The Story of New Netherland/Chapter 18

T HE Dutch came to America from it country in which printing was free and books worn cheap. Public schools, for all children to the age of twelve, sustained by taxation and giving free elementary instruction, had existed in most of alto towns from the Middle Ages. There was, besides these, a large number of Church schools, in which the young people of the upper classes received instruction in Latin and the humanities. Long before England enjoyed the “liberty of unlicensed printing,” for which Milton made seraphic plea, printers in the Netherlands were busy in free competition, and books were as common as bread and cheese. One of the chief elements of success in the Eighty Years’ War against Spain, as later in the case of Japan and Russia, was the power of general popular education.

Among the first and very definite provisions made, when the West India Company was formed, were those for ministers and schoolmasters, both of whom were required to show certificates before they received their appointment. The Domines must be university graduates, as a rule, though the instructors need not necessarily be such, but in both cases they must be educated gentlemen. Michaelius’s letter of 1628, long preserved among the dusty papers of a civil court of Amsterdam, not only pictures the first Communion Sunday in New Amsterdam, but gives his ideas of the true philosophy of education, — that is, to begin early with the children. On Manhattan, public school education was only five years later than Church life. New Netherland was the only one of the colonies in which elementary instruction for the youth of both sexes was maintained out of the public moneys.

Michaelius was also a teacher on week days. He began with the catechism. The Domine’s good work of training the savage children was interfered with through one redeeming trait of Indian character, their fondness for their offspring. “Time and again the little heathen, when just about emerging into light, are carried off by the parents, to be swallowed up again in the darkness of paganism,” wrote this observer and philosopher.

The schoolmasters of the future Empire State, beginning with Adam Roelandsen, crossed the ocean with all the glow of pioneers to begin their work, which was primarily among the white children of their own countrymen, though the pastors also taught not a few of the papooses. These schoolmasters came with their certificates. They have left their names on the landscape, as well as in the records, and their history is in the main highly creditable. From modern writers, who seek out the odd and curious, the incompetent and disreputable pedagogues have attracted much notice. The steady work of the good men, done without the noise of trumpets, is left unnoticed. The school which Roelandsen began on Manhattan in 1633 continued with varying success, and was maintained at the public expense, until the downfall of New Netherland in 1664. The English rulers cared little or nothing about public elementary instruction supported by taxation, and they swept away the Dutch public schools. Then the Dutch school on Manhattan was taken over by the Church, and has ever since been maintained in unbroken continuity. It is still in flourishing prosperity and situated in a fine building, whore I have more than once visited it. A “History of the Collegiate Church School” has been published. When, in 1800, Rev. William Linn, pastor of the Dutch Church and regent of the University of the State of New York, preached his “gleaming sermon,” as it was called, the response from the people in a collection was eleven hundred dollars, an amount at that time considered wonderful.

No special schoolhouses are known to have been built in the very early years of New Netherland. The schoolroom was attached to the church, or was in the edifice itself. On Manhattan it was in the City Hall.

Johannes Backerus, of Barcinger, Hoorn, may serve as one of many examples of the Dutch desire for learned ministers and teachers and the strictness of examination for certificates. He was introduced by letter from Domine Megapolensis, then minister at Koedijk, or the Cow Dike, as one willing to go out to the East Indies as Comforter of the sick. Not having a regular education, the young man’s application was declined, and not until after three years of hard study and several trials and examinations was he ordained, October 16, 1642, — all of which shows how careful the Dutch authorities were to have learned and acceptable ministers, as well as schoolmasters. After signing a contract for four years with the Company, Backerus proceeded to Curaçoa, becoming acquainted there with Peter Stuyvesant. Later he accompanied the new governor to Manhattan. Here he found one hundred and seventy members of the Church, and John Stevenson, who had been teaching school for seven years. Backerus did not wholly approve of Stuyvesant, and after two years’ work as pedagogue he sailed from New Amsterdam, August 15, 1649, with charges against the governor.

In 1647, when Stuyvesant tried to mix together taxation for school support and for military purposes, he found the Dutchmen against him. “Let John Company attend to his own proper business, and repair the fort, while we, gladly doing what we and our fathers had done for centuries, will pay the taxes to support the public schools,” was the gist of their answer. The upshot of the discussion was that the Nine Men promptly agreed to reorganize the school, finish the church edifice, and cheerfully lay a school and church tax upon themselves, but they demanded that the Company should repair the fort.

In 1649, the Nine Men complained, and directed that there should be two good masters in the public schools. “As it is now, the school is kept very irregularly; one and another keeping it according to his pleasure and as long as he thinks proper.” Stuyvesant, writing to the Classis of Amsterdam, seconded the request most earnestly. On January 10, 1650, the Classis sent out, William Vestens, “a good, Godfearing man,” as comforter of the sick and schoolmaster on Manhattan. He taught for five years. Later Jan, or Johannes, de la Montague taught in the Herberg, or City Hall, at a salary worth in our day one thousand dollars.

Various other names of Dutch schoolmasters, clerical or lay, are known of those who nerved on Long Island and in New Jersey and Delaware, some very creditably, those doing the best work being least heard from or noticed by later writers. Among those whose records are known were Everts Petersen, Gideon Schaats, Jacobus van Curler, Alexander Curtius, Godfrey Dellius, and Bernardus Freeman, who taught the children, white and red. Some of the scholarly men have left literary memorials in prose and verse, as seen in the Hon. Henry C. Murphy’s “Anthology of New Netherland.”

Many of the Dutch Domines were men of science also. Hence neither the weeds of narrow intolerance, nor such a deadly night-shade of superstition as belief in witchcraft, could easily grow up among the Dutch Christians, who were, for the most part, liberal-minded Bible readers. Rev. Peter Weeksten, a graduate of Leyden University, before preaching at Kingston, from 1681 to 1687, had been Latin master at Haarlem. Rev. John Peter Nucella, who served the Church at Kingston from 1689 to 1704, was active in public education until he was appointed by Queen Anne to take charge of the Dutch Royal Chapel of St. James in London. These instances serve as examples of more, whom we cannot mention for lack of space.

In general, it may be said that every town and village community was fairly well served by Dutch preachers after the English conquest, for wherever there was a church there was a precentor or voorlezer, who acted also as pedagogue. Scores of autographs of these men are extant on the church records. Quite often the day-school teacher was unduly ambitious and sought to climb into the pulpit.

Yet though the accepted Domine might be a schoolmaster, the converse was not true of the pedagogue. No wielder of the klap could enter the pulpit unless duly licensed and ordained. Some of them did thus enter, but others were kept out by the hedges of severe examinations. Nevertheless, startling stories are told of one or two who, by trickery or collusion with the dupes of the British governors, got in, and to the grief of the orthodox, added to the gayety of the ungodly. One such, after a career of marrying, christening, baptizing, and preaching which lined his pockets, was found out and exposed, and he fled the country in 1715. At this date, his name is usually spoken only with an uncomplimentary smile.

It must be remembered that the school record and educational activities of the Dutch in New York did not end with the one generation, or thirty-three years, between Adam Roelandsen and the English conquest of 1664, but stretched for the most part until 1800. From the first the New Netherlanders were not originating anything, but merely transplanting the institutions of Patria. Hence the instruction was not, as at first in Massachusetts, for boys only, based chiefly on Latin, and mainly as preparation for the Ministry of the Church, but was for girls as well as boys. New England’s first school was a college, the second was a Latin school, and the next schools were simply feeders for the college. Not until Andros’s time were there schools for elementary training. The chief idea of education was to maintain a learned clergy. The New England girls were not given free public education until the colonial era was over.

In New Netherland elementary education for all children, without regard to class, sex, or social condition, was from the first a matter of public concern and support. As against this, after 1664, was the English idea of schools for the nobles, the clergy, and “sons of quality.” The royal governors of New York province would approve only of Latin schools. England had “Board” or public schools with elementary instruction for all only within the memory of men now living. In Holland mediæval records tell how general was popular education.

New York has the honor of founding the first free public elementary school within the limits of the United States. The Dutch policy of state supervision of schools, without the interference of a state church, — which latter, neither New Netherland nor New York, as province or State, as a whole, ever had on her soil, — showed but orderly evolution when the University of the State of New York was formed. With this institution, the name of Alexander Hamilton is justly associated. It now guards, in beautiful order, the educational interests of eight millions of people, without dictation of Church, sect, priest, or parson. “The first organized government in the world to enshrine in her fundamental law the sacred pledge of absolute spiritual independence and of political action without ecclesiastical intervention” was that of the State of New York.

Besides having the oldest school in the United States, still in daily operation, the Dutch of New Netherland organized and maintained academies and colleges in the Raritan, Hudson, and Mohawk valleys, most of which have been in continuous existence to the present time. Modern immigrants from Holland in the West show the same love for education. The American Netherlanders were from the first the peers of the “Yankees” in a desire for a learned ministry, public schools, general popular education, and home culture, while they excelled the New Englanders in their regard for science and in freedom from superstition. They fell behind, in later days, because they persisted too long in the use of what, after 1700, was virtually a foreign language, while cut off from vital contact with the culture which Patria had given. If in the systematizing and state supervision of public education New York has led all the states of the Union, the reason for this lies in the previous preparation and character of the cosmopolitan people, and especially of those who carne from “the land where conscience was free,” the original home of the free, public, elementary school system.

The limits of our little book do not allow notice of “the intellectuals “ of New Netherland and of their literary productions, which when examined, as in Corwin’s Manual, are found to be notable in product and respectable in quality. Steendam, Selyns, and de Sille were the poets, and their verses have been collected in Henry C. Murphy’s “Anthology of New Netherland.” Thus writes Steendam in 1661: —


 * New Netherland, thou noblest spot of earth,
 * Where bounteous Heaven ever poureth forth
 * The fulness of His gifts, of greatest worth,
 * Mankind to nourish.