that was consonant with his prior record of abuse. Another New York City wife felt compelled to publish her side of the story when her abusive husband tarnished her reputation in 1757. Mariner Thomas Johnson was “pleased very scandalously to advertise me, his Wife, as having eloped from his Bed and Board without any Provocation, and that I was endeavouring to run him in Debt.” To set the record straight, Ruth Johnson presented her alternative version of events. “Be it known, that on Monday Evening last, without any the least Provocation, he basely, cruelly, and inhumanly barred his doors against me, forced me to take Refuge in a Neighbour’s House, and otherways so basely carried himself towards me, that I was obliged on Thursday last to have him Bound over before the authority: in Consequence of which he issued Advertisements against me without any Regard to Truth or Decency, as I did not elope from his Bed nor Board (other than obliged to by him) nor never attempted to run him in Debt since his ill-treatment.” Refusing to be humiliated, this wife held her husband up before the community, which she trusted would heap scorn on him for his actions and thereby restore her reputation. “I therefore hope,” she concluded, “my Friends will regard the Advertisement as false and scandalous in itself, and him as a base and cruel Man.”7 The indignities heaped on city wives did not escape the notice of their female relatives, who sometimes took it upon themselves to intervene to protect a victimized wife. One widowed mother mobilized the resources at her disposal to protect a daughter whose husband had mistreated her. In 1752, merchant William Flanagan declared that his wife Margaret “had absconded herself and with the assistance of some of her Companions robb’d me of upwards of Three Hundred Pounds in Cash, Plate, & c.” Margaret Flanagan was the daughter of Rebecca Hogg, the widow of merchant Robert Hogg, who had died in 1750. Rebecca Hogg knew full well that it took courage for an abused wife to stand up to a vindictive husband and feared that, given social pressure, her daughter would yield to his will. Determined to use her inheritance as financial leverage to shield her daughter from Flanagan, this loving mother contrived a clever plan to safeguard the young woman. Her 1753 will stated, “In case my daughter Margaret, wife of William Flanagan, continues to live separate from her husband, from whom she is now parted by reason of ill usage, the Trustees [two men whom Hogg appointed] are to pay her the interest so long as she lives separate from him.” Hoping to shore up her daughter’s resolve to continue to live apart from her husband, Hogg stipulated that the trustees “are to pay her no part if she lives with him, but what they shall think fit. But if she survives him, the whole is to be paid to

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her.” As if her daughter’s plight was not enough, Rebecca Hogg also had to address the problems of her sister, who was on the verge of submitting to the will of a potentially abusive man. “If my sister Rachel Bosworth shall choose to go to the West Indies to her husband, the Trustees are to furnish all those things necessary for her voyage. But if by reason of ill usage or neglect of her husband she shall return here, and live with my daughter Margaret, they are to provide for her.”8 Hogg’s well-thought-out course of action shows that widows could play a pivotal role in remedying the difficulties of married female dependents. Mrs. Sweeny, Mrs. Sloan, Mrs. Johnson, and Mrs. Flanagan (with the help of her mother) found ways to deal with the dismal marital circumstances in which they found themselves. In a society in which wife beating and other forms of mistreatment were condoned—within limits—just to endure was a victory, since it was no simple matter to withstand the cruelties of a husband intent on enforcing his will. But wives in unbearable situations could also act in their own behalf. These women directly challenged their husbands’ authority to oversee their conduct by exiting the household. Eighteenth-century husbands used the term “elopement” to denote their wives’ leave-taking in notices inserted in city newspapers. In choosing this word, a husband was equating leaving with abdicating household responsibilities, a meaning reinforced by the coupling of “elope” with the phrase “bed and board,” as when mariner John Miller stated that his wife Jane “has eloped from his Bed and Board.”9 Implicit in this usage was the accusation that the woman who had gone off was derelict in performing the role of wife, whose pillars were sexual cohabitation and economic dependence. Leaving a husband was an audacious act, given the subordinate position of wives in eighteenth-century New York City’s patriarchal society. Peeling away the vocabulary superimposed on this deed by husbands keen to place the onus for the dissolution of the marital union on their wives reveals what “eloping” meant to a wife chafing under the rule of a domineering or ineffectual husband. In independently arriving at a judgment of her husband’s performance in his ascribed role of benevolent master, a wife was disputing her husband’s conviction that he was ordained to instruct her how to behave. Discontented wives rarely had the chance to articulate their thoughts in print, but arguably a woman’s decision to depart from her husband’s domain can be taken as the equivalent of a statement of her feelings. One New York City husband, Charles Prosser, generated such ill will from his domestic partners that three different wives left him within the space of five years. In September 1761, Prosser, a lime seller, claimed that his wife Margaret “has behaved very ill of late, and considerably run him in debt.” Presumably she absconded,

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since by April 1762 Prosser had another wife named Mary, whom he alleged “has eloped from his Bed and Board, and since has been found naked in Bed with one Edward Painter, who was immediately confined in Gaol.” Whether the couple ever cohabited again is not known, but by October 1764, Prosser, who now identified himself as “Limeseller, and Publick Cryer,” inserted a notice in the New-York Gazette stating that they had “parted by consent.” In December 1766, Charles Prosser, “Public Cryer of this City,” who now signed his notice with a mark, indicating that he could not write, reported that his third wife, Abigail, “has of late behaved vastly unruly and unbecoming her station to me, and has absconded her Bed and Board; suspected withal of running me in Debt.”10 Three women had voted with their feet against Charles Prosser, a husband patently difficult to please. Notwithstanding the fact that the only documentary evidence we have of this sequence of events comes from Charles Prosser’s perspective, the “elopement” of three successive wives from a man whose flaws were evident to them speaks volumes. Another disgruntled wife named Sarah Bolton boldly turned the tables on her husband William, rebuking him for leaving her and taking up with an immoral woman. Cleverly, she attacked her husband in large part by launching a tirade against this infamous woman, Mary Bradey, “a common prostitute; whore, bawd and thief . . . [who] is with child by another man: . . . [she] has a child with her, and a boy about 6 years of age.” Noting that William Bolton, to whom she was “lawfully married” in Albany when he was a soldier, “pretends to be a school master,” Sarah Bolton claimed that she had been informed that “they practice nothing but thieving through the country, as she is known to be a notorious thief,” and went on to supply details of their exploits on the road. This enraged wife’s excoriation of her husband lies at the far end of a continuum of criticism of unworthy husbands that is observable, in piecemeal fashion, in the 134 elopement notices that appeared in the New York press beginning in the 1740s. From a husband’s vantage point, his wife’s departure was traceable to faults in her character. For a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, “eloping,” the conscious rejection of an insufferable arrangement, marked a positive step toward rebuilding her life in a more palatable form. Through her own initiative, a wife was embarking on a course she herself had set. Such an interpretation is consonant with the notion of “self-divorce,” the term used by scholars to describe the action of a wife fleeing an objectionable partner.11 Elucidating a wife’s viewpoint on severing the marital bond is critical for understanding husbands’ difficulties in keeping their cultural authority intact. When a wife moved out of the house, she was declaring that she no longer accepted the fundamental premise of the marital union—submission to her husband’s will. To signify she was breaking the nexus of dependence, a wife

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might embark on a round of shopping. Spending her husband’s money and destroying his credit was her most effective weapon in undermining his economic power. To a husband of modest means, a wife’s defection represented a threat to his pocketbook, so he hastened to protect himself legally by announcing to the public that since his wife had left his bed and board, he was no longer responsible for her debts. Indeed, some newspaper notices did not even mention elopement, but instead broadcast the fact that a wife was not to be trusted and therefore the husband would not pay any debts she contracted in his name. Such behavior often was the prelude to moving out. The bulk of the evidence bearing on elopement or self-divorce in eighteenthcentury New York City was produced by husbands embittered because their wives had gone off and/or financially embarrassed them. More than half of the 134 notices found in city newspapers between 1741 and 1776 contain no more than a basic statement of the event, though it was common for husbands to include a phrase to the effect that they feared that their wife would run them into debt in the future. Mariner William Temple had been married for only a year and a half when, in November 1767, he asserted that his wife Sarah “hath misbehaved herself at Sundry Times to her Husband, and he is apprehensive she may run him in Debt unjustly, or otherways strive to ruin him.” Patrick Riley, employing more sensational language, related that his wife Elizabeth “has absconded in an audacious Manner . . . and has clandestinely taken away some of his Effects, and has premeditated his Ruin.”12 In an era when women’s role as consumers was expanding, a wife’s spending habits became the focus of contention between husbands and wives. Husbands’ concerns about the depletion of their assets and the damage to their financial reputation intensified as wives came to realize that shopping and spending could be a potent weapon against the man who controlled the family’s resources. Female New Yorkers were not insensitive to the allegation that they were squandering their husbands’ hard-earned money. One wife adamantly denied amassing debts and countered her husband’s charge by producing evidence to the contrary. In her defense, Elizabeth Loshier asserted that her husband had “very falsely advertised me as having eloped from his Bed and Board; [and] that I had not only run him in Debt, but was continuing to do so.” On the contrary, this wife declared, “The publick may be assured that he very shamefully and abusively turned me out of his House on Occasion of only a single and most trifling family occurence [sic], which his Impatience, (thro’ Liquor) could not overlook, when a more considerate Person would.” Elizabeth Loshier succinctly summarized her argument. “I have neither run him, or attempted to run him in Debt: Nor do I intend it”; in short, “It is therefore a false and malicious Advertisement.”13

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Husbands’ preoccupation with their economic standing in the community was amplified when they learned that their wives, either singly or with accomplices, had stolen money or other items from their houses. In 1774, George Watson stated bluntly, “I . . . have been robbed of my goods and cash, and likewise of my character in my absence at sea, in a most scandalous manner by my wife, Rebecca Watson, and her confederates.” Cordwainer William Cadogan’s distress at finding out that his wife Margaret had eloped was exacerbated when he learned that she had “taken several Bills and Goods away with her belonging to [him].” Another cordwainer, James Conely, recounted that his wife, Hannah, had “quitted his Bed and Board, without occasion, and carried off some of his effects.” He remained “apprehensive she will run me in Debt.” In 1773, John Blank Sr. admitted that his wife Ann Blank “has in many respects misbehaved, and after stripping me of a considerable Part of my Substance, has eloped from me.”14 Loss of property, whether due to a wife’s thievery or her contracting debts in his name, was a husband’s prime concern, but economic issues at times intertwined with anger over moral lapses. John L’orrilard Jr. alleged that his wife “has been badly advised, and corrupted in bad Conduct towards her Husband, and has determined to run him in Debt.” Husbands’ absences from the city left the door open for unprincipled wives to perpetrate thefts. Rope maker Peter Walker claimed that his wife Margaret “has misbehaved so as to forfeit her Title to my Regard, and in my Absence has removed my Goods from my house.” In December 1767, James Henderson declared that “Ann my Wife, has in my Absence on lawful Business, wasted and embezzled my Goods, and has eloped from me, living in a lewd and scandalous Manner with three Men: And . . . I have Reason to be apprehensive that so abandoned a Woman, may endeavour further to injure me by running me in Debt.”15 A husband who treasured his reputation as master of the house did not hesitate to impugn his wife when it suited his interest. Dr. Austin Munson contended that his wife Elizabeth had “eloped from her Husband’s bed, and turned very loose in Conduct.” John Sutton asserted that his wife Mary had “defiled her Marriage bed”; Hugh M’Collom claimed that his wife Mary “has behaved herself disorderly towards her . . . husband”; and hatter Robert Rose alleged that his wife Catharine “hath behaved herself very disobediently.” Mariner Robert Stone maintained that his wife Anne “hath behaved herself very ill to her . . . Husband,” a charge echoed by schoolmaster Nicholas Barrington, who proclaimed that his wife Eunice “has used her . . . Husband very ill.” Francis Mivite alleged that his wife Catharine “has behaved very indiscretely and improperly towards him and has for several Days past separated herself entirely from him.” In 1768, rope maker Thomas Clemmons

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recounted that his wife Catharine “has for some Time behaved in a disorderly Manner, has frequently eloped from me, and I am apprehensive may run me in Debt.”16 In all these instances, a wife had purportedly embarrassed her husband in front of his peers, not to mention neighbors and other city residents. To preserve their honor, husbands deployed words such as “unbecoming,” “disorderly,” and “disobedient” to describe their wives, in essence branding them as troublemakers who should be shunned. Since rumors that a husband had failed to control his theoretically inferior wife could reverberate throughout the community, revealing that one’s marriage was on the rocks owing to the elopement of one’s wife could be mortifying for male New Yorkers. In November 1767, Weert H. Banta placed a notice in the newspaper intended to avert confusion between him and a “young Man” with virtually the same name, Weeart C. Banta, who had advertised that his wife Elizabeth had eloped. That both men were carpenters made it urgent to clear up any misunderstanding. To begin, Weert H. Banta summarized the dilemma he faced after the original notice appeared on October 1, saying that “most People from the Similarity of the Names, taking me to be the Person as I am noted through the whole City,” and then clarified that “my Name is Weert H. Banta, Carpenter, living in BattoStreet . . . and my Wife’s Name is Hanna.” In conclusion, this mature and respected citizen made his point. “I advertise this that the Names may be distinguished and my character not stained.”17 Some husbands spoke openly about their wives’ sexual promiscuity. Sailor Benjamin Davis charged that his wife Christian Davis “hath behaved in a loose and disorderly Manner.” Tavern keeper Patrick Robinson, whose wife Jane eloped in 1751, reported that “’tis tho’t [she] is gone towards Boston, in company with one William Donaldson.” Charles Eustace was even more explicit about his wife Catharine’s immoral conduct, asserting that she “has kept bad Company in the Block-houses [where soldiers were quartered], and sundry other Places to my great Damage.” After noting that his wife “Mary Douglas, formerly Mary Shepherd,” had eloped, Matthew Douglas stated pointedly that she “has associated with a Set of People as worthless as herself.”18 Several male New Yorkers charged their wives with adultery or even bigamy. In 1766, Joseph Beck, a stay maker, reported that “Anne, my Wife, thought proper to leave my bed and board, and go to another man,” adding that “she gave from under her hand before Witness, that she would not trouble me.” To be sure, however, Beck declared that “I will pay no debts of her contracting from the date of the signing her name different from mine.” That same year, the aptly named mariner, George Pain, acknowledged that “Sarah, formerly [his wife], in his Absence took unto herself another Husband, and now passes

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by the name of Sarah Neil.” Shamefacedly, Pain let it be known that “he will pay no Debts contracted by her since her last Marriage.” At times, the evidence of infidelity seemed irrefutable, as when a husband named the man with whom his wife had run off and even noted his occupation. George Drauntman tersely stated that his wife Peggy “has eloped from my bed and board, and likewise robbed me, and gone off with a certain William Smith, an Englishman and a blacksmith.” Lewis Ryan suspected that his wife Mary was using her maiden name when she “eloped from [his] bed,” but he was sure that she had “gone off with Thomas Collins, House Carpenter.” One of the best documented cases was that presented by David Humphrevil. “Parnel my Wife, hath three sundry times eloped from my Bed and Board, without any just reason; and . . . she was married on the 2d Day of August, 1769, by the name of Parnel Butler, (which was her Maiden Name) to one William Saunders, Silversmith, now living in this City, as appears by a Certificate, which I have from the Rev. Lambertus DeRonde.” Indeed, this marriage was inscribed in the records of the Dutch Reformed Church. Unable to conceal his outrage at the actions of his wife, a man named Roberts remarked that he “would earnestly recommend it to all the Modest and Virtuous, to shun and avoid her as an adulterous Contemner of the Laws of God, Government and Society.” In January 1774, New York’s Supreme Court convicted Jane, the wife of Thomas Dun, of bigamy.19 Because husbands’ allegations of their wives’ promiscuity are in most instances not verifiable, it is conceivable that some husbands fabricated or grossly exaggerated evidence of a wife’s sexual misconduct, since they feared having their reputation for virility sullied. Mary Dudley’s rejoinder to her husband’s insinuation that she had not been faithful to him addresses the issue of a husband’s credibility. On September 3, 1770, carpenter William Dudley stated in print that his wife Mary “hath behaved in such a manner as renders it necessary we should part.” On September 15, 1770, Mary Dudley went before a justice of the peace and swore under oath “that the Accusation against me by my Husband is false, malicious, and unjust; and that I have never had criminal conversation or unlawful Connection with my Husband’s Apprentice, Daniel McEwen, or with any other Person whatsoever, nor that I have ever in the minutest Manner violated, infringed, or broke my Marriage Vow.” Distressed by her husband’s action and eager to preserve her own honor, Mary Dudley publicly repudiated his contention, vague as it was, so as to crush the “Report propagated reflecting greatly upon my Character.”20 If it was in a husband’s interest to paint a troublesome wife as dissolute in order to justify abandoning her, then it is not implausible that some husbands concocted stories that were false. To disown an errant wife was to secure one’s own reputation and, in the process, shift blame for the collapse of the marriage to that wife.

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A desire to portray himself in favorable terms could lead a husband to adopt a defensive tone in his elopement notice and to insist that his wife had eloped without just cause. Breeches maker Michael Morris implied that he was extraordinarily forbearing when he reported in 1758 that his wife Margaret “has eloped from his Bed and Board without the least Provocation, (this being not the first time).” Continuing in this vein, he asserted that “he, in Justice to himself, is under the disagreeable Necessity of giving this publick Notice.” Leonard Cons went to some lengths to point out that his wife Jacobina “has, unreasonably, absented herself from me; and notwithstanding my most earnest Entreaty, refuses to return and cohabit with me.” Not only that, she had “contrived by some means to divest me of all my Estate.” An announcement crafted in this way intimated that a husband had done nothing to cause his wife to flee and made her look like the guilty party, even while implying that he would welcome her return. An allegedly errant wife and a forgiving husband could, of course, reconcile their differences. On December 11, 1766, John Ute made public the fact that “my wife Abigail Ute, has thought proper of her own free will and Accord (and without any just cause given her) to Elope and withdraw herself from my Bed and Board.” He posted this original notice several times. But after the couple resolved the issues that had sundered their marriage, John Ute sang a new tune, relating on February 19, 1767, that “all Differences and Misunderstandings, between my . . . Wife and me are accommodated, and real Harmony between us happily concluded.”21 The denouement of the Utes’ chapter of marital discord was exceptional. Most instances of friction between husbands and wives in eighteenth-century New York City probably were not resolved in an amicable fashion. The collapse of one marriage eventuated in a dreadful outcome. In October 1773, James Aigins, “a very good Seaman [with] the Character of a sober, industrious Man,” was “found in the Garret of his House strangled with a small cord fastened to a Beam.” According to the newspaper, “It is thought this rash Action was occasioned by Jealousy of his Wife, and uneasiness at her Conduct.”22 The anger expressed by some husbands in the face of what they perceived as betrayal by their wives implies that the breakdown of trust between spouses was irreversible and compromise was out of the question. A sense of finality pervades one of the five separation agreements recorded in local newspapers. Carman Joseph Palding, who signed with a mark, stated in September 1761 that he and his wife Judah “did part by Consent on Friday last, never more to have any Connection one with the other.” If mutual animosity underlay this pact, another voluntary separation left room for reconciliation. In September 1769, Samuel Higginson advised New York City newspaper readers that

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he and his wife Mary “have agreed to part with the mutual Consent of each other,” but the usual proviso regarding finances was qualified. “I will pay no Debts of her contracting while we live separate; not that I have the least Reason to suspect that she has any Intention to run me in Debt, but [do so] as evil Council [counsel] is very prevalent, and too frequently given in such Cases.” Higginson clearly hoped for a reunion, since he asserted “it is yet possible for Time and good Conduct on both Sides, to rectify all Mistakes that have past.” In 1764, cordwainer Peter Brown and his wife Mary “separated from each other by voluntary Act and Deed, duly executed before Authority,” but gave no clues as to their state of mind. Nicholas Brower Jr. was similarly reticent about divulging what had transpired, noting only that he “for many good reasons, [had] been separated from my wife Mary since March last.” Carpenter Thomas Brown merely stated that his wife Mary “hath behaved in such a Manner as renders a separation necessary.”23 Publicizing the discord in one’s marriage likely was a last resort, a step taken after informal methods of conflict resolution had been exhausted. Yet it is striking that virtually all the “elopement” notices in print were placed by middling men and some a notch below. With the exception of a merchant, a doctor, a clergyman, and two schoolmasters, all the husbands for whom information is available were men who worked with their hands. These included scores of skilled workers and tradesmen, many mariners, and a few laborers. On top of this, several husbands signed with a mark, suggesting a degree of illiteracy, and one was a free Negro. What this shows is that in eighteenth-century New York City, male privilege for all but the unfree knew no bounds. Husbands of any rank, even those who were illiterate or regarded as racial others, felt entitled to rebuke their wives publicly for running off or for other unseemly behavior. Friction between spouses in elite families did not culminate in elopement notices because airing personal grievances before the public was not consonant with standards of polite conduct. Shielded from the tumult that beset people of little means, couples in the topmost reaches of society could try to resolve their problems behind the scenes.24 Well-off New Yorkers had a greater chance of attaining harmony in their marriages because the major bone of contention between couples without resources, namely a wife’s purportedly extravagant spending habits and the consequent amassing of debt, was absent. The core financial issue that sparked controversy between husbands and wives—excessive female consumption of material goods—was not germane to those with ample assets. Men of high rank also were deterred from issuing public complaints against their wives by the contemporary shift in marriage ideals. As affection-based

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Figure 8.  Portrait of Mrs. Margaret Tudor Nicholls (1699–1772). The loving wife of lawyer Richard Nicholls, she was fifty years old when artist John Wollaston painted her portrait in 1749. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Bayou Bend Collection, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harris Masterson III in memory of Libbie Johnston Masterson. Accession Number B.69.344.

standards for married couples took hold in eighteenth-century New York, husbands and wives came to value emotional ties far more than their predecessors in traditional arranged marriages. Richard Nicholls, an attorney and a gentleman of respectable family, enjoyed a long and happy marriage with his wife Margaret. When she died in July 1772 at the age of seventy-three, one obituary praised her as his “amiable Consort” and went on to extol their

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blissful marriage. “During the long Space of Fifty two Years, such an endearing Affection reciprocally subsisted between her and her disconsolate Partner as may indeed be equalled, but will scarcely be exceeded; and which notwithstanding the Infirmities of Age, seemed only to increase with their Years.” The recalibration of the roles of husband and wife among the elite can be detected in the 1769 will of Elizabeth Goelet, the wife of merchant Peter Goelet. Avowing that she was writing her will “with the consent, approbation and free will of my husband signified by his being a party hereto and signing his name,” she stipulated “I make my two daughters, Alice and Janet, executors” and added, “The said Peter Goelet consents to the same.”25 When it came to distributing her estate, Elizabeth chose to empower her daughters rather than her sons.

Servants A gentleman’s household by definition included more than family members, since most of the labor required for everyday tasks was performed by unrelated individuals—servants, slaves, or a combination of the two. Indeed, the signature of a genteel lifestyle was the wherewithal to delegate household work of all sorts to subordinates. A few key posts—housekeeper, personal servant, or wet nurse for the mistress’s babies—were filled by free white people not under indenture, but, as a rule, workers in the city’s elite households were unfree. This also was the case in many artisan-headed households, where slaves, servants, and apprentices—youths whose servitude was linked to instruction in a trade—mingled. Given New York’s involvement in slavery going back to the days of New Amsterdam, there has been a tendency to assume that those who staffed the city’s households were primarily slaves. Yet the volume of newspaper advertisements related to selling servants’ time and recovering servants who had run off suggests that slaves might not always have predominated among household laborers. At a minimum, by the 1740s New York City was home to a thriving labor market in which ship captains, merchants, vendue masters, executors of estates, and other private individuals traded the indentures of young men and women of European ancestry. Although some of these indentured servants ended up in New York’s rural environs, others became workers in the households of the city’s gentlemen and tradesmen. Primarily new immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and the German states, these indentured servants were mostly in their teens or twenties and fit to labor at arduous tasks. When a ship reached the port of New York, the human cargo was itemized in terms of occupations. “Just landed,

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from on board the ship Newry, Matthew Russell, master, and their indentures to be disposed of,” read one 1764 advertisement, “a few healthy good Servants, consisting of Labour[er]s and Tradesmen, among whom is a Cutler, and a very good Miller, that can be well recommended for their honesty and sobriety; also, a couple of servant girls.”26 Instability was the defining theme of a servant’s life. Subject to market forces and without recourse, servants were shunted from one family to the next. Separated from kin and cut off from the institutional props that might have sustained them in their homelands, these young men and women struggled to adjust to an unfamiliar environment. Under pressure, most perfected the ability to survive, but not necessarily without psychological costs such as a “down look” that indicated displeasure with the situation. What masters singled out as unsavory attributes—a menacing demeanor, a propensity to drink excessively or be extremely talkative—likely were behaviors that arose in response to travails along the bumpy roads servants traveled. Cutler Richard Sause described his servant Alexander Johnston as “a strong well built fellow, of a dull, sullen countenance.” Mary Lookwhite, an Irish servant maid, was characterized by her master Moses Clement as having “a bold look.” Martin Doxey, an Irish servant, by trade a dyer, was pegged as “very much addicted to swearing,” and John Black was referred to as “an impertinent, talkative, boasting fellow” in 1764.27 By definition, the relationship between servant and master was asymmetrical, leaving those located in the subordinate position little choice but to suppress their own desires in order to meet the demands of the person who commanded their labor. With the power to dictate the terms under which their servants lived and toiled, the city’s heads of household anticipated these menial workers would embrace their servile roles. Yet masters encountered recalcitrance, if not downright resistance, from indentured men and women who harbored their own opinions on how they should be treated. The values masters upheld and the rules they laid down often did not sit well with the servants on whom they were imposed. Whether masters acknowledged it or not, their authority over servants was brittle. Propertied New Yorkers who had been groomed to regard their private domains as impervious to assault from below were inattentive to the grievances of servants. Some expressed surprise when a servant ran off. When Patt. Bryan (alias O’Bryan), an indentured servant recently arrived from Cork, “absented himself ” in April 1774, his master William Neilson speculated that “as he has been a very sober orderly boy, ’tis probable he hath been decoyed by some artful person, and having several acquaintance [sic] in Philadelphia and Baltimore, may be gone that way.” Even though this “smooth faced good

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looking lad [of] 18 or 20 years” was endowed with a skill that could expedite his flight—“as he can write pretty well, he may forge a pass or a receipt for his passage”—Neilson preferred to think that his servant had been inveigled into fleeing.28 Fostering the impression of gullible servants duped by malicious strangers allowed masters to locate the impetus for flight outside their household. Masters seem not to have taken seriously the nimbleness with which servants feigned loyalty while surreptitiously scheming to regain control of their lives. In the world of eighteenth-century New York’s servants, dissembling before social superiors was routine, and fantasies of liberation simmered alongside the performance of subservience. When servants summoned the courage to flee, they were vetoing their masters’ blueprint for their lives. Composing a servant-centered narrative brings to light the resources servants had at their disposal and how they used them. The men and women who labored in the households of propertied New Yorkers were often veterans in the army of servants that daily catered to the demands of city residents. Circulating among masters and regularly exchanging information, they collectively possessed a reservoir of experience from which to draw on when evaluating a master’s behavior. Aggrieved servants, aware that legal safeguards existed to protect them, initiated complaints against masters who worked them too hard, denied them necessities, or punished them too severely. By heading to court for redress, they were appealing to the larger community for relief from violent or cruel masters. Racial identity became a weapon for some. In 1754, a servant named Richard Caine who had been shackled and kept in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water asserted that he was “more miserable by the hard usage of my master and mistress than any Negro slave.” A convict bound to rope maker Stephen Wilkins who complained of “Cruel Usage and Mistreatments” declared that his master was attempting to “make a Slave of [him].”29 In drawing explicit parallels with the treatment of slaves, these men articulated a belief shared by white laborers that a master crossed an inviolable line if he treated his white servant like an enslaved black. New York’s courts examined the evidence pertaining to servants’ grievances and in some cases ruled for the servants. In 1726, the Mayor’s Court found apprentice William Lewis’s complaint against his master, barber and wigmaker John Schutz, for “immoderately correcting him without any just Cause” to be true and therefore freed him from his apprenticeship. In another

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case, “the master and mistress of a maid servant were indicted for ‘beating and bruising’ her ‘in a cruel and barbarous manner’ and on their plea of guilty fined five shillings.” But the privileged men who sat on the courts that decided such cases were not inclined to give credence to the allegations of servants upset at harsh usage, since they suspected that unfree laborers were not above fabricating charges against their masters. Chafing against restrictions imposed on them by powerful people often twice their age, young men and women had reason to invent instances of maltreatment. “In the beginning the Germans had an excellent name and reputation in these provinces,” lamented the city’s Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg in 1751, “but now so many rotten people are coming into the country and acting so wickedly that the name has begun to stink.” Typical of this breed was a “German servant [who] ran away from his English master because he thought he ought to have meat every day.” Muhlenberg, a man with little sympathy for lowly Germans, presumed that immigrants were being devious and untruthful when they brought charges against their masters. He recounted the case of two German servants who ended up in jail after “having falsely accused their master of making them eat rotten meat. When the authorities investigated the matter, however, it was found that they had carried a piece of meat in a sack for a long time until it putrefied in order to use it as evidence.” An even more egregious instance of German servants acting disrespectfully toward a purportedly beneficent master concerned two women who came to the city and asserted that their master had attempted to assault them. Muhlenberg contended that they had been put up to it by the leader of a rebel faction in the Lutheran congregation.30 Servants who could not obtain redress for their grievances in court sometimes absconded, even though running away had serious consequences. A survey of advertisements for runaway servants in city newspapers provides ample documentation that both men and women availed themselves of this method of protesting the conditions of servitude. Once in a while, a master tried to entice a servant to return with a promise of exemption from punishment. Tailor Patrick Steward gave instructions that if his Scottish servant William Landram “returns of his own Accord” he should be assured that “he shall be pardon’d for all that has past, and shall not be compell’d to serve any more Time than if he had not eloped.” But even the threat of extending his term of service did not always deter a servant from fleeing. A fifteen-year-old indentured servant boy named Philip Sparling, who first ran off in June 1765, unnerved his master, Charles Miller, who commented that Sparling “discovers a melancholly and suspicious Countenance when threatned.” Captured and returned to Miller, Sparling [now referred to as an apprentice boy] ran

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away again in March 1769 “with no coat, waistcoat, nor hat. looks to be old.” In April 1769, evidently following another escape attempt by Sparling, Miller was harsher in his criticism. “He is an artful rogue having taken up near 30£ due to his master.”31 Perhaps impatient to be independent, this youth repeatedly attempted to break free. Running away was a purposive act, a protest against an unendurable situation, a decisive way to deal with the burden of being under the thumb of a strict master and insensitive family members. The crushing burdens of work, the ever-looming possibility of abuse—verbal or otherwise—and the lack of privacy could combine to generate an irresistible urge to escape. Fleeing also was a means to satisfy yearnings that smoldered beneath the tedium of the quotidian—for women, to exchange marriage vows with a loved one and bear children; for men, to build economic security by working for themselves; for both, to form a family and join a community of fellow countrymen or coreligionists. If the decision to set off on one’s own was far from irrational, neither was it random, although servants occasionally fled spontaneously if they were mistreated. Leaving the household where one lived and worked entailed setting a goal and fixing on a destination. The sole aim of Nicholas Bayard’s Irish servant, William Patterson, was to rejoin kin. “His father is a Miller at Christeen Mills, and it is supposed he is gone that way.” Thomas Price, an Irish servant boy who ran away in 1749, also headed toward a relative, “a Brother named George Price, that sails out of Philadelphia in Mr. Allen’s Employ, and ’tis thought he is gone that Way.”32 In a busy port like New York, a longing to go to sea led male servants to the docks, where they came into contact with mariners who relayed information on the schedules of commercial vessels and military transports. Welsh servants John Owens and Francis Nuttle, who were “both Perriwig-makers, but may pretend to be Sailors,” schemed for a while before making their break in 1752. “Since they have been gone, ’tis reported they have been seen at this City Ferry-Stairs, in old Jackets, with Wallets, and wanted to go over to the Jersies, so ’tis supposed they have got other Apparel. . . . It is also thought they have got false Passes.” Attempted escapes by sea were so common that masters perfected a formulaic warning to include in their advertisements for runaways. Henry Marselis, whose Irish servant Thomas Holmes had fled wearing “a Sailors blue Waistcoat,” among other things, declared, “All Masters of Vessels and others, are forbid to harbour or carry him off, as they will answer it at their Peril.”33 In the excitement of mapping out their journeys, prospective runaways undoubtedly shared their itineraries with other unfree laborers in the house-

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hold. When masters got wind of these plans, they could make educated guesses as to where fugitive servants were headed and by which routes. According to Henry Pillson, his indentured Irish servant Martin Doxey was “supposed to be gone to the Jersies or Philadelphia.” Jacob Montany reported that his German servant Peter Clossen, a baker, was “supposed to be gone towards Goshen, [and] has lately been seen at Haverstraw.” When a fourteen-year-old Irish servant girl named Margaret M’Chellow left the home of tailor Bartholomew Coxetter, he wrote that “it is supposed she is gone towards New Windsor in the Highlands.” An Irish servant, John M’Lauchlan, characterized by merchant Malcolm Campbell as “very low sized, and [of] mean Appearance,” was rumored to have “gone to Rhode Island, in his way to Boston, to take Passage for Ireland or England.” Michael Daugherty, a “Scotch Irish servant Boy,” similarly was thought to have “taken the Road towards Rh. Island.” When Thomas Brown initially advertised for his servant girl Mary Rogerson, he stated that she “went away the 30th March [1760], and was seen on Staten-Island.” Her path of flight was more certain a few weeks later. “’Tis supposed she is gone to the Southward.”34 Some servants found safe places to hide within New York City. Peter Walsh, who “absented himself from his . . . Master” Richard Clark Cook in August 1750, was “said to be about town.” In 1740, John Higgins, alias Eagon, “an Irish Man who Served part of his time with one Wright in Long Island [and was] apt to get in Liquor and then delights much in Singing,” was suspected of still being in the city. “He was seen here at New York, this Week with a black Eve.” After Erasmus Ferrer, “a Shoemaker [who] understands both Men and Womens Work well,” ran away in August 1767, his master John Cree related that “he is supposed to be lurking at the back Part of this Town.” Catharine Fitzgerald, one of several runaway Irish servants who had arrived in the brig Galway Packet from Cork in the early 1770s, and had “formerly lived with Daniel Sickelles shoe-maker of this city,” had “absconded last October [1774], and is said to reside in some of the houses of ill-fame in the suburbs of this city.” An “Irish indented servant named Mary Frazier, belonging to Mrs. Henry,” ran off from her mistress in August 1769 and “has been seen lurking about the Barracks.”35 Masquerading was critical to a runaway’s success, since masters issued meticulous descriptions of fugitives’ physique, scars, and mannerisms as well as their garments and hairstyles. Taking extra clothing and altering their appearance improved servants’ chances of eluding captors. Martin Doxey was “supposed to have changed his cloaths as he carried off different cloths, silks, and other things entrusted to his care.” Masters readily admitted that those who managed to leave with a wide assortment of goods could camouflage

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themselves. After noting exactly what clothing his English servant girl, Mary Wright, was wearing when she fled in October 1753, watchmaker Carden Proctor conceded that “she may change them, the better to escape.” James Crawford dutifully described a runaway Irish servant’s attire and hairstyle, but ruefully added “it is supposed he will change his name and clothes.” The escape plan of Margaret Robinson, a Cheshire-born English servant girl, included stockpiling clothing elsewhere in the city in advance of her departure. “She had conveyed her Cloaths out of the House some Time before [she left],” her master Thomas Steel recounted, adding that “there is Reason to believe she designs to go off in the Transports to Carolina.”36 Among the most common ruses servants used to disguise their identity was changing their names, a tactic some experimented with while still in their master’s household. Adopting an alias hampered a master’s ability to earmark a servant, so it was not uncommon for masters to keep track of servants’ preexisting aliases. Although offering no reason for his suspicion, Jeremiah Regan surmised that his runaway Irish servant man named John M’Larman “will pose by the name of John Gossling.” Evert Everson had nothing good to say about a “Servant Girl named Mary Godfrey, from Liverpool in Lancashire,” after she fled his house for the second time in July 1762. “She is rather fawning than complaisant, very liquorish, and has something lewd in her Behaviour, is much addicted to lying, and generally betrays herself by her Talkativeness.” Godfrey, however, had proved resourceful earlier. “She ran away once before, and took the name of Mary Everson.” This seventeen-year-old immigrant’s gambit of choosing her master’s surname as her alias was matched by that of another fugitive, “an Irish servant man named James Rosbottom, by trade a weaver,” who ran away from John Beck in 1773. After noting that Rosbottom “has short black hair, a down look, a blemish on his right eye, [is] knock knee’d and walks stooping” and describing the clothing he was wearing when he left, Beck added “It is probable he may assume the name Beck.”37 In addition to changing their appearance and assuming a new name, runaway servants at times reinvented their career history, claiming aptitude for certain jobs for which they may not have been qualified. A Scottish servant lad named Robert Marshall was “in conversation very sly and plausible, [and] may pretend to a knowledge of the tobacco cutting business.” Masters frequently called attention to such deceptions. Francis Jones “stiles himself a Prizefighter”; James Wisely “pretends to be a Coachman, and brought up to attend Table”; James Caselick “pretends to be a Coach man, and at other Times a Barber”; Florence Crawley “pretends to be a surgeon”; and Joseph Jessop “pretends to be a taylor and a weaver.” The credentials of runaways such as German servant man Johan Ernst Frederick Zaensker, however, were

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difficult to challenge. His master James McHugh related that he “speaks bad English, but writes and speaks the French language very well; [and] writes a good hand in the German way, and can play well on the spinet or harpsichord, being brought up an organist.” Nineteen-year-old William Edwards arrived from London just eight weeks before he ran away, but he had already impressed his new master John De Peyster as “a tolerable good English scholar, and writes a Fair intelligible hand,” as well as one “remarkable for his affability and polite manner of talking to strangers.” These endowments clearly prepared Edwards to thrive on his own in America. In 1757, lime burner Barnet Borhite, along with his partner John Dougherty, advertised for “a High-Dutch Servant Man, named Mordecai Hart,” a person “who has some Time been a Pedler in York Government” and who was supposed to have gone to Rhode Island. With a note of skepticism, they alleged that Hart, “who pretends to be a great Scholar, can talk French and Spanish, Greek and Hebrew.” One clever indentured servant named Robert Byrne hatched an intricate escape plan. This “genteel looking young Fellow,” who took with him “an entire new Suit of Pompadour Clothes” when he ran away in 1767, was described as a man who “writes and understands Accounts extremely well, [and is] remarkably talkative, very plausible and greatly addicted to lying.” His master “supposed he has the Counterpart of his indentures with him, and by that Means may endeavor to pass for a Free Man.”38 Runaway servants sometimes left in pairs, since a reliable partner who possessed physical prowess or specialized knowledge could prove vital to survival. Choosing an accomplice from among fellow workers in the same household made sense, and it was all to the good if the partner came from the same background, as was the case when “two Indented Scotch servants, one named John Robinson, by trade a carpenter . . . and the other named John M’Lintock, a gardener by occupation,” ran away from James Van Cortlandt in October 1774. But the joint aim of escaping a detested master could bind household members together, whatever their ancestry. On a Sunday evening in September 1769, “a Servant Man, named Robert Tarbitt born in Paisley in Scotland, who speaks much with the Accent of that country,” ran away from John Laboyteaux’s household with “an Apprentice Lad, named Christopher Angele, born in this City, and . . . by trade a Taylor.” “Run away together,” wrote rope maker Elias DeGrushe in 1752, “two Servant Men; . . . Richard Poole, a West Countryman, and has that accent on his Tongue,” and “Thomas Jenkins, a Welshman.”39 Old World animosities between people of different cultural backgrounds paled when two indentured servants of dissimilar age, background, and ability made common cause to escape in 1767, “one an English Man, named

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Joseph M’Nabb, aged about thirty five Years, writes a good Hand, is a tolerable Scholar,” and “the other a Scotch Man, named William Rankin, a Shoe-maker by Trade, about twenty three Years of Age.” Their master Alexander M’Culluch valued these men according to their skills, offering “Ten Dollars [reward] for M’Nabb and Five for Rankin,” but could not resist delivering an ethnic slur after finding out that the pair had escaped. “It has been remarked by several, that None elopes but Irish People, but it is evident from the above, that there are other People of as bad a species as the Hibernians.”40 In a few instances, a white servant ran off with a black one, demonstrating that race was no barrier when it came to fleeing an intolerable situation. On the day nineteen-year-old Philip McManus left his master Smith Ramadge for the first time in October 1765, he was spotted near Kingsbridge (north of New York City) and soon captured and returned to Ramadge, who then sold McManus’s remaining time to John Keating, from whom the servant ran away on Sunday, May 26, 1766, and “was supposed to be gone to Rockaway, or towards Philadelphia.” McManus “went off in company with a white Chimney-Sweeper, who goes by the name of Tom Vanderill, and ’tis probable he may follow that business.” Again, McManus was unsuccessful in his escape and was returned to Keating’s service. Clearly not remorseful for his actions, McManus took off the following February, this time accompanied by “Dublin, a Negro lad.” Noting that “they are both chimney sweepers, and have took no clothes with them but their working dress,” Keating intimated that they might have left spontaneously.41 In February 1761, “a German Servant Girl, named Catharine, and a Negro Wench, named Gin,” fled from John Taylor. Outraged that both a white and a black female servant had conspired to evade his control, Taylor omitted the surname of the German servant in the text of his advertisement, referring to her as the “white Girl,” a tactic designed to degrade her to the level of a slave. The racial lines that bisected New York society meant little to these two young women whose shared antipathy to their master moved them to collude in planning their escape. Taylor noted that “both had with them Sundry other Cloaths, as well of their own as of the family’s, which they took with them on going off.”42 Cultural and racial differences may not have stood in the way of assembling a team of fugitives, but language could be a sticking point, especially for the city’s German immigrants. The comfort of having a partner who spoke his native tongue must have buoyed Barnet Shilling, John Van Zandt’s twenty-one-year-old German servant who “speaks little or no English,” as he “[ran] away in company with another German servant man” belonging to merchant David Provoost. In March 1768, John Slidell, a soap boiler and

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tallow chandler, reported that “an indented German Servant Man, named Johannes Frokinger,” had gone “off with two others of his Countrymen, one of which belonged to Peter Hasenclever, Esq’ and the other to Philip Lidack . . . Baker.” Feeling adrift in New York’s alien surroundings also underlay the leave-taking of “a German Man, his wife, with two small children, one at the breast, [who] have absented themselves from their Master since Thursday last, and are supposed to be lurking in some house among their countrymen in this city.”43 It was not a shared ethnic heritage, but the thrill of romance that led “two Irish servant women,” Ann Miller and Elizabeth Curry, to flee in July 1772 with “Mr. Henry Ustick’s two nailers, that went off the same time towards Kingsbridge, or the iron works in the Jerseys.” Henry Ustick’s nailery apparently was a breeding ground for New York’s restless youth, since Philadelphia-born nailer Robert Mathews escaped from Ustick in June 1770, and a pair of nail makers who “came to this place in the ship Sharp from Greenock in Scotland about 16 month ago” left in November 1775. Elizabeth Curry’s romantic adventure ended precipitously, as she was back in her master’s custody on October 26, 1772, when she escaped a second time. Now portrayed as “smooth tongued, and a very great liar,” but still longing for love, Curry left hastily, since she was “bare footed, [and] had no shoes, [and] had no other clothes with her, and cannot easily alter her dress.” Her master Alexander Leslie, noting that she “was seen to pass the old bridge [King’s Bridge] . . . in company with a man in a red or reddish coat or waistcoat,” supposedly “gone the Albany road,” set his sights on securing “the fellow that carried her off.”44 Sexual desire also lay behind the exodus of a twenty-four-year-old “Irish Servant, named Mary Clancy,” who had “much of the Brogue in her Speech.” Wigmaker James Morrison, who reported her disappearance in May 1765, was convinced that “she was inticed away, and went off with one Thomas Brown, (who has been for two Months in the Work House, and is a Servant to Messrs. Greg, Cunningham, and Co.).” Ann Hill, a thirty-year-old woman described by her master, painter James Barrow, as born in Philadelphia but having been in Ireland and England, left his household in June 1775 for the sake of love. “It is supposed that she is gone off to Horseneck, and probably may have changed her name as she went after a butcher named William Howard, (an apprentice to Mr. Bogart) who said he had married her the night before.” The story was even more complicated since Hill went off with the wife of “one Lindsey, a Tanner, who is a servant, and it is said has inlisted in the Connecticut Forces, under General Wooster.” Female servants obviously envisioned soldiers as protectors. Nineteen-year-old Hester Ashton from Lancashire, described as “remarkably strong made” but “fat and

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clumsy,” probably confounded her master Erasmus Williams by finding admirers, since he “imagined she went off with some of the Train of Artillery.” In January 1763, Margaret Long opined that Irish-born Catharine Carty was “supposed to be gone with a Soldier.”45 Men were equally capable of being seduced. When John Hendrick Reese, a “German servant man, who arrived here in the beginning of March” and “speaks bad English,” ran away in July 1775, baker Christian Van Phull, his master, conjectured that “he is gone off with a woman who has a husband in Pensacola; her name is Mary Arnold, but goes by the name of Mary Newbergh, her maiden name, she is a noted whore;—they will perhaps pass for man and wife.”46 Tellingly, Van Phull blamed the sinful woman for his servant’s flight. Servants were known to steal valuables from their masters before fleeing, but in two cases involving Irish servants of Anglican clergymen, the scale of the thefts speaks to the animus of closet Catholics toward the privileged En­ glishmen who claimed dominion over them on both sides of the ocean. Patrick Field, who was wearing “a light brown Cloth Livery, faced with green,” when he left, found King’s College president Myles Cooper’s penchant for dressing his servants in uniform particularly irritating, since he seems to have gone to great lengths to provoke his master. “He broke open and took out of a Desk, about 50 Dollars, some smaller Spanish Silver, 2 Guineas, one of his present Majesty; some English Silver, 2 mourning Rings, one for Mr. Joseph Haynes, the other for Archibald Kennedy, Esq; [and] his Indenture, made over to the Subscriber [Myles Cooper] by Mr. Deane, and is supposed to have counterfeited his Master’s Name, that he might pass for a free Man.” To top off all this, Field “took out of the same Desk likewise, several Shirts, Handkerchiefs, Cravats, Stockings marked M.C. and a pair of large oval Silver Buckles; and bought the Evening he went off, a thin Jacket, and a Pair of Musquito Trowsers.” Attired in style with money to spare, Patrick Field appears to have made the perfect escape. No wonder Myles Cooper was willing to pay “Ten Pounds Reward” to the person who apprehended Field, so strong was his desire to exact vengeance on a servant he deemed supremely ungrateful. Bitterness at the haughty carriage of an Anglican clergyman also must have filled the mind of James Carthy, a sixteen-year-old Irish servant who ran away from Trinity Church rector Samuel Auchmuty in 1773 and “carried off with him a small box containing one twenty shilling bill, a small bag of silver, a few coppers, and several accounts.”47 In these instances, stealing served as a symbolic assertion of power over a self-important man. Repeated attempts to run away from the same master, either in a short span of time or over the years, reveal not only the indomitable will of a few

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servants to be free of their indenture at any cost, but also the resolve of some masters to pursue their servants indefinitely. Yet a master’s concerted efforts to reassert his authority over a headstrong dependent did not always stifle the servant’s urge to take charge of his or her own life. The experience of being recaptured just added fuel to the fire, kindling anew the desire to be free. The contest of wills between servant and master, which in the extreme led to face-offs in court or recurring escapes, played out less visibly on the everyday level as servants’ discontent with the household regime fueled latent tensions between parties whose interests were diametrically opposed.

Ch ap ter   6

Attached to the Household

In 1762, Belinda, an enslaved female cook who had pleased merchant John Watts’s palate over the years, found out she was to be uprooted from her longtime home, shipped to Virginia, and sold to a master notably less lenient than Watts. What precipitated this turn of events was her own decision to incorporate charms into her religious practice, putting it at variance with the family’s Anglican faith. Responding to the concerns of his wife and daughters, John Watts ordered the woman’s expulsion from his household. He gave as the reason that “her simplicity led her to ‘triffle about charms,’ ” confirming that he, too, perceived her embrace of a magical form of religion as a direct challenge to his right to define the parameters of spirituality in his domain.1 By selecting the word “trifle” to describe Belinda’s activities, Watts was belittling his cook’s religious beliefs, although neither he nor his wife or daughters would have dignified the use of charms as falling under the rubric of religion. But what was frivolous to Watts was serious to this enslaved woman, whose notion of the sacred derived, at least indirectly, from Africa. In manipulating charms with supposed spiritual power for her own ends, she was opening a small space in the Watts mansion where she could act as a human being, not as chattel. This was her downfall. By daring to spurn European Christianity, Belinda, whom Watts described as “middle agd but not very comely,” managed to disturb the fragile equilibrium between master and slaves in this opulent home. Her offense was not 172

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one for which whipping or other physical punishment was appropriate. Without harming any family member, without uttering any threatening words, without destroying any property or attempting to flee, this “harmless stupid Being” who labored diligently in the family kitchen had challenged her master by maintaining a religious orientation at odds with the Protestant Christianity that was the bedrock of his faith. Ultimately, the only way John Watts found to resolve the tension caused in his family by Belinda’s unorthodox practice was to remove the offending woman and, in so doing, fortify his authority. Despite the fact that she was “not as the New England Men say dreadfull handsome nor very young,” John Watts valued Belinda highly for her prowess in the kitchen, confiding that he would give for another slave “that possessed only the quality she does of cooking, a hundred pounds, with great readiness.”2 But in the end, he was not willing to accommodate her beliefs in his home. Would Belinda have fared better under another master? Were other enslaved New Yorkers more successful in carving out places and times in which they could engage in their favorite pastimes or pray to their own gods? In the intimate setting of the household where slave owners vested with all-encompassing powers encountered human beings ensnared in a net created to contain them, the everyday transactions that defined the nature of mastery unfolded. As enslaved men and women squeezed out privileges, expanded margins, and educed sympathy, masters reluctantly relinquished slivers of their cultural authority over them. Historians of British New York who train their sights on the most dramatic expressions of resistance to the will of slave owners—the 1712 slave rebellion and the purported slave conspiracy of 1741—implicitly contend that what counted in this slave-dependent society were direct assaults on those holding the reins of power.3 Yet collective resistance is not the entire story of enslaved New Yorkers’ struggles against the indignities intrinsic to their condition. Defiance on the part of slaves consisted of furtive actions as well as grand gestures. It was in the crucible of the household, where slaves and masters negotiated matters ranging from the petty to the momentous, that slaves inched toward autonomy and masters brushed against the boundaries of white privilege. What made mundane interactions with their masters and mistresses so central to household slaves’ quest for a better life was the knowledge that bondage was permanent and that they and their progeny were destined to serve white families in perpetuity. The prospect of immeasurable hours of forced labor and a perilous family life impelled them to contest directives that clashed with their own sense of how things should be. Masters, by definition, had weapons with which to drive home their points—physical punishment

Figure 9.  The inventory of merchant Adolph Philipse’s possessions taken after he died in 1750 enumerated not only these gold and silver objects but the twenty-seven enslaved men and women who toiled for him at his Manhattan home and his estate up the Hudson River. Courtesy of Adolph Philipse estate records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library. Image ID 5439718, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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and the threat of sale—but drastic solutions were not practical in dealing with commonplace issues. Rather, informal negotiations, not necessarily recognized as such by either masters or slaves, were the rule. When merchant Jacob Walton was extolled as “a kind and humane Master,” the presumption was that his charitable disposition led him to accommodate his enslaved workers.4 But this public tribute overlooked the manifold ways slaves deliberately ingratiated themselves with masters in order to extract favors from them. What appeared to be unilateral actions actually were bilateral transactions. The most basic site on which negotiations took place was the body of the slave. Masters paid close attention to slaves’ bodies, preferring “likely” or “lusty” slaves physically capable of hard work. Once acquired, slaves were minutely inspected by masters who attempted to correlate shades of skin color with facial features and hair types. At times, owners found a particular combination of elements to be incompatible. Johanna Kelsall puzzled over the incongruities of her slave Johnsey’s appearance and eventually described him as “a Negroe Man . . . of . . . blubber Lips, yellow Complexion, his Hair is neither right Negro nor Indian, but between both, and pretty long.” Chocolate maker Peter Low similarly wrestled to reconcile the dissonant attributes of “a mulatto slave, named Syme or Symon (half Indian breed) age about 24 years, . . . a chimney sweeper, . . . he is short and well set, has a heavy walk, speaks slow and thick, both Dutch and English, has short but strait [sic] Indian like hair.”5 Differentiating people by physical features served to locate them in the eighteenth century’s evolving racial categories. For white New Yorkers, fair skin was the touchstone of a civilized being, and therefore mulattoes, who came closest to approximating European ideals of beauty, were placed atop the scale of people of color. Whatever reservations enslaved Africans had about Europeans’ privileging of lightness, they readily seized on their masters’ fine-tuned chromatic consciousness whenever they could to capitalize on their pale skin or their resemblance to Indians. A “mulato fellow named Dick,” who ran away in 1769, left in “a brown jacket and ozenbrigs trowsers,” but was said to have “gone towards New-England in an Indian dress.” Disguising himself in this way was a shrewd tactic, since many Indians could claim free status. Other slaves saw their light skin as their ticket to freedom. “A Negro Man named Wan, by Trade a Baker, a Yellow Fellow about 25 Years old,” was considered a fit subject for enslavement by baker Resolved Waldron, but Wan thought otherwise when he fled in June 1748. So did “a Negro Man named Frank, of a tauny complexion,” who ran away from the widow of Abraham Van Gelder in October 1747. Presuming to take advantage of her talents and features, Lena, a seventeen-year-old “Mulatto Wench” who spoke “good Dutch and English, and sings a good song,” ran away in June 1761. She

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is “a handsome wench,” her master wrote, “and may pass for a free Person, as she is very well-featured all but her Nose and Lips, which are thick and flat.”6 White masters schooled themselves to be discerning observers of Africans’ bodies in order to reclaim the men and women who fled their households. The scarification visible on individuals born in Africa left an impression on masters like Oliver De Lancey, who described an unnamed woman who went missing over the Christmas holiday in 1762 as “about 40 years of Age, very short, but well made [and] mark’d much by Scars in the Face, Neck, Breast and Arms, when she was a Child.” To identify “a tall likely Negro wench, named Nell, about 36 Years of Age,” Robert James Livingston specified that “she is mark’d with nine spots on each Temple, and none on her Forehead.” Spier, a fifteen-year-old “Negro Boy,” was characterized as “remarkably black, large Nose, with Guinea Cuts on his Cheeks,” while “an elderly negro fellow named Jack” was described as “bald pated, Guinea mark’d,” and a “Negro fellow named Tom” was said to be “marked on the Cheeks.” Philip Livingston emphasized what he deemed the most outlandish feature of a recently acquired slave. “A Negro Man, lately imported from Africa, his Hair or Wool is curled in Locks, in a very remarkable Manner; he is a very likely lusty Fellow, and cannot speak a word of English, or Dutch, or any other Language but that of his own Country.”7 But white masters’ familiarity with the bodies of blacks did not translate into cultural sensitivity. Guinea marks and other African adornments perceived as oddities by New Yorkers of European background became the pretext for scrutinizing Africans as specimens. Samuel Clossy, a King’s College anatomy professor whose demonstrations were conducted primarily on the bodies of blacks or mulattoes, was fascinated by the exotic markings he found on the body of a black female he dissected. “One thing singular was the beautifull carving on the Neck breast and belly which ’tis impossible to describe Verbally, Hieroglyphics possibly of the kingdom of Angola.” After dissecting a black male, Clossy observed that “this Negro was circumcised, a Custom (as I am Informed) of the Natives of Angola.” Clossy’s clinical approach to the study of the black body and his interest in African customs was exceptional, but in subjecting the cadavers of people of color to dissection he was at one with the majority of white New Yorkers whose disrespect for the bodies of blacks was legion.8 By the time “Tom a Negro Man Slave, the Property of Mrs. Haynes,” was sentenced to be hanged for “an Assault on Mary Ryan, a Child of eight Years of Age, with an Intent to commit Rape” in October 1763, New Yorkers were inured to the desecration of black bodies, having witnessed not only the incineration of a slave accused of rape in 1737 but also the burning of alleged slave conspirators in 1741. Heightened feeling at Tom’s execution tapped

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into a reservoir of fear that shadowed white New Yorkers repulsed by the prospect of black men attacking white women. “The Mob were so incensed after he was turned off, that the Officers could not stand their Ground from the Shower of Snow Balls, Stones, & c. thrown at him; thus were obliged to leave him to their Brutality: After they cut him down, they dragged his Body through some of the streets.” Although the popular frenzy was halted through “the great good Conduct of a single Gentleman [who] soon put a stop to their Inhumanity, by seizing the Corpse, and ordering it to be interr’d, judiciously knowing the Law was fulfilled, by the Execution, and consequently that the publick ought to be therewith contented,” the mutilation of this black man’s body was not yet at an end. “It is said that the Body has since been taken up, and likely to become a Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, by our tribe of Dissectors, for the better instruction of our young Practicioners.”9 However different their aims, physicians and street rioters were equally unconcerned about using the bodies of black people for their own ends. All the same, New York’s white men were not immune to the allure of women of color, as Philip Schuyler, a young gentleman visiting from Albany, made clear in 1753 when he compared the looks of his friend Phil’s sweetheart to those of a Native American woman. “She is a handsome brunette from Barbadoes, has an eye like a Mohawk beauty and appears to possess good understanding.” Crossing racial lines for love was not unheard of in New York City. In 1760, a “Mulatto wench named Sarah (alias Jenny) born at New-Rochel, in the County of West-Chester,” was supposed to have “gone off with a white Man, towards the Southward.” An Irish servant who “delights much in singing” evidently found women of color appealing since “he was seen here at New York, this week with a black Eve.” In one case, a white woman was involved with “a Spanish Negro Man named Domingo, about 40 Years of Age,” who “speaks bad English.” He was reported as “having been seen with one Mary Carney, a white Woman, that frequently used to harbor him at her Lodgings near the Stockadoes.”10 Engaging in a liaison with a woman of darker skin color could cause a white man to be solicitous of his partner and the biracial children that resulted from their union. Such a scenario played out in the life of wealthy merchant Laurence Reade, a single man who, in 1773, faced mortal illness at the age of fifty-two while traveling in England. With fond memories of Mary Barrow, the free mulatto woman who had been his paramour in Jamaica over a long span of years and who undoubtedly was the mother of “three children called after me by the Sir name [surname] of Reade, one Sarah Reade born in 1748, Laurence, born in 1750, and now a writer to the African Company, at Cape Coast Castle, in Africa, and the other Anne Reade, born 1759,” he averred

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that he was “desirous to assist them” and left “to Sarah £300, and to Laurence and Anne each £300, all Stirling Money.” At the end of his days, Laurence Reade acknowledged the people of color who made up his unofficial family. Although New Yorkers’ racial attitudes forced him to keep them at a distance, Reade defied the social conventions of his home city by ordering that “all my slaves are to be manumitted, and to my slave ‘Priam’ I give 6 guineas.”11 Nothing is known about Thomas Robertson’s interracial romance other than that it produced a child of whom he was inordinately fond. Robertson made no mention of the enslaved mother of “my mulatto boy, Joseph Moralla,” when he wrote his will in 1766, but the enslaved boy was promised a better future. “He is to be put to a trade, and be free when he is 21.” For good measure, Robertson also left the boy £50 and arranged for security. Unmarried white men who mandated special treatment for a female slave likely had engaged in an intimate relationship with her. Bolter Christopher Fell, whose primary heir was his brother Ralph in England, stipulated in his will that “My negro woman ‘Deppy’ is to be declared to be free, as if she had been born free, and I bequeath to her her two children.” As the putative father of these children, Fell probably assumed that his sexual partner Deppy would emancipate them. In 1768, John Vanderspiegel, a man with no wife or living children, bequeathed a variety of items—including family pictures—to several blood relatives. But two female slaves were granted special favors. “On account of her faithful service I manumit my slave girl Maria, ‘and my executors are to give Security as required by law.’ ” Furthermore, “my negro wench Phillis is to be supported without labor at some place in the Country as my executors direct.”12 Was Maria more than a household worker to John Vanderspiegel? Could Phillis have been her mother? Fragmentary evidence of interracial liaisons in New York makes it impossible to determine the extent to which force defined such relationships. But whether or not black women consented to sexual relations with their masters, there is little doubt that in these circumstances black women’s sexual impulses were channeled to serve the needs of white men. Enslaved females whose sexual partners were men of African descent had more freedom in their intimate moments, but the imperatives of the slave labor system blocked them from forming enduring personal ties. Masters permitted cohabitation between female and male workers but let it be known that slave couples, as a rule, would live apart. Hungering for secure relationships and dreading forcible separation from their mates, enslaved men and women, whatever their living arrangements, doubtless welcomed church-sanctioned marriages approved by their masters. Ten such unions were formalized in the decade or so before the Revolution, five in the Dutch Reformed Church, four in the Presbyterian Church,

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and one in the Lutheran Church. In two instances, both in the Dutch Reformed Church, one of the partners was a free Negro. In 1767, Louis “Neger van Thomas Oughston” married “Elisabet Jones, Vrye Negerin [free Negro woman],” and in 1773, Jain “negerin van John Dykman” wed Herry Crum, “vrye neger [free Negro].” Four slave couples lived in the same household. York and Isabel were described in Presbyterian records as “Clark’s Negros,” and Jine and Jenny as “Mr. Yates Negroes.” In April 1769, “Riden & Nanny, Neger en Negerin,” were married in the Dutch Reformed Church “met Consent van [with the consent of] haar [their] Meester Corn[elius] Bogart,” and on January 24, 1776, “Mr. Peter Ketletas [Keteltas] gave permission for the marriage of his two slaves—Lewis and Hannah” in the Lutheran Church. Among the four sets of enslaved brides and grooms who belonged to different masters were “George Eversen and Elizabet[,] Neger en Negerin,” who were wed in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1765 “met concent van haar Mr. en Vrouw [Master and mistress], de Neger behorende aan [belonging to] Mrs. Morris and de Negerin aan Abraham de La Noy.” Venus received permission from her master, mariner Jacob Van Voorhees, a Presbyterian, to marry Polis, a slave of Francois Stevens, in the Dutch Reformed Church in February 1769. In 1768, a slave referred to only as “Silas Watt’s Negro Man” married “Sylvia, Mr. Coon’s Negro Wench,” in the Presbyterian Church; and in 1771, “York, Widow Levingston’s Negro Man,” was united in marriage with “Catharine[,] Edward Michel’s Girl,” there as well.13 Regardless of whether their marital ties were inscribed in church ledgers, slaves demonstrated an emotional investment in their marriages by taking risks to reunite with their spouses. “A Mulatto Fellow named John [who] speaks French very well” was said “to be in this Town having a Wife at the Widow Bownes [sic] in Smith’s Fly.” Being separated from loved ones took an emotional toll on slaves such as Peter Keteltas’s thirty-three-year-old runaway Jack. “He was purchased from Hendrick Emons, of Rockey-Hill in New-Jersey, about 9 Years ago,” Keteltas related in 1773, and “it is supposed he is either gone that Way, where he has a Mother, or else to Anthony Ten Eyck’s of Albany, where he has a wife.” The anguish Jack felt at being cut off from the women who gave meaning to his life escaped Keteltas, but another slave owner, in making arrangements for the sale of “A NEGRO MAN, 29 years of age precisely, who was born in this country, in a sober and regular family, and has never been in one of a different character. . . . has been accustomed to all sorts of work, but in his last service has been chiefly employed in the kitchen garden, and in family and table attendance. . . . [and] can be fully recommended for honesty and sobriety,” seemed attuned to the dilemma of an enslaved man forced to live apart from his wife. This unidentified slave owner

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instructed his agent, merchant John Broome, to insist that anyone interested in acquiring this man meet certain requirements. “The purchaser must be of known sobriety and good character, who lives not above ten miles from Staten-Island. The reason of this limitation is, that his wife now lies there, and after many attempts, he has failed in getting her brought nearer to his present residence; and his being offered to sale is an act of humanity in his master on that account.”14 This owner’s self-congratulatory manifesto brought to light the enslaved man’s unceasing efforts to be nearer his wife, a pattern of behavior that eventually persuaded his master to act in his behalf by putting him up for sale. Masters imposed constraints on parenthood as well as marriage, severely limiting enslaved New Yorkers’ chances to form families. Keeping the mother-child unit intact was as far as most city masters would go toward countenancing the familial bonds of their enslaved workers. But in an urban society where child slaves were far from being an asset, even motherhood was contested by owners who preferred slave women who could not conceive. One “Young Wench about 29 Years old” was recommended because she “drinks no strong Drink, and gets no children.” Another woman of “about thirty six years of age, . . . well known in this city, and [who] bears an universal good character, to which she is justly intitled,” was singled out because “she has no children, nor any likelihood of an increase.” One seller touted a “healthy Negro Wench, about 30 Years of Age, has no children, altho’ she has been married eight or ten Years, had Small-pox, and Measles, can cook, wash, and iron with any Wench in the City.”15 The reader was led to assume that this woman was infertile. Since New Yorkers placed a premium on childless female workers, sellers of enslaved women known for their fertility had to acknowledge this quality as a deficit. The “very likely Negro Wench, about 27 Years old, with a Male Child 5 Months old,” who was offered in December 1765 was described as “very handy, faithful and honest, [and] sold for no fault, but getting children.” Another woman, “a Strong Healthy Wench [who] can do all sorts of House-Work,” was put up for sale “for want of Employment . . . and being apt to get Children, having had two already both dead.” Johannis Roerbach spelled out the reasons why he had to sell “a likely Negro Wench, about 30 Years old, with her two Children, the elder a Girl between 3 and 4 Years; the other a Boy about 1 Year, [a woman who is] a very good conditioned Wench, and can do all manner of house Work.” As he explained, “The only reason of selling her is, because she Breeds; which her present Master and Mistress are averse to, they being advanced in Years.” In the New York City market, a pregnant slave woman might well be put up for sale, as was

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Figure 10.  New Yorkers placed a high value on enslaved women. Bett was sold by John Ernest for ninety-five pounds in June 1764. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, the New York Public Library. Image ID 1244122, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

“a Likely breeding Negro Wench, about 27 Years old, that is now big with Child, for which Reason she would not suit her Master.”16 Despite their preference for a household without slave children, white masters could not enforce chastity on their female slaves, nor did they

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attempt to thwart their maternal instincts. Enslaved women with small children regularly were passed down in city families. In 1751, Jane Gilbert bequeathed “a negro wench and her two children” to her daughter Jane. Henry Riker of the Out Ward left his wife Elizabeth “my Negro woman and her child.” The widow Mary Alexander, a noted merchant, left “my wench called ‘Venus,’ and her two children” to her daughter Catharine Parker and “a negro wench and her son” to her youngest daughter, Susannah. One New Yorker who put slaves up for sale demonstrated respect for the integrity of the mother-child unit. In 1759, Gilbert Forbes advertised a “Likely negro wench, with two children, has had the smallpox and measles, one of 4 years, and the other about 10 months old.” But other city dwellers such as the person who advertised “A Negro Girl between 4 and 7 Years old, that has had the Small-Pox,” had no compunction about cashing in on child slaves’ value as workers. Separating children from their mothers usually occurred after a child reached an age to stand independently. “TO BE SOLD,” read a 1772 notice, “A Likely Negro Girl, about 8 Years old, [who] has had the Small-Pox and Meazels, and is disposed of for no fault.” Masters came to see children not as appendages of their mothers but as potential laborers. In 1761, a “likely Negro Girl, about nine Years old, has had the Small Pox; is healthy and sound” was “sold for no other Reason than being too small to go through the work required.”17 Given the haphazard arrangements under which enslaved husbands and wives were compelled to live, parent-child relations were fraught, since, at best, children had only intermittent contact with their fathers, and once they were fit to work could be removed from their mothers. Enslaved African men, women, and children became pawns uprooted from the people and places they cherished in the transfers of property that followed the decease of a slaveholder, a process structured for the benefit of white families. Decisions not to keep parents and children together were ostensibly made for economic reasons, but they were rooted in masters’ lack of respect for the sanctity of the proto-families of their slaves. Individuals who inherited slaves often thought nothing of consigning to the auction block human beings who might well be related. Such was the case when Teuntje Byvanck’s estate was disposed of. “The Corner House wherein she lived, and Ground thereunto belonging, with several Negro Slaves, House furniture, Shop Goods, and several other Things belonging to the Estate, will be sold at Publick Vendue, to begin on Monday the 29th of . . . January [1750].” Yet even as they were stunting family formation among their enslaved workers, some white masters took steps to weave black women and men into the fabric of their own families. Privileged New Yorkers took a proprietary attitude toward trusted

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family retainers, and on occasion the formal tie between mistress and slave was transformed into a personal relationship between two human beings with an affinity for each other. When Doctor Dupuy decided to sell a nineteen- or twenty-year-old “Negro wench” who had been “brought up in his Family from an Enfant,” he learned that “she is unwilling to be sold, and her Mistress as unwilling to part from her.” Dupuy was “afraid she’ll be stubborn and say she can do nothing,” even though “she can do everything belonging to a House, except milking a Cow.”18 Having formed a close bond with Dupuy’s wife, this young woman was prepared to defy the authority of the master of the house, as was Mrs. Dupuy, who seems to have regarded this woman more as a companion than a servant. Treating black household workers as if they belonged to the family led masters to safeguard favored individuals from the harsher aspects of slavery. Brewer Harmanus Rutgers ordered his executors to “provide a comfortable living for my old negro wench ‘Jane’ and not suffer her to be abused or want.” Richard Nicholls evinced the same sort of solicitude for venerable household slaves when he drafted his 1772 will. “If any of my negroes are old or feeble, my executors are to support them.” These dependents were still on Nicholls’s mind when, in a codicil added in 1774, he ordered that the interest on £300 be used “for the support of my negroes unable to work.” Rutgers and Nicholls, both men of high social standing, wanted to ensure that the final years of elderly slaves who had long labored in their behalf were spent in peace. Practical as well as humanitarian considerations shaped Barnard Rynlander’s instructions regarding the disposition of his sole slave. “I give my negro York unto my three sons in the following manner: That is, as long as he can bring any profit, it shall be equally divided between them. And so in like manner they shall join for his support, and that so as to make the remainder of his days as comfortable as they can.”19 For masters who imagined themselves as father figures, ensuring that their slaves remained within the family was a priority. In his 1762 will, merchant Nicholas Bayard painstakingly allocated the enslaved members of his household to his children, instructing that his son Stephen was to receive “my negro wench ‘Molly’ and my negro man ‘Quimono,’ ” his daughter Elizabeth was to receive “my negro girl ‘Celia,’ ” his daughter Ann was to receive “my negro wench named ‘Eva,’ ” and his son Nicholas was to receive “my negro man ‘Robin.’ ” At times, provision was made for family members to select the slaves they wanted. Adonijah Schuyler’s wife Gertruy was to have “the use of all household goods and 3 negro slaves, which she shall choose, while she remains my widow.” In 1739, baker Teunis Quick introduced a competitive element into this practice, stipulating “My Negro woman and child are

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to be sold to the highest bidder among my children.” Hester Weyman, the widow of printer William Weyman, left precise instructions that spared her slave from the auction block. “My executors are to sell all my real and personal estate, except my wrought plate and my negro ‘Sam,’ at publick venue.” Weyman’s orders regarding Sam were equally explicit. “My negro man ‘Sam’ is to be hired out till my youngest son is 21, and then sold to such of my sons as will pay the most for him.” Samson Benson, a “pott baker,” gave his slave potential influence over his future. “My negro man ‘Artles’ is to be sold to the highest bidder among my children, and if they cannot agree, then he is to have the choice to live with any stranger he shall think fit, provided they can agree upon a price.”20 Some New Yorkers such as widow Catharine Beekman granted their slaves latitude in selecting a new master. “My negro wench ‘Phebe’ may choose her own master.” Elbert Lieverse, a “lime burner” with no wife or children, bequeathed his “negro boy ‘John’ ” to his nephew and his “negro girl ‘Betty’ ” to a friend’s wife, but insisted that “My negro woman Diana shall be so far indulged, in consideration of her good services, as to choose the person she desires to live with.” Tallow chandler James Arden, despite his modest means, wished to give his slaves input into their future situation. Still, he could not afford to lose sight of their value. “My two negro boys may choose their masters, provided they will pay as much as another man would pay.”21 Being a lenient and compassionate master was a mark of virtue to genteel slave-owners like merchant John Watts, who appropriated the trope of indulgence when discussing the buying and selling of slaves in the city. “It’s an invariable indulgence here to permit Slaves of any kind of worth or character who must change Masters to choose those Masters.”22 The operative clause in Watts’s statement—“Slaves of any kind of worth or character”—implied that less meritorious slaves were dealt with more harshly; but Watts, speaking for slaveholding New Yorkers in his circle, accented masters’ lenience. A few masters promised particular slaves their freedom. Such manumissions, though rare in eighteenth-century New York City, are significant because they reveal that the master-slave relationship was malleable. Required by New York law to put up security so that their freed slaves would not become a public charge, masters needed good reasons for emancipating a slave. In his 1770 will, merchant Benjamin Gomez “confirm[ed] the freedom given to my Mustie Wench Kattey to be made free from the Yoke of Slavery after the desease [sic] of my daughter Rachel Gomez as a Reward for her fidelity and faithfull Services to my said daughter.” Widow Eve Scurlock, who relied on her five slaves to keep running her husband’s business as a victualer and tavern keeper, made plain in her 1750 will how grateful she was to them for

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their assistance. “In consideration of the extraordinary fidelity, faithful service, and good behavior of my negro slave Cesar, and my four other slaves, I manumit them and set them free from all manner of slavery and bondage.” Scurlock’s familiarity with these individuals’ needs and talents allowed her to personalize her bequests to them. “I leave to Cesar £4 and a pair of hand irons, and ½ the firewood, soap, and candles, six plates, the English books, and a small looking glass. To my slave Anthony I leave the tools he commonly works with in the carpenter’s trade. To my slave Ann £3 and some household utensils, and my homespun clothes ‘and the cupboard I put my clothes in.’ ”23 These enslaved people had become Eve Scurlock’s family. The close ties that developed over time between masters and particular slaves come to light in testamentary provisions such as that made by Mary Kennedy, the widow of Archibald Kennedy, who left £100 to her stepson Captain Archibald Kennedy “on condition that he manumits and makes free my old and faithful negro woman called ‘Juba’ and pays £100 for her support.” Attorney Joseph Murray simply stated, “My negro Cesar and his mother are to be free, and to have £20 yearly for support.” In 1768, merchant William Walton bequeathed “3 negro women” to his wife Cornelia, but added that after her death “the negro slaves left to her are to be free, and my executors are to give security . . . that they shall not become a public charge.” In addition, he left each one fourteen pounds per annum. Walton, a man of immense wealth, imagined a different future for the enslaved members of his household. “When they are of age, I leave to each £25 to purchase tools to enable them to carry on trades.” Mariner John Area instructed that “My negro ‘Jack’ is to be free, and the Church Wardens and Governors of the Poor are to be secured from his support,” but disclosed his emotional bond to this man by specifying that “my blue coat . . . is for my negro Jack.”24 Manumission, rather than being a unilateral, top-down action, might well have been the culmination of ongoing negotiations between two parties. Paternalistic masters conceived of benevolence toward their slaves not as putting them on the path to independence but as incorporating them into their own family. Creating a hybrid family unit dedicated to the welfare of its white members entailed establishing the master’s family as the object of slaves’ loyalty. One way to accomplish this was to convince enslaved men and women that their devotion to their “family” would translate into material rewards. Such seems to have been the strategy employed by merchant James McEvers who named “5 negroes” who were to be “left £5 each for their faithful service.” Peter Rutgers somehow elicited a personal commitment from his slaves, since his obituary claimed that “his Death is much lamented by his Domesticks.”25 Bent on conjoining their slaves to their own family, paternalistic

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masters presided over the attenuation of slaves’ ties to brethren in the city’s embryonic black community. Masters’ hopes of orchestrating family life along these idyllic lines were dashed when presumably contented slaves exploded. After being told he would be punished for “stealing a small Quantity of Rum from his Master,” an enslaved man “belonging to Mr. Gamble” and heretofore attuned to his master’s wishes revealed his pent-up anger. The fact of being “threatened with correction . . . he seemed to resent most maliciously, having before been always treated with great Kindness.” He was then observed by “a woman in the family to sharpen a knife; she ask’d him what he was going to do with it, he answered to kill his Master.” After waiting a long time for his master to return home, long enough no doubt for him to recognize that his grand gesture had made his situation hopeless, the enslaved man “went into the Garret and hang’d himself with a Handkerchief.”26 As rage mutated into despair, the frustration that caused a man trapped in the nightmare of slavery to contemplate homicide resulted in his suicide. The suicide of “Tom, a Negro Fellow, belonging to William Bates,” casts additional light on the enmity festering beneath the veneer of harmonious relations between slaves and masters. In August 1765, he “went from home, seemingly in good Humour, not having had before, any known Cause, nor shown any Appearance of Displeasure, or Uneasiness, and with his Handkerchief, hang’d himself, in an old House where he was found about 4 Hours after he had been missing; his Knees bent, and his Toes on the Ground.” The official finding of “Self-Murder” concealed the internal struggle of an enslaved man likely ground down by a train of humiliations at the hands of people who had no clue to his true feelings.27 An “old Negro Woman, who had belonged to Mr. Isaac De peyster,” ended her life tragically because she stood her ground rather than conforming to the rules laid down by her master. Being a slave for so many years evidently had demoralized her, causing her to be “notoriously addicted to Theft, Drunkenness and other vices.” When her body was discovered “in the Fields, at the new Powder-House,” in August 1765, it was clear that the De Peysters’ disregard for this refractory retainer hastened her death. Because “she had long been a nuisance to her Master’s Family: and having been out on Monday Evening, [she] was refused Admittance, and died thro’ old Age and want of proper Nourishment.”28 The prominent De Peysters had failed to convert this aged slave into one of their tribe. A few slaves whose rage knew no bounds were intrepid enough to act in the face of overwhelming odds. When a fire broke out “in a Garret in a House on Stone Street” in June 1750, it “was conjectured to have been done

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on Purpose by one of the Negroes belonging to the House.” The perpetrator of this act was put in jail. Another slave, infuriated at being forced to endure deprivation in the face of luxury, faced a more awful fate. “Cuffee, a Negro belonging to James Alexander, Esq; received sentence of Death, for feloniously breaking open and stealing several Goods from his Mistress’s Shop.”29 Perhaps nothing could compare to the feelings of a mother who watched helplessly as her offspring perished as a consequence of the marginal care they received. In 1760, two child slaves who slept in “the loft of a back kitchen” were consumed by a fire, which the newspaper alleged was “occasioned by the Carelessness of a Negro Wench, by her sticking a Candle to a Beam in the Loft when she went to put her two Children to sleep.”30 Likely exhausted from a hard day’s labor and blamed for a conflagration that caused her master John Thurman huge financial losses, this mother was left to grieve for her children. Enslaved mothers who could not come to grips with the thought of rearing a child in a house ruled by a white master contemplated extreme measures. Fanny, “a Mulatto Wench,” risked fleeing from the home of Capt. Thomas Davis in 1759 “with her young Child about eight months old.” In August 1762, New Yorkers learned that “a Negro Wench, with a Mulatto Child, named Sue” had run away from Isaac Johnston about three months ago and was “supposed to be harboured about Amboy, and pretends to be free.”31 Pregnant slaves stood on the precipice. A handful determined not to introduce their offspring to a life of slavery and let their babies die soon after birth. What looks to have been a case of infanticide was reported in May 1736, when “a small Infant in a Wigg Box, and partly buried underground” was discovered in “the Negroes Burial-Place.” The news item stated that “it is strongly suspected that it was Murdered.” The prospect of having a baby that would be condemned to a life of slavery may have driven some women who thought they were pregnant to suicide. In September 1749, “a Negro Girl of about 15 Years of Age, belonging to Capt. Tingley of this place, fell out of a Garret Window three Story, of which unhappy fall she was so bruised, that she dyed in a few Hours, the family observed that she had been for some time disordered in her Sences.” An unwanted pregnancy also may explain the action of “a negro Wench belonging to Lewis Evans, Taylor, who had hanged herself the Night before [in July 1759] in her Master’s Garret.”32 Drastic solutions—running away, infanticide, and suicide—did not seem practicable to most enslaved New Yorkers, who instead coped with duress by reinventing family life in a form that compensated for the deficits resulting from masters’ proscriptions. As a substitute for the elaborate kinship networks that threaded the city’s white society, enslaved New Yorkers’ knit, piecemeal, a communal blanket composed of individuals who intermittently combined

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to soften the blows, insults, and affronts that punctuated the days of those in bondage. Impeded by law, urban demography, and the callousness of masters from enjoying stable marital unions, enslaved men and women improvised alternative ways of satisfying their needs for intimate companionship. Forging links to a wide range of African American people, enslaved as well as free, they grew to rely on each other and to revel in each other’s company. “Fictive kin” stood in for blood relatives in an environment where slaves were arbitrarily moved around, sometimes to distant places. After “Mary-Ann, a Negro Girl about 13 Years of Age, belonging to Mr. David De Voor at Turtle-Bay, was found drowned near that Place” in June 1771, the coroner’s inquest concluded that “she had met with a Disappointment from her Sisters, who went to a Frolick (as it is termed) without taking her along with them, which had such an Effect upon her, that it was occasion of her destroying herself.”33 Did it matter to this bereft girl whether these “Sisters” were blood relatives or fictive kin? In place of the family members whom she had been forced to abandon in her African homeland, “Belinda, a Negro Wench belonging to Mr. Cook,” befriended “a Negro Woman belonging to Mr. Marston,” a native of the same region in Africa. The close bond between these two women came to light when Belinda was mistakenly accused of murdering this woman in 1767. Eventually acquitted, Belinda benefited from the testimony of a reliable witness who spoke of the comradeship the women shared. “The Deceased and the Prisoner were Country Women, a remarkable Friendship had subsisted between them, they were often together, nor was it known that there had been any Quarrel between them.”34 White New Yorkers discounted the attachment of enslaved men and women to their nascent community, not comprehending the crucial role collective identity played for uprooted Africans and their progeny. John Watts signaled his own opacity when he registered amusement at slaves’ reluctance to be transferred outside New York City. “There is no persuading them to leave their Country (if I may call it so) their acquaintance & friends to explore what to their narrow minds appears a New World.” Instrument maker Anthony Lamb, by contrast, perceived how vital communal ties were to African Americans adrift in the colony. Seeking to recover a “well-set negro wench, named Jane,” who formerly had belonged to John Burling, who had given her “a note or pass, to look for a master,” Lamb suspected that “she may possibly make use of [it] now, to go unmolested.” As Lamb saw it, Jane likely would turn to her own community for help. She was “supposed to be harbour’d by some of her own colour in or about this city.”35

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One exceptional New York master took into account the distinctive nature of slaves’ kinship ties as he planned the private sale of a twenty-year-old black woman “who can be well recommended for her Honesty and Industry; [and is] one that never runs out, or goes from home; . . . is very healthy, and has had the small-pox.” In his May 1769 advertisement, he stated bluntly that “he will not dispose of her to any Person but such as reside in this City, on Account of her Connection.” Noting that she “is sold for no Fault whatsoever, unless the having a child may be called one,” he offered generous terms to prospective buyers. Not only would the woman’s “young child . . . be given to the Purchaser of the Mother,” but “a Bond, with security, will answer as well as the Cash.”36 For enslaved individuals who were sold and resold, the link between family and place was strong. Amelia, “a black Negro Wench” who ran away from Philip Kissick in 1763, had made known her longing for her previous home, so Kissick had little doubt where she was headed. “She is a Barbados Wench, and she is very desirous to go to her own country.” William Smith Jr. sensed that Lewis Francois, a “quite black” man who “came not long since from Jamaica” and was fluent in English and French, missed his familiar culture. “He has been seen lurking about the Town, and is supposed to be harboured by West-Indian Negroes of his Acquaintance. Honing in on a fugitive’s destination was not hard in the case of recently uprooted slaves. When he launched his search for Cato, a twenty-two-year-old man described as very black and looking “grum,” in 1772, John De Peyster Jr. noted that “3 months ago he belonged to Charles Tooker of the borough of Elizabeth, county of Essex,” in New Jersey, and then surmised “It is supposed that he is gone that way.”37 Enslaved New Yorkers were most successful in countering the cultural dominion of masters when they carved out mental space in which to disassociate themselves from the everyday roles they were expected to perform. On the most basic level, this involved spending time in places beyond masters’ surveillance—in the streets, at the water pump, and especially in mean tippling houses where they quenched their thirst, danced, gambled, and engaged in illicit trade.38 In congenial surroundings and unencumbered by the regimentation of household routine, men and women legally defined as property discovered their voices and gained the confidence to express themselves openly. In the course of entertaining themselves, they demarcated the distance between their own opinions and those foisted on them by powerful white people.

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Physical separation was not the only route to mental independence. Enslaved men and women found recesses in the homes of their masters where they could nurture beliefs at odds with those dictated to them. This is precisely what Belinda, the accomplished woman who cooked for John Watts, did. Inoffensive in all other respects, she chose to put her trust in time-honored religious practices that struck members of the Watts family as sinister. Belinda’s patent repudiation of her master’s church-centered faith was rooted in African traditions she had preserved despite her enslavement. By 1762, when Belinda was removed from the Watts household, many enslaved New Yorkers had encountered Protestant Christianity through the agency of the SPG, the Anglican organization that sponsored the school for blacks that Huguenot Elias Neau had begun in the first years of the eighteenth century. Blacks’ opportunities for a Christian education were enlarged in 1760, when the Bray School, an auxiliary enterprise funded by English philanthropists, was launched. Here Mrs. Lourier, a schoolmistress characterized by Trinity Church rector Samuel Auchmuty as “very diligent & careful,” instructed thirty and sometimes more enslaved boys and girls in “sewing, knitting, reading, and learning their Prayers, [and] Catechis[m].”39 Exposure to Christianity affected enslaved Africans’ position vis-à-vis their masters in ways not readily apparent in old Anglican-slanted histories lauding SPG catechists for their enterprise in manufacturing tractable slaves prepared to endure suffering in this world as a prelude to rewards in the next. Such works depict slaves as passive in their transactions with Anglican educators, whereas recent scholarship makes clear that those in bondage were not uniformly receptive to Church of England doctrines mandating submission to authority. Christianization in New York City did not proceed seamlessly, and the motives of enslaved pupils were not always pure. Learning to read was the primary objective of some, while others used the time when they purportedly were at school to snatch precious moments away from work, as when “some [slaves] have under pretense of going to catechising taken opportunity to [be] absent from their masters service many days.”40 However invested slave pupils were in becoming Christians, they found themselves enmeshed in an educational process that inadvertently had the effect of compromising masters’ cultural authority over their dependents. By giving enslaved students access to alternative authority figures in the person of teachers and ministers, Anglicans precipitated a transformation in relations between masters and slaves. Once people legally classified as slaves realized that men with impeccable credentials—the clergy of Trinity Church—were judging them not by the condition of their body but by the state of their soul, they were emboldened to form their own opinions of their masters’

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morality. When the backers of the Bray School importuned “such Persons as have a Regard for the Souls of their poor Young Slaves, especially those born in their House, [to] be ready to assist in forwarding and promoting this laudable undertaking,” they were proposing something radical, that owners cede their authority over child slaves to educators whose outlook on the world was shaped by religion rather than the marketplace.41 Such a demand went against the grain for white New Yorkers who cared little for the spiritual life of slaves whom they conceived of as property. From the time Elias Neau opened his school for blacks, resistance to incorporating slaves into the Christian community was widespread. Masters who believed that baptism would undermine the primary justification for enslavement adamantly opposed converting slaves even after the New York Assembly enacted a law in 1706 guaranteeing that baptism would not alter a slave’s status. Suspicions that the Christian message of salvation would energize those in bondage spiked after the 1712 slave rebellion and resurfaced in the wake of the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741. But the tide began to turn after Samuel Auchmuty inaugurated his educational work among the city’s blacks at midcentury. “I am very sure there are very few Negro Children born here but what are baptized,” Auchmuty declared in 1761. “For some Years past I have baptized not less than 80, or 90 Negro Children, & often upwards of 100; besides, several adults. Dr. Barclay has also baptized many, & the Dutch Ministers & the Dissenters dayly do the same, and yet they continue peaceable Slaves.” Although Auchmuty’s claim about the activities of Dutch Reformed and Dissenting clergymen cannot be corroborated, the Anglican record of baptisms was sterling. In 1764, Auchmuty reported that from January 1, 1763, to January 1, 1764, “Dr Barclay & myself have baptized . . . 431 Adults and children which is more than have been baptized in every other congregation in this city.”42 Still, support for placing enslaved boys and girls under the tutelage of persons who cared more for their piety than for their productivity was far from universal in New York City. Anglican pleas to masters to exempt enslaved boys and girls from household duties so they could spend several hours every week attending classes and public worship rang hollow in a society whose history had been entwined with slavery from the earliest days of Dutch rule. To win over those concerned about depleting the domestic labor force, Auchmuty outlined a sweeping plan that called for the education of slaves to commence at a young age and continue over a period of years. “Taking them early before they have imbib’d bad principles affords me a prospect of a much greater harvest, than I could expect, from the same Number grown up, & used to a wrong way of thinking.” Auchmuty’s fondest hope was that “none are admitted until

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I am assured by their Masters [or] Mistresses, that they shall continue in the School, till [they] are perfectly instructed, in the principles of our most holy Religion; which was not the Case with some that have left it, being wanted to tend Children & c.”43 In Auchmuty’s regimen, catechetical instruction in the classroom was linked to participation in Anglican worship. “I take great Care that they constantly attend divine Service on the Lord’s Day; & also, that they attend my plain & familiar Lecture to the Blacks, between the two services; they then hear the Adults Catechized, & are also Catechized themselves.” Becoming good Anglicans took place in a collective context as enslaved children studied and worshipped together over the years, forming cohorts of converts immersed in Anglican life. “The whole little Flock constantly attend divine service on the Lord’s Day,” and “some of the bigest among them attend also on prayer Days.” Completing the course of study marked the starting point for a life of Christian practice. “Those that have left the School, after proper Instruction, attend every Sunday Evening on Mr. Ogilvie’s, with the Adult blacks, & are Catechised.”44 Despite the tangible results of SPG-sponsored classes as measured in numbers of blacks baptized and admitted to communion, an undercurrent of resistance to Auchmuty’s program persisted among slave owners made uneasy by the loss of labor. When fourteen enslaved pupils were withdrawn from the Bray School in 1764, Auchmuty knew why. “Their Masters, as they grew handy, and were pretty well instructed in reading & c. could not as they say, do any longer without them.” His tone then became wistful. “I could wish their Masters in general could be prevailed upon to let them stay a little longer at School; but alass! such is their eagerness for their Service, and such the prejudice in favour of keeping their Slaves in Ignorance, for fear of being rendered by Instruction too knowing, that I have a hard Task to persuade them that it is certainly their Duty to have them instructed, and that their poor Souls are as precious in the sight of God, as theirs.” Auchmuty comforted himself with the knowledge that masters who took religion seriously approved of his plan. “With many worthy Christians I have the pleasure to succeed, & their Blacks constantly attend me, and their Numbers increase.”45 Among the substantial minority of enslaved New Yorkers who became at least nominal Anglicans were some whose owners were not attached to the Church of England. In 1759, “a negro child” named Margaret was put forward by Dutch Reformed merchant Evert Bancker to be christened in Trinity Church. The next year Bancker enrolled two other baptized slaves in his household, both five years old, in the new Bray School. Richard entered in October 1760 and was said to be “learning to spell,” and Mary, who had

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been admitted on September 22, 1760, was singled out as one who “Reads well.” When Mary died in December 1773, Bancker felt responsible for arranging a Christian burial for her, consonant with the Anglican beliefs she had absorbed during her time at the Bray School. His household accounts show a payment of eighteen shillings to Thomas Whaley “for the Funeral Charges in burying my Negro Girl Mary in the English Church Yard the 27 Dec[ember] last.”46 Bancker, who shortly before this had paid for “1 Year pew hire in the Gallery of the North [Dutch Reformed] Church,” implicitly was acknowledging that his own church did little to provide spiritual care for enslaved blacks. Enslaved New Yorkers outside the Anglican orbit had no access to formal Christian education, but they were exposed to various forms of religious practice at local churches. The city’s Dutch Reformed church was notably inhospitable to blacks, if the paucity of slave baptisms and marriages recorded is any indicator. When Elias Neau observed in 1719 that “Dutch and French masters make their Servants look after their houses and Children while they goe to church,” he was implying that those held in bondage in the city’s Dutch Reformed households were not welcome at worship. A 1767 directive given the new “Door-keeper, Bell-ringer and Grave-digger” of the Garden Street Church “to prevent any disorders in the church, by children, negroes, or dogs, either before, during and after service-time,” also exemplifies the low esteem in which blacks were held by congregants. None would have objected to the consistory’s decision in 1770 to accede to John van Zandt’s request “to take a young Negro, valued at £45., in payment of [a] debt.”47 By the 1760s, blacks were finding a religious home in the city’s Presbyterian church, where, between 1766 and 1775, fifteen black people were baptized, all but three of them slaves.48 In the cases of four of the seven enslaved children baptized, the child’s parents are not identified: “Adam, [a] Negro Child Belonging to Mrs. Mary Fox,” “George, a Negro Child belonging to Henry Sheaf,” “Jane a negro Child, the property of John Grigg,” and “Hannah, a Negro Child, the property of Levinus & Mary Clarkson.” These children presumably were baptized at the behest of their masters, but in three other instances where the name of one or both enslaved parents is included in the record, the possibility exists that a parent played a role in this decision. “Phenix, son of Phenix a Negro (belonging to Geo Shaw) & Peggy his Wife, belonging to the Widow Rickers, born October 10th, 1767,” was baptized in the Presbyterian church on November 12, 1767. Phenix’s master clearly prized Protestant slaves, since “Phenix, a Negro Man belonging to Mr. Shaw,” was baptized on April 17, 1772. “Flora, daughter of Ben and Tamar his Wife, both the Property of John Smith, Esqr.,” was born on July 31, 1773, and baptized on

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October 17, 1773, and “Charles, son of Cate, both Slaves to Doctor William Talman of the City of New York,” was baptized on June 30, 1774. Enslaved blacks old enough to decide for themselves, such as “Sylvia a negro Wench, belonging to Ann Smith, widow; aged about nineteen,” “Letty, a Negro Woman belonging to Doctor Farquar,” “Cato, A Negro Man of Peter Golets,” and “Lydia, A Negroe Wench belonging to Andrew Marcelis,” likely expressed a desire to become Christians to their masters. The 1769 enumeration of the 386 communicants of the First Presbyterian Church included six people noted as Negroes. One woman was identified as “Dinah, a free Negra” (probably “Dinah, A Negro Wench” baptized on March 9, 1766), but the legal status of the other five was not recorded.49 The select black men and women incorporated into New York’s Presbyterian congregation came under the scrutiny of men designated to uphold Christian moral standards. In 1765, the church sessions reviewed the case of “a Free Negro Man named Cato,” a communicant, who “after he became a Widdower . . . had been guilty of antinup[tia]l fornication with a Negro Woman now his Wife, who professed herself a Christian of the Eng[lis]h Church, & had against his desire got their Child the Fruit of their Fornication, Baptized by a Clergyman of that Church.” The problem arose when this free black man, wishing to have the couple’s second child baptized in his own Presbyterian church, was confronted with a damaging report of his prior actions. “Cato had Conversed with Mr Bostwick our Late Minister, concerning his Guilt of Antinuptial Fornication, when he appeared Insenseable of any Crime therein; from his Prejudices of Heathenism whereby he justified that part of his Conduc[t] by his Marrying the same Woman he had Defiled.” The consequence had been that “Mr Bostwick had Refused to Baptise his Child or admit him to the Privileges of Christians, until he should profess his Repentance for said Guilt & his belief of  & obedience to the purer Rules of Christianity.” David Bostwick’s tacit assumption that Cato’s racial identity predisposed him to heathen values, coupled with his demand that Cato adhere to the “purer Rules of Christianity,” reveals the tenuous status of blacks in the community of Presbyterians, even though the men of the sessions eventually decided to admonish Cato in private for this “Scandal scarce known to any others of the Congregation or People of the City.” The racial template that underlay the policies of New York’s Presbyterian church was fully exposed in February 1766, when it was “ordered that Mr Brown imploy a Proper White Person under him, to serve as Sexton in the Room of the Negro which he now imploys[,] the Trustees being of Opinion that it is improper to Imploy a Negro in that Business.”50 Blacks were treated respectfully by the city’s Lutherans and Moravians. Historically accepting of free blacks in the congregation, Lutherans

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occasionally consented to baptize a slave. On April 9, 1749, “in our meeting at Nieuw Jork, Dina a child of a negress of Doctor William Huit” was baptized as well as “a negro named Jack and a negress Mallij.” In 1752, Lutheran minister Muhlenberg remarked on the spiritual transformation of an enslaved woman who had listened to his sermons. “A widow in the congregation has a Negro slave who comes diligently to our Dutch and English services and puts many nominal Christians to shame by her life.” This woman “began to weep bitterly” upon learning that Muhlenberg was to depart and confided in him that “she had experienced the power of the preached Word in her heart, had never in her whole life been so comforted in her soul.” Blacks noted for their spirituality were welcomed respectfully by the Moravians as well, as the case of Andrew the Moor showed. By 1774, New York’s Moravian congregation included eight people identified as Negroes, though it is not clear whether these individuals were free blacks or slaves.51 But it was the Methodists, with their unrelenting attacks on well-off New Yorkers—those most likely to own several slaves—for squandering their time on frivolous pursuits at the expense of devotion, who set the world on fire for slaves. Methodists not only cast doubt on slave owners’ standing as Christians, but accused them of ignoring their dependents’ spiritual needs. “If the people who keep them in a state of slavery would but take pains to have them instructed in the Religion of Jesus, it would be some compensation for the loss of their liberty; but this, alas! is too much neglected.” Welcomed at Methodist meetings and inspired by evangelical preaching, enslaved African Americans mustered the courage to confront owners who attempted to thwart their independent religious choice. Joseph Pilmore related the story of one resolute female slave who resisted her owner’s demands. “A few days ago the Lord was pleased to manifest his Love to a poor Black, her mistress has persecuted her very much because she came to the Methodist church, but she thought it was better to be ‘beaten for hearing the word of God here; than to burn in Hell to all eternity.’ ”52 The intensity with which another enslaved woman presented her case for becoming a Methodist presaged a new tenor in relations between slave and master. Prior to listening to Methodist exhorters she had remained silent, perhaps internalizing her master’s definition of her not as a woman or as a Christian, but solely as a household laborer owing him service. But, as Methodist Richard Boardman recounted, once she grasped the liberating potential of Christianity, she found her voice. Now able to visualize herself as much more than a worker, she rejected her master’s contention that she lacked spiritual stature. Savoring the truths proclaimed by Methodist preachers and embarked on a quest for meaning in her life of servitude, she was greatly

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distressed at being barred from attending preaching. “She could neither eat nor sleep, because her Master would not suffer her to come to hear the word.” According to Boardman, “She wept exceedingly, saying, ‘I told my Master I would do more work than ever I used to do, if he would but let me come.’ ” Holding up her labor as an item of value, this woman negotiated with her master for permission to attend Methodist meetings, astutely appealing to his conception of her as a worker by promising that she would “do everything in my power to be a good servant” if he let her have her way in the matter of religion. Evidently a bargain was struck, since she continued listening to the Methodists expound the gospel in the city. Her devotion culminated in an experience of conversion, and she was said to be filled with joy until her death.53 Christianity gave New Yorkers of African descent a new lens through which to imagine their lives. Emboldened to articulate to their masters their yearning for an enhanced spiritual life, they sometimes were given latitude to join a congregation of their own choosing. On May 21, 1771, “Judith, een Slaavin van Dr. J. Rogers,” was admitted as a member of the Dutch Reformed Church on a confession of faith. Had this enslaved woman, perhaps a Dutch speaker, convinced her master, Presbyterian minister John Rodgers, that her spiritual needs would be best served in the Dutch Reformed Church? Did Grace, another female slave, persuade her master David Gomez, a member of a well-known clan of Jewish merchants in the city, to allow her to enter the Anglican fold? Grace was the one adult slave christened in Trinity Church in 1759.54 When a faithful black Anglican was singled out by Samuel Auchmuty in 1774 to preside over a new Thursday evening religious meeting for his peers at the home of “Mr. Gerard G. Beekman, a merchant of opulence among us,” at the behest of “a number of good Christians among us,” the seeds of an autonomous black religious community were planted. In Auchmuty’s words, “One of the blacks, a sincere good man in my absence reads such parts of the Church Service as I have directed, & then such Sermons as I order, best adapted to their Capacities.” Although this tableau—a family setting, benevolent whites, a respectful black man following the lead of his clerical mentor—represented the essence of the paternalistic brand of religion Anglicans admired, the reality of a black man vested with the authority to speak to an assembly of slaves all present “by the consent of their Masters & Mistresses” marked not only a transition in the apportionment of cultural power in white households, but also a watershed in the group life of the city’s enslaved Christians. A literate man whose spiritual qualities were evident to both whites and blacks had been empowered to fill a role akin to that of pastor. Who would doubt that his words and deeds carried unusual weight

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among the city’s blacks, whatever their religious beliefs? Auchmuty, encouraged by the success of his experiment, proposed a subsidy for “some honest good Christian, who would constantly attend upon the poor Slaves at their Meetings [and] read for them.” He predicted that “these Negro’s [sic] blessed with an able Instructor would, (as indeed many of them are now) soon become qualified to instruct their own Children.”55 The appropriation of Christian values by enslaved converts opened a new front in the household contest over cultural authority. Given reason to believe they had immortal souls, they mobilized their resources in pursuit of salvation, all the while glorying in the knowledge that they were the spiritual equals of their white masters. As practicing Protestants, these men and women gained leverage with those masters inclined to let their dependents spend time in church, an environment where their stature as beings endowed with moral capacity was recognized. Encouraged to read and pray, they unintentionally were being equipped to transcend their servile domestic roles. Barely perceptible but nonetheless consequential concessions from white masters would one day ramify into a widespread recognition of African Americans as devoted Christians.

Ch ap ter   7

Sabotaging the Civilizers

The Protestant gentlemen who considered themselves to be the arbiters of manners and morals in eighteenth-century New York City never doubted that their social position entitled them to define the standards by which people beneath them in rank were expected to measure themselves. Middling New Yorkers, both those who emulated their betters in hopes of inching into polite circles and those whose religiously inspired sobriety led them to deplore the excesses associated with the genteel lifestyle, had no reason to dispute the elite’s core beliefs centering on Protestant Christianity and civility. Less fortunate city dwellers, especially the impoverished and the unfree, had grounds for objecting to the rules imposed on them from above, but even though these maxims were incongruous in the context of their lives, the daily struggle to survive left them with a stark choice—exhibit the qualities that gentlemen deemed appropriate for people in their station or risk forfeiting access to employment, shelter, or a bit of extra food or clothing. Nonetheless, numerous denizens of New York’s netherworld behaved in ways contrary to elite expectations and in so doing risked sanctions from those who controlled vital resources. Intermittently but persistently, city dwellers without credentials transgressed the rules set by gentlemen. By contesting the dominion of the city’s great men in small but discernible ways, people disdained as nonentities diminished the elite’s cultural authority. 198

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Gentlemen’s claim to cultural supremacy rested not only on refined manners and an aptitude for sociability but also on an ingrained sense of responsibility to improve the moral condition of the destitute, the enslaved, and the native peoples living on the fringes of English settlement. To be a man of virtue was to shoulder the burden of guiding the lesser peoples of the world toward a more civilized existence anchored by the universal truths of Protestant Christianity. The centrality of Protestant beliefs in elite New Yorkers’ portfolio of values is apt to be obscured by the shrillness of anti-Catholic politics in the eighteenth-century British world. Virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric coursed through Britain’s empire, a vocabulary of hate employed against the Spanish, the French and their Indian allies, the Stuart pretender to the English throne, and, of course, the pope. Colonists of all backgrounds united in heaping abuse on the common Catholic enemy. Men of low social standing took to the streets in Pope’s Day processions. In 1755, onlookers of all ranks witnessed the “ ‘Devil Pope and Pretender’ [being] carried about the city on a bier at night, hideously formed, and as humorously contrived, the Devil standing behind the Pope, seemingly paying his compliments to him, with a three prong’d Pitchfork in one Hand, with which at Times he was made to thrust his Holiness on the Back, and a Lanthorn in the other, the young Pretender standing before the Pope, waiting his Commands.” The raucous popular celebration, though not to the liking of the elite, was seemingly condoned. New York’s Jews, seeking to enhance their credentials among the city’s Protestant elite, demonstrated their attachment to the Protestant cause in April 1741 by signing a loyalty oath to George II in which “they pledged to abjure ‘that damnable Doctrine & position, that princes excommunicated or deprived by the pope, or any authority of the see of Rome, may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects.’ ” Protestant clergymen offered biblical justification for taking up arms against the agents of Catholic power on the frontier. In 1755, Trinity Church rector Samuel Auchmuty voiced his hope that New York’s men “will be ready to draw ye swords in defence of ye Country & ye Religion & all [that] is near & dear to a Xtian” and declared that “Death itself is far more eligible than Slavery & Popery.”1 For New York’s gentlemen, backing the military crusade against Catholics, crucial as it was to the politics of empire, was by no means the only way to affirm their deep-seated Protestant faith. In the contest for souls, education also was considered vital. Men of privilege eager to bring nonbelievers into the Protestant fold signaled their readiness to support those charged with inculcating civilized manners and Christian tenets into men and women on the

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edges of society. For some, this impulse was channeled toward Native Americans beyond the city’s borders. Presbyterian gentlemen, working under the aegis of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), an organization whose original objective of eradicating the Catholic-tinged culture of the denizens of the Scottish Highlands had broadened to include converting Native Americans to Protestant Christianity, dedicated themselves to saving Indian souls beginning in 1740, when a New York Board of Correspondents of the SSPCK was formed. Under the direction of successive Presbyterian ministers—Ebenezer Pemberton, David Bostwick, and John Rodgers—committed to bringing the Protestant faith to unconverted Native Americans, they sponsored the missionary work of Azariah Horton, David Brainerd, and then his brother, John Brainerd. In June 1761, Samson Occum, a Mohegan trained at the Indian school by Rev. Eleazer Wheelock in Connecticut and recently ordained on Long Island by Rev. Samuell Buell, was invited by Bostwick to preach before the Presbyterian congregation and to solicit funds for his journey inland to meet the Oneidas. Occum recounted his successes to his mentor. “The Last Sabbath after the afternoon Service was over; at Mr Bostwick’s Congregation, they made a Collection for me and my Family’s Support, and it mounted to £60:s15:d7 and Monday Evening the Baptists made a Collection for me at their Meeting House, and it Mounted to £13:0:0.” He was jubilant at securing influential sponsors. “My Recommendations are done by the Most Noted Gentlemen of this place,” he wrote, adding, “The Letters that I have to the Genrals are Sign’d by The Honbl. Wm. Smith Esqr, Revd David Bostwick, Mr [Peter Van Brugh] Livingston, Mr David Van Horne, Willm Livingston, Esqr.”2 Samson Occum was living proof that Native Americans could become Christians, and his example inspired New York’s leading Presbyterians to lend financial and moral support to Eleazer Wheelock’s campaign for his Indian school. Lawyer William Livingston, who was instrumental in this endeavor, informed Wheelock in January 1764 that George Whitefield had preached a sermon at the Presbyterian church for the purpose of raising a collection for the Indian school. “Mr. David Van Horne[,] James Jauncey Thomas Smith and myself, having offered our services to stand at the Doors and receive the Collections, & undertaken to remit you the money, we collected £120 this Currency.” Although the cold weather had resulted in “a much thinner audience than usual [and] the Collection fell considerably short of our expectations,” Livingston assured Wheelock that “the bare rendering your undertaking so much more Public than it was before among us, & the advantageous account Mr. Whitefield gave of it in the Pulpit, will . . . prove as Beneficial to it, than the Collection itself.”3

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The imperative to Christianize natives on the frontier was of paramount importance to William Livingston. “In a religious Consideration, we ought certainly to be covered with Confusion, for suffering such numbers of Pagans to live almost at our Doors without propagating among them the Glorious Gospel, or even the knowledge of the true God.” Because enlightening the “savages” was essential, Livingston urged Wheelock’s son Ralph to extract “a Contribution in ye vast Rich Church call’d The Dutch Reformed Protestant Church in NYork.” Proposing that “a Memorial should be laid before ye Chh. Directed To the Ministers, Elders, & Deacons,” he suggested as well that “Letters recommending ye Affair & bespeaking of friendship” be sent to ministers Lambertus De Ronde and Archibald Laidlie, the latter of whom should be written to “wth friend ship & freedom, as his Congregation sett much by him, and his advice.” Wheelock implemented Livingston’s strategy and received a heartening response from De Ronde. “The Members of our Consistory unanimously concluded, that . . . a collection Should be made in our Church for promoting Such Christian work.” Confiding to Wheelock that he daily prayed for “the advancement of the gospel in the world and for the Success of all the faithfull Servants of God, especially among the Heathen Nations,” De Ronde was pleased that “our exhortations to liberality by God’s Blessing have been of Such effect,” and surely was gratified when he received Wheelock’s thanks for “the truly Generous Collection of . . . £88.6.6.” In August 1765, when both De Ronde and Archibald Laidlie met with Wheelock’s emissary, Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker, to discuss Indian affairs, they encouraged him to seek support for the school in Europe and in particular from the Dutch ministers in the Classis of Amsterdam. Laidlie offered to “write to the Revd. Mes R. Walker & J. Erskine, Ministers in Edinburg—to the Revd Mr Longueville & some other Gentlemen in Holland.” He cautioned however that “it would not be worth while to go there unless the Gentlemen who went could speak Dutch.” The generosity of New York’s Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and Baptists in contributing funds for Wheelock’s educational mission to Native Americans was heralded by sympathetic Londoners who enumerated over twenty-five city residents in a list of Friends of Religion in America in A Brief Narrative of the Indian Charity School . . . Founded and Carried on by . . . The Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, published in 1766.4 Concern for the spiritual welfare of Native Americans did not blind New Yorkers to the political benefits of creating reliable Protestant allies on the frontier. Presbyterian minister John Rodgers and those in his circle became patrons of Joseph Johnson, another of Wheelock’s protégés, and Johnson, in turn, praised Rodgers as “a Member of that Honorable Board who is remarkably friendly” and someone who “believes me to be Deserving of

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Encouragement.” Yet the political underside of the civilizers’ project came into view when it was announced that Johnson, “an Indian of the Mohegan Tribe,” was to preach on the evening of December 22, 1774, in the Presbyterian church. “A Collection was to be raised for him to defray a considerable Expence he has been at, in preparing the Way for the Removal of his Tribe, and the Remains of six other Tribes in that Vicinity, who are chiefly Christians, unto the Oneida Country: An Event that promises the most salutary Effects to this Province.” No wonder Johnson was applauded for his “great Merit in this Affair and his deserving Character” and was “encouraged in the Prosecution of his Design by the Kindness of . . . our Lietuenant Governor, several Gentlemen of the Council, the Mayor of this City, and other principal Gentlemen.”5 The commendations Joseph Johnson received from government officials belied the tepid support that missions to the Indians received from New York City’s Anglicans. British politicians realized that Indians who came under the influence of Protestant ministers and schoolmasters could prove to be priceless partners in the struggle against French Catholics and their Indian allies, but neither the imperial government nor the SPG allotted adequate resources to implement such a policy. The missionary field in the northern colonies was, in effect, ceded to Dissenters. Sir William Johnson, the influential superintendent of Indian affairs who lived near the New York frontier, initially backed the efforts of the New York Presbyterians affiliated with the SSPCK. In December 1761 he informed William Smith, David Bostwick, Peter Van Brugh Livingston, David Van Horne, and William Livingston that “agreable to your desire, I took Mr. Occum with me whom I introduced to the Oneidas & Tuscaroras as a person sent for their Instruction in the Christian Religion.” He even added “I am very sensible of the great importance of ye. Design as well in a Religious, as a Political sense.” But Johnson soon became suspicious of Eleazer Wheelock’s influence on the Indians and urged Anglican leaders to emulate Wheelock and launch their own educational initiatives under the mantle of the SPG.6 Trinity’s Rector Auchmuty enthusiastically enlisted in the cause. “I am very solicitous that some worthy Clergyman may be sent among [the Indians] before their . . . Religious principles are debauched by the stupid Bigots that Wheelock is continually turning too [sic] go among them,” he wrote William Johnson in 1768. Auchmuty thanked Johnson for “the account you have given me of one of Wheelock’s Cubs—Surely such Wretches ought not to be suffered to go among the Indians. Such independent fire-brands are wicked eno’ to kindle a Civil War.” Anglican churchgoers, however, exhibited little interest in funding SPG missionaries to serve the Indians on the

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frontier. “The Indians of Conajoharee (The upper Mohock Village) are now very sollicitous to have a Church erected at that place,” William Johnson informed a correspondent in 1769, adding, “I have accordingly Mentioned it to Dr Auchmuty to endeavor to obtain something from his Congregation.” Contributions apparently were not forthcoming. In 1771, Charles Inglis, Trinity’s assistant minister, expressed his hope that a new plan put forward by Johnson would “command Notice and awake the slumbering Charity of many Christians.”7 In contrast to their Anglican counterparts, Presbyterian artisans and tradesmen were persuaded to take a financial stake in the educational outreach to Native Americans sponsored by the leading gentlemen of their congregation. Representing Samson Occum as a good Indian, thereby differentiating him from the majority of Native Americans who ordinarily were associated with savagery, allowed New Yorkers to maintain their prejudices even as it compelled them to weigh the possibility that Christian education could transform select Indians into civilized beings who might help solidify En­glish dominion over the colony. After George Whitefield preached a charity sermon at the Presbyterian church “for the benefit of Mr. Wheelock’s Indian School” in 1764, the New-York Mercury pointed out that “he collected (notwithstanding the current prejudices of many People against Indians) the sum of 120£.”8 By articulating a convincing rationale for contributing to Wheelock’s school, gentlemen civilizers rallied impressionable churchgoers to the cause of Indian education, despite New Yorkers’ widespread distrust of Native American peoples. New York gentlemen’s devotion to the Protestant cause inspired them to back efforts to inscribe Protestant Christian values on a broad canvas, but in practice most directed their energy toward projects close to home that focused on transforming lowly city dwellers into dutiful and virtuous subordinates. The dispensation of charity was instrumental in these endeavors. Historically at the forefront of charitable activities in the city, gentlemen set great store by the ideal of Christian charity transplanted from England, where, in the words of Roy Porter, charity was “the cardinal virtue . . . of genteel humanity, a generous soaring above sordid miserliness and the institutional dribblings of the parish Poor Law.” Expected to exhibit compassion for the stricken, gentlemen acting the part of the good Christian took steps toward ameliorating the suffering of others and thereby enhanced their own chances for salvation. When J. Watts gave “a large Sum of money to relieve the distressed and indigent Inhabitants of this City” in November 1752, he was honored in the New-York Mercury with a poem that made patent the heavenly rewards awaiting him

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for benevolence. “Hail! Great good Man, hail! Patron of the poor . . . in the Next [Life], a Crown of Life receive, which GOD, the righteous Judge to thee will give; Because thou didst the afflicted relieve.” Gentlemen could count on more tangible rewards for their charity in the form of political loyalty, as when the successful candidates in the 1769 election “generously gave £200 for the benefit of the poor of this city,” which was “accordingly distributed.”9 Individuals known for their kindness to the suffering were extolled in funeral sermons, such as the one lauding Dr. John Nicoll for his “sense of duty to GOD, and an affectionate regard to the lives and health of men.” Presbyterian minister Ebenezer Pemberton explained that it was “from this principle . . . that he not only visited the poor, in their sickness, and administered to them, without any prospect of gain; . . . but also with a large and bountiful hand dispensed his charity among them. He was never deaf to the complaints of the miserable; nor blind to the objects of pity and compassion.” Rather, “his hand was continually stretched forth for their relief and support.” The sterling qualities of local luminaries were highlighted in obituaries that featured the subject’s philanthropic disposition. Merchant Henry C. Bogert was praised as “a Friend to all who stood in need of his Assistance: Benevolence and Charity sat perching on his right Hand: The Fatherless and Widow have tasted of his unceasing Bounty.” Philip van Cortlandt was saluted as “a Gentleman of an unblemish’d Character, kind and courteous to all, more especially to the Poor.” Merchant Mordecai Gomez “of the Hebrew Nation,” who died in 1750, “was esteemed a fair trader, and charitable to the poor,” and fellow Jewish merchant Jacob Franks was characterized as “humane and benevolent; a friend to the poor of all Denominations.”10 Clergymen did their best to exhort city residents of means to act charitably toward the unfortunate by contributing to church collections for the needy. Joseph Treat preached a charity sermon at the Presbyterian Meeting in January 1767 “for the benefit of the Poor in their Hardships the approaching Season, when a most generous Collection was made.” Appeals such as this were common on the brink of cold weather, as when the Presbyterian church announced its “usual annual Collection for the Use of the Poor against the approaching Winter” in November 1770. From the pulpit of New York’s French Protestant church, Abraham Keteltas preached Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in Becoming Poor for Men, Displayed and Enforced in A Charity Sermon on December 17, 1773. On October 30, 1775, word went out that “Next Sunday publick Collections are to be made in the Dutch Churches of this City for the poor Children at their Free School, and such other of their Poor as at this Day of publick Distress stand in Need of Charity.” To bolster genteel New Yorkers’ resolve to be magnanimous, a local printer embellished the notice of

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upcoming charity sermons and collections for the poor in the Old and New Presbyterian churches in December 1768 with a quotation extolling the charitable impulse. “To be able to soften the Calamities of Mankind, and inspire with Gladness, the Heart oppressed with Want, is the noblest Privilege of an ample Fortune.”11 Desirous of spreading Christianity to all corners of the city, ministers from various denominations encouraged members of the elite to take notice of the abysmal conditions facing those who were imprisoned. The city’s jail became the setting for preaching to “Numbers of poor unhappy Souls, confined to that dreary Place of Exile, who have been debar’d the opportunity of Divine Worship for several years past.” In early February 1767, Presbyterian John Rodgers delivered a sermon on the text “For the Wages of Sin is Death; but the Gift of God is Eternal Life, through Jesus Christ our Lord” to several condemned criminals and a host of insolvent debtors in the presence of “several Ladies and Gentlemen of Distinction in this City.” When Anglican clergymen Samuel Auchmuty and John Ogilvie replicated this edifying spectacle the following week, “Many of the inhabitants of this city, attended these Discourses and from their observation of the calamitous situation of the poor unhappy confined Debtors, immediately sent wood and other Necessaries for their Relief.”12 Witnessing ministers preach the gospel to malefactors and those in financial distress aroused the Christian sympathies of propertied Protestants. Local congregations reinforced the lesson. In 1772, the Dutch Reformed church sponsored a collection “not only as a farther Aid in relieving the necessitous Poor[,] Now confined in Goal [sic] for debt, in case they have not already received a sufficient Supply from the Collections made for that Purpose in other Churches, but also towards relieving their distressed Families, and such other Poor as may need some help in this severe Season.” In the same season, a “very handsome collection” followed from a charity sermon preached by Presbyterian John Rodgers to relieve “the poor Prisoners confined in our Goal, many of whom are in such want, that they have nothing to provide themselves with the common Necessaries of Life, but what they receive from the Beneficient Hand of Charity.” No doubt wishing to inspire other gentlemen to emulate him, New York’s governor, in December 1773, “sent to Whitehead Hicks, Esq; Mayor of this city, the sum of two hundred pounds which he most munificently ordered to be applied in relieving the properest objects of distress confined in the city goal.”13 The charity of genteel New Yorkers was inflected by humanitarian sentiments such as those of David Van Horne, who averred that “the poor ought always to be tenderly dealt with and not dispised or treated with any slight or

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Figure 11.  The elite’s desire to civilize lowly New Yorkers emerges in this 1764 letter in which Anglican minister Samuel Auchmuty pleads for more time to instill Christian values in a condemned criminal. Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library. “Letter to Cadwallader Colden,” New York Public Library Digital Collections, EM 4262–7302, Image ID 4007334.

Contempt because they are such.” But when aid was doled out, the demeanor of the disadvantaged was a crucial consideration. Recipients of gentlemen’s largesse, however great their misery, should deserve the food, clothing, or cash that was bestowed on them. In 1716, Anglican May Bickley left “£10 to be divided among such poor housekeepers as my executors and Mr. William Vesey shall think proper objects for charity.” In 1734, William Ricketts, “late

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of the Island of Jamaica, but now of New York, Gent.,” restricted an annual bequest “to the poor communicants of Trinity Church.” Thirty years later, an oculist named John Lavine who claimed to “cure all disorders of the eyes, and deafness,” advertised that he “will cure gratis any poor person, that will come to him recommended by any creditable housekeeper of New York.”14 To be eligible for care, a needy individual had to be vouched for by someone of higher status. For gentlemen, the disbursement of aid was contingent on the performance of humility by recipients. For privileged city dwellers, the purpose of furnishing material aid to those in distress was never simply to alleviate misery. In the world as they imagined it, contact with well-meaning Christians was supposed to transform idle and possibly sinful men and women into practicing Protestants prepared to become productive workers and compliant members of the civic community. Cues to proper behavior were provided by city ministers such as Lambertus De Ronde, who in 1766 was “requested by the Supervisors of the Poor House to preach to the poor, every six or seven weeks, in English, in turns with the other ministers.” The moral vision of New York’s elite was centered not on eradicating poverty, but rather on elevating people through Christian education. In 1773, Presbyterian minister John Rodgers conceived of a project that would uplift the ignorant and the fallen through educational means. To combat vice and immorality in the city, Rodgers teamed with two Presbyterian booksellers to found the American Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor in the British Colonies, modeled after organizations in England and Scotland. Its aim was to disseminate Protestant Christianity to those without resources by distributing “Bibles and other useful and religious books” rather than food among the poor.15 Certain that their wealth, education, and social standing bestowed moral authority on them, high-ranking Protestants aspired to create a society in which the objects of their munificence not only displayed appropriate gratitude for the gifts they received, but also absorbed the Christian values cherished by their benefactors. The prime vehicle for realizing this goal was the city’s Anglican Charity School, which traced its origins to the school begun by William Huddleston in the first decade of the eighteenth century. In its early days, the school included pupils of varied backgrounds, but by 1712, “the people of Fashion in the Town [had] taken their children from him out of a senseless notion that they will not send their children to a charity school.”16 Huddleston’s pleading amid the twists and turns of transatlantic religious politics led to SPG sponsorship of the enterprise, but since funds from overseas paid for only the teacher’s salary, local Anglicans depended on New Yorkers of means to supply pupils’ fundamental needs. Appeals in the press sought

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to animate the charitable feelings of good Christians by cultivating sympathy for the benighted children. “As the Charity School in this City, receives poor Children of every persuasion amongst us, so it is to be hoped, that every catholic, benevolent, well-disposed Christian, will generously contribute to the Relief and Comfort, of a set of poor helpless Children, (many of them Orphans) who, without the kind Charity proposed, must inevitably be greatly exposed to Cold and Nakedness this ensuing Winter.” Emphasizing the fact that “the poor Children belonging to the Charity School, are now almost destitute of Covering,” promoters of the school reminded New Yorkers that “they cannot employ their Charity in a Way more acceptable to their blessed Saviour, than by Cloathing his poor naked Members.”17 With the goal of showcasing the success of the Charity School in elevating poor youngsters into practicing Protestants, leading Anglicans orchestrated a procession at the opening of St. George’s Chapel in July 1752. Clergymen, vestrymen, and other “Gentlemen of Distinction” set out from the Charity School House “in regular Form and Order attended by the Charity Scholars, 40 boys and 12 Girls, who walk’d before in Pairs, with their School-Master at the Head of them.” At the city hall they were “joined by the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen and Common Council,” and then “they all proceeded to the Chapel, where Divine Service was perform’d, with the utmost Decency and Propriety.”18 The fifty-two charity scholars paraded before the public embodied genteel Anglicans’ aspirations for the city’s lower sorts. To ensure the continued support of the city’s Charity School, Trinity Church vestry ordered Anglican ministers to deliver annual charity sermons beginning in 1755. Promoted in the press, these sermons codified the principal elements of the civilizers’ ethos. In 1760, Henry Barclay recommended to the beneficence of his listeners “one of the most noble objects of Christian charity . . . Christian children members of God’s family and of the household of faith.” Exhorting them to “preserve [these children] from the contagion of an Evil and corrupt world,” he urged that parishioners “dispense to their use a portion of that wealth entrusted to your hands as good and faithful stewards.” Reminding assembled Anglicans that “for want of your friendly and pious assistance [these poor children] must in all probability have remained under the tyranny of Satan,” he complimented them that “now by your charity [they are] put into the state of arising to the true and saving knowledge of God and Jesus Christ.”19 According to Anglican protocol, charity sermons culminated in a collection for the poor children, who then sang for the assembled parishioners. After Samuel Auchmuty preached on an apt biblical text at Trinity Church in December 1766, “a very generous Contribution was made for the poor

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Scholars; who alone sung an Anthem to the great satisfaction of the Congregation.” A similar performance unfolded the next week at St. George’s Chapel, where, following a sermon by John Ogilvie, “a genteel Collection was made for the Benefit of the Charity School in this City.—The Hymn sung by the Charity Children was very pleasing to the Congregation in general.”20 It was the hope of Charity School advocates that the grounding in Protestant principles children received would steer those most susceptible to pernicious influences away from vice and crime into productive lives conducted along lines that fulfilled the expectations of their social superiors. Supplementing church collections for impoverished students were philanthropic bequests as well as occasional outright gifts. In 1760, Mrs. Frances Auboyneau left “the principal part of her Estate for the education and cloathing the Poor Children of the Free School in this City, under the Direction of the rector and Church Wardens of Trinity Church.” Another legacy to the school came from Anne Chambers, a wealthy widow who stipulated that the interest from her gift of £500 be “used for the support of the girls only, belonging to the Charity School, and for the rewarding of such girls on their leaving School, as [are] judge[d] deserving, which I intend as an incouragement of their diligence.”21 Fostering the moral improvement of impoverished children was a focal point of the civilizing efforts of Anglican gentlemen who viewed the Charity School as a training ground where instruction in reading and religion would remake boys and girls into literate Protestants fit for employment as well as limited participation in the civic community. Once imbued with the rudiments of civility and Christianity, they would take their place as uncomplaining workers in an urban social order headed by privileged men only too willing to congratulate themselves on the fruits of their benevolence. Molding the manners and morals of the city’s lowly youths was not exclusively the province of Anglicans. Well-off people attached to other religious groups also took seriously the obligation to provide the offspring of destitute families in their congregations with an appropriate education. In their wills, non-Anglicans designated funds to support the education of poor children. In 1744, merchant Joshua Isaacs allocated “fifty pounds to our Congregation of Jews at New York,” the yearly income of which was to be “for ever Imployed For the Support of our Hebrew School . . . to teach poor Children the Hebrew tongue.” In 1775, the obituary for Elias Brevoort, “a worthy and much respected Citizen, a Man who walked with God,” noted that “he has left a Legacy of Three Hundred Pounds to the Charity School of the Dutch Church in this City.” The Dutch Reformed church periodically raised money for educating poor children in the church school, but only in 1775

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was it reported in the press that “publick Collections” were scheduled “in the Dutch Churches of this City for the poor Children at their Free School, and such other of their Poor as at this Day of publick Distress stand in Need of Charity.”22 Unlettered boys and girls from needy families were the ideal candidates for the sort of educational intervention advocated by Protestant gentlemen. But the ambitions of the city’s cultural elite extended beyond children of European ancestry to another swath of the urban population—enslaved Africans—whose numbers and constant presence on city streets made their unchristian religious opinions difficult to ignore. Gentlemen’s gradual recognition of the value of molding slaves into practicing Protestants, traced in the previous chapter, gathered steam after the cataclysmic events of 1741, as Anglican-sponsored schools churned out appropriately educated black boys and girls to serve in the households of enlightened masters. The increasing visibility of enslaved men and women in the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian congregations by the 1760s reinforced this trend, reflecting the evolving consensus among New Yorkers of means that slaves indoctrinated with the fundamentals of Protestantism were an asset to the community. The elite’s investment in civilizing enslaved Africans bore fruit in New York’s households and workplaces, where slaves well-rehearsed in the rituals of Christian submission served gratified masters. The gentlemen entrusted to set the points on New York’s cultural compass stood on guard against ideas that diverged from the Protestant mainstream. When a leading Anglican testified in 1763 that “the wildest notions are propagated here, both on the side of Enthusiasm and Infidelity,” he was echoing the sentiments of orthodox clergymen who perceived threats emanating not only from radical Protestant sects but also from “such creatures as [Jonathan] Mayhew,” a Boston minister associated with rational Christianity.23 But the doctrines of Protestant sectarians, as unsettling as they were, were not as threatening as deistical or atheistic principles. The dangers posed by anyone who deviated from traditional Christian teachings were of a different order. Genteel New Yorkers vigilantly monitored the borders of their Protestant world and reacted quickly when they discovered that city dwellers were articulating ideas at odds with the Christian scheme of salvation. In 1714, the grand jury examined several persons under the “suspition of their being parties . . . to an Atheisticall Club or meeting kept within this Citty.” Swift to disassociate themselves from such a charge, the men in question indignantly petitioned the jurors, taking pains to “express their utter

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abhorrence of any such abominable offence” and to assert that “their lives and conversations will undoubtedly vindicate them from such an aspersion.” Concerned that “notwithstanding their Innocency ye very imputation may be a stain upon them to strangers,” they requested the jurors to punish the persons who accused them as “Disturbers of the peace who have . . . falsely malitiously and groundlessly been the Occation of this Imputation upon them.”24 Three decades later, a trio of Presbyterians noted the presence of deists in the city. Obadiah Wells apprised Joseph Bellamy, an evangelical Connecticut minister who had preached in New York, that “last night a club of yonge Deists or rather Atheists met, who it seems had all of them heard your fore noon sermon yester day; it happened that the toppick of their Conversation turned upon your discourse & one in partickculer made a Banter & Ridicule of it, on which another of them Rose up and debated the point with him in a very Engaiged maner & then solemnly Reproved him & all the rest of them.” Samuel Loudon assured Bellamy that “some Deistical persons . . . have been convinced under your Preaching,” but William Smith Sr. was dismayed that several New Yorkers favored what he called “a Modern Scheme in Divinity.” Those most inclined to take seriously philosophical arguments on the flaws of orthodox religion were young men familiar with Enlightenment thinking—likely college students or recent graduates—who gathered in small discussion groups that were looked upon by their detractors as “club[s] of freethinkers.” Intellectual experimentation, common at this stage of life, tempted some to take an adversarial stance toward religious institutions. Quaker Lindley Murray, who came of age in the 1760s, documented his peers’ fascination with rationalist ideas even as he rejected their arguments. Murray considered himself fortunate that “my principles were never disturbed by infidelity or skepticism. . . . Some of my acquaintances were either deists or sceptics: but I always found replies to their reasonings, which perfectly satisfied my own mind.”25 New York’s privileged young men did not pursue this line of thinking to the point that they overtly repudiated Christian teachings. Still, the dissemination of deistic ideas in the city became a cause célèbre in 1752 when printer James Parker, urged by an apothecary named Patrick Carryl, published an article in the New-York Post Boy widely viewed as endorsing deistic theology. Henry Barclay, the rector of Trinity Church, labeled it a “Scandalous Piece,” and “the English and Dutch ministers preached against it in all the churches.” Parker and Carryl subsequently were “indicted in the Supreme Court for publishing ‘a Writing containing scandalous Reflections against the Christian religion.’ ” Parker protested the indictment as a violation of English liberty, and the case was not carried forward, most likely owing

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to the intercession of Benjamin Franklin. Nevertheless, Lutheran minister Muhlenberg recorded that “there was much unrest in the city and this matter was the subject of many conversations.”26 Although subject to legal action, proponents of ideas that were deemed heretical posed no real threat to the city’s Christians. Far more ominous in the eyes of the Protestant elite was the religious apathy of the men and women on the margins of society, those most vulnerable to the impersonal forces of the eighteenth-century urban economy. With their days spent in scratching out a living, they had little time to ponder their spiritual condition. Defenseless against the vagaries of the market and often overwhelmed by intractable problems, they were liable to violate the Christian-based moral standards vaunted by men of high rank. Of all free New Yorkers, they had the thinnest commitment to the civilized standards respectable Protestants believed should govern behavior. Some people at the bottom of the social scale clung to their faith through adversity, maintaining their ties to a local church and thereby staying eligible for assistance from coreligionists. Loyal congregants, usually women who had fallen on hard times, or the aged, the ill, and disabled, regularly received a pittance or an allotment of firewood to help them survive. The records of the Dutch Reformed church document regular disbursements to such unfortunate people.27 Poor churchgoers could qualify for aid in time of need, but as beneficiaries of congregational funds, they were expected to show their appreciation by striving to attain the benchmarks set for them by their superiors. That charity was contingent on recipients conforming to the standards set by congregational officers is made clear by a 1724 case in which the deacons of the Dutch Reformed church acted to “deny the request of Philip van Borssem and his wife for support by the church, as both are under censure for their evil lives, and in which they persist, despite all warnings.” Conscious that an entire family was therefore in jeopardy, the church’s consistory declared that it “is disposed to care for the children, but only on condition that, by Indenture before the magistrate, they are committed to the Deacons, in order to receive a Christian education.”28 Surrendering their children to certified Christians was the price this poor couple had to pay for ensuring sustenance for their children. If poverty did not prevent a person from embracing a Christian identity, neither did illiteracy. In New York’s Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, numbers of individuals expressed their opinion on critical issues by signing congregational documents with an X, indicating that, at the least, they could not write. Appearance, however, could be a barrier to acceptance, since pious but poor city dwellers tended to be judged on how they looked.

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Mistrustful of those who were shabbily dressed, privileged New Yorkers equated a person’s outward appearance with his moral condition. Surveying those assembled at the newly erected Lutheran church in 1767, Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg remarked that when the door was opened, “nothing . . . could prevent publicans and sinners from thronging in too, for there was a tremendous crowd of all kinds of people and it was hardly possible to distinguish righteous from unrighteous, except by the clothes.”29 Poor people were the most likely to stand outside the Christian circle. Recent Irish immigrants, few of whom had any resources, had another potent reason for staying away from New York’s Protestant churches. Many men who filled the lowest ranks of the British military units stationed in New York were recruited in Ireland and had been born into Roman Catholic families, as had most of the Irish indentured servants working in the port city. These newcomers, whether or not they secretly adhered to their faith, may have shied away from the city’s Protestant institutions. Yet the loyalty of Irish soldiers and indentured servants to the Catholic Church proved fungible in New York’s social environment, since men and women with Irish birthplaces regularly appeared among the brides and grooms listed in the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church.30 Irish immigrants’ willingness to amalgamate with the city’s Protestant population also is evident in the numerous Irish names in Trinity Church’s marriage records after the mid-eighteenth century. Once immigrants realized that a tacit acceptance of Protestant principles was the price of prospering in British New York, the pull of Catholic traditions diminished. Notwithstanding the fidelity of some indigent New Yorkers to the Protestant ideals championed by their well-fixed neighbors, others in a similar condition drifted aimlessly in the currents of a turbulent port society that had little use for them except as menial laborers. As they struggled to eke out a livelihood, they sometimes made choices that put them in conflict with the civilizers. Such choices were seen by the elite as random and mindless, the product of men and women of debased status, the very scoffers, Sabbath breakers, petty criminals, and prostitutes who were most likely to resist the entreaties of the genteel and the pious. Suppose, however, that there was an element of deliberateness in the actions of the individuals so vilified. What if opting for pleasure over prayer, drunkenness over sobriety, petty crime over grueling labor had an ulterior level of meaning, even if it rarely was articulated? Contravening the Protestant-based communal standards shared by gentlemen and middling city dwellers might then be an indirect way of challenging the cultural authority of those who admonished them to live as good Christians. To engage in sinful behavior, in this sense, was to implicitly criticize organized religion and its proponents.

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Knowing that men and women on the brink of ruin opted to forgo the inducements awaiting them if they abided by the precepts of the civilizers should cause us to ask whether their actions were as purposeless as their superiors claimed. Is it conceivable that theirs was a cultural stance with a degree of coherence? Plotting the coordinates of this cultural position is made difficult by the cluster of derogatory labels customarily affixed to those violating the elite’s cultural prescriptions. Official reports, newspaper accounts, and private writings routinely were infused with a vocabulary of scorn that dehumanized these subjects. Labeled as dregs, scum, ruffians, miscreants, rabble, or even tools of the devil, individuals with no claim to respectability were deprived of integrity in the everyday discourse of more privileged New Yorkers. Restoring these beleaguered New Yorkers to their bona fide role as historical actors can be accomplished by counterbalancing the rhetoric of the censorious with a frame of reference that facilitates an alternate reading of their conduct. My intention is not to argue that essentially powerless men and women mounted a coherent assault on the values idealized by the city’s gentlemen, but rather to suggest that a composite picture of their actions in multiple settings reveals an unambiguous pattern of oppositional behavior that, although not orchestrated, worked to undermine the cultural influence of the elite. Despite the righteous tone of civilizers’ observations, these commentaries are vital for identifying the key sites where the lower sorts contested the elite’s cultural values. The most direct clash between the lower sorts and men with cultural power occurred over the Sabbath. New Englanders, certain of their moral superiority, took every opportunity to censure New Yorkers for improper behavior on the Sabbath. After returning from New York in the summer of 1718, Connecticut resident John Winthrop related that “the Sabbath . . . is not kept w[ith] that ord[er] & retirem[ent] at New York as it is at Boston. If you were to see the actions of the people on the Sabbath at York, you would imagine that it was more like a Boston Training-day then [sic] like Sunday.” A cautionary tale printed in a Boston newspaper centered on an “unhappy Accident” in New York that “fell out on the Lord’s Day, the 14th of January [1722], the River being Froze, some Hundreds of their Youth went presumptuously upon the Ice, and the Ice withdrawing from both sides, they could not get to either shoar.” Most were saved, but “It may be a fair warning to them and all others not so prophanely to abuse the Lord’s Day, in turning it unto a Day of Sport and Diversion as these did.”31 In 1723, Elizabeth Belknap, who had recently moved from Connecticut to New York with her husband Samuel, a carpenter, issued a more blanket indictment of the impious behavior of city dwellers. Religion in New York “is

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made a ridocill [ridicule] and of no asstame [esteem] and hee and Shee that can Sware and whore and roge [rogue] most are ye beaste and heald moste in asteame thoue they cannot beayre to be made sansibell [sensible] of it . . . I dow thinke [New York] a worss place no pearson that fears god neade to com into and espashely on ye accounte of ye Sabath for that is a great holyday with them.” She added that “my greateesst consearn is for my poore children that thay should be brough up in such a plase whare all manner of uice [vice] is abounding with out controle.” Nearly four decades later, Native American minister Samson Occum was astonished by what he witnessed on the outskirts of the city. “I never Saw a Sabbath Spent so by any Cristian People in my Life as Some Spent it here,” he wrote in June 1761. “Some were Riding in Chairs Some upon Horse Back others traveling by foot, Passing and Repassing all Day long, and all Sorts of Evil Noises Caried on by our Drunkards were Realing and Stagaring in the Streets, others tumbling off their Horses, there were others at work in their farms, and ever any People under the Heavens Spoke Hell’s Language, these people did, their Mouths were full of Cursing, Prophaning Gods Holy Holy Name—I greatly mistake if these are not the sons and Daughters of Belial.”32 The hypercritical comments of pious individuals horrified at the desecration of the Sabbath and the profusion of sinners in New York tell us more about these writers’ state of mind than about actual conditions in the city, but their observations cannot be entirely discounted as fictions of overheated imaginations. Contests between city dwellers and officials over keeping the Christian Sabbath as a holy day can be traced to New Amsterdam, where burghers who failed to abide by Petrus Stuyvesant’s increasingly stringent Sabbath edicts faced prosecution and punishment. Once the settlement at the tip of Manhattan Island passed into English hands, preserving the sanctity of the Sabbath became a less heated issue, but still a matter of concern to authorities. Although Calvinist fervor was notably absent in British New York, officials periodically condemned inhabitants who failed to recognize Sunday’s sacred character. At first, enslaved people were the target. In 1682, the Court of Assizes railed against the “Many Great Evills and Inconvenincys . . . Committed and Done by Negroes and Indian Slaves their Frequent Meetings and Gathering themselves together in Great Numbers on the Lords Day . . . using and Exerciseing Severall Rude and Unlawful Sports and Pastetimes.” Municipal authorities were called to account in 1700 when the grand jury cited “the frequent meetings of negroes in tumultuous crowds [on the Sabbath],” and had to admit that “the Inhabitants of this Citty have neglected to Restrain their Indian and Negro Slaves from Associating together on the holy Sabbath in time of Divine Service to the Great Scandal

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of the Christian profession and Religion.” In 1703, schoolmaster Elias Neau chimed in, reporting that “on Sundays while we are at our Devotions, the streets are full of Negroes, who dance and divert themselves.”33 By this time, provincial legislators had defined breaches of the Sabbath comprehensively. Starting from the premise that “the holy keeping of the Lords day is a principall part of the true Service of God,” the authors of “A Bill against Sabbath breaking” passed in November 1685 confirmed that the Sabbath “hath been and now is p’fained [profaned] and neglected by unlawfull travelling or Journying . . . by shooting horsehunting and horseracing rideing on steeds unnecessary hunting and tipling in Alehouses taverns or other publick houses and other unlawfull Exercises and pastimes also Exercizing worldly labour bussinesse or work of Ordinary callings.” Intent on deterring those who flouted injunctions to keep the Lord’s day, lawmakers imposed a fine of six shillings and eight pence on Sabbath breakers, with no mention of their race or social status. Ten years later, the New York Assembly again took up the problem of Sabbath breaking, targeting those “who do not keep holy the Lords day but in a disorderly manner accustom themselves to travel Labouring working shooting fishing sporting playing horse racing frequenting of Tipling houses and the using many other unlawful Exercises and pastimes.” Potential offenders were now differentiated as “any of the Inhabitants or sojourners within this province or . . . their slaves or servants.” Penalties distinguished between white and black New Yorkers, setting a fine of six shillings or at worst “being set publickly in the stocks by the space of three hours” for wrongdoers of European descent, but ordering “thirteen lashes upon the Naked Back for each offence Committed by such Indian or Negro slave and servant.”34 By November 1731, the men who sat on New York City’s Common Council were ready to crack down on people who made a mockery of the Sabbath. “A Law for the Observation of the Lords Day Called Sunday” stipulated that “no manner of servile work be done on the Lords Day called Sunday (works of Piety, Charity or Necessity Excepted) nor any Goods bought or sold.” Zeroing in on the most likely offenders, they commanded that “no Children Youths Maids or Other Persons . . . do meet together on the Lords Day . . . in any of the Streets or places within this City . . . and there Sport, Play, make Noise or Disturbance.” People of color again were singled out—“no Negro Mullatto, or Indian Slaves, above the Number of three, do assemble or meet together on the Lord’s Day, called Sunday and sport, play or make Noise or disturbance.” This law was to be vigorously enforced. The high constable was instructed to “order and take Care, that two or more of the Constables of the six Wards on the South Side of Fresh Water do by Turns, successively, on every Lord’s

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Day, called Sunday, in Time of Divine Service and Preaching, walk through the several Streets and Lanes of this City with their Staffs, and take care [that] the . . . Law . . . be duely kept and Observed.” To fulfill this duty, constables were “authorized and required to enter into all or any Publick House, Taverns Ale-Houses, Tap Houses, Victualling Houses or Ordinaries, and if any Company or Persons shall be found Tipling therein, or Liquors sold, contrary to the Law . . . , they are to make Complaint and Presentment.”35 Not all gentlemen were overly concerned when people of African descent disregarded the Christian holy day. In August 1738, an enslaved man belonging to a top municipal official presumably was permitted to travel to a Sunday revel outside the city, where he perished in a tragic accident. “Last Saturday Night three Negro Men got a Canoe to go into the Country and be merry with some others on Sunday and going thro’ Hell Gate they were suck’d into the Pot or Whirlpool, the Canoe drawn in, and Alderman Banker’s Negro (the fidler) drowned, the other two saved themselves by swimming to the shore.” Judging from the newspaper account of this incident, the fiddler’s plans to “be merry” on the Christian Sabbath were winked at by his master. By contrast, two free white men were held accountable by the Court of General Quarter Sessions for an infraction of the Sabbath law that same year. Joseph and Edward Anderson were arrested for “grievously assaulting a watchman who was marching them to the guard house for playing with a bat and a ball during the time of divine service.” In August 1742, in the aftermath of the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741, the Common Council, seeking to allay the fears of white residents, ordered patrols on every Sunday, explaining that these steps were being taken “to prevent the Scandalous and unchristian irregularities lately so much Practised: by Negroes Children and others on the Sabbath day in this City.” In February 1756, municipal authorities had nine Negroes whipped at the whipping post for illegally assembling on Sunday.36 Official oversight of residents’ behavior on the Sabbath may not always have been practical in the expanding city, but the civilizers’ key themes were conveyed through the medium of print. In January 1761, not long after King George III was crowned, the New-York Mercury published the new monarch’s “Proclamation For the Encouragement of PIETY and VIRTUE, and for Preventing and Punishing Vice, Profaneness and Immorality,” which prohibited “all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever, from playing on the Lord’s Day at dice, cards, or any other game . . . either in public or private houses” and commanded them . . . decently and reverently to attend the worship of God on every Lord’s day, on pain of highest displeasure, and of being proceeded against with the utmost rigour that may be by law.” New Yorkers’ memory of legislation already on the books was jogged by a local newspaper

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that printed the texts of two old provincial laws in October 1769 with the heading “The following is inserted by order of the Magistrates”—An Act for Suppressing Immorality passed 18 September, 1708 and An Act against Profanation of the Lords Day passed in the year 1697.37 From the late seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution, lawmakers and civic officials, acting in behalf of the civilizers, made repeated efforts to compel lowly New Yorkers to respect the Christian Sabbath. If such people could not be turned into practicing Protestants, then, at a minimum, they could be prevented from conducting themselves in ways that publicly dishonored this sacred day. The goal was reining in and isolating enslaved Negroes, servants, and insolent youths who transgressed the Sabbath statutes. If the “Parent, Master, or [guardian]” of “Children, Youth or Maids” who “sport, play, make Noise or Disturbance” in “any of the Streets and Places within this City or Liberties thereof ” failed to pay the fine of “One Shilling for each Offence,” the 1731 law mandated that “such child, Children, Servants or Apprentices to be sent to the House of Correction or to the Cage.” Placing offenders in a cage was literally fencing in the traducers of the majority’s view of proper behavior on the Sabbath. By 1764, city officials had erected “a large wooden cage . . . between the New Gaol and the Work-House . . . designed for disorderly Boys, Negroes, & c. who publicly break the Sabbath.”38 A graphic symbol of the elite’s policy of circumscribing those who menaced orderly Christian life in the city, the cage segregated and publicly humiliated individuals who deviated from Christian-based moral standards. Tellingly, individuals of high status who did not keep the Lord’s Day were not subject to the policy of containment. Merchant Gerard G. Beekman made known to a correspondent in 1750 that he was voluntarily violating the injunction not to engage in worldly business on the Sabbath in order to impart a vital piece of news bearing on his trade. “I should not have time to write you tomorrow therefore have transgressed the Sabbath,” he wrote. A man who customarily honored the Sabbath, Beekman rationalized breaking this rule in order to forward his commercial dealings. Municipal authorities were circumspect in dealing with solid citizens who crossed the line. When it came to the “Knowledge of the Magistrates” in July 1768 that “Some Butchers of this City have made a Practice in hot Weather to sell Meat on Sunday Mornings,” they felt compelled to “forbid it for the future.” Yet sensitive to public opinion and wishing to conciliate the butchers, they quickly made a concession. So that “none of the Inhabitants may be disappointed,” the printer was “desired to advertise this Prohibition that the Inhabitants may supply themselves the Saturday before.”39 Officials whose job it was to implement the platform of

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the civilizers had no qualms about granting respectable city residents leeway in the matter of Sabbath observance. Persons who exhibited contempt for the sanctity of the Lord’s day and, by extension, Protestantism as practiced in eighteenth-century New York City did so for several reasons. Youths and servants were disposed to spend whatever free time their masters gave them in amusing themselves. Frolicking on Sundays or holidays was a means of escaping disagreeable work routines through sensory gratification that alleviated the tedium of their humdrum lives. They craved fun and companionship, not confrontation with those who wielded authority. This was especially true on Christmas, traditionally a time of revelry and rowdiness in the city. After the mid-eighteenth century, genteel New Yorkers came to mark the holiday with distinctive presents. On January 7, 1760, bookseller Garret Noel advertised a series of volumes that he deemed “very proper for Christmas and New-Year’s Gifts, being neatly bound in red.”40 By the early 1770s, a campaign was afoot to transform Christmas into a religiously inflected holiday rather than just an occasion for family celebrations and gift giving. A broadside inserted in a local newspaper in 1772 advocated Christmas as a “Christian festival” to be celebrated “in the exercise of the amiable virtues of Christianity . . . Hospitality, benevolence and charity.” Presenting an alarming picture of New Yorkers’ obnoxious behavior on a day meant to be spent “in commemoration of the birth of our blessed Saviour,” the author emphasized that on this special day, “all intemperance in eating and drinking, all rioting and drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, Lewdness and obscenity, and all other vicious actions . . . have more than their common enormity, they are highly wicked and abominable, and are great insults to him we pretend to honor.” Assailing “the assembling of Negroes, servants, boys, and other disorderly persons in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing & c,” the anonymous writer saved his harshest words for “the barbarous and abominable custom of throwing at cocks,” decrying the spectacle of people tormenting animals on Christmas Day. “To abuse and torture an innocent defenceless and useful animal, merely for sport, is such base cowardice and barbarous cruelty that one would not imagine human nature could be guilty of. But to do this on a Christian festival, is a diabolical abuse of the institution, and makes it resemble the sanguinary sacrifices of heathenish idolatry.” In 1769, the founders of the “Society for Reformation of Manners and suppression of Vice in the city of New York” warned of an impending moral crisis. “Whereas it is notorious that the Laws of GOD and our Country are basely trampled upon, by drunkenness, lewdness, profane swearing, cursing, Sabbath breaking, and

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many other dissolute and irregular practices, these evils are not only subversive of Christianity, and destructive to the souls of men; but they waste our substance, destroy mutual confidence, draw down the judgments of heaven on a land, and thus ruin the civil state.”41 Ominous diagnoses of New York’s social ills by righteous observers attest to the imperfect dominion of Christian gentlemen over their inferiors. If most of those who engaged in unsavory behaviors on the Sabbath or other Christian holy days merely were entertaining themselves, this did not preclude deriving satisfaction from discomfiting their betters and subverting the civilizing project. Try as they might, the privileged few and the pious middling sorts could not bring everyone under the Christian umbrella. Whether consciously or not, men and women of low standing thwarted the civilizers’ design and, in the process, undermined their cultural authority. For some among the downtrodden, flouting Christian norms had a more sinister meaning rooted in an aversion to organized religion. In the case of enslaved Africans, the subtext is unmistakable. Dancing and drinking during sacred time was a way to tell one’s master “you can command my labor, but you cannot force me to honor your God.” White New Yorkers’ ill will toward clerics and churchgoers became visible in sporadic displays of irreverence. The defiling of Trinity Church in 1713 and the smearing of ordure on Rector William Vesey’s vestments was a pointed attack on a minister whose policies and bearing galled the perpetrators. In a deed so brazen that it moved the city’s diverse Protestant community to speak in unison to condemn the outrage, unidentified commoners demonstrated that direct action spoke as forcefully as polished prose when it came to challenging cultural authority. The sacrilegious behavior of those who desecrated Trinity Church was replicated a generation later when a Jewish burial ceremony was mobbed in 1743. A self-described Christian witness to the actions of “a Rabble” of “Rude unthinking Wretches” declared these people beyond the pale. Lashing out at “many who (O Impudence) dare stile themselves Christians,” he characterized them as “Lost to Shame and Humanity they even insulted the Dead in Such a vile manner, that, to mention all would Shock a human Ear.” By contrast, he “saw nothing but decency on [the Jews’] part.” This observer reserved his greatest fury for “one whom by his dress I should have thought to be a Gentleman, seem’d to head this Mob, he when the Coffin was let down, held out an image (which I fear he’s to[o] fond of ) and Mutter’d, in Latine, as I suppose, his Pater Noster.” Representing this man as a devotee of Roman Catholicism not long after John Ury had been accused of being a priest during the conspiracy trial of 1741, the Christian penman mobilized anti-Catholic sentiment to

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defame the demagogue who lured “a Rabble” to attack a group of innocent, well-behaved Jews. Publicizing this anti-Semitic incident did not daunt the “malicious and evil-minded Persons” who, in July 1746, did “very considerable Damage, both to the walls and Tombs of the Jewish Burying-Place, near this City,” nor did it deter “several evil-minded People [who] have at sundry Times broke down the Wall of the Jewish burying Ground, and very much damaged the Tomb Stones belonging thereto” in 1751.42 In May 1756, the Lutheran church became the target of someone determined to cause damage “by conveying a Number of live Coals in a Quantity of Rags and Shavings into the said Church.” A female servant of the house adjoining was suspected. In September 1767, an attempt was made to set fire to some outbuildings near the Lutheran church in the Broadway. The following spring, the Baptists were the intended target. “Last Friday Afternoon, a fire broke out in a Stable, near the Baptist Meeting-House in this City. . . . It appeared to have been set on Fire on Purpose, by some vile Incendiary, and some persons who lived in a small wooden building close by it, and were noted for keeping a disorderly House have since been taken up, and committed to Gaol.” Soon after “John Dowers, Cornelius Ellison, Samuel ­Chesnut, and Mary Mulvaney, [who] were all convicted of keeping a disorderly House,” were identified as “the Persons suspected of setting Fire to the Rev. Mr. ­Gano’s Stable.”43 Whatever the motives of these arsonists, their actions reveal a lack of respect for Christian institutions. Heckling clergymen who proclaimed unfamiliar ideas had less serious consequences than the vandalizing of Trinity Church, the disrupting of the Jewish burial service, or setting fire to the Baptist minister’s stable, but this disruptive act also can be considered an attack on religious authority. Young men on the margins of society frequently gathered on the fringe of crowds and jeered at religious figures in a display of indiscriminate rowdiness. One writer described the “Hundreds of People” who came to the fields to hear George Whitefield preach in December 1739 as a crowd “consisting of Christians of all Denominations, some Jews, and a few, I believe, that had no Religion at all.” The assembly “soon appeared to be divided into two Companies, the one of which I considered under the Name of GOD’S Church, & the other the Devil’s Chappel. The first were collected round the Minister, and were very serious and attentive. The last had placed themselves in the skirts of the Assembly, and spent most of their Time in Gigling, Scoffing, Talking & Laughing.” But commoners who came prepared to hector the celebrated itinerant could have a change of heart. One New Yorker of deep faith told of “the Bakers of the Town, [who] came (as they afterwards told) with Whistles in their Pockets, on purpose to mock and disturb him.” But they were won over by

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the evangelist’s preaching. “Behold the power of the Word, when backed by the Spirit, quickly catch’d them, and made them change their Mind, so as ever afterwards they were constant and devout Hearers of him.”44 It was no secret that the city’s young men took pleasure in ridiculing serious Christians. Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg imagined the devil at work when he found “a crowd of loose fellows—nigers, apprentices, and the like—hanging around the church and making a great uproar,” but he was assured by old-time city residents that “the rabble made such a racket every time something new occurred. They had done the same thing in front of the Presbyterian and Dutch churches at first, and there was not much that could be done about it.” The camaraderie of the tavern emboldened male patrons to taunt individuals who held exotic beliefs. In May 1749, a minister of the Moravian sect, well known for focusing on Jesus’s wounds in his side, was gratified that Adolph Vandyke, a local resident, “dares to walk about with me in the streets & invites me to his House which is not a little reproach for him here in York where sometimes as I go along the streets the People call after me Sidehole, Sidehole by way of Scoffing, out of ye Taverns.”45 People on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, many of whom lacked the intellectual foundation for mounting a reasoned assault on Protestant doctrines, could express their views in a nihilistic fashion. Taunting men of piety, defiling a church, and mocking a burial ceremony graphically conveyed their dislike of religion’s honorific place in New York. Whether such insults reflected an all-encompassing iconoclasm or were directed at particular denominations is less important than the fact that people from the lower reaches of society felt no compunction at ridiculing the beliefs of their betters. Disrespect for the sanctity of the city’s houses of worship also underlay several thefts from sacred sites. In late summer 1730, William Ricketts advertised that “a new Common Prayer Boo[k] cornered and clasped with Silver marked LR. and in the Book wri[tt]en Wm Ricketts” had been taken out of Trinity Church. A fugitive apprehended in Connecticut in May 1740 was guilty of a crime against the city’s Jewish congregation. A plate with “Hebrew Letters upon it” was found in the possession of “the fellow that robbed the Jewish Synagogue in New York.” In August 1755, “the Consistory Room in the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in this city was broken open, and about Sixty Pounds in Silver, Paper Money, and Copper Money, stolen and carried away.”46 A reward of twenty-five pounds for those who had committed this felony was offered by the lieutenant governor. St. Paul’s Chapel also was the site of robberies. A man named William Johnson was tried before New York’s Supreme Court in August 1767 “for

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felony and Sacrilege, in stealing books out of St. Paul’s Church,” and about two years later “a Man who has called himself Hamilton, and says he is a sailor, confessed that he had in his Possession, and sold to different Persons, the three Damask Covers of the cushions, and three Prayer Books, lately stolen out of St. Paul’s Church.” However, “he says he found them, and had no Concern in stealing them.” Shortly thereafter a man named John Hennessy was found guilty of “Felony and Sacrilege, in stealing the Satein covering of the Cushings [cushions] of St. Paul’s in this City” and was sentenced to death.47 The individuals responsible for these crimes likely were more concerned with procuring objects that could be exchanged for cash than with voicing their animus toward Anglicans, but New York authorities chose to accent the religious dimension of their acts, pointedly charging men who stole from churches with felony and sacrilege. In order to survive in eighteenth-century New York City’s predatory netherworld, the destitute would do virtually anything, including breaking laws founded on Christian ideals. When stealing someone else’s property was the only way to put bread on the family table, the sanctity of the Sabbath was ignored. Sunday was just another day to the men and women whose dire circumstances led them to take food from Nicholas Bayard’s farm on the outskirts of New York City in December 1763. This crime was connected to a rash of incidents that brought to light not only the callous attitude of hungry New Yorkers toward keeping the Sabbath, but their lack of respect for the prominent Christian gentleman who owned the estate. “We are informed that great Disturbances are made every Sabbath Day, in the Outward of this City, By idle and disorderly people, who In their walks pilfer and steal every Thing they can lay their Hands on, especially Indian Corn, Fruit, & c. besides breaking open Enclosures, trampling and spoiling the Grain, Grass, & c. . . . That on Sunday last, in the Afternoon; a Number, at least 200 of such disorderly People, surrounded the Orchard of Nicholas Bayard, where a large quantity of Apples lay on Heaps for making Cyder; Mr. Bayard being absent.”48 In 1758, Bayard’s consternation at the encroachment of the lower sorts on his property caused him to issue a warning to the “numbers of idle persons [who] make it their daily practice to frequent and gun upon my farm, and woods, in Bowery-Lane; and several times this summer, both myself and people have run great risque of being shot; Two horses, 7 sheep, and a number of hogs, pigs, and pultry have been shot.” Obtaining foodstuffs was not the only goal of these vandals, according to Bayard, who noted that they had “lately cut four new leather harnesses into six pieces each, and two sett of plow geers . . . and drawing out by the root, and breaking off above twenty locust trees equal with the rails of the fence, which was planted along-side of

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the lane aback of my woods, as an ornament and conveniency for gentlemen, and others, who take their walks that way.” Spoiling the view of strolling gentlemen may well have been the point. In May 1762, Nicholas Bayard again aired his grievances against those whom he accused of wrecking his property, making known that “great Abuses are daily committed at my Farm, in several respects, such as taking down of fences, that not only strange cattle enter my land, but my own Cattle destroying my crop and mowing fields; by Design or Neglect of such Persons that pass over my Lands.”49 Bayard was not a victim of indiscriminate vandalism; he was singled out for attack because of his wealth and influence. The impunity with which the marauders sacked Bayard’s orchard and other substantial properties in the Out Ward and the timing of their incursions on the Sabbath illuminate the chasm between New Yorkers at the bottom of society and gentlemen such as Nicholas Bayard who assumed that Protestant values were universally applicable. For city dwellers earning very little and owning virtually nothing, Sunday did not possess the sacred character affirmed by exemplary Protestant gentlemen such as Bayard.50 Lacking the resources to protect themselves from adversity, their energy sapped in the relentless pursuit of sustenance, these destitute people had little reason to heed the injunctions of Christian standard-bearers. The humbling experience of depending on people of privilege for basic necessities struck those in desperate straits in different ways. We can only speculate on how incarcerated debtors felt when the gentlemen of the Scots Society, after celebrating the Feast of St. Andrew in December 1760, saw fit to bestow “the Fragments of a very plentiful and well furnished Table . . . upon the Prisoners in Goal [sic].”51 If they meekly displayed their gratitude, was it at the price of their self-respect? One downtrodden New Yorker waxed philosophical about his predicament, declaring that he placed his trust in God, thereby allowing him to maintain his dignity even as he bowed and scraped before a prospective patron. Explaining to Attorney General William Kempe that he had not been well “for tree or four Year Past,” Richard Wenman insisted that “since it has Pleas god to Proteck Me heder to I will not Disspare his goodness yet for the lord is abel to Rase me if it seams good in his Site for my hart is willon as yet to Strugel in any Calling that My good frends will imploy me.” Giving credit to his friends for their “Charity and goodness,” he expressed the hope that “With the Blessing of god I may get Bread for my self wife and six Children. . . . But I must wate with Pashence for the lords Will to Rase Me or to let me fall.” In the meantime, Wenman shrewdly turned to Kempe for assistance. “Sir I hope you wont take it a miss my Sending Down today for at this Present I am so Put

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Figure 12.  The Bayard family coat of arms and crest were engraved on this tea caddy crafted in New York City in the 1720s by Huguenot silversmith Simeon Soumaine. Such symbols marked the prestige of this family, whose roots went back to New Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Nancy Dunn Revocable Trust Gift, 2015. Accession Number 64.249.5a, b.

to it that I Cant tell witch way to Sheaft I hope I shall get Beter Soon so that I may wate on you Spare me as Much as it Suats You at present.52 Being indebted to benefactors for precious supplies of food, clothing, or firewood was to remain mired in ignominy. Frustration at not being able to

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support loved ones could engender rudimentary attempts at protest. Such demonstrations invariably were met with implacable resolve by social superiors who demanded obsequious behavior as the price for assistance of any sort. One city official publicly mocked the desperate act of a jobless worker in 1748. This poor man had thrown an anonymous letter addressed to the governor into “Alderman Roome’s House.” Roome responded by drafting a newspaper advertisement that reeked with sarcasm. “Whereas the Author of that Letter seems to be much out of Humour and greatly distressed for want of Employment. This is to give Notice, That if he will call at the Good Honest Alderman’s, who keeps two Mills agoing, he need not Starve on that Account.” A suitably humble demeanor, of course, was the prerequisite for this job. “Provided he can be depended upon & not become Ungrateful and Detractive when Favours are thrown him.”53 The disdain of the privileged few toward people without means was palpable. They were incapable of understanding the pain caused by the loss of pride. The prospect of mandatory groveling before social superiors who reserved favors for those who performed rituals of gratitude grated on penniless New Yorkers, who doubtless were aware that well-off residents who referred to them as “those abandoned Miscreants, that too much infest this City” held them in contempt. Unable to salvage their self-respect, they might gain solace from nettling the men whose haughty carriage exuded smugness. On a Saturday night in March 1750, “some low-liv’d People have . . . broken off and stolen the Brass Knockers of several Doors of Gentlemen’s Houses, in this City which vile and infamous Practice hath, for some Years past, been frequently repeated, not only to the Loss of the particular persons suffering by such mean Practices, but also to the frequent Disturbance and Alarm of the Neighbourhood where the said Villainy has from time to time been perpetrated.” The gentlemen victimized by these furtive deeds banded together to halt them, employing the printer of the New-York Gazette as their intermediary. Anyone willing to supply proof of the criminals’ identity was promised a reward of sixty pounds to be paid by “the Persons whose Names are herewith given to the . . . printer, subscribed to a Paper, whereby they bind themselves to pay the said Reward to such Informer or Informers.” For the gentlemen moved to offer such a huge sum of money, the symbolic weight of the misappropriated brass knockers far exceeded the cost of replacing the fixtures themselves. Despite their grand gesture, the crime was repeated the following March. “Last Saturday Night, several Gentlemen and others, in this City, had the knockers of their Doors taken off and carried away.” Indeed, this anti-authoritarian gesture remained a staple in the repertoire of the city’s lower sorts, resurfacing amid the euphoria following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. Crowds in

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the city streets celebrated by “throwing . . . Squibbs, Crackers, firing of muskets and pistols, breaking some windows and forcing . . . the Knockers off the doors.”54 Infuriating the powerful now took on political overtones. In the world of the marginalized, scheming, improvisation, and shortcuts were common. City dwellers perpetually in precarious circumstances did what was necessary to stay afloat, even if it entailed flouting the Christian-based moral standards upheld by the elite. Shut out of the formal economy, blacks and whites, men and women tried their luck in the city’s lively underground marketplace where shady transactions, often in stolen items, were the norm.55 Tantalized by the array of consumer goods flooding into the homes of affluent New Yorkers, they engaged in criminal activity for which they would be harshly punished if caught. Living on a financial precipice and lacking personal ties to more affluent New Yorkers who could assist them, desperate men and women were susceptible to illicit propositions of all sorts. For women, this might mean deviating from the sexual norms prescribed for both single and married females. Whether deserted by poor male companions unable to support them or victimized by men of substance, women who engaged in sex outside marriage were exposed to the scorn of the community, and their reputations were irreparably tarnished. Subject to the lopsided rules of eighteenth-century sexual morality, such women faced even worse problems if their sexual encounters left them pregnant. For poor unmarried women in this predicament, the likely loss of employment and the prospect of authorities taking their bastard child could lead them to the most drastic action imaginable—infanticide. The jury in the 1749 coroner’s inquest into the murder of her child by “Isabella, a mulatto free woman a servant to Daniell Shatford . . . merchant,” concluded that “not having God before her eyes but being moved and seduced by the Devil,” she had “in the garret of the same house” taken “a piece of twine of the value of one penny . . . which she tied about the neck of the . . . male infant and then and there with the twine aforesaid strangled the male infant until it died.” Sitting in judgment on a distraught woman of color, a jury of white men interpreted this deed as a sign of the mother’s lack of Christian faith. When “a new born Child was found dead in the Cellar of Mr. Thomas Inglis of [New York], Victualler,” in May 1730, his servant Elianor Lloyd “pretend[ed] it was dead born,” but authorities “suppos’d she Murder’d it.” In January 1762, the coroner’s inquest in New York determined that a servant named Margaret Barbery Dagbrien “was delivered alone of [a male infant] and immediately wrapped it up in a sheet . . . kept it in bed with herself two or three days.” She then put it “behind some wood in a garret,” where it was discovered. “The verdict brought in was ‘Murder in the Mother.’ ”56

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Young single women reluctant to bind themselves to the drudgery of housework and unable to find a husband who would support them may have reasoned that selling sexual favors was a way not only to earn money but to resist being dominated by men who felt entitled to set the rules for women’s lives. In deciding to use their bodies for their own purposes, these women were blatantly disobeying the moral injunctions of respectable Christians. Whether exhilarated at thumbing their nose at superiors, merely content to maintain a degree of independence, or simply desperate, they managed to impede the elite crusade to reform the uncouth. Women who engaged in sex for money were essentially in business. Catering to the needs of soldiers, sailors, officers, college students, and other men yielded much-needed income. Prostitution flourished in the city not just because poor women were willing to treat their bodies as a commodity, but because their many male customers regarded women as objects of desire and willingly paid for their services. Eighteenth-century New York’s version of commercialized sex, as seen through the eyes of three educated male visitors, was tightly woven into the fabric of urban life. When Scottish physician Alexander Hamilton went to the Battery in 1744, he learned from a companion that “to walk out after dusk upon this platform was a good way for a stranger to fit himself with a courtesan, for that place was the generall rendezvous of the fair sex of that profession after sunset.” He also was told that “there was a good choice of pritty lasses among them, both Dutch and English.” Whether or not Hamilton contemplated indulging in sex with any of these “courtesans,” he conceived of them as providers of services that could be acquired at a price. Thirty years later another Scot, Patrick McRoberts, noted that “above 500 ladies of Pleasure keep lodgings contiguous within the consecrated liberties of St. Paul’s . . . [a] part of the city [that] belongs to the church, and has thence obtained the name of the Holy Ground. Here all the prostitutes reside.” Although McRoberts regarded it as “unlucky” that the entrance to King’s College “is thro’ one of the streets where the most prostitutes live,” offering “temptation to the youth that have occasion to pass so often that way,” he not only complimented the city’s prostitutes, noting that “among [them] are many fine well dressed women,” but found it “remarkable that they live in much greater cordiality one with another than any nests of that kind do in Britain or Ireland.”57 As a man familiar with the business of sex overseas, McRoberts verified that prostitutes were a common perquisite of men in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A young Massachusetts lieutenant billeted in New York in the spring of 1776 provided an alternate reading of the scene in the city’s so-called Holy Ground. Insisting that it was curiosity that drove him to this place, Isaac Bangs

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sanctimoniously recorded that many soldiers and officers were tempted by the neighborhood’s women and routinely availed themselves of their services “till the Fatal Disorder seized them & convinced them of their Error.” In no way condoning his colleagues’ behavior, Bangs nevertheless made clear that he felt sorry for the soldiers whose imprudence led them to consort with women he described as “worse than brutal Creatures” and notable for their “impudence and immodesty.” Alleging that these women “not only destroy Men by Sickness, but . . . sometimes inhumanly Murther them,” and even claiming that “one [soldier] was castrated in a barbarous Manner,” Bangs implied that the soldiers were justified when they “assembled and pulled down the Houses where the Men were treated.”58 This upright young officer evinced more sympathy for his military comrades than for the working women they paid to satisfy their sexual desires. Contretemps between prostitutes and soldiers or sailors were not unusual in the city during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and accounts of these incidents invariably sided with the male customers, who were given the benefit of the doubt when their encounters with a prostitute veered off track. In 1760, one Pearson, a mate on one of his majesty’s ships in New York harbor, “having been with a leud [lewd] woman in a house near the College,” ended up having “his Pocket picked of his money” and in revenge stabbed the woman with his sword. When she died of the wound, Pearson was convicted of “Willful Murder” by the coroner’s inquest. But, at the urging of the New York Council and with testimony from “the officers of the Mercury & many of the seamen” of Pearson’s good character, Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden reprieved the sailor and recommended him to the king’s mercy. Colden transmuted a sailor who murdered a prostitute into a sympathetic figure, explaining that “as he appears to be penitent, the people of this place tho’ he be a stranger in it, have compassion for him.” Integral to this metamorphosis was defaming Mary Allen, Pearson’s victim, as “a woman of an infamous character” who kept “a bad house.” Compassion for women whose commerce in sex ended tragically was entirely wanting. When “the Body of a Woman very much disfigured, and the Flesh off in several Places” was found in Hendrick Rutgers’s barn in August 1760, the coroner’s inquest determined that “she had been a lewd Woman, and that about six weeks ago she went into the said Barn and there died, as the Barn had been locked up at least for that Space of Time.” The prudent Lieutenant Bangs reported that “[a]n old Whore who had been so long Dead that she was rotten was . . . found concealed in an out House at the Holy Ground.”59 Although New Yorkers were well aware that men in the port city sought out prostitutes, they did not conceive of sexual transactions as a form of

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business, even when grand jury indictments touched on the financial motives of women in the sex trade. In 1767, Catherine O’Neil, alias Catherine Tregaw, was charged with “keep[ing] and maintain[ing]” an “ill governed and disorderly house; and . . . there for her own lucre and gain” caused “men [and] women of evil Name & Fame” to engage in “drinking, tipling, quarelling, fighting, whoring and misbehaving themselves.” Instead, the vocabulary reserved for prostitutes in the press and no doubt on the streets spoke to moral deficiency rather than financial savvy. Terms such as “lewd women,” “loose women,” “ladies of pleasure,” “strolling trulls,” “women of ill name and fame,” and “women of ill repute” conjured up an image of licentiousness that meshed with the prevailing opinion that women who sold their bodies were moral reprobates guilty of violating the fundamental Christian tenets. As a 1767 newspaper account put it, “those abandon’d Prostitutes . . . live only to disgrace Human Nature, and disturb society.”60 When Alderman Evert Byvanck denounced Elizabeth Collier, “a single woman who leads a Base and very lewd Life as a Common Bawd and [who] Harbored also some of the worst Strumpets and Vile Adultermen” in 1755, he exposed the biblical cast of his thinking. Having been ordered to depart the city by the mayor and recorder because she had been “found to Herd with the Viler sort,” Collier promised to comply, but then “came to [Byvanck’s] house with a Scratcht & Blody face to make a Complaint against a Vile Bawd as Bad as herself . . . Jew Nell.” Collier wished to “Sware the peace” against this woman, but Byvanck refused, “not Judgeing it prudent to Let a woman of so Vile a Character profaine the Name of God by administering a sacred & solemn oath to her.” Mystified that Attorney-General William Kempe had given credence to another complaint lodged by Collier, Byvanck righteously intoned “I am amased to see a Gentlemen of so Deep Pennetration Should not find out the wicked & Base Designs of this Vile Woman but Allow his Judgement to be Imposed upon, Much in the Like mannor as the Pharisees Case was In his Thoughts About our Saviour as in Luke ye 7th & ye 39 Verse. This man if He were a proffitt, would have know who & what manner a woman this is that Thouched him, for She was a Sinner.”61 Offended New Yorkers, whether they articulated the Christian basis of their assumptions or not, donned the mantle of respectability in order to trumpet the moral flaws of poor women forced to sell their only asset. The places where prostitutes conducted business were considered legitimate targets for vengeful soldiers and outraged neighbors. On a Tuesday night in October 1766, “A Number of Soldiers with Bayonets, went to several Houses in the Fields” to retaliate for “ill treatment which some . . . had received the Night before.” Instead of reproving the soldiers who “were very

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noisy and abusive, to the great Disturbance and Terror of the Inhabitants,” a newspaper took aim at the “infamous Houses, which to the great scandal of our wholesome Laws, are suffered to exist as so many Receptacles for loose and disorderly People.” City dwellers eager to rid their neighborhoods of prostitutes stood by when one of the blockhouses on the Common went up in flames on a Saturday night in March 1761. The “Inhabitants, so much noted for their Agility at fires, remained tame Spectators” since “it was a Monument of Reproach, and an Asylum for Debauchery.” A raucous and violent altercation between Nancy M’Culloch, “a very young girl” who was “very liberal of oaths and lewd obscene Expressions” and a soldier who had “used her ill” even though “she had treated him all the Night, and had granted her Favours to no man in the Barracks but himself,” captured the attention of people living near “the Exchange [which] has long since been a Place of Resort for those abandoned Creatures, and especially towards the latter Part of the Night, when the Neighbours are frequently waked with the cry of Murder, and entertain’d with the most shocking Expressions of Indecency and Blasphemy.” A spokesman for these residents pointed the finger at “the Watchmen [who] are so negligent in their Duty, as not to prevent such scandalous Nusances by regularly patroling the streets at all Hours, and in all Parts of the City.”62 The perception of prostitutes shaped by newspaper articles reinforced conventional morality even as it subliminally titillated readers and piqued their curiosity. Eyewitnesses to the punishment of prostitutes evidently derived satisfaction from women’s public humiliation. When five of the twenty-two “Ladies of Pleasure . . . taken out of several Houses of ill Repute” in July 1753 “were condemn’d to receive 15 Lashes each, at the Whipping Post,” the sentence was “performed . . . before a vast Number of Spectators.” It was common to portray prostitutes as engines of evil and their potential customers as vulnerable victims. In August 1755, “Eleven of the common and strolling Trulls of the Town were disciplin’d at the Post belonging to the Work House in this City” and then ordered out of the city, “their harbouring with People of more chaste and pure inclinations, being found to be of very pernicious Consequence.” A 1771 report stated that “the Magistrates intend to exert themselves in the Extirpation of these Pests to Society, which corrupt the morals of our Youth, and are Frequently the Means of their Ruin and Destruction.”63 Not all the women who were willing to sell their bodies to pay the rent were unmarried. Sometimes the carnal transactions of wives were condoned by their husbands in the interests of raising needed cash. In February 1751, a New York newspaper published a jauntily written account of a scheme concocted by one couple in order to extract fifty pounds from a man ready to buy sex. “A Lady of Pleasure inviegled [sic] a Man into her Bed Chamber, whilst

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her Husband had hid himself in a Closet near by; when they had the Enamoreta secure, the Husband rushed out of the Closet with a knife drawn in his Hand, swearing he’d kill him, unless he made his Satisfaction for the Wrong done to his Honour.” The unhappy client foiled the scheme by having the man seized and brought before an alderman, to whom he “confess’d the Knavery,” as did his wife when she was sent for. “The Woman being with Child was for that Reason let go,” but the husband was sent to jail.64 This unidentified woman may have been spared, but her scheme opens our eyes to the lengths a pregnant woman would go to bring money into the family. A rare glimpse into how poor men and women without a steady stream of income thought about prostitution emerges from the memoirs of Francis Burdett Personel, a repentant condemned criminal. Personel, an Irish immigrant who had made his way to New York from Baltimore, married a prostitute. “Notwithstanding I knew she had followed a loose way of life, I loved her.” Personel’s new bride, however, could not easily extricate herself from the trade. “The next morning after I had been married and beded to her, I consented to her going to her old habitation, till she could pay some debts which she said she owed and for which otherwise I would be sued.” Her new husband soon “took her away as I could not bear to think of her following that course any longer” and began to work to support her. But when he was “taken so ill, as to be unable to work; and, as we saw no other way, rather than be beholden to the people we lived with, we concluded unanimously, that we must either perish, or she take to her old course; accordingly, she prostituted her body as usual.”65 This mutual decision, certainly appalling to the pillars of society who so glibly criticized “loose women,” lays bare the predicates of poor people’s immoral behavior. Haunted by the specter of debt that could land them in jail for a lengthy period of time, this couple chose to have the wife commit adultery. From their vantage point, breaking a Christian commandment was less sinful than losing their freedom. Only by taking into account the way of thinking of the Personels and countless other urban denizens who could not swallow the prescriptions of their alleged betters is it possible to render a balanced judgment of the scope and substance of gentlemen’s cultural authority in eighteenth-century New York City.

Conclusion Tipping the Cultural Scales

In June 1771, John Singleton Copley arrived in New York City prepared to immortalize the pillars of society on canvas. “Painting much engages the attention of people in this City and takes up all my time,” he reported. “I have begun three portraits already, and shall as soon as time permits fill my Room which is a very large one.” Clearly gratified that “so many . . . are impatient to sit,” Copley praised the discerning taste of his clients. “I am visited by vas[t] numbers of People of the first Rank, who have seen Europe and are admirers of the Art.”1 The gifted artist masterfully captured the likenesses of select New Yorkers, leaving little doubt that his subjects, resplendent in their finery, were outstanding examples of refined Britons. Copley’s stunning portraits of weighty New Yorkers and their wives, along with those executed by less renowned eighteenth-century artists such as John Wollaston and Thomas McIlworth, radiate an aura of gentility that conjures up a vanished world of privilege in which the superiority of its denizens was taken as axiomatic. This world was not populated solely by the Anglican royal sympathizers who sat for Copley. On his way to the Continental Congress in August 1774, John Adams was entertained by Presbyterian political leader John Morin Scott, a Huguenot descendant whose wife Helena Rutgers belonged to an eminent Dutch family. At Scott’s “elegant Seat” three miles out of New York City, “with Hudson’s River just behind his House and a rural 233

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Figure 13.  During his sojourn in New York City in 1771, John Singleton Copley painted several members of the wealthy Verplanck family, including Gulian Verplanck (1751–1799), a recent graduate of King’s College. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Bayard Verplanck, 1949. Accession Number 49.13.

Prospect all round him,” Adams encountered a level of luxury that astonished a sober New Englander. “A more elegant Breakfast I never saw—rich Plate—a very large Silver Coffee Pott, a very large Silver Tea Pott—Napkins of the very finest materials, and toast and bread and butter in great perfection. After breakfast, a Plate of beautifull Peaches, another of Pairs and another

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of Plumbs and a Muskmellen were placed on the Table.”2 Neither Scott’s position on the political spectrum nor his family’s ethnic makeup affected his standing among the city’s elite. From the vantage point of New York’s ladies and gentlemen, the material expressions of the refinement they cherished validated the genteel standards they upheld. Their social preeminence, made visible in Copley’s portraits and John Adams’s paean to John Morin Scott’s style of life, was deemed the sole prerequisite for decreeing how everyone else should behave. In other words, they believed that social superiority would translate seamlessly into cultural authority. Yet the image of mastery conveyed by the portraits and reflected in the everyday carriage of ladies and gentlemen masked a persistent undercurrent of discontent with the cultural canons enshrined by those in the top echelons. Three centuries later, the flawed logic of the elite’s case is evident. Eighteenth-century men of privilege sought to impose their cultural vocabulary on people whose traditions, religious convictions, or abject life circumstances denied meaning to these concepts. The elite failed to grasp how incongruous their lexicon seemed to city dwellers mired in poverty or bound in slavery, to adherents of alien cultures and the spiritually awakened, to victims of spousal abuse or neglect. Precepts of gentility rang especially hollow to those they termed the vulgar. Expectations of respectful speech and sycophantic gestures bordered on the absurd to human beings devoid of basic rights and relegated to observing others enjoy the fruits of their labor. This book has explored how a variety of eighteenth-century New Yorkers, some of more credible social standing than others, took issue with the standards vaunted by the urban elite. Many of those locked in subservient roles expressed their feelings spontaneously, without commentary. Provoked by unreasonable commands or undue chastisement, they found relief in heated outbursts, petty misdeeds, and short-term escapades. But such outlets did not suffice for everyone weighed down by the ever-present reality of domination. Rebelling against the restrictions that defined their lives, wives, servants, and slaves absconded from household heads who pressed them to conform to rules they found odious. Despondent individuals with no hope of severing their connections to the white men who ruled them turned on occasion to violence, lashing out at those they held responsible for their plight or, in a few tragic instances, destroying themselves or those they held dear. Although virtually all these acts were impulsive, they hold significance because they reveal a mind-set at odds with that of city stalwarts. Greater insight into the thinking of New Yorkers who contested the cultural authority of the elite comes from the pens of devout men and women

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who were alarmed at the direction in which the city’s mainstream churches were headed. Although New York’s three major congregations—the Dutch Reformed, the Anglican, and the Presbyterian—included people of all ranks, leadership posts were held almost exclusively by members of the elite whose cosmopolitan outlook on the world colored their views of Christian worship. Socially and mentally distant from the commoners filling the pews, people of privilege could not comprehend the Bible-based spirituality of ordinary men and women untouched by Enlightenment thought. These unremarkable churchgoers regarded the elite’s moralistic approach to religion, not to mention their frequent indulgence in worldly pleasures, as signs of faithlessness. Those most unnerved by the shortcomings of the orthodox clergy and their lay allies felt justified in deserting congregations dominated by gentlemen of questionable moral standing to join with fellow believers in one of the embryonic religious communities that sprang up in the city after 1740. Nestled in sacred spaces of their own and removed from the oversight of the elite, Moravians, Baptists, Scottish Presbyterians, and Methodists were free to steer an independent religious course. Other disaffected churchgoers doubtless wrestled with the same issues that induced their coreligionists to secede from mainstream congregations, but they hesitated at taking so extreme a step. Instead, they pinned their hopes on instigating changes within the congregation by first mobilizing and then delegating spokesmen who would lay out their objections to specific church practices and press their case. Their aim was to bring church practices in line with their deeply held convictions, not to overturn church leadership. Dissident artisans involved in these contests may not have been out to discredit gentlemen as a whole or to remake the social landscape; yet by debating substantive issues with members of the elite in the religious setting, they were presenting themselves as legitimate adversaries to the high-ranking men who governed church affairs. Once this threshold in the relations between commoners and those clothed with cultural authority had been crossed, New York’s gentlemen needed to ponder the consequences of losing the allegiance, if not the respect, of people of lesser rank. This minute recalibration of New York’s cultural scales also had a profound effect on commoners. Individuals immersed in ecclesiastical politics were primed to look critically at the utterances of leaders previously thought to be invincible. Remonstrating against influential men afforded these neophytes invaluable experience in formulating platforms and mastering the rhetorical and political skills already at the fingertips of the privileged. Infused with the confidence that comes from practical experience, partisans in protracted church battles edged

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toward political consciousness at the very time the bonds between England and its colonies were fraying. As the imperial crisis unsettled customary relationships, men who had jousted with high-ranking members of their congregations, along with many of the city residents who had stood up to intransigent masters in the household and on the streets, were poised to make connections between their struggles over cultural authority and the broader political controversies rending New York society. Jacobus Stoutenburgh, the gunsmith turned Dutch party advocate, cleverly appropriated the language of rights running through contemporary discourse to bolster his brief against the Anglicized gentlemen of the Dutch Reformed congregation. No simple equation can capture the precise relationship between cultural and political positions at this crucial juncture in New York City’s history. But one can assume that there was spillover from the cultural to the political realm. Orthodox clergymen of the Church of England who vocally defended the prerogatives of church and state were barraged with pointed criticism on both counts. An antiroyalist partisan whose words were transcribed by Captain John Montresor during the furor over the Stamp Act attacked the political views of local clerics by decrying their religious pronouncements. “To such a pitch are the Sons of Liberty arrived at,” Montresor wrote, “that one the other day Reproached the Clergy here with preaching false Doctrine and that they were only the Embassadors of Hell & the same man a Communicant of the Trinity Church.” Trinity Church rector Samuel Auchmuty took heat from both evangelical parishioners and those such as pamphleteer C.J., who condemned Auchmuty’s political stance. Such was Auchmuty’s reputation for dismissing the opinions of his many critics that his colleague and successor Charles Inglis saw fit to present the venerable minister’s disregard for commoners as a badge of honor. “Unshaken in his Loyalty to our gracious Sovereign, and in his Attachment to our happy Constitution, he spurned the Voice of popular Applause, where conscience forbid him to approve of it.”3 But even siding with the rebels could not protect an Anglican minister from the aspersions of displeased listeners. Samuel Provoost, the only one of Auchmuty’s colleagues to take the American side in the Revolution, was reproached by Anglican evangelicals for hewing too closely to orthodox Anglican ways. He was harried out of the pulpit by these renegades in combination with vestrymen unhappy with his political views. The situation in the Dutch Reformed Church was equally complex. Having shown the backbone to battle congregational leaders on the issue of English-language preaching, Dutch traditionalists maintained their independence when it came to choosing sides in the Revolution. They surely were not

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in the audience when “a very sed-t——s [seditious] sermon [was] preached by Mr Ledly [Archibald Laidlie] Minister N—— [North] Dutch Church exciting people to Reb——ll——n [Rebellion].” Dissociated from the Anglicized gentlemen who attended the North Dutch Church—men they despised for introducing the English language into the Dutch Church—they refused to follow them into the camp of the rebels and instead cast their lot with supporters of King George III. The loyal Dutch stayed in British-occupied New York City, where in October 1779 the Trinity Church vestry, “impressed with a grateful remembrance of the former kindness of the members of that ancient Church, in permitting the use of their Church to the members of the Church of England, when they had no proper edifice of their own,” offered these Dutch “the use of St. George’s Chapel for celebrating their worship on Sundays, and such other times as they shall choose to perform.” In April 1780, after the return of “the old Dutch Church,” which had been used by the British as a hospital for soldiers, Dutch congregational leaders, grateful for the respect shown them, thanked the Trinity vestry for the use of St. George’s Chapel. Abel Hardenbrook, John Alstyne, William Ellis, Henry Brevoort, Barnardus Smith, Jeronimus Alstyne, Abel Hardenbrook Jr., and Isaack Kip, none of them of high rank, in company with their minister Gerrit Lydekker, an exile from New Jersey, chose their words carefully. “The Christian-like behavior and kind attention shown in our distress by the members of the Church of England, will make a lasting impression on the minds of the ancient Reformed Dutch congregation, who have always considered the interest of the two Churches inseparable, and hope that this instance of brotherly love will evince to posterity the cordial and happy union subsisting between us.”4 Repudiating the views of the cosmopolitan gentlemen who had triumphed over them in church politics may not have been a wise move in the long run, but it brought vindication to Dutch speakers in the city their ancestors had founded. Cultural power would remain in the hands of privileged New Yorkers for generations to come, but by the eve of the American Revolution compliance with their directives was far from universal. Commoners from all corners of society challenged the elite’s prescriptions on multiple fronts and in doing so poked holes in the fabric of authority. These transactions, many on a very small scale, set limits to the cultural reach of the city’s elite by marking the points at which their notions would be rebuffed. Some contests, particularly the internecine church battles, gave political novices a glimmer of their potential as actors on the public stage. Men who had negotiated with social superiors in their congregations had reason to think that their ideas would matter in the debates swirling around constitutional issues in the 1760s and

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1770s. Opposition to the elite’s cultural dominion in British New York City was neither coordinated nor programmatic. Yet when the microbursts of defiance that had been punctuating the lives of local luminaries flowed into the broader political stream in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the likelihood of more robust forms of resistance increased.

Notes

Abbreviations

CNYHS DHNY

Collections of the New-York Historical Society E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. The Documentary History of the State of New York. 4 vols. Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1850–1851. Doc. Rel. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York. 15 vols. Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1853– 1887. Ecc. Rec. Edward T. Corwin, ed. Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York. 7 vols. Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1901–1916. Iconography I. N. Phelps Stokes. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909. 6 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1967; originally published 1915–1928. Laws The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution. 5 vols. Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1894. MCC Herbert L. Osgood, ed. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776. 8 vols. New York, Dodd, Mead, 1905. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts SPG Introduction

1.  Esther Singleton, Social New York under the Georges (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1902), vii. 2.  This concept comes from Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, “Introduction: Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society,” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–42. 3.  Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 143. 4. “The Beekman Coach,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin 5 (April 1921–January 1922): 24–25. In the procession at James De Lancey’s funeral in 1760, “An Open Hearse bearing the Body in a Coffin covered with black Velvet, richly adorned with gilt Escutcheons and Furniture . . . was drawn by a beautiful Pair of white horses belonging to his Honour, in mourning, and were drove by his own Coachmen.” New-York Mercury, August 4, 1760. This cradle, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is pictured in Myrna Kaye, There’s a Bed in the Piano: The Inside Story of the American Home (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 8; Edward P. Alexander, A Revolutionary Conservative: James Duane of New York (1938; repr., New York: AMS, 1966), 40;

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Philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce, 1677–1877 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1956), 405. 5.  Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Cha­pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 62, 64; New-York Mercury, Decem­ber 20, 1762. 6.  On New York’s pleasure gardens see Thomas M. Garrett, “A History of Pleasure Gardens in New York City, 1700–1865” (PhD diss., New York University, 1978). 7.  Will of Teuntie Byvanck, Collections of the New-York Historical Society (hereafter CNYHS), 1895, 244–45; Will of Raphael Goelet, CNYHS, 1895, 157. 8.  For an elaboration of this theme see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Social and Cultural Life of Dutch Settlers, 1664–1776,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 120–31. 1. The Crystallization of an Anti-Dutch Narrative

1.  In 1679, a visitor to New York mentioned in passing the “frequent changes and conquests of the country. Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin Jameson, eds., Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 65. For the problems involved in interpreting this era in New York history see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Dutch Restoration of 1673–1674 and the Narratives of Seventeenth-Century New York History,” De Halve Maen 84 (2011): 3–6. 2.  Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols. (New York, 1897), 5:208. For a discussion of tensions between Dutch and English in early New York see John M. Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression: The English Conquest, the Charter of Liberties of 1683, and Leisler’s Rebellion in New York,” in Authority and Resistance in Early New York, ed. William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1988), 58–61; Clarendon Papers, CNYHS, 1869, 74; Peter R. Christoph and Florence A. Christoph, eds., New York Historical Manuscripts, English: Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York, 1664–1673; Orders, Warrants, Letters, Commissions, Passes and Licenses Issued by Governors Richard Nicolls and Francis Lovelace (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1982), 13; Clarendon Papers, 118; Samuel Maverick to Earl of Clarendon, November 7, 1665, Clarendon Papers, 80; Colonel Nicolls to the Duke of York [fragment], Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (hereafter Doc. Rel.), ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 15 vols. (Albany, 1853–1887), 3:105. 3.  Rev. Samuel Megapolensis to a Friend, New York, September 7, 1668, Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York (hereafter Ecc. Rec.), ed. Edward T. Corwin, 7 vols. (Albany, 1901–1916), 1:595. Governor Stuyvesant to the Duke of York, n.d., Doc. Rel., 3:163; Petition of the Common Council of New York to James, Duke of York, n.d., Doc. Rel., 3:187; Order in Council on the preceding Petition, December 11, 1668, Doc. Rel., 3:179.   4.  Samuel Mavericke to Colonel Nicolls, New York, July 5, 1669, Doc. Rel., 3:183; “The Interment of William Lovelace, New York, 1671,” American Historical Review 9 (1904): 522–24; Victor Hugo Paltsits, ed., Minutes of the Executive Council of the Province

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of New York, Administration of Francis Lovelace, 1668–1673, 2 vols. (Albany: State of New York, 1910), 1:191; 2:617–18; 1:182.  5. Peter R. Christoph and Florence A. Christoph, eds., The Andros Papers, 1674–1676 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 76. For the wording of the oath of fidelity see Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 7:2.   6.  Meeting of the Commanders and . . . Council of War, September 6, 1673, Doc. Rel., 2:599.   7.  John Sharpe to John Winthrop Jr., Milford [CT], May 12, 1674, Winthrop Papers, vol. 10, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (microfilm); Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672–1674 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 308–9; John Sharpe to John Winthrop Jr., Milford [CT], May 12, 1674; Shomette and Haslach, Raid on America, 308–9.   8.  Quoted in Shomette and Haslach, Raid on America, 309; Rev. William Van Nieuwenhuysen to the Classis of Amsterdam, July 26, 1674, Ecc. Rec., 1:653–54.   9.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 24; “Petition of Dutch Burghers of New-York,” March 16, 1674/75, Doc. Rel., 2:743; William Van Nieuwenhuysen to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York in America, May 20/30, 1676, Ecc. Rec., 1:686. 10.  Mary Lou Lustig, “Edmund Andros and the Dutch in New York, 1674–1681,” De Halve Maen 49 (Winter 1996): 67–75; Charles Wooley, “A Two Years Journal in New-York: and Part of Its Territories in America (London, 1701),” in Historical Chronicles of New Amsterdam, Colonial New York and Early Long Island, ed. Cornell Jaray, 1st series (Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1968), 55; Edward Randolph to William Blathwayt, New York, September 12, 1698, in Edward Randolph; Including His Letters and Official Papers from the New England, Middle and Southern Colonies in America . . . 1676–1703, 7 vols., ed. Robert Noxon Toppan (Boston: Prince Society, 1898–1909), 7:546. 11.  James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 238; quoted in Thomas J. Archdeacon, “Anglo-Dutch New York, 1676,” in New York: The Centennial Years, 1676–1976, ed. Milton M. Klein (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976), 31; “Governor Andros’ Answer to Mr. Lewin’s Report,” London, December 31, 1681, Doc. Rel., 3:313; Orders to Bee Observed by the Constables Wattch and the Citizens, Souldiers in the Citty of New York, January 11, (1675/76), Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776, 8 vols., ed. Herbert L. Osgood (New York, 1905) (hereafter MCC), 1:8. 12.  Quoted in Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17; James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 46; Christoph and Christoph, Andros Papers, 89; Archdeacon, “Anglo-Dutch New York,” 31. On weights and measures see MCC, 1:3. On governmental reorganization see Archdeacon, “Anglo-Dutch New York,” 32. 13.  Churchwardens and Vestry of Trinity Church, New-York, to Archbishop Tenison, New York, May 22, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:526. 14.  This estimate of the congregation’s size was made by the elders and deacons at the time of Nieuwenhuisen’s death. The Church of New York City to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, February 25, 1680/81, Ecc. Rec., 2:760. In July 1674,

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Nieuwenhuisen himself had stated that “our church consists of between four and five hundred members.” Wilhelmus van Nieuwenhuysen to the Classis of Amsterdam, New Orange, July 26, 1674, Ecc. Rec., 1:654; James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 75–76. In 1681, Domine Casparus van Zuuren noted that “New York has no English minister or chaplain, and very few ever partake of the Lord’s Supper when they have a minister.” Casparus van Zuuren, Minister, to the Classis of Amsterdam, June 25, 1681, Ecc. Rec., 2:779; James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 85–86; Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21/31, 1683, Ecc. Rec., 2:867. 15.  Ministers of New Netherland to the Classis of Amsterdam (1680?), Ecc. Rec., 2:755. 16.  Sir John Werden to Governor Andros, Windsor, May 24, 1680, Doc. Rel., 3:284. For the English context of these events see Stephen Saunders Webb, “The Trials of Sir Edmund Andros,” in The Human Dimensions of Nation Making: Essays on Colonial and Revolutionary America, ed. James Kirby Martin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 23–53, and Lustig, “Edmund Andros and the Dutch in New York”; William Byrd to Daniel Horsmanden, Virginia, March 8, 1685[/86], in The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776, 2 vols., ed. Marion Tinling (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 1:55. In 1677, the Dutch accounted for 81 percent of taxable citizens. Archdeacon, “Anglo-Dutch New York,” 27; Gov. Dongan’s Report to the Committee of Trade on the Province of New-York, February 22, 1687, The Documentary History of the State of New York (hereafter DHNY), 4 vols., ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1850–1851), 1:103. 17. Gov. Dongan’s Report to the Committee of Trade on the Province of New-York, February 22, 1687, DHNY, 1:116–17. 18.  Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt to Maria van Rensselaer, [New York,] January 16, 1683, in Correspondence of Maria van Rensselaer, 1669–1689, ed. A. J. F. van Laer (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1935), 83. In 1682, Selyns reported, “As to Papists there are none; or if there are any, they attend our services or that of the Lutherans.” Rev. Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 28, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:830. 19.  John M. Murrin, “The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century New York,” in New York and the Union: Contributions to the American Constitutional Experience, ed. Stephen L. Schechter and Richard B. Bernstein (Albany: New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, 1990), 29–71. 20.  On the Nadere Reformatie see Fred A. van Lieburg, “From Pure Church to Pious Culture: The Further Reformation in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” in Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, ed. W. Fred Graham (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1994), 409–29. Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21/31, 1683, Ecc. Rec., 2:865–66. On Selyns see Jos van der Linde, “Henricus Selijns (1636–1701): Churchman with a Steady Hand,” in Transatlantic Pieties: Dutch Clergy in Colonial America, ed. Leon van den Broeke, Hans Krabbendam, and Dirk Mouw (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 119–45; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 90. For the distinction between the “members of this congregation, and the well-disposed hearers in the same” see “The Consistory’s Resolution for the Building of a New Church, December 30, 1687,” Ecc. Rec., 2:951.

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21.  Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 28, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:829; Order for a Day of Thanksgiving . . . for January 4th, 1685, Ecc. Rec., 2:892; Order for a Thanksgiving Day [for January 6, 1684], Ecc. Rec., 2:873; Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 28, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:830. 22.  T. J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem: Jean De Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 300; Letter from Domine Selyns to Willem a Brakel quoted in Henry C. Murphy, Anthology of New Netherland; Or Translations from the Early Dutch Poets of New York, with Memoirs of their Lives (1865; repr. Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1969), 96; Order for a Thanksgiving Day [for January 6, 1684], Ecc. Rec., 2:872–73. 23.  Order for a Day of Thanksgiving . . . for January 4th, 1685, Ecc. Rec., 2:891. 24.  Church of New Castle (South River) to the Classis of Amsterdam, September 25, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:824; Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 28, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:831–32; Church of New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 30, 1682, Ecc. Rec., 2:837. 25.  Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, September 20, 1685, Ecc. Rec., 2:907. 26.  Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21/31, 1683, Ecc. Rec., 2:866–67; Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 10, 1688, Ecc. Rec., 2:959. Another Dutch minister reported, “The French congregation increases by daily arrivals from Carolina, the Carribean [sic] Islands and Europe.” Rudolphus Varick to the Classis of Amsterdam, September 30, 1688, Ecc. Rec., 2:956; Henry Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21/31, 1683, Ecc. Rec., 2:867. 27.  “Call for a day of Prayer upon the Queen’s Pregnancy,” Ecc. Rec., 2:951–52; Edward Randolph to William Blathwayt, New York, October 2, [16]88, in Toppan, Edward Randolph, 6:263. 28.  Lieutenant Governor Leisler and Council to the Bishop of Salisbury, New York, January 7, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:655. For Selyns’s proclamation see David William Voorhees, “The ‘fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 51 (1994): 467–68, n101; “Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam,” October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1247. 29.  Steven C. A. Pincus, “From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s,” Historical Journal 38 (1995): 333–61. 30.  [Jacob Leisler] to William Jones in Newhaven, New York, July 10, 1689, DHNY, 2:6. 31.  Captain Leisler to King William and Queen Mary, August 20, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:615; Representation of Ensign Joost Stol, Agent for the Committee of Safety of New-York, London, November 16, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:630; Captain Leisler to King William and Queen Mary, August 20, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:616; Deposition of Pieter Godfree and another, July 22, 1689, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, Volume 12, 1685–1688, and Addenda, 1653–1687, ed. J. W. Fortescue (London: H.M.S.O., 1899), p. 100, no. 281. 32. “Certificate of the Clergy of New-York in favor of Messrs. Cortland and Bayard, June 11, 1689,” Doc. Rel., 3:588.

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33.  Randall Balmer, “Traitors and Papists: The Religious Dimensions of Leisler’s Rebellion,” New York History 70 (1989): 362. 34.  Governor Fletcher to the Lords of Trade, New York, May 30, 1696, Doc. Rel., 4:150; Governor Fletcher to Mr. Blathwayte, New York, May 30, 1696, Doc. Rel., 4:157; Governor Fletcher to the Duke of Shrewsbury, May 30, 1686, Doc. Rel., 4:149; Governor Fletcher to the Lords of Trade, June 10, 1696, Doc. Rel., 4:159, 160. 35.  Wallace Gandy, ed., The Association Oath Rolls of the British Plantations [New York, Virginia, Etc.] A.D. 1696; Being a Contribution to Political History (London: privately printed, 1922), 33–47; Governor Fletcher to Mr. Blathwayte, July 13, 1696, Doc. Rel., 4:165. 36.  “An Act declareing what are the Rights and Priviledges of their Majesties Subjects inhabiting within their Province of New York,” passed May 12, 1691, in The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (hereafter Laws), 5 vols. (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1894), 1:244–48; “An act against Jesuits & popish preists,” passed August 9, 1700, ibid., 1:428–30; Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, October 28, 1700, Doc. Rel., 4:770. On this episode see Lawrence H. Leder, ed., “ ‘Dam’me Don’t Stir a Man’: Trial of New York Mutineers in 1700,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 42 (1958): 261–83. 37.  I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (hereafter Iconography), 6 vols. (New York, 1915–1928), 4:452. In 1715, when fears of the uprising in behalf of the Catholic pretender were at their height, a host of foreign-born Protestants took the oath of abjuration. “The Oath of Abjuration, 1715–1716,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 3 (1919): 35–40. 38.  Governor Fletcher to the Committee of Trade, October 9, 1693, Doc. Rel., 4:57; Representation of Messrs. Brooke and Nicoll to the Board of Trade, Whitehall, August 26, 1696, Doc. Rel. 4:181–82; Charles Lodwick, “New York in 1692,” CNYHS, 2nd series, vol. 2 (New York, 1849), 244. For Bullivant’s and Knight’s comments see Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 214–15. The curiosity of British travelers to the Netherlands about Dutch ways can be traced in Kees van Strien, Touring the Low Countries: Accounts of British Travellers, 1660–1720 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998). 39.  Churchwardens and Vestry of Trinity Church, New-York, to Archbishop Tenison, New York, May 22, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:526. 40.  Iconography, 4:396, 412, 413. On the work of the SPG in New York see William Webb Kemp, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1913; repr., New York: Arno, 1969). 41.  Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, May 3, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:515; Common Council meeting, November 2, 1700, MCC, 2:121. 42.  James N. Green, “The Book Trade in the Middle Colonies, 1680–1720,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 199–200; “Instructions to Governor Dongan,” May 29, 1686, Doc. Rel., 3:375. On William Bradford see Alexander Wall Jr., “William Bradford, Colonial Printer: A Tercentenary Review,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 73 (1963): 361–84. James N. Green discusses Bradford’s career as a government printer in New York in “The Book Trade in the Middle Colonies, 1680–1720,” 211–15.

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43.  New York Colonial Manuscripts, 45:96c., New York State Archives, Albany, N.Y.; Iconography, 4:972. 44.  Jarvis Marshall’s Affidavit, “Papers Relating to the Administration of Lieut. Gov. Leisler,” DHNY, 2:238; Deposition of John Gardner of Newwarke in East Jersey, August 18, 1692, ibid., 2:233–34. 45.  Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1248. 46.  Mr. William Nicholls to Mr. George Farewell, New York, January 14, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:662–63; “Colonel Bayard’s Narrative of Occurrences in New-York, from April to December 1689, New Yorke, December 13, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:639; Mathew Plowman to the Marquis Halifax, New York, June 7, 1689, August 14, 1689, in “Documents Relating to the Administration of Leisler,” CNYHS, 1868, 291; Governor Sloughter to Lord Nottingham, [New York,] May 6, 1691, Doc. Rel., 3:759. 47.  “A Memorial of what has occurred in New-York,” Doc. Rel., 3:739. 48.  Voorhees, “ ‘Fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler.” On Leisler’s cultural adaptation see Donna Merwick, “Being Dutch: Why Jacob Leisler Died,” New York History 70 (1989): 373–404. On Jacob Milborne see David William Voorhees, “ ‘Fanatiks’ and ‘Fifth Monarchists’: The Milborne Family in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 129 (1998): 67–75, 174–82; Leisler to the Governor of Barbados, [New York,] November 23, 1689, “Papers Relating to the Administration of Lieut. Gov. Leisler,” DHNY, 2:24–25. 49.  Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, June 22, 1698, Doc Rel., 4:325; “The Case of William Atwood, Esq., 1703,” CNYHS for the Year 1880, 273–74. 50.  The political significance of this has been pointed out by Patricia Bonomi, but the cultural implications need to be spelled out. Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 251–52, n1. Images of the Dutch as backward and ignorant were found in contemporary English writings and engravings. Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner (The English Satirical Print, 1600–1832) (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986). 51.  [Robert Livingston], “A Satyr Upon the Times,” 1702, in The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis of 1689, ed. Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1972; originally published 1964), 132–33. 52.  Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, June 30, 1703, Doc. Rel., 4:1059–60. 53.  “Case of William Atwood, Esq.,” 282. The partisan underpinning of Baker’s case is explored in Elizabeth Marting, “Dom. Rex vs. Roger Baker,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 31 (1947): 139–47. 54.  Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 13, 1689–1692, p. 103; Deposition of John Gardner of Newwarke in East Jersey, August 18, 1692, “Papers Relating to the Administration of Lieut. Gov. Leisler,” DHNY, 2:233; Margaret Kinard, “John Usher’s Report on the Northern Colonies, 1698,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 7 (1950): 101. The old image of the Dutch as “boors and butterboxes” resurfaced in a poem penned by Scottish New Yorker Robert Livingston in 1702. [Livingston], “Satyr Upon the Times,” 132.

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55.  A Commission for Wm. Bogardus to be Dutch Publique Notary [1668], Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York, 1664–1673, 171; A Warrant for the Publishing a Generall day of Humiliacion throughout his Royall Highness Territoryes, September 4, 1668, Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York, 1664–1673, 168; “Account of Proceedings in Court,” in “Documents Relating to the Administration of Leisler,” CNYHS for 1868, 313. This document is reproduced in the original Dutch as well as in English translation. Hendrick Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 1693–1794 (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: B. De Graaf, 1974), 23. 56.  Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, Orange County, September 27, 1702, Doc. Rel., 4:972; Colonel Bayard’s Narrative of Occurrences in New-York, from April to December 1689, New Yorke, December 13, 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:640; Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, May 15, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:520. See also Bellomont’s comment that a remonstrance written by Abraham Gouverneur contained “some expressions and words that are not very proper English.” Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, April 27, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:511; Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, April 27, 1699, Doc. Rel., 4:508. 57. Governour (Robert) Hunter, Androboros: A Biographical Farce in Three Acts (1714), in Satiric Comedies, ed. Walter J. Meserve and William R. Reardon, America’s Lost Plays, vol. 21 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 1–40. For an illuminating analysis of this play see David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 139–49. [Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, June 9, 1734], in Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748), ed. Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore Meyer (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968), 25. Alexander Malcolm to Charles Mackie, July 3, 1738, quoted in Elaine G. Breslaw, Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2008), 126. 58.  Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 147; Wayne Andrews, ed., “A Glance at New York in 1697: The Travel Diary of Dr. Benjamin Bullivant,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1956): 66; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 90. 59.  Depositions respecting the Riot at New-York [Deposition of Abraham Governier, June 23, 1690], Doc. Rel., 3:746. 60.  Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 20, 1702, p. 618, no. 999. 61.  Peter R. Christoph, ed., The Leisler Papers, 1689–1691: Files of the Provincial Secretary of New York Relating to the Administration of Lieutenant-Governor Jacob Leisler (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 172; Will of Elie Boudinot, 1700, CNYHS for 1892, 346–47; Christoph, Leisler Papers, 429–30; Adrian Howe, “The Bayard Treason Trial: Dramatizing Anglo-Dutch Politics in Early Eighteeenth-Century New York City,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 47 (1990): 68. Howe notes that the Provincial Council found that among the signers of these petitions were “French townsmen, several of whom were aliens.” Ibid., 65. 62.  Leisler to John Tathem at Burlington [NJ], May 7, 1690, DHNY, 2:241–[42]; Earl of Bellomont to the Board of Trade, New York, September 21, 1698, Doc. Rel., 4:379. 63.  Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, July 12, 1703, Doc. Rel., 4:1065; John A. F. Maynard, The Huguenot Church of New York: A History of the French

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Church of Saint-Esprit (New York, 1938), 95; Lord Cornbury to Secretary Hedges, New York, July 15, 1705, Doc. Rel., 4:1155. 64.  Lord Cornbury to Mr. Secretary Hedges, New York, July 15, 1705, Doc. Rel., 4:1151. 65.  [Livingston], “Satyr Upon the Times,” 179; Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, June 30, 1704, Doc. Rel., 4:1111–12. 66. Mr. Tuder to Captain Nicholson, August 1689, Doc. Rel., 3:617. “Olliverians” refers to supporters of Oliver Cromwell; Attorney-General [Samson Shelton] Broughton to the Lords of Trade, New York, June 27, 1704, Doc. Rel., 4:1111. 67.  Jacob Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 55 (1971): 354–74; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 112–13. 68. “Case of William Atwood, Esq.,” 273–74; Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1253; Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, May 29, 1703, Doc. Rel., 4:1044.; Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, September 9, 1703, Doc. Rel., 4:1071; Memoranda made by Du Simitiere, May 31, 1769, “Documents Relating to the Administration of Leisler,” CNYHS for 1868, 425. 69.  Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, New York, December 12, 1702, Doc. Rel., 4:1017. 70.  Lord Cornbury to Mr. Secretary Hedges, New York, July 15, 1705, Doc. Rel., 4:1155; “Colonel Bayard’s Narrative of Occurrences in New-York, from April to December 1689, New Yorke, December 13, 1689,” Doc. Rel., 3:639; An Account of the Illegal Prosecution and TRYAL of Nicholas Bayard, In the Province of New-York For Supposed High Treason, In the Year 1701/2, Collected from several Memorials taken by divers Persons privately, the Commissioners having strictly prohibited the taking of the Tryal in open COURT (New York: William Bradford, 1702), 39–40. 71.  Lieutenant-Governor and Council of New-York to the Lords of Trade, Doc. Rel., 4:942–43. 72.  Account of the Illegal Prosecution and TRYAL of Nicholas Bayard, 36; Christoph, Leisler Papers, 182–84. 73.  Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1246–61; Balmer, “Traitors and Papists,” 363; Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1258. 74.  Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, October 21, 1698, Doc. Rel., 4:400; Answer of the Church-Masters of the Dutch Church concerning the re-burial of Leisler and Milbourne in their church, New York, October 14, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1242. 75.  Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, October 21, 1698, Doc. Rel., 4:401; Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1261. On keeping the arms of Leisler and Milborne in the church see Dutch Church of New York, “Arms” of Leisler and Milborne, May 24, 1702, Ecc. Rec., 3:1490. The display of Leisler’s arms in the church might have been interpreted as inappropriate in light of the 1616 dictate of Amsterdam’s burgomasters that it was forbidden “to hang in the churches the arms of the deceased who are buried there.” Frits Scholten, Sumptuous

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Memories: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Tomb Sculpture (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders [2003]), 35. According to Scholten, “The following generation of Amsterdam’s regents and patricians simply ignored the prohibition. Around the middle of the century they actually displayed a great desire to flaunt their descent, titles and possessions, both during their lifetimes and posthumously.” Ibid. 76.  Charles Howard McCormick, Leisler’s Rebellion (New York: Garland, 1989), 371; New York Colonial Manuscripts, 45:66. See E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, N.Y., vol. 2, English Manuscripts, 1664–1776 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1865), 290; Letter of certain members of the Dutch Church of New York, (of the Leisler party) to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, October 21, 1698, Ecc. Rec., 2:1246–61. 77.  Attorney-General [Samson Shelton] Broughton to the Lords of Trade, New York, September 3, 1701, Doc. Rel., 4:914. 2. From Nation to Linguistic Community

  1.  On cosmopolitanism see Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).  2. Pete Hamill, Forever (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 153; New-York Gazette, October 29–November 5, 1739; March 25–31, 1740; The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942), 1:282.  3. On mid-eighteenth-century German immigration to New York see Klaus Wust, Guardian on the Hudson: The German Society of New York, 1784–1984 (New York: The Society, 1984) and Marianne S. Wokeck, The Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999); Protocol of the Lutheran Church in New York City, 1702–1750, trans. Simon Hart and Harry J. Kreider (New York: The Synod, 1958), 331, 332; “Letter from the Consistory of the Lutheran Church at New York to the Amsterdam Consistory,” May 22, 1746, in The Lutheran Church in New York, 1649–1772: Records of the Lutheran Church Archives at Amsterdam, Holland, trans. Arnold J. H. vanLaer (New York: New York Public Library, 1946), 230.  4. Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:290; “Petition for a Brief to Build a Lutheran Meeting House in New York,” April 4, 1750, DHNY, 3:488. New York City’s Lutherans remained separated in Dutch and German churches until 1784, when the congregations reunited. Harry Julius Kreider, Lutheranism in Colonial New York (1942; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972), 122; “Letter from the Rev. Johann A. Weygand and the Church Councils of the Dutch Lutheran Congregations in New York City (Trinity Church), Hackensack and Albany, to the Very Rev. Dr. Friedrich Wagner, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium of Hamburg,” New York City, April 1754, in Lutheran Church in New York and New Jersey, 1722–1760: Lutheran Records in the Ministerial Archives of the Staatsarchiv, Hamburg, Germany, trans. Simon Hart and Harry J. Kreider (n.p., 1962), 372; ibid.; “Letter from the Rev. Johann A. Weygand, Pastor, and the Church Council, of the Old Dutch Trinity Lutheran Church in New York City to the Very Rev. Dr. Friedrich Wagner, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium of Hamburg,” New York

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City, September 12, 1755, in Lutheran Church in New York and New Jersey, 391; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 2:328–30. 5.  Protocol of the Lutheran Church, 332; German Reformed Church of the City of New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, February 5, 1766, Ecc. Rec., 6:4038; Consistory meeting, December 20, 1758, Ecc. Rec., 5:3724. 6.  Hermann Wellenreuther, Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides and Their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730–1830 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013), 217–19; Willi Paul Adams, “The Colonial German-Language Press and the American Revolution,” in The Press and the American Revolution, ed. Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981), 171. 7.  Merchant Isaac Roosevelt’s mid-eighteenth-century letter book includes correspondence in Dutch with contacts in St. Eustatius, a colony controlled by the Netherlands. Isaac Roosevelt Letter Book, MSS, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. Letters from the Voorhees family in the Netherlands to their kin in New York are translated in Through a Dutch Door: 17th Century Origins of the Van Voorhees Family (Van Voorhees Association, 1992). In the 1740s, Gerardus Duyckinck wrote to his uncle Hendrick van Rensselaer, who lived in Claverack, in both Dutch and English. He addressed him as “Broeder Rensselaer.” Van Rensselaer–Fort Papers, MSS, New York Public Library. Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, ed. Thomas J. Davis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 46–47. 8.  New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, September 19, 1768; New-York Journal; or, the General Advertiser, February 9, 1775. When Queens College, the new Dutch institution of higher learning in New Jersey, was about to open in 1772, the trustees assured the parents of prospective students that “to obviate the objection of some of sending their Children on account of their small Proficiency in English, a proper Person has been provided, who attends at the Grammar School an Hour a Day, and teaches Reading, Writing and Arithmetic with becoming Accuracy.” New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, April 30, 1772, quoted in William H. S. Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766–1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers College, 1924), 84. This phrase comes from Donna Merwick, “The Suicide of a Notary: Language, Personal Identity, and Conquest in Colonial New York,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederica J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 148. 9.  Agitation for English preaching may have started even earlier, according to church historian E. T. Corwin. “As early as 1730 David Abeel, of New York, presented a petition with many signatures for English services in part in the church of New York, but the effort was not successful.” E. T. Corwin, J. H. Dubbs, and J. T. Hamilton, A History of the Reformed Church, Dutch, the Reformed Church, German and the Moravian Church (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1894), 207. Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Archibald Laidlie and the Transformation of the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Journal of Presbyterian History 81 (2003): 149–62. “The Opponents of Rev. Archibald Laidlie to the Classis of Amsterdam, July 22, 1763,” Ecc. Rec., 6:3880. 10.  Declaration of the Reverend Consistory to the Christian Congregation . . . January 1, 1726, Ecc. Rec., 4:2340; Baptisms in Private Houses [Paper read by Rev. John [Johannes] Ritzema], New York, August 20, 1747, Ecc. Rec., 4:2971.

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11.  Quoted in David E. Narrett, “Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and the Law in Colonial New York City,” in Authority and Resistance in Early New York, ed. William Pencak and Conrad Edick (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1988), 40–41; Rev. Gualterus Du Bois to the Classis of Amsterdam, November 2, 1748, Ecc. Rec., 4:3038. 12.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:282; extract from preface of the Independent Reflector . . . January 1754, Ecc. Rec., 5:3459; Adolph B. Benson, ed., The America of 1750: Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America; The English Version of 1770, Revised from the Swedish Original, 2 vols. (1937; repr., New York: Dover Books, 1966), 2:626; [Letter from the Rev. Michael Christian Knoll] to the Lutheran Consistory at Rothenburg on the Tauber [Germany], December 21, 1749, Protocol of the Lutheran Church, 465; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:283, 287. 13.  Church of New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, March 8, 1764, Ecc. Rec., 6:3914. 14.  Draft of a letter to Messrs. David Longueville and James Brinshall at Amsterdam in behalf of the Consistory, New York, January 10, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3854. 15.  William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, 2 vols., ed. Michael Kammen (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:227; draft of a letter to Messrs. David Longueville and James Brinshall at Amsterdam in behalf of the Consistory, New York, January 10, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3855–56. 16.  Robert Francis Seybolt, “The Teaching of French in Colonial New York,” Romanic Review 10 (October–December 1919), 364–76. New York’s booksellers targeted this market. “Those who teach, or want to learn the French language, may be supplied at Noel and Hazard’s Book-Store . . . with Boyer’s and Perrin’s Grammar . . . Perrin’s Spelling Book . . . [Perrin’s] Collection of French Verbs, both regular and irregular, disposed in one Sheet of Paper. Boyer’s, D’Alembert’s and Nugent’s Dictionaries.” Quoted in Seybolt, “Teaching of French in Colonial New York,” 371; John Sharpe, “Proposals for Erecting a School, Library and Chapel at New York,” New York, March 11, 1712/13, CNYHS for 1880, 343. Sharpe added, “It is possible also to learn Hebrew here as well as in Europe, there being a Synagogue of Jews, and many ingenious men of that nation from Poland, Hungary, Germany, & etc.,” ibid.; Occasional Reverberator, September 21, 1753, 10; R. D. Grillo, Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174. Grillo discusses “Barbarous Tongues” and the “discourse of cultivated language” at length, ibid., 173–93. 17.  The petition is printed in Alexander J. Wall, “The Controversy in the Dutch Church in New York Concerning Preaching in English, 1754–1768,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 12 (1928): 39–58; Classis of Amsterdam to the Opponents of Rev. Laidlie as English Preacher, October 3, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3898. 18.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Archibald Laidlie (1727–1779): The Scot Who Revitalized New York City’s Dutch Reformed Church,” in Transatlantic Pieties: Dutch Clergy in Colonial America, ed. Leon van den Broeke, Hans Krabbendam, and Dirk Mouw (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 256–57; Thomas De Witt, A Discourse Delivered in the North Reformed Dutch Church (Collegiate) in the City of New-York, on the Last Sabbath in August 1856 (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1857), 31; David D. Demarest, The Reformed Church in America: Its

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Origin, Development and Characteristics, 4th ed., rev. and enlarged (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1889; originally published 1856), 65; Charles E. Corwin, “The Introduction of the English Language into the Services of the Collegiate Dutch Church of New York City,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 10 (1919–1920): 175–88; Wall, “Controversy in the Dutch Church in New York Concerning Preaching in English.” A more balanced account of the language question appears in Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1978), 211–27. 19.  Correspondence of Jeremias Van Rensselaer, 1651–1674, ed. and trans. A. J. F. van Laer, (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1932), 403; CNYHS for the year 1902, 37; Lewis Morris Jr. to the Lords of Trade, New York, July 19, 1729, Doc. Rel., 5:886. Both men, Rip Van Dam and Abraham Van Horne, were members of the New York Council. 20.  Nan A. Rothschild, New York City Neighborhoods: The Eighteenth Century (San Diego, Academic Press, 1990), 96. See also Bruce M. Wilkenfeld, “New York City Neighborhoods, 1730,” New York History 17 (1976): 165–82. Some Cursory Remarks Made by James Birket in His Voyage to North America, 1750–1751 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 43–44; T. Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America, ed. Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949), 43. 21.  Leanne Hinton, “Revitalization of Endangered Languages,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, ed. Peter K. Austin and Julia Sallabank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 297–99; narration of case transcribed in document in Isaac Roosevelt MSS, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. See also the cases of Dirick Cook vs. Jacob Swan (1713), John Vanloon vs. Frans Wenna (1713), and Peter Anderson vs. Martin van Everen (1728) in Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674–1784, ed. Richard B. Morris (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1935), 337, 339–40, 359. 22.  Consistory meeting, March 6, 1728/29, Ecc. Rec., 4:2450. “The two churches had a common consistory and shared ministers with the pastors rotating each Sunday.” De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church, 86. 23.  Consistory meeting, December 20, 1731, Ecc. Rec., 4:2563; New-York Evening Post, February 29, 1747. 24.  New-York Evening Post, February 29, 1747. 25.  Hugh Simm to Andrew Simm, Albany, New York, September 27, 1774, in Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era, ed. Barbara De Wolfe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142, 141. One can get a sense of the sources of the Dutch in-migration to New York City in the eighteenth century by examining the places of origin of new members of the city’s Dutch Reformed Church. 26.  Paul F. Hoftijzer, “Metropolis of Print: The Amsterdam Book Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, ed. Patrick O’Brien, Derek Keene, Marjolein ’t Hart, and Herman van der Wee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 249–63; Lotte Hellinga, Alastair Duke, Jacob Harskamp, and Theo Hermans, eds., The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade, 1473–1941 (’t Goy-Houten,

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Netherlands: Hes & De Graaf, 2001). On the literacy of New Yorkers see David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 222–27. 27.  For books in New Netherland see Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 417–20. Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin Jameson, eds., Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 81–82; CNYHS for 1893, 72. Gunsmith Garrit Harsin left his “Large Dutch House Bible” to his “well-beloved son Bernardus” in 1753. CNYHS for 1896, 24. 28.  James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 296–97; Henricus Selyns to Theodorus Janssonius Almeloveen, New York, October 30, 1696, manuscript letter, Special Collections, University of Utrecht Library, MSS 996 (6k4), vol. 2, fol. 133r. 29.  Linda Briggs Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from Dutch to English Law 1643–1727 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983), 95, 97; James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 62–63. 30.  Inventory of Peter Jacobs Marius, 1702, New York State Archives. 31.  Inventory of Abraham De La Noy, 1702; Inventory of Samuel Mynderts, 1702; Inventory of Gertye Splinter, 1722, New York State Archives. 32.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Dutch Book Trade in Colonial New York City: The Transatlantic Connection,” in Books between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860, ed. Leslie Howsam and James Raven (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139; James and Jameson, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 62–63; Inventory of Peter Jacobs Marius, 1702, Inventory of Abraham De La Noy, 1702, Inventory of Samuel Mynderts, 1702, Inventory of Gertye Splinter, 1722, MSS, New York State Archives; Declaration of the Reverend Consistory to the Christian Congregation . . . January 1, 1726, Ecc. Rec., 4:2341. 33.  Henricus Selyns to Theodorus Janssonius Almeloveen, New York, October 30, 1696. A half century later, Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg confided to a colleague overseas that if he had “to remain in New York for a time I would establish a German print shop in New York.” Henricus Muhlenberg to Samuel Theodor Albinus, New York, June 1, 1752, The Correspondence of Henricus Melchior Muhlenberg, vol. 2, 1748–1752, ed. John W. Kleiner and Helmut T. Lehmann (Camden, ME: Picton, 1997), 261. For specific cases see Goodfriend, “Dutch Book Trade,” 130–32. Hendrik Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 1693–1794: A Descriptive Catalog of Dutch-Language Books, Pamphlets and Almanacs Printed in America (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: B. de Graaf, 1974). Since this book was published, Edelman has found two additional Dutch-language imprints, from 1759 and 1763. Noah Sheola, “Dutch Language Imprints in Colonial America,” Library Quarterly 84 (2014): 73, n3. 34.  For an overview of New York’s colonial printers see John Z. C. Thomas, “Printing in Colonial New York, 1693–1763” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1974). 35.  Ibid., 41, 44–45. See also Charles R. Hildeburn, Sketches of Printers and Printing in Colonial New York (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1895), 55–58. 36.  Petrus Van Driessen, De Heerlykheit der Gernade van den Eenigen en Drie-Eenigen Verbonds God. . . . (New York: J. Peter Zenger, 1730). Du Bois and Boel signed the declaration of this catechism. For more on the connections between Goelet, Venema, and Zenger see chap. 3.

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37.  Z.Z.’s manifesto is discussed above. On the English-language liturgy see Daniel James Meeter, “Bless the Lord, O My Soul”: The New-York Liturgy of the Dutch Reformed Church, 1767 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 35–37. In 1748, a congregational committee resolved that “two hundred copies of the Form [of the lease for the farms on Fordham Manor] should be correctly printed by Mr. Hendrik De Foreest, at the cost of our church, under the direction of the Committee,” Ecc. Rec., 4:3014; New-York Evening Post, January 14, 1750/51. 38.  New-York Evening Post, March 18, 1750/51; New-York Evening Post, November 4, 1751, April 20, 1752. The advertisement was repeated on May 11, 1752. 39.  T. J. Tomlin emphasizes the religious content of eighteenth-century almanacs, in “ ‘Astrology’s from Heaven not from Hell’: The Religious Significance of Early American Almanacs,” Early American Studies 8 (2010): 288–321. 40.  New-York Mercury, April 28, 1755, May 12, 1755. 41. For sermons preached on the death of “Prins Frederik van Walles” see New-York Evening Post, June 10, 1751; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, October 14, 1751; New-York Evening Post, October 14, 1751. 42. Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 83 (no. 66). According to Edelman this broadside was advertised in the New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy on November 8, 1756. An obituary of Curtenius appeared in the New-York Mercury, November 1, 1756. “Goelet & Curtenius, who have lately taken the store of Mr. John Dies, at the Golden Key, in Hanover Square,” advertisement in the New-York Mercury, June 17, 1754. See also Howard S. F. Randolph, “Jacob Boelen, Goldsmith of New York, and His Family Circle,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 72 (1941): 282; “Peter T. Curtenius, At the Sign of the Golden Anvil and Hammer, opposite the Oswego Market,” advertisement, New-York Mercury, September 1, 1760; New-York Mercury, December 7, 1761; New-York Gazette, November 7, 1763; New-York Mercury, January 9, 1764; New-York Gazette, January 23, January 30, 1764; March 12, 1764. 43.  New-York Mercury, September 30, 1765; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, October 17, 1768; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, May 16, 1771. This advertisement also lists several titles in English; Rivington’s New-York Gazeteer, June 10, 1773, supplement. 44.  Philip Livingston advertised Dutch Bibles in the New-York Mercury on November 6, 1752, and subsequent dates. Robert Crommelin advertised Dutch Bibles and Testaments in the New-York Mercury on August 26, 1758, and subsequent dates. According to his account books, Cornelius Clopper “imported many Dutch books, Bibles, and Psalmbooks.” Meeter, “Bless the Lord,” 70. For more on Clopper’s trade see Goodfriend, “Dutch Book Trade,” 142–43, 146. 45. Wynkoop: New-York Mercury, November 2, 1761; Bamper: New-York Gazette, April 4, 1763 (see also September 20, 1762); Low: New-York Mercury, August 12, 26, 1765; Curtenius: New-York Mercury, January 9, 1764, New-York Gazette, January 30, 1764. Great family Bibles printed in various places in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century are extant, many with provenance. According to music historian Robin Leaver, virtually everyone owned a psalm book: Robin A. Leaver, “Dutch Secular and Religious Songs in Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Amsterdam–New York: Transatlantic Relations and Urban Identities since 1653, ed. George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2005), 99–124. Jean Parker Waterbury, A

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History of Collegiate School, 1638–1963 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1965), 49–50; Low: New-York Mercury, August 12, 26, 1765; Curtenius: New-York Mercury, January 9, 1764; New-York Gazette, January 30, 1764. 46.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, May 4, 1747. Bamper: New-York Gazette, September 20, 1762; Low: New-York Gazette, May 6, 1765, June 3, 1765; Bogart: New-York Journal, and General Advertiser, March 17, 1768; Low: New-York Mercury, August 12, 26, 1765; Curtenius: New-York Mercury, January 9, 1764; New-York Gazette, January 30, 1764. 47.  For Low see Ecc. Rec., 6:4076. In July 1765 the consistory noted that “a translation into English of domine A. Hellenbrock’s Catechism by Petrus Lowe, was presented, with a request that it be examined and approved,” Ecc. Rec., 6:3999. Writing on September 9, 1765, Domine De Ronde mentioned “a little catechism, by Rev. Hellenbroek, which had been translated into English by a man named Low, a builder by trade,” Ecc. Rec., 6:4007. The book was Specimen of Divine Truths, Fitted for the Use of those, of various capacities, who desire to prepare themselves for a due Confession of their Faith, by the Rev. Mr. A. Hellenbroeck, Late Minister of the Gospel at Rotterdam; Translated from the Dutch, for the Use of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, of the City of New-York (New York: John Holt, 1765). For more on the catechism written by Abraham Hellenbroek, an important Dutch Pietist, see Goodfriend, “Archibald Laidlie and the Transformation of the Dutch Reformed Church,” 159–60. For Curtenius see “A List of the Persons who subscribed towards Building the Church . . . with the respective sums they contributed (1767),” in “A Journal of the Proceedings of the Consistory of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York in Regard to the petitions of their Congregation calling for an English Preacher and the Disputes Arising therefrom, 1762–1771,” MSS, New-York Historical Society. 48.  Extract from a letter of the Consistory of New York, May 12, 1764, Ecc. Rec., 6:3948; John H. Livingston to –––, June 26, 1772, Emmett Collection, New York Public Library. Quoted in Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 19. 49.  Rev. De Ronde to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 29, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4031. Not long after, the consistory ordered that “the Old Church be repaired and the old seats be removed with the floor, that an entire solid floor be laid and furnished with seats.” Consistory meeting, February 2, 1766, Ecc. Rec., 6:4032. Extract from a letter of the Consistory of New York, May 12, 1764, Ecc. Rec., 6:3948; Samuel Auchmuty to the Secretary, New York, May 5, 1766; Samuel Auchmuty to the Secretary, New York, March 29, 1764, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (hereafter SPG) Letter Books, microfilm, series B, vol. 2, no. 17, fols 62–64. 50. Opponents of English preaching in New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 23, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4030; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, August 12, 1771. 51.  Jacobus Stoutenburgh, a gunsmith, was active in civic affairs. In July 1761 he was entrusted with “the Care and Charge of the Severall Fire Engines” of New York City, for which he was to be paid thirty pounds a year. “Jacobus Stoutenburgh Engenier” heads a lengthy list of “Firemen for the Several Wards in this City” in

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February 1769. In February 1770 he was appointed “overseer of the City’s watch.” MCC, 6:255, 7:144, 206. Stoutenburgh has been mythologized by historians of New York City firefighters for purportedly leading a battalion of firemen out of the city with General Washington in 1776. Benjamin L. Carp, “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 58 (2001): 801. Jacobus Stoutenburgh, A Short Detail, of the Church, At the time of the Apostles: Withall shewing how far we are degenerated from them: With a Christian Admonition, to heal this lamentable Breach again among us, if we hope to receive a Blessing from God (New York: printed by Samuel Brown, 1764). Samuel Brown was married to Henricus De Foreest’s daughter. 52. Stoutenburgh, Short Detail, of the Church, 38, 41–42. A similar phrase, “what has become of the rights and privileges, of the Dutch in this City?” appears in a 1763 letter to the Amsterdam Classis from critics of English-language preaching. Stoutenburgh was one of thirteen men who signed this letter. Opponents of Rev. Archibald Laidlie to the Classis of Amsterdam, July 22, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3881. 53. Wall, “Controversy in the Dutch Church”; Kenneth Scott, “Jacob Goelet: Translator of Dutch for the Province of New York,” de Halve Maen 55 (Winter 1981): 1–5; 20–21. Goelet offered to translate the psalms into English for the Dutch Reformed Church. Having already spurned another Dutchman’s efforts “to versify the psalms in the same manner as they are versified in Dutch” and instead employed English poet Francis Hopkinson to find “the best method of doing this according to the genius of the English tongue,” the consistory ordered that a letter be sent “to Mr. Jacob Goelet, declining his proposal in the most courteous way, and promising as soon as our Psalm-book is printed, to present him with one or two copies.” Consistory meeting, May 22, 1764; Consistory meeting, November 24, 1766, Ecc. Rec., 6:3922, 4075. See also Leaver, “Dutch Secular and Religious Songs”; Virginia L. Redway, “James Parker and the ‘Dutch Church,’ ” Musical Quarterly 24 (1938): 481–500; and Carleton Sprague Smith, “The 1774 Psalm Book of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in New York City,” Musical Quarterly 34 (1948): 84–96. 54.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Cultural Metamorphosis of Domine Lambertus De Ronde,” Hudson River Valley Review 25 (Spring 2009): 63–73. 55.  Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to the Rev. John Kalkoen, September 9, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4007; Letter from Rev. De Ronde from Paramaribo, December 10, 1749, Ecc. Rec., 4:3109. 56.  Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to the Rev. John Kalkoen, September 9, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4007; Lambertus De Ronde, A System: Containing the Principles of the Christian Religion, Suitable to the Heidelberg Catechism (New York: H. Gaine, 1763), preface, i, ii; Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to one of the Deputies of the Classis of Amsterdam, November 24, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3906. 57.  Elders and Deacons of the Church of New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, October 26, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4016. 58. Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to his own Consistory—that of New York, August 20, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4004. 59.  Lambertus De Ronde, The True Spiritual Religion, or delightful service of the Lord, with fear, solely due and acceptable unto the most holy and glorious God, As Distinguished from Idolatrous Heathenism, Legal Judaism, and lofty Pharisaism; in two discourses, on the

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address of Christ’s ministers, to the enemies of His Kingdom (New York: John Holt, 1767), vi, vii, xiv–xv. 60.  Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to one of the Deputies of the Classis of Amsterdam, November 24, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3905–6; Lambert De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, August 30, 1765, Papers of Eleazer Wheelock, MSS, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH; Lambert De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, August 30, 1765, ibid.; Lambert De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, September 6, 1769, ibid. A lengthy advertisement for this work appeared as “Proposals For Printing by Subscription A Treatise Concerning the true Spiritual Religion . . . By Lambertus De Ronde, Minister of the Protestant Dutch Church in New-York,” New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, January 22, 1767. 61.  The Opponents of Rev. Archibald Laidlie to the Classis of Amsterdam, July 22, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3881. 62.  For a full account of the controversy over language in the Wall Street Presbyterian Church see Joyce Goodfriend, “Scots and Schism: The New York City Presbyterian Church in the 1750s,” in Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800, ed. Ned C. Landsman (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 221–44. 63.  Trustee Minutes, First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, 1717–1775 (microfilm), fol. 52; [David Van Horne] to the Revd. New York Synod met at Philadelphia, n.d. but probably 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, MSS, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. 64.  [David Van Horne] to the Revd. New York Synod met at Philadelphia, n.d. but probably 1753. 65. Ibid. 66.  Trustee Minutes, fol. 60; Peter Clark, Wm Nicholson, Jacob Reyken, Ranal m’Dougal, Duncan Campbell to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, June 7, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers, MSS, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, CT. 67.  Goodfriend, “Scots and Schism,” 234–35; Smith, History of the Province of New York, 1:207. 3. George Whitefield Awakens New York City

  1.  Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 219–20, 485, n96; Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 113. 2.  In 1842, Joseph Tracy asserted that Whitefield “produced no very remarkable effect in New York, till his visit in 1764.” Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Tappan and Dennet; New York: Josiah Adams, 1842), 52. Samuel Buell, A faithful narrative of the remarkable revival of religion, in the congregation of East-hampton, on Long- Island in the year of our Lord 1764 (New York: Samuel Brown, 1766), 49. 3.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 8, 1770; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, October 29, 1770. Among the volumes Hugh Gaine listed in his advertisement for books newly imported from London in June 1773 was Whitefield’s sermons. Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, June 10, 1773; A Sermon on the Death of

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the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield preached At the Chapel in Tottenham-Court-Road and at the Tabernacle near Moorfields, On Sunday, November 18, 1770 (London Printed, New-York, Re-printed by John Holt, at the Exchange, 1771); Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 37–40; Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., “New York City in 1772: The Journal of Solomon Drowne, Junior,” New York History 82 (2001): 45. 4.  David Bostwick to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, January 4, 1763, Joseph Bellamy Papers, MSS, Hartford Seminary. Thomas Kidd states that Gano “contributed significantly to Baptist revivals in New England in 1764.” Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 259. “A Concise Description of New York and New Jersey,” a manuscript apparently written by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere after his 1769 visit to New York, quoted in Iconography, 6:801. 5.  William Wale, ed., Whitefield’s Journals (London: Henry J. Drane, n.d.), 344, 345, 346. Mr. Pemberton was Ebenezer Pemberton, the minister of the Wall Street Presbyterian Church. 6.  Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg recounted that “Mr. Whitefield became acquainted with [Mr. Pemberton] during his visit to New York and preached in his church several times, which resulted in a very large increase in the congregation.” The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942–1958), 1:291; William Seward, Journal of a Voyage from Savannah to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to England, M,DCC,XL (London: J. Oswald, 1740), 14; Extract of a Letter from Dr. John Nichols, Physician in New-York to Nicholas Spence, Agent for the Church of Scotland, Dated May 20, 1741, in The Weekly History; or, An Account of the Most Remarkable Particulars Relating to the Present Progress of the Gospel, no. 41, January 16, 1741/42, pp. 3, 4; New-York Evening Post, September 2, 1745; Jonathan Belcher to Mr. Walley, Burlington, New Jersey, October 2, 1747, Jonathan Belcher Letterbooks, MSS, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Thanks to Michael Batinski for providing me with a copy of this letter. Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, A City Church: The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, 1716–1776 (New York: First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, 1981), 12; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:291. 7.  Erasmus Middleton, Biographia Evangelica: or An Historical Account of the Lives and Deaths of the most eminent and evangelical Authors or Preachers, both British and foreign, in the several denominations of protestants, from the beginning of the Reformation, to the present, 4 vols. (London: J. W. Pasham, 1779–1786), 4:414. This source claims that “the late Mr. Whitefield preached several times in Mr. Bostwick’s meeting-house, while he was at New-York.” Ibid. It is uncertain when this could have been. Fowler, City Church, 32; Shepherd Knapp, A History of the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York (New York: Brick Presbyterian Church, 1909); “Communicants of the First Presbyterian Church, New York City, 1769,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 131 (2000): 287–90. Of the 386 communicants, 245 were women and 141 were men.  8. Wale, Whitefield’s Journals, 343; Boston Weekly-Newsletter, November 30, 1739 (repr. from New-York Gazette, November 26, 1739); William Smith to George Whitefield, New York, September 12, 1764, William Smith Papers, MSS, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Thanks to Jennifer Brown for her assistance in procuring this letter.

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  9.  George Whitefield to Mr. [John] Smith, Philadelphia, July 10, 1746, in “Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield, 1745–46, Part III,” ed. John W. Christie, Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 32 (1954): 267; George Whitefield to Mr. [John] Smith, Philadelphia, July 10, 1746, ibid., 267; David Van Horne to Joseph Bellamy, January 9, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers; [David Van Horne] to George Whitefield, New York, April 19, 1754, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, MSS, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia; [David Van Horne] to Mrs. Elizabeth Whitefield, New York, September 29, 1754, ibid. At the end of this letter, he notes that “Mrs. Vanhorne . . . has already wrote to you.” Rev. David Bostwick to Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, New York, June 14, 1760, MSS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; George Whitefield to Peter Van Brugh Livingston, London, February 27, 1766, Eleazer Wheelock Papers, MSS, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Frederick E. Maser and Howard T. Maag, eds., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore, Methodist Itinerant, for the Years August 1, 1769, to January 2, 1774 (Philadelphia: Message Publishing Co., 1969), 214. The editors give a mistaken identity for Van Horne. 10.  New-York Mercury, January 23, 1764; New-York Mercury, June 25, 1764; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, October 22, 1770. 11.  Protestants at odds with church leaders had far more options than their Jewish counterparts in eighteenth-century New York. For an instructive comparison with the structure of authority in Shearith Israel, the city’s synagogue, see Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 14–17. 12. Wale, Whitefield’s Journals, 414. See also ibid., 346–47; Rev. Mr. Colgan to the Secretary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, Jamaica, November 22, 1740, DHNY, 3:192–93; Rev. Mr. Colgan to the Secretary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, Jamaica, December 15, 1741, DHNY, 3:193; Richard Charlton to Philip Bearcroft, New York, October 30, 1741, quoted in Frank J. Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940), 145. 13.  Petition of William Vesey to the Council, New York, February 15, 1713/14, DHNY, 3:269–70. 14.  Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 107. 15.  Alison Gilbert Olson, “Governor Robert Hunter and the Anglican Church in New York,” in Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. M. G. Dickson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 44–64; Cynthia Kierner, “A Concept Rejected: New York’s Anglican ‘Establishment,’ 1693–1715,” Studies in History 26 (1982): 71–100; Lustig, Robert Hunter; Depositions taken on February 17, 1713, DHNY, 3:273–74; Address of the Rector and Vestry of Trinity Church in New York to the Council, February 19, 1713, DHNY, 3:274. 16.  Quoted in Robert E. Cray Jr., “The Boundaries of Clerical Morality: The Reverend Alexander Campbell in the Middle Colonies, 1726–1734,” Anglican and Episcopal History 59 (1990): 71; ibid.; Alexander Campbell, A True and Just Vindication of Mr. Alexander Campbell, from the aspersions cast upon him. . . . (New York: John Peter Zenger, 1732), and Alexander Campbell, A Supplement to the Vindication of Mr. Alex. Campbell. . . . (New York: J. Peter Zenger, 1732).

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17. Wale, Whitefield’s Journals, 346; Revs. Boel, Mutzelius, and Mancius, to the Classis of Amsterdam, April 14/25, 1743, Ecc. Rec., 4:2798; New-York Evening Post, July 14, 1746. For an obituary praising Vesey see Morgan Dix, A History of the Parish of Trinity Church in the City of New York, Part 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 231–32. 18.  George Whitefield to Mr. Habersham, Philadelphia, July 21, [1746] “Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield, 1745–46, Part III,” 269; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:283. Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg recorded this opinion in his journal after meeting Barclay in 1752. “In spite of clerical hostility, by the 1760s evangelical religion was making slow inroads into some Anglican churches through the laity, particularly in the middle and southern colonies.” Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7. 19. Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, Part 1, 223–24. See also Gloria Deak, Picturing New York: The City from Its Beginnings to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 33. William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New York, 2 vols., ed. Michael Kammen (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:203. 20.  Rev. William Berrian, An Historical Sketch of Trinity Church, New York (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1847), 82; Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf, eds., The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 117; T. Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America, ed. Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949), 44. Thomas Pownall arrived in New York in 1753. In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton had described Trinity as “a large congregation of above a thousand, among which were a number of dressed ladies.” Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 45. Quoted in Berrian, Historical Sketch of Trinity Church, 81. 21.  Samuel Auchmuty to Revd Mr [Richard] Peters, New York, July 29, 1754, MSS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 22.  Samuel Johnson to the Archbishop of Canterbury, July 25, 1759, in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, 4 vols., ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 1:290; New-York Gazette, August 20, 1764; quoted in Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, Part 1, 306; Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, December 21, 1764, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 1:348. 23.  For the interactions of Frelinghuysen and the New York City Dutch clergy see James Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 42–43, 80–81. 24.  James Tanis, “Frelinghuysen, the Dutch Clergy, and the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies,” Reformed Review 38 (1985): 111; Revs. Boel, Mutzelius, and Mancius, to the Classis of Amsterdam, April 14/25, 1743, Ecc. Rec., 4:2798–99. Du Bois’s favorable attitude toward Whitefield was likely colored by his son’s relationship to the Nicoll family. In December 1740, Isaac Du Bois, a physician, married the daughter of Dr. John Nicoll, a prominent New York City Presbyterian and a staunch backer

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of the evangelist. William J. Hoffman, “The Ancestry of Rev. Gualterus du Bois and Two Generations of His Descendants,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 82 (1951): 139. 25.  Revs. Boel, Mutzelius, and Mancius, to the Classis of Amsterdam, April 14/25, 1743, Ecc. Rec., 4:2798–99. With this letter, Boel sent the Classis in Amsterdam “a small tract against Mr. Whitefield.” Ibid., 2800. 26.  On the anti-Moravian writings of Reformed church clergy in the Netherlands see Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 144–46. 27.  Gualterus Du Bois to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, May 14, 1741, Ecc. Rec., 4:2756. On Venema see A. Day Bradley, “Pieter Venema: Teacher, Textbook Author, and Free Thinker,” Scripta Mathematica 15, no. 1: 13–16; Arithmetica of Cyffer-Konst: Volgens de munten maten en gewigten, te Nieu-York, gebruykelyk als mede een kort ontwerp van de algebra, opgestelt door Pieter Venema, mr. in de mathesis en schryf-konst (New York: Gedruckt voor Jacob Goelet . . . by J. Peter Zenger, 1730). See also Hendrik Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 1693–1794: A Descriptive Catalog of Dutch-Language Books, Pamphlets and Almanacs Printed in America (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: B. de Graaf, 1974), 50, no. 23. Harry Emilius Stocker, A History of the Moravian Church in New York City (New York, 1922), 37. 28.  Rev. Gualterus Du Bois to the Rev. Classis of Amsterdam, May 14, 1741, Ecc. Rec., 4:2756. Intercession Every Christian’s Duty: A Sermon preach’d by George Whitefield. . . . (New York: Reprinted by John Peter Zenger and sold by Jacob Goelet, 1739) was advertised in the New-York Weekly Journal on January 7, 1739/40. Voorbidding een ieder Christen’s Plicht, vertoont in een Predicatie door George Whitefield, A.B. & c. Gedrucket en te koop by J. Peter Zenger, en Jacobus Goelet. This volume was advertised in Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal, March 3, 1740. No copy has been located, according to Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 55, no. 29. De Wyze and Dwaaze Maagden: Vertoont in een Predicatie Door George Whitefield (Niew-York, Gedruket en te koop by J. Peter Zenger, en Jacobus Goelet). According to Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 56, no. 30, the English text of this sermon, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, was published in London in 1738 and in Philadelphia in 1740. 29.  Revs. Boel, Mutzelius, and Mancius to the Classis of Amsterdam, April 14/25, 1743, Ecc. Rec., 4:2798, 2800. In 1744, painter Gerardus Duycking, a member of the Dutch Reformed congregation, produced a volume of writings by Moravians purporting to show that “they are not of that Church of the Antient United Moravian and Bohemian Brethren.” Gerardus Duyckinck, A Short though True Account of the Establishment and Rise of the Church so called Moravian Brethren. . . . The Same is Taken out of their own Writings, and Some Observations on it (New York, [1744]). Advertisements for this book appeared in the New-York Gazette on June 25, 1744, and August 13, 1744. In the August 13 advertisement, the book’s title was amended to read “Observations on it by G. Duycking.” Gilbert Tennent, The Necessity of holding fast the truth represented in three sermons on Rev. iii. 3. Preached at New-York, April 1742. With an Appendix Relating to Errors lately vented by some Moravians in those Parts (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1743). For Gilbert Tennent’s views on the Moravians see David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 208–9. E. Pemberton to [Philip Doddridge,] N. York December 1743, in The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge D.D., 5 vols., ed. John Doddridge

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Humphrey (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829–1831), 4:300; “An Act for Securing of his Majesties Government of New York,” passed September 21, 1744, Laws, 2:424–29; Address of New York’s Council and General Assembly to Governor George Clinton, April 25, 1744, Journal of the votes and proceedings of the General Assembly of the colony of New York. . . . 2 vols. (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1764–1766), 2:16. Councilor Daniel Horsmanden’s defense of the 1744 law is in Ecc. Rec., 4:2906–2908. 30.  C. J. Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:257, 282. Milton M. Klein, ed., The Independent Reflector: Or, Weekly Essays on Sundry Important Subjects More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New-York, by William Livingston and others, John Harvard Library (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 89–95, 130, 129. William Smith Jr. also defended the Moravians. Milton M. Klein, The American Whig: William Livingston of New York (New York: Garland, 1990), 252. 31.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:361, 284, 334. Muhlenberg referred to Boel as “Buhl.” Stocker, History of the Moravian Church in New York City, 88. 32.  New-York Mercury, July 1, 1754; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:284. This petition is printed in Alexander J. Wall, “The Controversy in the Dutch Church in New York Concerning Preaching in English, 1754–1768,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 12 (1928): 39–58. Waere genade, Onderschieden van de Bevindinge, der Duyvelen; . . . ([New York], 1754). See Edelman, Dutch-American Bibliography, 74, no. 57. Edwards preached this sermon at a meeting of the New York Synod of the Presbyterian Church in 1752, and it was printed in English in New York in 1753. 33.  Recollections of Helena Kortright Brasher, 1802, MSS, New-York Historical Society. 34.  [David Van Horne] to Mrs. Elizabeth Whitefield, New York, September 29, 1754, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church. Informed by “the best intelligence I can collect,” Taylor supplied John Wesley with “a short account of the state of religion in this city” that assigned George Whitefield most of the credit for awakening New Yorkers to spiritual matters. Frank Baker, “Early American Methodism: A Key Document,” Methodist History 3 (1965): 9. 35.  The Baptist congregation’s evolution from its beginnings as a prayer meeting in 1745 is traced in Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” American Baptist Quarterly 16 (1997): 220–21; Nathaniel Hazard to Joseph Bellamy, New York, June 18, 1761, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Goodfriend, “Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” 221; William McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols. (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), 1:583. 36.  George Whitefield to Reverend Mr. G–––, New York, December 18, 1763, The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield . . . Containing All his Sermons and Tracts . . . with a Select Collection of Letters, 6 vols. (London: printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771–1772), 3:304. 37.  Alexander Gunn, Memoirs of the Rev. John Henry Livingston, new ed. (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1867), 32–33. On Livingston see John W. Coakley, “John Henry Livingston (1746–1825): Interpreter of the Dutch Reformed Tradition in the Early American Republic,” in Transatlantic Pieties: Dutch Clergy in Colonial America, ed. Leon Van den Broeke, Hans Krabbendam, and Dirk Mouw (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2013), 296–314; “Occupation of New York City by the British, 1776, Extracts from the Diary of the Moravian

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Congregation,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1877): 255; Samuel Miller, Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D.D.: Late Pastor of the Wall-Street and Brick Presbyterian Churches in the City of New-York (New York: Whiting and Watson, 1813), 13–15. 38.  Baker, “Early American Methodism,” 9. 39.  George Whitefield to [unknown person], New York, December 1 and December 4, 1763, Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, 3:301; George Whitefield to Mr. H–––y, New York, December 8, 1763, ibid., 3:303; George Whitefield to Mr. S––– S–––, New York, December 16, 1763, ibid., 3:303; George Whitefield to the Reverend Mr. G–––, New York, December 18, 1763, ibid., 3:304; George Whitefield to Mr. D––n, New York, January 12, 1764, ibid., 3:305; George Whitefield to Mr. R––– K–––n, New York, August 25, 1764, ibid., 3:314; George Whitefield to Mr. W–––, New York, August 8, 1764, ibid., 3:313. 40.  Lambertus De Ronde to Joseph Bellamy, January 15, 1764, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Samuel Auchmuty to Dr. Samuel Johnson, New York, October 26, 1764, MSS, Hawks Collection, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, TX. 41.  New-York Mercury, January 23, 1764; Rev. Samuel Seabury to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, Jamaica [Long Island], October 6, 1764, Ecc. Rec., 6:3952. 42.  Reuben Aldridge Guild, Chaplain Smith and the Baptists; or Life, Journals, Letters, and Addresses of the Rev. Hezekiah Smith, D.D., of Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1737–1805 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1885), 40; McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1:564–65. On this revival see Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 274–81; Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 174–77; and Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 108. 43.  Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, March 5, 1764, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 4:106. 44.  Hugh Neill to the Secretary, Oxford, October 18, 1764, in Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, vol. 2 (of 5 vols.), Pennsylvania, ed. William Stevens Perry (Hartford, CT, 1870–1878), 365. 45.  On Macclennachan’s impact on Philadelphia Anglicans see Deborah Mathias Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia: The Nation’s Church in a Changing City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 77–82; Frederick V. Mills Sr., Bishops by Ballots: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 77; Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 104–5. 46.  J. Viator, Reply to Remarks on a Late Pamphlet entitled A Vindication of Governor Parr and His Council, & c. (London: printed for John Stockdale, 1784), 45. J. Viator was a pseudonym for two critics of Inglis, Samuel Peters and Samuel Hake, who engaged in a pamphlet war with him in the 1780s. For a detailed account of this pamphlet war see Brian Cuthbertson, The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis (Halifax, NS: Waegwoltic Press, 1987), 67–75; ibid., 13; Berrian, Historical Sketch of Trinity Church, 122; Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, December 21, 1764, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 1:348. 47.  Samuel Auchmuty to SPG, April 13, 1765, quoted in Reginald V. Harris, Missionary Loyalist Bishop (Toronto: General Board of Religious Education, 1937), 29; Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, September 2, 1765, MSS, Hawks Collection;

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Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, September 2, 1765, MSS, Hawks Collection. Brian Cuthbertson asserts that Inglis “retained an intimate relationship with the Methodists of John Street Chapel.” Cuthbertson, First Bishop, 171. 48.  Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, December 21, 1764, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 1:348. 49.  Myles Cooper to Samuel Johnson, New York, January 9, 1764, ibid., 4:111; Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, October 26, 1764, MSS, Hawks Collection; Myles Cooper to William Smith of Philadelphia, April 9, 1770, quoted in Bruce E. Steiner, Samuel Seabury, 1729–1796: A Study in the High Church Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1971), 393–94, n33. 50.  Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, December 21, 1764, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 1:348. 51.  Auchmuty’s sermon of September 9, 1764, is quoted in Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, Part 1, 308. 52.  Samuel Auchmuty to Richard Peters, New York, May 11, 1767, MSS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Samuel Auchmuty to Richard Peters, New York, May 6, 1770, MSS, ibid. 53.  Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson, New York, January 3, 1767, MSS, Hawks Collection; John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44; Samuel Auchmuty to the Secretary, New York, May 1, 1767, SPG Letter Books, microfilm, series B, vol. 2, no. 23; Samuel Auchmuty to SPG, New York, September 1, 1767, ibid., no. 25. 54.  Richard Boardman to the Rev. J. Wesley, New York, November 4, 1769, Arminian Magazine for the Year 1784, vol. 7 (London, [1784]), 164; Samuel Auchmuty to Dr. Samuel Johnson, New York, March 27, 1771, MSS, Hawks Collection; Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 49. Pilmore, after mentioning that he “had the honour to wait on the Revd. Mr. Whitefield and congratulate him on his safe arrival in New York,” noted that he rearranged his preaching schedule in deference to the famed evangelist. “As Mr. Whitefield was to stay some time in the city, I set off for Long Island.” Ibid. 55.  John N. Norton, Life of Bishop Provoost, of New York (New York: General Protestant Episcopal Sunday School Union, and Church Book Society, 1859), 38; Letter of Samuel Provoost c. 1769 printed in Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, Part 2, 36. 56.  Letter of Samuel Provoost c. 1769 printed in Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, Part 2, 36; Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, 2:36–37. In a letter drafted c. 1771, Provoost stated “I had no pecuniary connection with old England, and entertained political opinions quite opposite to the rest of my brethren.” Ibid., 2:52. 57. Mr. [William] Smith to the Bishop of London, Philadelphia, October 29, 1773, in Perry, Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 2:461–62; E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 146; Rivington’s New-York ­Gazetteer, February 17, 1774; Will of Ann Smith, 1773, CNYHS for 1903, 398; Rivington’s New‑ York Gazetteer, January 20, 1774; January 27, 1774; February 10, 1774. 58. Dix, History of the Parish of Trinity Church, 1:356. 59.  Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, September 28, 1774, in Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the

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Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717–1777, ed. John C. Van Horne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 321; Samuel Auchmuty to Samuel Johnson [July 22, 1769], MSS, Hawks Collection; Dr. Auchmuty’s Letter to Capt. Montresor, chief engineer at Boston (Cambridge?, 1775); A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Auchmuty (America, 1775). The inscription appears on the title page of the Library of Congress copy, which was digitized for Eighteenth Century Collections Online. A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Auchmuty, 3–4; 4–5; 8. 60.  Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War, 2 vols. (New York: New‑York Historical Society, 1879), 1:59–60. 4. Becoming Religious Consumers

 1. F. J. Sypher, Hanover Square in the British Colonial Period (New York: British Memorial Garden Trust, 2003). On New York merchants see Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), Cathy D. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).   2.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).  3. Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Limits of Religious Pluralism in EighteenthCentury New York City,” in Amsterdam—New York: Transatlantic Relations and Urban Identities since 1653, ed. George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2005), 67–86.   4.  Nathaniel Hazard to the Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, November 24, 1764, Joseph Bellamy Papers, MSS, Hartford Seminary.   5.  John Smith to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, January 18, 1765, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Reminiscences of Helen Kortright Brasher, 1802, MSS, New‑York Historical Society.  6. The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942), 1:342–43, 344; 2:235, 331.  7. Some Cursory Remarks Made by James Birket in His Voyage to North America, 1750–1751 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 45; Wm. Parkinson, A Jubilee Sermon, Containing a History of the Origin of the First Baptist Church in the City of New-York, and Its Progress during the First Fifty Years since Its Constitution; Delivered in the Meeting-House of Said Church, Jan. 1, 1813 (New York, 1846), 11–14; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” American Baptist Quarterly 16 (1997): 219–40.   8.  Lambertus De Ronde to the Rev. John Kalkoen, September 9, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4006; Nathaniel Hazard to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, November 24, 1764, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Samuel Miller, Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D.D., Late Pastor of the Wall-Street and Brick Presbyterian Churches in the City of New-York (New York: Whiting and Watson, 1813), 177.  9. New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, April 22, 1773; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, April 26, 1773.

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10.  Jonathan Edwards quoted in Jonathan Sarna, “The Mystical World of Colonial American Jews,” in Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World; Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer, ed. Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 189. Sarna has identified this individual as a man named Lousada (Louzada). I am grateful to Professor Sarna for this reference. Further evidence of the religiosity of city Jews comes from the prayer scraps found in the ledger of a mid-eighteenth-century New York merchant named Daniel Gomez. Holly Snyder, “ ‘Under the Shado of Your Wings’: Religiosity in the Mental World of an Eighteenth-Century Jewish Merchant,” Early American Studies 8 (Fall 2010): 581–622. 11.  Gerard G. Beekman to John Channing, New York, October 25, 1746, in The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799, 3 vols., ed. Philip L. White (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1956), 1:10. 12.  Mrs. Anne Watts to Samuel Johnson, April 29, 1757, in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, 4 vols., ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 1:273–74; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:321. 13.  A Catalogue of Books in History Divinity, Law, Physic, Arts and Sciences, and the Several Parts of Polite Literature (New York, H. Gaine, 1759). Noel began issuing catalogs in 1754. Noel’s catalogs for 1754, 1755, 1759, and 1762 are extant, as is one produced by Noel and Hazard in 1771. For a biographical sketch of Garret Noel see Austin Baxter Keep, History of the New York Society Library, with an Introductory Chapter on Libraries in Colonial New York, 1698–1776 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972; originally published New York, 1908), 102–8; New-York Mercury, November 13, 1758; New-York Gazette, December 14, 1767. 14.  Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 3:240; Inventory of the Estate of Lambertus De Ronde, 1796, MSS, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, NY. The contents of the library of Rev. Archibald Laidlie, who died in 1779, are enumerated in “an undated catalogue of books belonging to the estate of A. Laidlie” in Jared Lane Papers, MSS, New York Public Library. 15.  Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of John Montgomerie, Colonial Governor of New York and New Jersey (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 42–43. 16.  Will of Dirck Brinckerhoff, 1772, CNYHS for 1899, 315; Will of Henry Barclay, CNYHS for 1897, 351; Edith Gelles, ed., The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733–1748 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xxxii. For a detailed analysis of what Abigail Franks read see Leo Hershkowitz, “Abigail Franks and Jewish Education in Early New York,” in Education in New Netherland and the Middle Colonies: Papers of the 7th Rensselaerswyck Seminar of the New Netherland Project, ed. Charles T. Gehring and Nancy Anne McClure Zeller (Albany: New Netherland Project, 1985), 44–45. 17.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:333; Will of Mary Tiebout, CNYHS for 1899, 182; Will of Rachel Smith, CNYHS for 1896, 218. 18.  Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, compiled by the Rev. John Gillies (New York: Hodge and Shober, 1774); Goodfriend, “Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” 237n31. 19.  Daniel B. Shea, ed., “Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge,” in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives, ed. William

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L. Andrews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 152. The reference is to the Book of Common Prayer used in the Church of England. The term “superficially righteous” comes from Daniel B. Shea’s introduction to “Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge,” 128. 20.  George Whitefield to Mr Van-horn, Philadelphia, May 22, 1746, in “Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield, 1745–46,” Part 2, ed. John W. Christie, Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 32 (1954): 170–71; [George Whitefield to Mr Van-horn, June 21 or June 22, 1746], “Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield,” Part 3, 263. 21.  [David Van Horne] to Benj Brandon, New York, August 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, MSS, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia; [David Van Horne] to ?, August 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid.; [David Van Horne] to Mrs. George Whitefield, n.d., Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid.; [David Van Horne] to Benj Brandon, New York, August 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid. 22.  Obadiah Wells to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, February 28, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers; [David Van Horne] to ?, August 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, MSS, Presbyterian Historical Society; [David Van Horne] to Mrs. George Whitefield, n.d., Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid.; [David Van Horne] to Mrs. George Whitefield, n.d., Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid.; [David Van Horne] to Mrs. Elizabeth Whitefield, New York, September 29, 1754, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, ibid. 23.  Thomas Nobel [sic] to Edward Evans, December 28, 1741, quoted in Milton J. Coalter Jr., Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 109; George Whitefield to Mr. Thomas N[oble] at New York, London, February 26, 1742, in The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, 6 vols. (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771), 372. 24.  For Noble’s correspondence with Henchman see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Dutch Book Trade in Colonial New York City: The Transatlantic Connection,” in Books between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860, ed. Leslie Howsam and James Raven (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 147–48. Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 819; Account Books Kept by Benjamin Franklin, Ledger “D,” 1739–1747, notes by George Simpson Eddy (New York, 1929), 88–89. 25.  Daniel B. Thorp, “Chattel with a Soul: The Autobiography of a Moravian Slave,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112 (1988): 449, 450. 26.  James Alexander to Cadwallader Colden, New York, February 15, 1743/44, Cadwallader Colden Papers, vol. 3, 1743–1747, CNYHS for 1919, 48. 27.  William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, 2 vols., ed. Michael Kammen (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:208. The 1754 list of those in the Moravian congregation is found in Harry Emilius Stocker, A History of the Moravian Church in New York City (New York, 1922), 84–86. The names of those associated with the congregation in 1774 appear in another list included in

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this volume. Ibid., 116–18. Biographical information on Jane and Hendrick Boelen is taken from Howard S. F. Randolph, “Jacob Boelen, Goldsmith, of New York and His Family Circle,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 72 (1941): 273–74; and Stocker, History of the Moravian Church in New York City, 82, 85. “Occupation of New York by the British: Extracts from the Diary of the Moravian Congregation,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1877): 143. 28.  “Martha Buninger, nee Marriner,” in Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820, ed. and trans. Katherine M. Faull (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 31. 29.  “Sarah Grube, nee van Fleck,” ibid., 40, 41. 30.  “Catharine Brownfield, nee Kerney,” ibid., 78–82. 31.  “Margaretha Edmonds, nee Anton,” ibid., 33-34. 32.  Kenneth G. Hamilton, trans. and ed., The Bethlehem Diary, Volume I, 1742–1744 (Bethlehem, PA: Archives of the Moravian Church, 1971), 196, 197, 202, 204. 33. Translation of a Narrative of Judith Gashrie [Gasherie], Widow of Luck Brasher, Born April 25th, 1700, Written in the 66th Year of her Age (original in Dutch), Colgate Family Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. All quotations in this and the following three paragraphs come from this source. The records of New York City’s Dutch Reformed Church show that on November 24, 1724, “Lucas Braesier” married “Judith Gageri.” Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York: Marriages from 11 December 1639, to 26 August 1801 (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1890), 141. 34.  Reminiscences of Helena Kortright Brasher, 1802, MSS, New-York Historical Society. 35.  Rev. Gualterus Du Bois to the Rev. Classis of Amsterdam, New York, May 14, 1741, Ecc. Rec., 4:2756; Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:281, 331, 257. 36.  Trustee Minutes, First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, 1717–1775 (microfilm), fol. 60. On the social background of these Scots see Joyce Goodfriend, “Scots and Schism: The New York City Presbyterian Church in the 1750s,” in Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800, ed. Ned C. Landsman (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 225; John Robinson to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, March 18, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers. 37.  Consistory meeting, January 29, 1746/7, Ecc. Rec., 4:2955; Consistory meeting, August 20, 1747, Ecc. Rec., 4:2971. 38.  Rev. Lambertus De Ronde to one of the Deputies of the Classis of Amsterdam, November 24, 1763, with a postscript, Ecc. Rec., 6:3904. For a more detailed analysis of De Ronde’s attitude toward heterodox ideas see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Cultural Metamorphosis of Domine Lambertus De Ronde,” Hudson River Valley Review 25 (2009): 63–73. Lambertus De Ronde to the Rev. John Kalkoen, September 15, 1765, Ecc. Rec., 6:4007. 39.  Johannes Ritzema to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, May 9, 1769, Ecc. Rec., 6:4159. 40.  Lambertus De Ronde to Joseph Bellamy, March 20, 1764, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Samuel Auchmuty to Dr. Samuel Johnson, New York, October 26, 1764, MSS, Hawks Collection, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, TX. 41.  American National Biography, s.v. Robert Sandeman. See also John Howard Smith, The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion: A History of Sandemanians in the

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Eighteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). David Bostwick to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, March 17, 1761, Joseph Bellamy Papers; Nathaniel Hazard to the Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, June 5, 1761, ibid.; Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Anne Watts, September 1757, in Schneider and Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 1:275; Samuel Johnson to Archbishop Secker, Stratford [CT], December 20, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3910. Johnson’s comment was general, but it resonated in New York. For an Anglican critique of Sandeman see John Beach to the Secretary of the SPG, New Town in Connecticut, October 6, 1766, in Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, vol. 2, Connecticut, ed. Francis L. Hawks and William Stevens Perry (New York: James Pott, 1864), 99–100. Lambertus De Ronde’s library contained several of the polemical works in this theological debate. 42.  New-York Gazette Weyman’s, February 24, 1765; advertisement of Garret Noel, New-York Mercury, February 11, 1765. 43.  The Life of Rev. John Murray, Preacher of Universal Salvation, Written by Himself, new ed. (Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1870), 214. On John Murray and the origins of Universalism in America see Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1978). Dexter, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:290; Biographical Memoirs of the Rev. John Gano, of Frankfort (Kentucky) Formerly of the City of New York (New York: printed by Southwick and Hardcastle for J. Tiebout, 1806), 88–89. 44.  Biographical Memoirs of the Rev. John Gano, 89. On John Allen see John M. Bumsted and Charles F. Clark, “New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 21 (1964): 561–70. Dexter, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:244–45; Biographical Memoirs of the Rev. John Gano, 89. 45.  Elmer T. Clark, ed., The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958), 1:128, 131, 132, 133. 46.  David Bostwick’s rivalry with John Gano is analyzed in Goodfriend, “Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” 223–25. David Bostwick to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, January 4, 1763, Joseph Bellamy Papers; David Bostwick, A Fair and Rational Vindication of the Right of Infants to the Ordinance of Baptism (New York: John Holt, 1764). 47.  This volume was advertised in the New-York Gazette Weyman’s, August 4, 1766. Details on these works by Bostwick and Gill are contained in Goodfriend, “Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” 224–25. Thomas Bradbury Chandler to Samuel Johnson, January 22, 1768, quoted in Brian Cuthbertson, The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis (Halifax, NS: Waegwoltic Press, 1987), 21; An Essay on Infant Baptism: in which the right of infants to the sacrament of baptism, is proved from Scripture, vindicated from the usual objections and confirmed by the practice of the four first centuries (New York: H. Gaine, 1768). 48.  On ministers’ performances see Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Draft letter to Messrs. David Longueville and Jas. Brinshall at Amsterdam, New York, January 10, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3855–56, 3854. 49.  New-York Gazette, April 16, 1764. A portion of the sermon Laidlie delivered on April 15, 1764, is printed in “Religious Communications,” Magazine of the Reformed Dutch Church 2 (September 1827): 161–69. Samuel Auchmuty to Dr. Samuel Johnson, New York, October 26, 1764, MSS, Hawks Collection. Auchmuty mocked his Dutch

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Reformed competitor as “Ladley the Scotch Orator who bye the bye is no more a true Orator, than fowl at Norwalk is a philosopher.” Ibid. Thirteen members of the Church of New York to the Classis of Amsterdam, February 18, 1767, Ecc. Rec., 6:4082; Archibald Laidlie to John Laidlie, New York, November 5, 1773, Archibald Laidlie Papers, MSS, New-York Historical Society; John Henry Livingston quoted in Alexander Gunn, Memoirs of the Rev. John Henry Livingston (New York: Rutgers Press, 1829), 104–5; Silas Deane to his Wife, August 29, [1774] in “Correspondence of Silas Deane, Delegate to the First and Second Congress at Philadelphia, 1774–1776,” Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vol. 2 (Hartford, 1870), 146; Clark, Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3:242. 50.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:279; R. Boardman to the Rev. J. Wesley, New York, April 2, 1771, letter 356, Arminian Magazine, February 1785, 113; quoted in John Wigger, American Saint Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 54; quoted in John A. F. Maynard, The Huguenot Church of New York: A History of the French Church of Saint Esprit (New York: 1938), 153. 51. Dexter, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:130; Archibald Laidlie to John Laidlie, Amsterdam, December 1, 1763, Archibald Laidlie Papers; Morgan Dix, A History of the Parish of Trinity Church in the City of New York, Part 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 327–28. 52.  Church Wardens and Vestry of Trinity Church to the Secretary, New York, September 22, 1764, SPG Letter Books, microfilm, series B, vol. 2, fol. 181; Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., “New York City in 1772: The Journal of Solomon Drowne, Junior,” New York History 82 (2001): 41; Philip Padelford, Colonial Panorama, 1775: Dr. Robert Honyman’s Journal for March and April (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1939), 28–29. 53.  On the Brick Presbyterian Church, which opened on New Year’s Day in 1768, see Shepherd Knapp, A History of the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York (New York: Trustees of the Brick Presbyterian Church, 1909). The North Dutch Church was dedicated on May 25, 1769. Plate 6, The Old North Dutch Church, in Kenneth Holcolmb Dunshee, As You Pass By (New York: Hastings House, 1952). Dexter, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:130; Dunshee, As You Pass By, plate 6; Charles Inglis to Richard Hind [secretary of SPG], New York, October 31, 1776, in John Wolfe Lydekker, The Life and Letters of Charles Inglis, His Ministry in America and Consecration as First Colonial Bishop, from 1759 to 1787 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1936), 168. 54.  On the early history of Methodism in New York City see Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 55.  Frank Baker, “Early American Methodism: A Key Document,” Methodist History 3 (1965): 11; Samuel A. Seaman, Annals of New York Methodism: Being a History of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the City of New York (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1892), 41. Richard Boardman to the Rev. J. Wesley, New York, November 4, 1769, Arminian Magazine, March 1784, 164. Boardman erred in stating “our House contains about seventeen hundred hearers.” Seaman, Annals of New York Methodism, 41n. 56.  Frederick E. Maser and Howard T. Maag, eds., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore, Methodist Itinerant, for the Years August 1, 1769, to January 2, 1774 (Philadelphia: Message Publishing Co., 1969), 47, 70; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Time, Celebration, and the

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Christian Year in Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 99–102; Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 70. 57.  Journal of Thomas Rankin, transcription, Drew University Library. Thanks to Will Gravely for providing me with a copy of this source. Clark, Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 1:23–24; J. Pilmoor [sic] to the Rev. J Wesley and all the Brethren in conference, New York, May 5, 1770, Arminian Magazine, April 1784, 223; Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 90. 58.  Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 46, 92; Clark, Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 1:84, 118, 135. 59.  The Society numbered 180 in 1773 and 222 in 1774. Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America; From 1773 to 1813, inclusive, vol. 1 (New York: Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, 1813), 3, 8. On early Methodist organizational structure see Philip F. Hardt, The Soul of Methodism: The Class Meeting in Early New York City Methodism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000). Goodfriend, “New York City in 1772,” 46; Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 93, 96. On the origins and early history of the love feast and the watch night in America see Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, American Methodist Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 60–67. Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 116. 60.  Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 122. 61.  Ibid., 69. In May 1770, Pilmore mentioned that he “heard a Baptist minister preach in the Poor-house who somed (seemed) to be much in earnest for the salvation of his hearers”: ibid., 45; ibid., 75. 62.  In the words of one scholar, “The primary revolutionary impulse of early American Methodism came in the group’s desire to expand the notions of family to include blacks and whites in the same family.” Anna M. Lawrence, One Family under God: Love, Belonging, and Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 207. J. Pilmoor [sic] to the Rev. J Wesley and all the Brethren in conference, New York, May 5, 1770, Arminian Magazine, April 1784, 223–24; Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 96. 63.  Maser and Maag, Journal of Joseph Pilmore, 95, 128, 96. 64.  Baker, “Early American Methodism,” 13; Samuel Auchmuty to Dr. Samuel Johnson, March 27, 1771, Hawks Collection. 65.  J. Pilmoor [sic] to J. Wesley and all the Brethren in conference, New York, May 5, 1770, Arminian Magazine, April 1784, 223; Thomas Bell to George Cussons, Charleston, South Carolina, May 1, 1769, Methodist Magazine for 1807, vol. 30, 46; Consistory meeting, May 6, 1771, Ecc. Rec., 6:4200; Consistory meeting, May 19, 1771, Ecc. Rec., 6:4200; Consistory meeting, November 14, 1764, Ecc. Rec., 6:3968. 66.  Martha J. Lamb, “The Golden Age of Colonial New York,” Magazine of American History 24 ( July 1890): 27. 5. “Master of the House”?

 1. New-York Gazette, August 11, 1760; New-York Gazette, April 21, 1760; New-York Mercury, December 27, 1762; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, October 23, 1749.

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 2. Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). Karin Wulf asserts that “gender was the core of household hierarchy.” Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 89.  3. New-York Mercury, August 11, 1755.   4.  Cadwallader Colden to Elizabeth De Lancey [c. 1739], quoted in Merril D. Smith, Women’s Roles in Eighteenth-Century America (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010), 10.  5. Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, August 12, 1773; New-York Gazette, February 15, 1762.   6.  Ruth H. Bloch, “The American Revolution, Wife Beating, and the Emergent Value of Privacy,” Early American Studies 5 (Fall 2007): 223–51; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, June 6, 13, 20, 1771; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, June 13, 20, 27, 1771.  7. New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, July 25, August 1, 1757. I have not found Thomas Johnson’s original notice.  8. New-York Evening Post, September 25, 1752; CNYHS for 1895, 441–42.  9. Kirsten Denise Sword, “Wayward Wives, Runaway Slaves and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in Early America” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002); New-York Gazette: or, The Weekly Post-Boy, June 19, 1758. 10.  New-York Gazette, September 14, 1761; New-York Gazette, April 5, 1762; New-York Gazette, October 8, 1764; New-York Gazette, December 1, 1766. 11.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 6, 1772; Merril D. Smith, Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730–1830 (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 4; Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14–58. 12.  Marriages from 1639 to1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1940), 222; New-York Gazette: or, The Weekly Post-Boy, November 5, 1767; New-York Mercury, March 19, 1764. 13.  Mary Beth Sievens, Stray Wives: Marital Conflict in Early National New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mary Beth Sievens, “Female Consumerism and Household Authority in Early National New England,” Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2006): 353–71; New-York Gazette, February 13, 1764. 14.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, April 28, 1774; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, November 7, 1768; New-York Gazette, December 10, 1764; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 23, 1773. 15.  New-York Gazette, July 30, 1764; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, February 25, 1768; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 24, 1767. 16.  New-York Gazette, September 5, 1766; New-York Evening Post, September 8, 1746; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, December 4, 1749; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, August 6, 1750; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, September 25, 1752; New-York Mercury, April 6, 1761; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, June 30, 1768; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 29, 1768. 17.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 5, 1767. For the original advertisement see New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, October 1, 1767.

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18.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, July 2, 1770; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, June 17, 1751; New-York Mercury, July 17, 1758; New-York Chronicle, August 3, 1769. 19.  New-York Mercury, December 22, 1766; New-York Mercury, July 7, 1766; Supplement to Rivington’s Gazetteer, July 21, 1774; Constitutional Gazette, June 1, 1776; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, April 12, 1770; Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York, 231; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, April 12, 1770; Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, January 27, 1774. 20.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, September 3, 1770; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, September 17, 1770. 21.  New-York Gazette, or, The Weekly Post-Boy, August 21, 1758; New-York Mercury, August 5, 1765; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 11, 1766; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, February 19, 1767. 22.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 4, 1773. 23.  New-York Gazette, September 28, 1761; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, September 4, 1769; New-York Gazette, August 13, 1764; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, December 5, 1768; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, September 10, 1770. 24.  For revealing comments on one troubled marriage between New Yorkers of high rank see Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, New York, June 9, [1734], in The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence: The Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748), ed. Leo Hershkowitz (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968), 28–29. 25.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, August 3, 1772; Will of Elizabeth Goelet, CNYHS for 1898, 441. Elizabeth Goelet mentioned three sons in her will. 26.  On Irish immigrants to New York City see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “ ‘Upon a Bunch of Straw’: The Irish in Colonial New York City,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 35–47, 583–87; New-York Mercury, December 17, 1764. 27.  A “down look” has been associated with being shamefaced. Barry Levy, “Levelers and Fugitives: Runaway Advertisements and the Contrasting Political Economies of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 78 (Winter 2011): 22. See also Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). New-York Gazette, January 5, 1767; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, December 30, 1751; New-York Mercury, May 12, 1766. Doxey was also described as “very deaf.” New-York Mercury, April 9, 1764. 28.  Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, April 28, 1774. 29.  On this point see Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Harper & Row, 1965; originally published 1946), 359, 441–45; Richard Caine to William Kempe (October 23, 1754), quoted in Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1776 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 108; Andrew Francks to John Tabor Kempe (October 4, 1772), quoted in Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 108. 30.  Mss. Mayor’s Court Minutes., 1723–1728, fol. 366, July 19, 1726, Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674–1784, ed. Richard B. Morris (Washington,

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DC: American Historical Association, 1935), 185; King v. Rice and Dorothy Williams, Mss. Minutes of the New York Court of General Quarter Sessions 1732–62, 391, 395, 396, August 4, 1756, quoted in Julius Goebel Jr. and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial New York: A Study in Criminal Procedure (1774–1776) (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1944), 109n217; The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942–1958), 1:304. 31.  Pennsylvania Gazette, April 22, 1742; New-York Mercury, June 24, 1765; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, March 2, 1769; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, April 10, 1769. 32.  New-York Evening Post, June 29, 1740; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, June 5, 1749. 33.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, August 10, 1752; New-York Journal, October 16, 1766. 34.  New-York Mercury, May 12, 1766; New-York Gazette, August 11, 1766; New-York Gazette, August 20, 1759; New-York Gazette, March 8, 1762; New-York Weekly Journal, April 30, 1750; New-York Mercury, April 7, 1760, April 21, 1760. 35.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, August 20, 1750; New-York Weekly Journal, July 7, 1740; New-York Mercury, August 24, 1767; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, July 3, 1775; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 17, 1769. 36.  New-York Mercury, May 12, 1766; New-York Mercury, October 15, 1753; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 2, 1769; New-York Mercury, December 8, 1760. 37.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, January 24, 1774; New-York Gazette, July 19, 1762; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, November 8, 1773. 38.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 3, 1775; New-York Weekly Journal, July 13, 1741; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, January 8, 1750; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, October 8, 1750; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 23, 1767; New-York Mercury, June 17, 1754; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, June 15, 1775; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, August 8, 1757; New-York Mercury, October 19, 1767. 39.  In lieu of a human companion, one lad “took with him a large yellow Dog, with his for feet white” when he left in 1760. New-York Mercury, February 11, 1760. New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 10, 1774; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, September 14, 1769; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, June 8, 1752. 40.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, January 1, 1767. 41.  New-York Mercury, October 14, 1765; New-York Mercury, July 7, 1766; New-York Mercury, February 9, 1767. 42.  New-York Mercury, February 9, 1761. 43.  New-York Mercury, April 21, 1755. Uneasiness at being under the heel of someone who spoke a foreign language—English—may have motivated an eighteen-yearold “german Servant lad named Philip Barnet Kremer” to run away from Nicholas Bayard. New-York Mercury, May 26, 1755. New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, March 21, 1768; New-York Mercury, April 20, 1767.

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44.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 30, 1772; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July, 21, 1770; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, November 27, 1775; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 3, 1772. 45.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, March 21, 1768; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, June 29, 1775; New-York Mercury, May 26, 1755; New-York Mercury, January 17, 1763. 46.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 20, 1775. 47.  New-York Gazette, April 9, 1764. Cooper advertised for Field in both the New-York Gazette and the New-York Mercury; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, August 16, 1773. 6. Attached to the Household

  1.  John Watts to John Riddell, New York, November 27, 1762, Letter Book of John Watts, Merchant and Councilor of New York: January 1, 1762–December 22, 1765 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1928), 97.   2.  Ibid.; John Watts to George and John Riddell, New York, February 21, 1763, Letter Book of John Watts, 126; ibid.   3.  For a review of the literature on slavery in New York City see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Slavery in Colonial New York City,” Urban History 35 (2008): 485–96.  4. New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, October 23, 1749.   5.  On slaves’ bodies see Gwenda Morgan and Peter Robinson, “Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39 (Fall 2005): 39–64. New-York Weekly Journal, August 26, 1734; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, March 14, 1771.  6. New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, April 10, 1769; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, June 13, 1748; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, November 16, 1747; New-York Mercury, June 15, 1761.  7. New-York Gazette, January 3, 1763; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, March 19, 1750; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, December 10, 1770; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, May 16, 1774; New-York Mercury, October 22, 1759; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, November 6, 1752.   8.  Samuel Clossy to Mr. Cleghorn, New York, August 1, 1764, Appendix to Byron Stookey, “Samuel Clossy, A.B., M.D., F.R.C P. of Ireland, First Professor of Anatomy, King’s College (Columbia), New York,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 38 (1964): 166; Robert J. Swan, “Prelude and Aftermath of the Doctors’ Riot of 1788: A Religious Interpretation of White and Black Reaction to Grave Robbing,” New York History 81 (2000): 417–56.  9. New-York Gazette, October 31, 1763. In 1734, the convicted rapist was burned alive “in the Presence of a numerous Company of Spectators, great part of which were of the Black Tribe.” New-York Gazette, January 28, 1733/34 [1734]. See also New-York Weekly Journal, January 28, 1733/34 [1734]. On events in 1741 see Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); New-York Gazette, November 28, 1763. 10.  Benson J. Lossing, The Life and Times of Philip Schuyler, 2 vols. (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1872–1873), 1:68–69; New-York Mercury, June 9, 1760; New-York Weekly

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Journal, July 7, 1740; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, June 27, 1748 (supplement). 11.  CNYHS for 1899, 243–44. 12.  CNYHS for 1898, 43; CNYHS for 1897, 417; CNYHS for 1898, 346. 13.  On sexual relations between blacks and whites in the colonial era see Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1940), 227, 241; Records of the First and Second Presbyterian Churches of the City of New York, Marriages 1756 to –––,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 11 (1880): 86; 14 (1883), 122; Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York, 231; “Lutheran Church Marriages, New York City,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 74 (1943): 78; Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York, 220; ibid., 230; “Records of the First and Second Presbyterian Churches of the City of New York, Marriages 1756 to –––,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 14 (1883): 122, 123. 14.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, January 14, 1751. A childless Negro woman of thirty put up for sale in 1762 was said to have “been married eight or ten years.” New-York Gazette, March 22, 1763. New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, January 11, 1773; Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, June 2, 1774. 15.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, December 19, 1748; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, November 11, 1771; New-York Mercury, March 22, 1762. 16.  New-York Mercury, December 9, 1765; New-York Mercury, July 6, 1767; New-York Gazette, May 27, 1765; New-York Mercury, August 20, 1761. 17.  CNYHS for 1895, 369; CNYHS for 1897, 223; CNYHS for 1896, 386, 387; Weyman’s New-York Gazette, May 14, 1759. See also New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, September 12, 1748. New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, August 10, 1772; New-York Gazette, December 7, 1761. 18.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, January 8, 1750; Letters of Isaac Bobin, Esq.: Private Secretary of Hon. George Clarke, Secretary of the Province of New York, 1718–1730 (Albany: J. Munsell, 1872), 151, 157. 19.  CNYHS for 1895, 447; CNYHS for 1899, 296; CNYHS for 1899, 26. 20.  CNYHS for 1897, 427–30; CNYHS for 1897, 154; CNYHS for 1894, 412; CNYHS for 1898, 285; CNYHS for 1894, 16. 21.  CNYHS for 1897, 258; CNYHS for 1895, 407; CNYHS for 1897, 374. 22.  Letter Book of John Watts, 151. 23.  Leo Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews (1704–1799) (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1967), 136. In 1765, Gomez had manumitted another slave. Ibid., 136, note. CNYHS for 1896, 42. 24.  CNYHS for 1895, 322; CNYHS for 1896, 165; CNYHS for 1898, 180; CNYHS for 1898, 34. 25.  CNYHS for 1898, 200; New-York Evening Post, April 26, 1745. 26.  New-York Mercury, August 11, 1760. 27.  Boston Evening-Post, September 2, 1765. 28. Ibid. 29.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, June 25, 1750; American Weekly Mercury, February 12, 1744/45.

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30.  New-York Mercury, March 24, 1760. 31.  New-York Gazette, October 1, 1759; New-York Mercury, August 30, 1762. 32.  New-York Weekly Journal, May 10, 1736; New-York Weekly Journal, September 25, 1749; Weyman’s New-York Gazette, July 9, 1759. 33.  Boston News-Letter, June 5, 1771. 34.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, January 29, 1767. 35.  John Watts to General Murray, New York, July 4, 1763, Letter Book of John Watts, 151; New-York Mercury, April 23, 1753. 36.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, May 1, 1769. 37.  New-York Mercury, December 5, 1763; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, November 5, 1753; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 19, 1772. 38.  On blacks meeting at Gerardus Comfort’s water pump, where they procured tea water, see Lepore, New York Burning, 133, 135–36. On the activities of blacks in taverns see Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 39.  Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 18, 1762, in Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717–1777, ed. John C. Van Horne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 192. Auchmuty names the schoolmistress in Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, April 4, 1761, ibid., 155. 40.  William Webb Kemp, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1913; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969); Frank J. Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940), chap. 4, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 121–86; Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James Wetmore to David Humphrey, West Chester, December 3, 1726, quoted in Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism, 141. On enslaved New Yorkers’ path to literacy see E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 41.  New-York Mercury, August 4, 1760. 42.  Samuel Auchmuty was appointed catechist of Negroes and assistant minister in 1747 and rector of Trinity Church in 1764. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 7, 1761, in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery, 167; Samuel Auchmuty to the Secretary, New York, March 29, 1764, SPG Letter Books, microfilm, series B, vol. 2, fol. 21. 43.  Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 7, 1761, in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery, 168; Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 18, 1762, ibid., 192. 44.  Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 7, 1761, ibid., 168; Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 18, 1762, ibid., 192; Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, May 1, 1767, ibid., 257. 45.  Auchmuty reflected on the increase in black communicants in 1774. “From ten Communicants which I found when I first took the charge of them, I now with pleasure can see, at one time, near Sixty.” Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 20, 1774, ibid., 322; Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring,

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New York, May 2, 1764, ibid., 212–13; Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, May 2, 1764, ibid., 213. 46.  A rare record of christenings of Negroes in Trinity Church in 1759 enumerates twenty-one blacks, all but one of them children. Seventeen of the twenty children baptized were slaves, two were the offspring of free black couples, and one child, Rachel, was “the Daughter of Scipio a slave of Captain Tiebout and Rachel Dow a free negroe woman.” This list is found in “Marriages of Trinity Church Parish New York City,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 68 (1937): 77–78. Christenings of whites are recorded separately. The list of Bray School pupils is in Rev. Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 7, 1761, in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery, 168–69. Evert Bancker House Expences, MSS, New-York Historical Society. 47.  Gerald De Jong’s research revealed that “out of a total of about six thousand baptisms listed in the published records of the Collegiate Church of New York for the last half century of the colonial period, 1726–1776, only nineteen children are listed whose parents had servile status.” Moreover, “eleven of the nineteen notations are for children of the same parents.” Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1978), 164–65. On slaves who married in the Dutch Reformed Church see above. Elias Neau to the Secretary, New York, October 18, 1719, SPG Letter Books, series A, vol. 13, fols. 479–82. In 1748, a Swedish visitor observed that “the negroes or their other servants accompanied [Dutch Reformed women] to church mornings carrying the warming pans. When the minister had finished his sermon and the last hymn had been sung, the same negroes, etc. came and removed the warming pans and carried them home.” Adolph B. Benson, ed., The America of 1750: Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America; The English Version of 1770, revised from the original Swedish, 2 vols. (1937; repr., New York: Dover, 1966), 2:624. Act of Appointment of John Montanye, as Door-keeper, Bell-ringer and Grave-digger, in and around the Old Church, . . . January 1, 1767, Ecc. Rec., 6:4078; Consistory meeting, May 10, 1770, Ecc. Rec., 6:4184. 48.  “Records of the First and Second Presbyterian Churches of the City of New York: Births and Baptisms,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 7 (1876): 35–38, 65–68, 135–40, 169–72; vol. 8 (1877): 20–24, 74–79; vol. 9 (1878): 16–19, 80–85, 169–73; vol. 10 (1879): 44–46, 93–96, 127–33, 177–81; vol. 11 (1880): 29–33. 49.  “Communicants of the First Presbyterian Church, New York City, 1769,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 131 (October 2000): 287–90. The record of Dinah’s baptism is found in “Records of the First and Second Presbyterian Churches of the City of New York: Births and Baptisms,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 6 (1875): 51. 50.  The records concerning Cato are in Sessions Meetings, May 22, 1765, June 27, 1765, July 23, 1765, New York Presbyterian Church, MSS (microfilm), fols. 15–17. See also the case of “a Negro Free Man named William, living with Mrs Hazard,” who “Confessed his being Guilty of Fornication with a Negro Wench several years agoe.” Sessions Meeting, February 26, 1766, MSS, fols. 22–23. Trustees Meeting, February 5, 1766, New York Presbyterian Church, MSS (microfilm), fol. 185. 51.  “Baptisms in the Lutheran Church, New York City, from 1725,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 100 (1969): 166; The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia:

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Evangelical Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942–1958), 1:342; Harry Emilius Stocker, A History of the Moravian Church in New York City (New York, 1922), 116–17. Only two people of African descent were members of the city’s Baptist congregation, Betty Nicolls, “a Molattoe Woman” who was baptized in 1766, and Marian, a black woman who was baptized in 1775. It is likely these were free women. Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Baptist Church in Prerevolutionary New York City,” American Baptist Quarterly 16 (1997): 228. 52.  Frederick E. Maser and Howard T. Maag, eds., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore, Methodist Itinerant, for the Years August 1, 1769, to January 2, 1774 (Philadelphia: Message Publishing Co., 1969), 96. Frederick Maser, ed., “Discovery,” Methodist History 10 (April 1972): 56–57. 53.  Richard Boardman to Rev. John Wesley, New York, November 4, 1769, Arminian Magazine, March 1784, letter 323, 164. 54.  “Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in the City of New York—Church Members List,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 61 (1930): 273; “Marriages of Trinity Church Parish New York City,” 77–78. 55.  Samuel Auchmuty to Rev. John Waring, New York, October 20, 1774, in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery, 322–23. 7. Sabotaging the Civilizers

1.  Quoted in Iconography, 4:673. See also New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, November 7, 1748, and Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 25–30. David L. Barquist, Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 250. The original manuscript of the oath is in the New-York Historical Society. Quoted in Morgan Dix, A History of the Parish of Trinity Church in the City of New York, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1898), 281. 2.  Samson Occum to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, June 24, 1761, in The Collected Writings of Samson Occum, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67. The extraordinary nature of Samson Occum’s appearance before New York’s Presbyterians and the collection made in his behalf was considered noteworthy enough that Scottish leaders included David Bostwick’s letter describing the event in An Account of some late Attempts by the Correspondents of the Society for propagating Christian Knowledge, to Christianize the North American Indians (Edinburgh, 1763). 3.  Other New York Presbyterian advocates of the Indian school who communicated with Wheelock were Hugh Wallace, Samuel Broome, bookseller Garret Noel, and Rev. John Rodgers, Bostwick’s successor. This correspondence is in the Papers of Eleazer Wheelock, MSS, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library. William Livingston to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, January 14, 1764, Eleazer Wheelock Papers. 4.  William Livingston to Eleazer Wheelock, March 22, 1764, Eleazer Wheelock Papers. Livingston refers to “our present Rupture with the Savages” in his letter to Wheelock, ibid. Ralph Wheelock to Eleazer Wheelock, Nassau Hall, February 2, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers; To the Ministers, Elders and Deacons of the Dutch reformed Protestant Chh & Congregation in New York, draft, April 1765, Eleazer

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Wheelock Papers; Lambertus De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, May 27, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers; Lambertus De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, June 12, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers; Eleazer Wheelock to Lambertus De Ronde, June 25, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers; Archibald Laidlie to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, August 30, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers. See also Lambertus De Ronde to Eleazer Wheelock, New York, August 30, 1765, Eleazer Wheelock Papers. Among those listed were eleven merchants, three lawyers, three doctors, and seven clergymen. A Brief Narrative of the Indian Charity School . . . Founded and Carried on by . . . The Rev. Eleazer Wheelock (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1766). 5.  Joseph Johnson to Eleazer Wheelock, February 14, 1775, in To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 251. Johnson related that “I preached for him three times, and he was very desirous of helping me”: ibid. New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 22, 1774. 6.  Sir William Johnson to William Smith and others, Fort Johnson, December 9, 1761, in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols., ed. James Sullivan, Alexander C. Flick, Milton W. Hamilton, and Albert Corey (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–1965), 3:585–86. The evolution of Sir William Johnson’s views on Eleazer Wheelock’s school is traced in Frank J. Klingberg, “Sir William Johnson and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1749–1774),” in Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940).   7.  Samuel Auchmuty to Sir William Johnson, New York, November 14, 1768, in Sullivan et al., Papers of Sir William Johnson, 6:455, 457; Sir William Johnson to Richard Peters, Johnson Hall, January 3, 1769, ibid., 6:563; Quoted in Klingberg, “Sir William Johnson and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,” 114.  8. New-York Mercury, January 23, 1764.  9. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 375; New-York Mercury, November 20, 1752; New-York Mercury, February 2, 1769. 10.  A Sermon Preached at the Presbyterian Church in the City of New-York On Occasion of the Death of John Nicoll, M.D. . . . who departed this Life October 2, 1743. Etat [Aetatis] Suae 64. (New York: James Parker, 1743), 25–26; New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, May 30, 1744; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, September 5, 1748; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, November 5, 1750; New-York Mercury, January 26, 1769. 11.  New-York Mercury, January 5, 1767; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy; November 26, 1770. For similar notices see New-York Gazette, December 14, 1761; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, December 4, 1769; New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, December 5, 1771; Abraham Keteltas, The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, in Becoming Poor for Men, Displayed and Enforced in A Charity Sermon preached in the French Protestant Church in New York, December 27, 1773 (New York: James Rivington, 1774); New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 30, 1775; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, November 28, 1768. 12.  New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, February 5, 1767; New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, February 17, 1767. 13.  New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, February 10, 1772; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, February 3, 1772; New-London [CT] Gazette, December 31, 1773.

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14.  [David Van Horne] to the Revd. New York Synod met at Philadelphia, n.d. but probably 1753, Letter Book of an Elder of the New York Presbyterian Church, MSS, Presbyterian Historical Society; CNYHS for 1894, 188–89; New-York Mercury, September 10, 1764. 15.  Lambertus De Ronde to the Classis of Amsterdam, New York, July 3, 1766, Ecc. Rec., 6:4063; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, November 8, 1773. This notice is on the first page. 16.  On the work of this school see E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 148–49, 156–65. Quoted ibid., 157. 17.  New-York Mercury, October 21, 1754; New-York Mercury, October 28, 1754. 18.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, July 13, 1752. 19. For this sermon by Henry Barclay see Timothy C. Jacobson, Charity and Merit: Trinity School at 300 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 337n22. 20.  New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, December 4, 1766; New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, December 11, 1766. 21.  New-York Mercury, April 21, 1760. See also Frances Auboyneau’s will in CNYHS for 1896, 369–70; Will of Anne Chambers, 1767, CNYHS for 1899, 168. 22.  Leo Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1967), 70; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 6, 1775; Irmgard Elisabeth Carras, “Who Cared? The Poor in Colonial New York City, 1628–1753” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 123–25, 142, 178–79; New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, October 30, 1775. 23.  Samuel Johnson to Archbishop Secker, Stratford [CT], December 20, 1763, Ecc. Rec., 6:3910. On Jonathan Mayhew see Charles W. Akers, Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 24.  Quoted in Julius Goebel Jr. and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial New York: A Study in Criminal Procedure (1774–1776) (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1944), 348n73. 25.  Obadiah Wells to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, April 8, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers, MSS, Hartford Seminary; Samuel Loudon to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, New York, June 12, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers; William Smith [Sr.] to Rev. Anthony Stoddard . . . New York, May 15, 1754, Joseph Bellamy Papers; memoir of Lindley Murray printed in Stephen Allott, Lindley Murray, 1745–1826: Quaker Grammarian of New York and Old York (York, UK: Sessions Book Trust, 1991), 10. 26.  A detailed account of this episode is found in Alan F. Dyer, A Biography of James Parker, Colonial Printer (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1982), 27–29. The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942–1958), 1:323–24; Dyer, Biography of James Parker, 27. See Benjamin Franklin to Cadwallader Colden, Philadelphia, May 14, 1752, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 41 vols., ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 4:310–12. Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:323. 27.  Carras, “Who Cared?” 28.  Consistory minutes, Dutch Reformed Church, New York, December 10, 1724, Ecc. Rec., 3:2235

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29.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 2:329. 30.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, “ ‘Upon a Bunch of Straw’: The Irish in Colonial New York City,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 35–47, 583–87. 31.  John Winthrop to Increase Mather, July 2, 1718, “Correspondence of John Winthrop, F.R.S.,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 5, 6th series (Boston, 1842), 381; Boston News-Letter, February 5–12, 1722. 32.  Mrs. Elizabeth Belknap to Hezekiah Wyllys, New York, March 20, 1723, Wyllys Papers, Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vol. 21 (Hartford, 1924), 402–3; Samson Occum Journal, June 14, 1761, in Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occum, 260. 33.  Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Struggle over the Sabbath in Petrus Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam,” in Power and the City in the Netherlandic World, ed. Wayne te Brake and Wim Klooster (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006), 205–24; CNYHS for 1912, 37–38; CNYHS for 1912, 192; MCC, 2:102–3; Elias Neau to Mr. Hodges, July 10, 1703, SPG Letter Books, microfilm, series A, vol. 1, no. 106. 34.  Laws, 1:173, 357. 35.  In February 1737, Zenger’s newspaper featured a compilation of the city’s laws, one of which was this detailed Sabbath law. New-York Weekly Journal, February 20, 1737. The law is also in MCC, 4:78–80. 36.  New-England Weekly Journal, August 29, 1738; George William Edwards, New York as an Eighteenth-Century Municipality, 1731–1776 (Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1967; originally published 1917), 117; MCC, 5:59; Iconography, 4:678. The source is cited as the New-York Post-Boy, February 16, 1756. 37.  New-York Mercury, January 26, 1761. An excerpt from this proclamation had been published on January 12, 1761; New-York Gazette; and Weekly Mercury, October 16, 1769; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy. October 23, 1769. 38.  New-York Weekly Journal, February 20, 1737; New-York Gazette Weyman’s, September 10, 1764. 39.  Gerard G. Beekman to Thomas Gilbert, September 24, 1750, in The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799, 3 vols., ed. Philip L. White (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1956), 1:121; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 14, 1768. 40.  New-York Mercury, January 7, 1760. 41.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, December 31, 1772. As far back as February 1718/19, the Court of General Sessions had cited the “Disorders and Other Mischiefs that Commonly happen within this City on Shrove Tuesday by Great Numbers of Youths Apprentices and Slaves that assemble together in throwing at Cocks” and condemned this traditional form of entertainment as a “Cruel Usage and Custom.” Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 121. New-York Chronicle, August 31, 1769. 42.  New-York Weekly Journal, May 16, 1743; Iconography, 4:598. The source is cited as the New-York Post-Boy, July 21, 1746. New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, September 30, 1751. 43.  Iconography, 4:681. The source is cited as the New-York Post-Boy, June 14, 1756. New-York Gazette, September 21, 1767; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, April 4, 1768; New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, April 11, 1768.

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44.  New-England Weekly Journal, December 4, 1739; [John Nicoll, William Wardrobe], Copy of Two Letters, The First written by a Gentleman of New York, to his friend at Edinburgh; the second by a dissenting Minister in England to a Gentleman in Scotland. Both giving an Account of the Progress and Success of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (Edinburgh: printed by A. Alison . . . for David Duncan, 1740), 3. 45.  Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 1:301; New York Congregational Diary, MSS, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA. 46.  New-York Gazette, September 21, 1730; Samuel Johnson to Peter Jay, Stratford [CT], May 27, 1740, Papers of John Jay, MSS (digitized), Columbia University Libraries; New-York Mercury, August 11, 1755. 47.  New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, August 6, 1767. Johnson, who had been tried the previous October under the name William Herring, “on three several Indictments for felony,” received a death sentence and was scheduled to be executed but was pardoned by Governor Henry Moore “at the Request of Doctor Auchmuty, and the Rest of his Brethren.” New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 20, 1767; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, July 20, 1769; New-York Chronicle, August 3, 1769. 48.  Boston News-Letter and New-England Chronicle, December 15, 1763. 49.  New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, September 11, 1758, and subsequent issues; New-York Gazette, May 3, 1762. 50.  Nicholas Bayard was a member of the Dutch Reformed church. He signed a petition on October 20, 1763. Ecc. Rec., 6:3900–3901. 51.  New-York Mercury, December 8, 1760. 52.  Undated petition of Richard Wenman to William Kempe, John Tabor Kempe Papers, MSS, New-York Historical Society. 53.  New-York Weekly Journal, January 25, 1747/48. 54.  New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, October 22, 1767; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, March 12, 1750. For advertisements for brass door knockers see New-York Mercury, January 3, 1757, April 2, 1759, September 29, 1760, February 28, 1763; New-York Gazette, December 14, 1761, May 28, 1764; New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, March 25, 1751; G. D. Scull, ed., The Montresor Journals, CNYHS for 1881, 368. 55.  On the informal economy see Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 57–80, and Serena R. Zabin, “Women’s Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2006): 291–321. 56.  Minutes of Coroners Proceedings, City and County of New York, John Burnet, Coroner, 1748–1758, ed. Francis J. Sypher Jr., Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, vol. 16 (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 2004), 22–23; New-England Weekly Journal, June 22, 1730; Boston Evening-Post, January 11, 1762. 57. Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 46; Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., “Tour through Part of the North Provinces of America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 59 (1935): 142. 58.  Edward Bangs, ed., Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1 to July 29, 1776 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1890), 29–31.

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59.  Boston News-Letter, October 20, 1760; Cadwallader Colden to Mr. Pitt, New York, December 4, 1760, in The Colden Letter Books, vol. 1, 1760–1765, CNYHS for the Year 1876, 43–44; New-York Mercury, August 16, 1760; Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, 31. 60.  Quoted in Mark Caldwell, New York Night: The Mystique and Its History (New York: Scribner, 2005), 52. In 1774, Sarah Dyllon was indicted for keeping a “disorderly house for her own lucre & gain [and for having] procured women of ill fame who gathered drinking tipling . . . etc.” Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997), 57–58; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, September 3, 1767. 61.  Evert Byvanck to William Kempe, John Tabor Kempe Papers, MSS, NewYork Historical Society. 62.  New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, October 23, 1766; New-York Mercury, March 23, 1761; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 31, 1769. 63.  New-York Mercury, July 23, 1753; Boston-Gazette, or Country Journal, August 18, 1755; New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, August 15, 1771. 64.  New-York Gazette, Revived in The Weekly Post-Boy, February 4, 1751. 65.  An Authentic and Particular Account of the Life of Francis Burdett Personel Written by Himself who was Executed at New York September 10th 1773 (New York, 1773), 8–9. Conclusion

  1.  John Singleton Copley to Henry Pelham, New York, June 20, 1771, Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 71 (1914), 120; John Singleton Copley to Henry Pelham, New York, July 14, 1771, ibid., 128.  2. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols., ed. L. H. Butterfield et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 2:105.   3.  “Journals of Capt. John Montresor, 1757–1778,” in The Montresor Journals, ed. G. D. Scull, CNYHS for 1881 (New York, 1882), 363–64; A Sermon on Philip. III. 20.21. Occasioned by the Death of Samuel Auchmuty, D.D. Rector of Trinity Church, New York. Preached March 9, 1777, by Charles Inglis, A.M. (New York: H. Gaine [1777]), 19.   4.  “Journals of Capt. John Montresor,” 350; William Berrian, An Historical Sketch of Trinity Church, New York (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1847), 171–72.

In dex

Page numbers followed by letter f refer to figures. Aarding, James, 66 Adams, John, 233 – 34, 235 African Americans: interracial liaisons of, 177 – 78; in Methodist community, 140, 195 – 96; in Moravian community, 120, 194, 195; racial categories for, 175; and religious independence, 129, 196 – 97; Sabbath breaking by, 215 – 16, 217, 220 African slaves, in New York City, 2, 39 – 40, 160; bodies of, 175 – 77; and Catholics, presumed collaboration between, 92; Christian education of, 190 – 93, 210; communal ties of, 187 – 89; familial bonds of, constraints on, 178 – 82; interactions with masters, 173 – 75, 182 – 86; liberating potential of Christianity and, 191, 195 – 97; manumissions of, 184 – 85; in patriarchal household, 146; pent-up rage of, 186 – 87; rape accusations against, 176 – 77; religious practices of, 120, 172 – 73, 190 – 97; runaway, 175 – 76, 179, 187; Whitefield’s preaching and, 81, 85 Alexander, James, 116, 120 Alexander, Mary, 182 alien, use of term, 41 – 42 Allen, John, 131 American Revolution: Anglican Church on eve of, 107 – 8; cultural contests preceding, vii – viii, 8, 236 – 39; Dutch Reformed Church during, 76, 237 – 38 Anabaptists, 128, 129 Andrew the Moor, 120, 195 Andros, Edmund, 16 – 18, 19, 23, 29 Anglican Church, in New York City: and African slaves, 191 – 93, 196 – 97; under Auchmuty, 100 – 104, 107 – 8, 191 – 92; under Barclay, 87, 88 – 89, 99 – 100; charitable work of, 205, 207 – 9; elite’s authority in, resistance to, 85 – 89, 99 – 100; and

En­glish party, 32; evangelicals in, 100 – 109; and Native Americans, 202 – 3; and new church construction, 135; Page’s splinter church and, 106 – 7; under Vesey, 28, 82, 85 – 87; weakness in 17th century, 19, 20; Whitefield’s preaching and, 80, 84 – 85, 87, 88, 89, 99 – 109. See also St. George’s Chapel; Trinity Church apprentices, 160, 162 Apthorp, Charles Ward, mansion of, 147f architecture, in New York City: church, consumer culture and, 135, 136f; Dutch influence on, 56; English conquest and, 18 Arnold, Jonathan, 83 arson, 221, 231 Asbury, Francis, 131 – 32, 134 Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 118 atheism, 210 – 12 Atwood, William, 32, 40 Auboyneau, Frances, 209 Auchmuty, Samuel, 100 – 104, 107 – 8; and African Americans, 190, 191 – 92, 196 – 97; and anti-Catholic crusade, 199; on Barclay, 89, 99; charitable work of, 205, 206f, 208 – 9; on consumer approach to religion, 129; Dutch traditionalists’ appeal to, 68; on Methodists, 140 – 41; and Native Americans, 202; political views of, attacks on, 237; remuneration of, 135; runaway servant of, 170; on Whitefield, 88, 98 Backus, Isaac, 96 Baker, Roger, 33 – 34 Bamper, Lodewick, 66, 67 Bancker, Evert, 192 – 93 Bangs, Isaac, 228 – 29 Baptist Church, in New York City, 85, 111; attacks on, 221; defections to, 85, 96, 132 – 33, 136, 236; under Gano, 81, 96, 131,

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Baptist Church (cont.) 132 – 33; itinerant preachers at, 130 – 31; poor congregants in, 212 Barberie, John, 42 Barclay, Henry, 87, 88 – 89, 96, 99 – 100; Auchmuty on, 103; baptisms of African slaves, 191; books owned by, 117; charity sermon by, 208; on deistic theology, 211; on Moravians, 93 Barclay, Mary Rutgers, 117 Barnes, Thomas, 145 Bayard, Elizabeth, 148 Bayard, Nicholas (Leisler’s archrival), 17, 24, 25, 31, 36, 37; and cultural labeling, 35, 40 – 41 Bayard, Nicholas (merchant): farm of, 223 – 24; slaves of, 183 Bayard, Samuel, 4 Bayard family, coat of arms, 225f Becker, Carl, vii Beekman, Catharine, 184 Beekman, Gerard G., 115, 196, 218 Beekman, James, 3 Belcher, Jonathan, 82 Belknap, Elizabeth, 214 Bellamy, Joseph, 211 Bellomont, Lord, 27, 29, 44; and ethnic politics, 32, 35, 37; and Leislerians, 42, 43, 44 Betts, Dorcas, 118 Birket, James, 56, 114 Black party, Leislerians labeled as, 39 – 40 Blackstone, William, 145 Boardman, Richard, 104, 134, 137, 140, 195, 196 Boel, Henricus, 87, 89 – 90, 91f, 94; and anti-Moravian campaign, 90 – 91, 92, 93 – 94 Boelen, Hendrick, 121 Boelen, Jane, 121 Bogert, Henry C., 204 Bogert, Nicholas, 66, 67 Bonomi, Patricia, 3 books: for charity, 207; children’s, 4 – 5; Christian, 116, 117 – 18, 120, 130; Christmas gifts, 219; Dutch-language, 58 – 62, 65 – 67, 70, 92, 117; elite’s preferences for, 116 – 17; German-language, 49; thefts of, 222, 223; on Whitefield, 81 Boolen, Anna, 124 Bostwick, David, 72, 81, 83, 84, 96, 129, 130, 132, 194, 200, 202 Boudinot, Elie, 37, 42 Bourignon, Annette, 61 Boyteu, Gabriel, 42

Bradford, William, 29, 60, 61, 64 Brainerd, David and John, 200 Brasier (Brasher), Abraham, 126 Brasier (Brasher), Elizabeth, 124 – 25 Brasier (Brasher), Helena Kortright, 94 – 95,  126 Brasier (Brasher), Judith Gasherie, 113, 125 – 27 Brasier (Brasher), Lucas, 125 Bray School, 190, 191, 192, 193 Brevoort, Elias, 209 Brick Presbyterian Church, 83, 97, 135, 142 Brinckerhoff, Dirck, 117 Brinckerhoff family, 3 Brooke, Chidley, 27 Broome, John, 180 Broome, Samuel, 135 Broughton, Samson Shelton, 44 Brownfield, Catharine Kerney, 123 Buell, Samuel, 80, 200 Bullivant, Benjamin, 27 Buninger, Martha Marriner, 122 Byrd, William, 19 Byvanck, Evert, 230 Byvanck, Teuntie, 5, 182 Callender, Hannah, 88 Campbell, Alexander, 86 Campbell, Duncan, 145 Carryl, Patrick, 211 Catholicism: in 17th-century New York, 20; attacks on, as unification instrument for New Yorkers, 26 – 27, 199, 220 – 21; French refugees and animosity toward, 11 – 12, 20, 23; of James II, concern about, 11 – 12; Leislerian campaign against, 24 – 25, 43; and slave conspiracy of 1741, 92 Cats, Jacob, 67 celebrations (holidays): Christmas, 219; and English cultural authority, 28 – 29, 31; Pope’s Day processions, 199 Chambers, Anne, 209 Chambers, John, 116 charitable activities, 200 – 205, 207 – 10 Charlton, Richard, 85 children: of African slaves, 181 – 82, 187, 192; infanticide, 187, 227; poor, charity schools for, 207 – 10; poor, surrendering of, 212 churches, in New York City, 111; attacks on, 220 – 223; charitable activities of, 200 – 205, 207 – 10; congregational elite in, challenges to, 85 – 89, 236; construction boom in 1760s, 97, 135, 141 – 42; defections of

I N D E X     289 congregants, 85, 132 – 33, 135 – 37, 141 – 42, 236; growth in late 18th century, 97, 135, 141 – 42; language of worship in, conflicts over, 46 – 48, 50 – 51, 54 – 55; poor congregants in, 212 – 13; rivalry among, 52, 111 – 12, 132–33; in 17th century, 18 – 19, 21. See also specific churches and denominations Clarke, Peter, 74 clergymen: charity sermons by, 200, 203, 204 – 5, 208 – 9; consumer culture and challenges to, 127 – 29; desirable characteristics of, 53; heckling of, 221 – 22; Huguenot, 22; itinerant preachers, 21, 130 – 32; Methodist, 138 – 39; missionaries to Native Americans, 202; performative abilities of, new importance of, 133 134; Pietist, 21, 22; political views of, attacks on, 237, 238; rivalry among, consumer culture and, 132 – 33, 140 – 41; salaries and perquisites offered to, 134 – 35; servants of, 170; Whitefield’s sermons and, 82, 89 – 90 Clopper, Cornelius, 66 Clossy, Samuel, 176 Cocceius, Johannes, 22 Colden, Cadwallader, 148, 229 Colden, Elizabeth, 148 Colgan, Thomas, 85 Colve, Anthony, 16 commoners: in historical accounts of British New York, 1 – 2; imitation of elite, 5; language retention by, 50, 52, 53 – 54; marital problems of, 149 – 58; passion displayed by, vs. elite’s politeness, 74 – 75; religious battles and developing political consciousness of, 236 – 37; traditionalism of, vs. elite’s cosmopolitanism, 45 – 46; Whitefield’s preaching and, 88, 89, 102. See also poor residents; resistance consumer culture, 110; and religion, 110, 111 – 12, 118 – 19, 127 – 37, 141 – 42; and spending habits of women, 153 – 54 Cooper, Myles, 102, 108, 170 Copley, John Singleton, 233; portraits by, 233, 234f, 235 Cornbury, Lord, 33, 35, 37 – 40, 44 Crommelin, Daniel, 66 Curtenius, Antonius, 65 Curtenius, Peter T., 65 – 66, 67 Daillé, Pierre, 22, 36 Danckaerts, Jasper, 21, 59 Dawson, Henry, 131

Deane, Silas, 134 De Foreest, Barent, 61 De Foreest, Henricus, 61 – 62; newspaper of, 62, 64, 87 deistic ideas, dissemination of, 210 – 12 De La Grange, Arnoldus, 59 De Lancey, Etienne (Stephen), 3 De Lancey, James, 3, 116; on English language, 47, 51; on Moravians, 93 De Lancey, Oliver, 3, 4, 176 De Lancey, Peter, 148 De La Noy, Abraham, 60 Demarest, David, 54 De Peyster, Cornelia, 55 De Peyster, Johannes, 51 De Ronde, Lambertus, 70 – 72; charitable work of, 207; Dutch-language sermons of, 76; forced retirement of, 54; funeral sermon for Du Bois, 62, 63f; inaugural sermon of, 62; and informal religious gatherings, 114; library of, 116; and Native American education, 201; on new religious sects, 128 – 29; and Whitefield, 98 Dewit, John, 114 De Witt, Thomas, 54 De Witt, William, 4 Dies, Jannetie Goelet, 65 Dies, John, 65 Dix, Morgan, 107 Doddridge, Philip, 117 Dominion of New England, 11; New York’s incorporation into, 20, 23 Dongan, Thomas, 19 – 20, 23, 24, 29 Drowne, Solomon, 135, 139 Duane, Anthony, 117 Duane, James and Mary, 3 Du Bois, Gualterus, 57; on consumer culture and religion, 127; divisions after death of, 50; funeral sermon for, 62, 63f; on language of worship, 51; on Moravians, 90 – 91, 92; obituary of, 64; Pietist critique of, 89; and Whitefield, 90 Duché, Jacob, 100 Dutch community, in New York City: Anglicization of, pressure for, 30; anti-Catholic sentiments in, 23; bilingualism in, 68 – 72; churches attended by, 111; Dutch re-capture of New York and, 14 – 16, 38 – 39; efforts to weaken, 12 – 13, 18, 27 – 28; English capture of New Netherland and, 13 – 14; vs. English community, cultural breach between, 12, 29 – 31, 34 – 35; ethnic politics against, 30 – 33;

290    I N D E X

Dutch community (cont.) homogeneous neighborhoods of, 56 – 57; hybrid identity of members of, 14, 19; Leisler’s rebellion and, 12, 30 – 33; linguistic limitations of, ridiculing, 34 – 35; Protestant feeling among, intensification in 1680s, 20 – 21; racial categories applied to, 39 – 40; relations with English, under Governor Andros, 17 – 18, 19; republican tendencies of, 39; second English take-over and, 16 – 18; stereotyping/stigmatization of, 33 – 35, 38, 39 – 41, 44; strength/size in 17th century, 18 – 19, 27; traditionalists vs. Anglicized elite in, 68 – 72, 73, 75 – 76 Dutch language: association with lower-class people, 50, 52, 53 – 54; books in, 58 – 62, 65 – 67; discourse of decline regarding, 50 – 55; efforts to preserve, as resistance, 46, 50, 72 – 73; as language of worship, supporters of, 54 – 55, 58, 68, 73, 76, 111; newspaper in, lack of, 64; tenacity of, 29, 47, 49 – 50, 55 – 67 Dutch Lutherans, 18, 21, 46 Dutch Reformed church, in New York City, 21; and African slaves, 178 – 79, 193, 196, 210; during American Revolution, 76, 237 – 38; under Boel, 89 – 90, 93 – 94; charitable activities of, 205, 209 – 10; under De Ronde, 70 – 72; divisions within, 57 – 58; Dutch-language worship at, 54 – 55, 58, 68, 73, 76, 111; English-language worship at, 50, 52, 53, 54, 67 – 68, 73, 81, 94; evangelical-style preaching at, 97; Garden Street Church, 54, 57 – 58, 76; German immigrants and, 47 – 48; Irish immigrants and, 213; under Laidlie, 97, 133 – 34; language of worship in, conflict over, 46, 50 – 51, 54 – 55, 58, 67 – 68, 73, 75 – 76; Leislerians in, 42 – 43; Nassau Street Church, 57 – 58; and Native American education, 201; and new church construction, 135; under Nieuwenhuisen, 16, 17, 18; Pietism and, 21 – 22, 89 – 94; poor congregants in, 212; pressure for reform in, 128 – 29; privileging of Anglican church and, 28; religious revival of 1740s-60s and, 81; under Selyns, 21 – 23; strength in 17th-century, 18, 21; Whitefield’s preaching and, 80, 84 – 85, 87, 90, 97 Duyckins (Duycking), Gerrit, 30, 34 Edelman, Hendrik, 60 Edmonds, Margaretha Anton, 123, 124 Edsall, Samuel, 31

education: of African slaves, 190 – 93, 210; of lesser classes/races, elite project of, 199 – 203, 207 – 10; of Native Americans, 200 – 203; of poor children (charity schools), 207 – 10 Edwards, Jonathan, 115 Église Françoise à la Nouvelle York. See French Protestant church elite: Catholicism sanctioned by, 20, 23; challenges to authority of, vii – viii, 2, 6, 235 – 38; charitable activities of, 203 – 4; cosmopolitanism of, vs. commoners’ traditionalism, 45 – 46, 68 – 72, 73, 75 – 76; Englishness and cultural authority of, 2 – 3, 27 – 29, 111; in historical accounts of New York, 1 – 2; languages spoken by, 53; marital relations of, 147 – 48, 158 – 60; material expressions of refinement, 3 – 5, 4f, 225f, 233 – 35; reading preferences of, 116 – 17; spiritual commitment of, skepticism about, 137 – 38 Embury, Philip, 104, 137 emotion (passion): commoners’ display of, vs. elite’s politeness, 74 – 75; in Whitefield’s preaching, 85, 102 England, Church of. See Anglican church English common law: model of, 28; and patriarchal household, 145 English language: in Dutch Reformed church, 50, 52, 53, 54, 67 – 68, 73, 81, 94; Dutch residents’ inability to speak, 29, 34 – 35, 41, 55; Dutch traditionalists’ use of, 68 – 72; as language of gentility, 51, 53, 54; as language of worship, 50, 52, 53, 54, 67 – 68, 73, 133 – 34; monopoly in New York’s print culture, 60, 64; as official language, 47, 51; translation of Dutch records into, 70 Englishness: and cultural authority of New York’s elite, 2 – 3, 27 – 29, 111; vs. Dutch culture, 12, 29 – 31; and ethnic labeling, 41; vs. foreignness, 45 – 46 English residents, in New York City: in 17th century, 18, 19, 27, 38; churches attended by, 111; vs. Dutch residents, cultural breach between, 12, 29 – 31, 34 – 35; and French Huguenots, 37 – 38; indentured servants, 160 – 61, 166, 167 – 68 ethnicities, in New York City, 27; hierarchy of, 33, 35 – 36, 38 ethnic labeling: of Dutch New Yorkers, 33 – 35, 38, 39 – 41, 44; and politics, 12, 30 – 41,  44

I N D E X     291 evangelical revival, 80, 96, 97. See also Whitefield, George Fell, Christopher, 178 Finley, Samuel, 120 Fletcher, Benjamin, 26, 27, 28, 29; and ethnic politics, 32, 35, 36 Franklin, Benjamin, 120, 212 Franks, Abigail, 35, 117 Franks, Jacob, 3, 117, 204 Franks, Phila, 3 Frelinghuysen, Theodore Jacobus, 89 – 90 French immigrants (Huguenots), in New York City, 27; Anglicization of, 3; anti-Catholicism of, 11 – 12, 20, 23; and English residents, alliance of, 37 – 38; in ethnic hierarchy, 35 – 36, 38; politics vs. religion in identity of, 33 French language, 53 French Protestant church, in New York City, 111; charitable work of, 204; evolution of, 22 – 23, 36; itinerant preachers at, 131; and politics, 42; search for new minister, 134; and Whitefield, 80 Gaine, Hugh, 61, 62, 64, 116 Gano, John, 81, 96, 131, 132 – 33 Garden Street Church, 54, 57 – 58, 68 George II (King of England), 199 George III (King of England), 217, 238 German immigrants, in New York City, 47 – 49; indentured servants, 160, 163, 166 – 67, 168 – 69; printers,  61 German Lutherans, 47 – 48 German Reformed church, 48 Gill, John, 132 – 33 Goelet, Catherine, 65 Goelet, Elizabeth, 160 Goelet, Isaac, 65 Goelet, Jacobus, 41 Goelet, Jacobus, Jr., 61, 62, 64 – 65, 69 – 70, 92, 114 Goelet, Peter, 160 Goelet, Raphael, 3 Gomez, Benjamin, 184 Gomez, David, 196 Gomez, Mordecai, 204 Gouverneur, Abraham, 39 Grillo, R. G., 53 Hamill, Pete, 47 Hamilton, Alexander, 228 Hardenbroek, Abel, 68

Hardenbroek, Margriet, 59 Haring, Catharina, 66 Hazard, Nathaniel, 96, 112, 113, 130 heads of household: challenges by dependents, 146 – 47; challenges by servants, 161 – 71; challenges by slaves, 175 – 76, 179, 187; challenges by wives, 149 – 58; ideal attributes of, 145, 175; relations with slaves, 173 – 75, 182 – 86 Heathcote, Anne, 3 Heathcote, Caleb, 3 Hellenbroek, Abraham, 67 Henchman, Daniel, 120 Herrenhutters (Hernhuters). See Moravians Hervey, James, 130 holidays. See celebrations Holt, John, 61, 81 Honyman, Robert, 135 Horsmanden, Daniel, 49, 117 Horton, Azariah, 200 households: patriarchal model of, 145 – 46. See also heads of household Huddleston, William, 207 Huguenots. See French immigrants Hunter, Robert, 35, 85 – 86 Hutchins, John and Hannah, 29 indentured servants. See servants Inglis, Charles, 100 – 101, 103, 104, 133, 135, 203, 237 Innes, Alexander, 24 – 25 Irish immigrants: anti-Catholic campaigns and, 27; fungible religiosity of, 213; indentured servants, 160 – 62, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169 – 70, 213; poverty and difficult choices of, 232 Isaacs, Joshua, 209 itinerant preachers, 21, 130 – 32 James II (King of England), 11 – 12, 20, 23, 24, 26, 29, 43 – 44 Jewish community, in New York City, 3, 111, 115; anti-Semitic acts against, 220 – 21; charity work in, 209; loyalty oath to George II, 199; thefts from, 222 Johnson, Joseph, 201 – 2 Johnson, Samuel, 88, 102, 103, 115, 130 Johnson, Sir William, 202, 203 John Street Chapel, 104, 137, 140, 141 Kalm, Peter, 52 Kempe, William, 224, 230 Kennedy, Archibald, 116, 185

292    I N D E X

Keteltas, Abraham, 204 Keteltas, Peter, 179 Kilburn, Lawrence, 3 King’s College, vii; anatomy demonstrations at, 176; evangelical revival and, 102; graduates of, 138, 234f; presidents of, 108, 115, 130, 170; prostitutes’ residences near, 228, 229 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 27 Knoll, Michael Christian, 47, 52 Koelman, Jacobus, 22, 59 – 60 Kuyler (Cuyler), Hendrick, 35 Kuypers, Gerardus A., 54 Labadists (radical Pietists), 21 Laidlie, Archibald, 96, 97; and English-language preaching, 73, 81; inaugural sermon of, 67; and informal religious gatherings, 114; itinerant preachers and, 131; vs. Methodists, 104, 141; and Native American education, 201; political views of, 238; popularity of, 129, 133 – 34; remuneration of, 135 Lamb, Anthony, 188 Lamb, Martha, 141, 142 Lane, Henry, 117 language(s), in New York City, 47; bilingualism, 68 – 72; and divisions between Dutch and English communities, 29, 34 – 35, 45; and religious life, 111; retention of, as challenge to English cultural authority, 50; of worship, conflicts over, 46 – 48, 50 – 51, 54 – 55. See also specific languages Leisler, Jacob, 12; anti-Dutch narrative after rebellion of, 12, 30 – 33; and English culture, 31; execution of, 25 – 26; French community’s response to, 36 – 38; rebellion of, 24 – 25; re-burial of, 42 – 43; republicanism and, 39 Leislerians: as Black party, 39 – 40; in Dutch Reformed church, 42 – 43; ethnic labeling used by, 41; as foreigners, 41 – 42 Livingston, John Henry, 67, 73, 97, 134 Livingston, Margaret Beekman, 134 Livingston, Peter Van Brugh, 83, 84, 200, 202 Livingston, Philip, 66, 176 Livingston, Robert James, 176 Livingston, William, 4, 83, 202; on English language, 51 – 52, 53; on Moravians, 93 Lodwyck, Charles, 27 Loudon, Samuel, 116, 211 Louis XIV (King of France), 12, 20 Lovelace, Francis, 14, 34 Low, Peter, 66, 67

Lupton, William, 141 Lutheran Church, in New York City: African Americans in, 194 – 95; attacks on, 221; defections to Moravians, 93; Dutch, 18, 21, 46, 111; German, 47 – 48; and informal religious gatherings, 113; poor congregants in, 213; and Whitefield, 80 Lydekker, Gerrit, 238 Macclennachan, William, 100 Malcolm, Alexander, 35 Manning, James, 99 Manning, John, 14 Marius, Peter Jacobs, 60 marriage(s): affection-based standards for, 158 – 60; of African slaves, constraints on, 178 – 80; wives abandoning, 149 – 58 Marshalk, Andries, 41 Mary II (Queen of England), 12, 24, 25, 41 Mason, John, 96 McIlworth, Thomas, 233 McRoberts, Patrick, 228 Megapolensis, Samuel, 13 Melyn, Isaac, 16 Methodist Church, 97 – 98, 129; and African Americans, 140, 195 – 96; defections to, 85, 136, 236; growing influence in 1760s, 104 – 6, 137 – 41; itinerant preachers at, 131 – 32; preaching style at, 100 – 101, 137 – 39; religious revival and, 81, 85, 138 Milborne, Jacob, 25, 31, 42 Mills, Frederick V., Sr., 100 Mill Street Synagogue, 111, 222 Montagne, Lydia, 124 Montgomerie, John, 116 Montresor, John, 108, 237 Moravians, 90 – 94, 118 – 27; and African Americans, 120, 194, 195; defections to, 85, 93, 136, 236; vs. established churches, 128; rituals of, 139 Morris, Lewis, 55 Muhlenberg, Henry, 52, 115, 117; on African slaves, 195; on deistic ideas, 212; on German servants, 163; on informal religious gatherings, 113; on Moravians, 93, 94; on poor people, 213, 222; on religious marketplace, 127; on Whitefield’s sermons, 82 Murray, John (itinerant preacher), 130 – 31 Murray, John, 116 Murray, Lindley, 211 Murrin, John, 20 Mynderts, Samuel, 60

I N D E X     293 Nadere Reformatie, 20 – 21,  24 Nassau Street Church, 57 – 58 Native Americans, conversion of, 200 – 203 Neau, Elias, 28, 190, 191, 193, 216 Neill, Hugh, 100 New Amsterdam, 11, 15f, 215 New Netherland, English invasion of, 11, 13 New Orange, 11, 15 – 16 newspaper(s), 64; advertisements for runaway servants in, 161 – 71; advertisements for runaway slaves in, 175 – 76, 179; elopement notices in, 149 – 58; obituaries in, 64, 87, 89, 145, 159 – 60, 204. See also specific newspapers New-York Evening Post (newspaper): Dutch section in, 64; English-language manifesto in, 57 – 58, 62; Vesey’s obituary in, 87; on Whitefield’s sermons, 82 New-York Gazette (newspaper), 64; on Barclay’s death, 88 – 89; elopement notices in, 152 New-York Gazetteer (newspaper), 107 New-York Mercury (newspaper): Barclay’s obituary in, 89; on charitable activities, 203 – 4; George III’s proclamation in, 217; on Whitefield, 98 – 99 New-York Post Boy (newspaper), deistic ideas in, 211 Nicholls, Margaret Tudor, 159, 159f Nicholls, Richard, 159 – 60, 183 Nichols, John, 82 Nicoll, Benjamin, 145 Nicoll, John, 204 Nicoll, William, 27 Nicolls, Richard, 13, 18 Nicolls, William, 30 Nieuwenhuisen, Wilhelmus, 16, 17, 18 Noble, Thomas, 82, 83, 119 – 21, 122 Noel, Garret, 4, 116, 130, 219 North Dutch Reformed Church, 97, 135, 136f, 142 Occum, Samson, 200, 202, 203, 215 Ogilvie, John, 103, 192, 205, 209 Page, Bernard, 106 – 7 Parker, James, 61, 64, 211 patriarchal model, 145 – 46 Peabody (itinerant preacher), 131 Peiret, Pierre, 36 – 37, 42 Pemberton, Ebenezer, 83; charitable work of, 204; on Moravians, 92; and Native Americans, 200; resignation of, 75, 127 – 28; and Whitefield, 82, 90

Personel, Francis Burdett, 232 Peters, Richard, 103 Philipse, Adolph, possessions of, 174f Philipse, Frederick, 17, 39 Philipszen, Frederick, 59 Pietism: Dutch Reformed church and, 21 – 22, 89 – 94. See also Moravians Pilmore, Joseph, 84, 104, 137, 138 – 40, 141, 195 Plowman, Matthew, 24, 31 political consciousness, religious battles and development of, 236 – 37 politics: charitable activities and, 204; clergymen and, 237, 238; ethnic labeling and, 12, 30 – 41, 44; Native American education and, 202; racial labeling and, 39 – 40; religion and, in 17th-century New York (Leisler’s rebellion), 12 poorhouse, preaching in, 139, 207 poor residents, of New York City: charitable activities aimed at, 203 – 7; infanticide by, 227; performance of subservience by, 224 – 26; prostitution by, 228 – 32; religious expectations for, 212 – 13; resistance to elite’s civilizing efforts, 213 – 24, 226 – 32; Sabbath breaking by, 214 – 19, 220, 223, 224; schools for, 207 – 10; thefts by, 222 – 24, 226 – 27 Pope’s Day processions, 199 Porter, Roy, 203 Pownall, Thomas, 56, 88 Presbyterian Church, in New York City: African slaves in, 178 – 79, 193 – 94, 210; anti-Moravian rhetoric in, 92 – 93; under Bostwick, 83, 132; charitable work of, 204 – 5; decline after Bostwick’s death, 129; defections to Baptist Church, 96, 132 – 33; expansion of, 82 – 83; missionary work among Native Americans, 200, 203; and new church construction, 135; under Pemberton, 82, 83; poor congregants in, 212; under Rodgers, 81, 83, 97; Scottish psalms in, controversy over, 73 – 75, 83, 127 – 28; Whitefield’s preaching and, 80, 82 – 84,  94 printers/printing, 29, 60 – 64 prisons, charitable activities at, 205, 224 prostitution, 228 – 32 Protestantism, in New York City: vs. Catholicism, 11 – 12, 20 – 27, 33, 199; Leisler’s crusade in name of, 24 – 25; variety of denominations, 111. See also specific denominations Provoost, Samuel, 103, 104 – 6, 237

294    I N D E X

punishment: of prostitutes, 231; for Sabbath breaking, 218; of wives, 148 – 51 Quakers, 19, 26, 80, 111, 211 racial categories: for African Americans, 175; use in politics, 39 – 40 Ramsberg, Ana, 124 Randolph, Edward, 17 Rankin, Thomas, 138 Reade, Laurence, 177 – 78 religion: African slaves and, 120, 172 – 73, 190 – 97; books on, 116, 117 – 18; consumer approach to, 110, 111 – 12, 118 – 19, 127 – 37, 141 – 42; denominational competition, 52, 111 – 12, 132 – 33; elite’s vs. commoners’ approach to, 236; ethnic politics supplanting, 32 – 33; evangelical revival, 80, 81, 94 – 109; informal religious meetings, 113 – 15; itinerant preachers, 129 – 32; vs. nation, importance of, 24; new ideas in, 115 – 16; Pietism and, 89 – 94; and politics, in 17th century, 12; Protestantism vs. Catholicism, 11 – 12, 20 – 27, 33, 199; rationalistic/deistic ideas, 210 – 12; Sabbath breaking, 214 – 19, 220, 223, 224; sectarianism in, 23; Whitefield’s preaching and, 79 – 85, 87 – 89, 94 – 109. See also churches; clergymen; specific churches and denominations resistance: by Anglican commoners, 85 – 89, 99 – 100, 106; consumer approach to religion and, 112 – 13, 127 – 42; defections to smaller religious communities as, 85, 132 – 33, 135 – 37, 141 – 42, 236; by Dutch traditionalists, 54 – 55, 58, 68, 72 – 73, 75 – 76, 79, 111; to elite’s civilizing efforts, 213 – 24, 226 – 32; to elite’s cultural authority, vii – viii, 2, 6, 235; language of worship and, 46 – 48, 50 – 51, 54 – 55, 72 – 76, 79; language retention as, 46, 50, 72 – 73; novel religious ideas and, 79; to rules of behavior, 198; by Scotch Presbyterians, 73 – 75, 83, 127 – 28; by servants, 161 – 71; sinful behavior as, 213 – 24, 226 – 32; by slaves, 173; Whitefield’s ideas and, 79, 99 – 100; by wives, 149 – 58 Rice, Owen, 123, 124 Ritzema, Johannes, 122; on English language, 51; forced retirement of, 54; library of, 116; vs. Methodists, 141; on new religious sects, 129 Rivington, James, 107 Robertson, Thomas, 178

Rodgers, John, 81, 83, 84, 97; charity work of, 205, 207; and missionary work among Native Americans, 200, 201; and private religious gatherings, 114; slave of, 196 Romme, Elizabeth, 49 Roosevelt, Jacobus, 56 Rous, Francis, 73 Russmeyer, Albrecht Ludolph, 123 Rutgers, Harmanus, 183 Rutgers, Helena, 233 Rutgers, Hendrick, 229 Rutgers, Peter, 185 Sabbath breaking, 214 – 19, 220, 223, 224 Sandeman, Robert, 129 – 30 Schuyler, Philip, 177 Scotch Presbyterian Society, 74, 96, 224, 236 Scotch Seceder Church, 75, 129 Scots: churches attended by, 111; indentured servants, 160, 167, 168; in Presbyterian Church, conflict over psalms, 73 – 75, 83, 127 – 28 Scott, John Morin, 233 – 34, 235 Scurlock, Eve, 184 – 85 Selyns, Henricus, 19, 20, 21 – 23; and Dutch-language books, 59, 60; vs. Leisler, 25, 36, 42, 44; vs. Pietist preachers, 21, 22 servants: infanticide by, 227; new immigrants as, 160 – 61; in patriarchal household, 146, 160; resistance to masters, 161 – 71 Seward, William, 82 Sharpe, John, 16, 53, 86 Shepard, Thomas, 120 Shewkirk, Oswald Gustav, 121 Simm, Hugh, 58 sinful behavior, 213 – 24, 226 – 32 Singleton, Esther, 1 slave conspiracy of 1741, 85, 92, 173, 176, 191, 217 slave rebellion of 1712, 173, 191 slaves. See African slaves Sloughter, Henry, 25, 31 Sluyter, Peter, 21 Smith, Ann, 107 Smith, Hezekiah, 99 Smith, John, 107, 113 Smith, Joshua Hett, 107 Smith, Rachel, 117 Smith, William, 107 Smith, William, Jr., 53, 70, 75, 83, 88, 121, 202 Smith, William, Sr., 83, 211

I N D E X     295 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 28, 190, 192, 202, 207 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), 200, 202 Splinter, Gertye, 60 Staats, Samuel, 39 Stamp Act, euphoria following repeal of, 226 – 27 St. George’s Chapel, 87, 88, 89, 99, 208, 209, 238 Stiles, Ezra, 116, 131, 135 Stoutenburgh, Jacobus, 68 – 69, 70, 237 St. Paul’s Chapel, 135, 142, 222 – 23 Stuyvesant, Petrus (Peter), 13, 17, 215 Taylor, Thomas, 95, 97, 137 Ten Cate, Jacob, 61 Tennent, Gilbert, 92, 120 theft: by indentured servants, 167, 170; by poor residents, 222 – 24, 226 – 27 Tiebout, John, 68 Tiebout, Mary, 117 traditions, vs. cosmopolitanism, 45 – 46 Treat, Joseph, 129, 132, 134, 204 Trinity Church, 111, 135; during American Revolution, 238; under Auchmuty, 103; under Barclay, 87, 88 – 89; construction of, 28; desecration in 1713, 220; enlargement of, 87; Irish immigrants in, 213; “legal sermons”; in, Whitefield on, 85; political views of clergy at, attacks on, 237; under Vesey, 82, 85 – 87 Tuder, John, 39 underground economy, 227 Universalism in America, 130 Usher, John, 34 Van Brockle, James, 107 Van Cortlandt, Anne, 3 van Cortlandt, Oloff Stevenszen, 20 Van Cortlandt, Philip, 204 Van Cortlandt, Stephanus, 23, 24, 25, 34 Van Courtlandt, Jacobus, 35 Van Dam, Rip, 35 Vanderspiegel, John, 178 Van Driessen, Petrus Henricus, 61 Van Fleck (Van Vleck) Grube, Sarah, 122 Van Hook, Evert, 59 Van Horne, Cornelius, 51 Van Horne, David, 74, 75, 83 – 84, 95, 118 – 19, 121; humanitarian sentiments of, 205 – 6; and missionary work among Native Americans, 200, 202

Van Kipp, Johannes, 35 van Rensselaer, Jeremias, 55 van Wagenen, Huybert, 68 Venema, Pieter, 61, 91 – 92 Verplanck, Gulian, 234f Vesey, William, 28, 32; and charitable work, 206; commoners’ disaffection with, 86, 220; death of, 87; vs. Hunter, 85 – 86; vs. Whitefield, 82, 90 Voetius, Gisbertus, 22 Wall Street Presbyterian Church. See Presbyterian Church Walters, Robert, 31 Watts, Anne, 115, 130 Watts, Isaac, 74 Watts, John, slaves of, 172 – 73, 184, 188, 190 Webb, Thomas, 104, 105f, 129, 141 Wells, Obadiah, 119, 211 Wells, Rachel, 81 Wendover, Mary, 124 Wesley, John, 81, 104, 137 Westminster, Treaty of, 16 Weygand, Johann Albert, 93 Weyman, Hester, 184 Weyman, William, 61, 184 Wheelock, Eleazer, 72, 200, 202 Wheelock, Ralph, 201 Whitaker, Nathaniel, 72, 201 Whitefield, Elizabeth, 84, 119 Whitefield, George, 79 – 85, 87, 88, 89, 94 – 97; appeal to commoners, 88, 89, 102; book by, 117 – 18; Dutch versions of writings of, 92; Gano compared to, 96; heckling of, 221 – 22; influence on Methodist ministers, 138; influence on New Yorkers, 80 – 81, 97 – 109, 125; vs. mainstream clergy, 82, 89 – 90; and Moravians, 94, 126; and Noble, 119, 120; and religious awakening, 80; sermon to benefit Indian school, 200, 203; and Van Horne, 83 – 84, 95, 118 – 19 William III (King of England), 12, 24, 25, 26, 29; New Yorkers’ petitions to, 41; questions about legitimacy of, 33 – 34 Wincope (Wynkoop), Benjamin, 56 Windower, John, 30 Winthrop, John, 214 wives: of commoners, elopement of, 149 – 58; of elite, 147 – 48, 158 – 60; ideal attributes of, 148; spending habits of, contention regarding, 153 – 54, 158 Wollaston, John, 233

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women: African slaves, 175 – 76, 180 – 81, 181f, 187, 195; of color, allure of, 177 – 78; domestic violence toward, 148 – 51; indentured servants, 163, 165 – 66, 168, 169 – 70; infanticide by, 187, 227; in Methodist community, 140; in Moravian community, 121 – 27; in patriarchal household, 146; private religious gatherings of, 113, 114; prostitution by, 228 – 32; reading preferences of, 117, 118; religious independence of, 121, 129; religious introspection by,

115; sex outside of marriage, 227; white, fear of black men attacking, 176 – 77. See also wives Wooley, Charles, 17 Wright, Patience, 81 Wynkoop, Cornelius C., 66 York, Duke of. See James II Zenger, John Peter, 60, 61, 62, 64 – 65, 70, 92 Zinzendorf, Count, 93, 120