The Story of New Netherland/Chapter 25

T HOUGH we Americans speak the English language, our country is not a New England, or a New Britain, but a New Europe. Our race gained a thousand years of potency by crossing the Atlantic. Old World ideas, unless modified, will not work on our continent. Yet, “above all nations is humanity.”

Dutchmen in America, like men of other strains and stocks, face to face with new problems, found themselves compelled to cut apron strings, and firmly but reverently, first ask and then demand of Patria to grant her sons freedom to grapple with new tasks in their own way. That was the meaning of the troubles and differences which came into the eighteenth-century Dutch Church. This typical Netherlands institution and survival in America is conservative, above all others, of things distinctively Dutch.

In 1739 seventy-five years had passed since the English conquest, and two generations had grown up. Only a few octogenarians among the Dutch Churchmen had seen Patria. Most of the people spoke the Dutch language, but were loyal to the British King, yet from a sense of duty rather than from affection or admiration, and increasingly they were of the “Continental” spirit. The very attempt to serve two masters made them eager to rest their supreme loyalty in that law of safeguarded liberty, which, older than thrones, is common to the two countries which were one in love of order and progress. Hence, the people of Dutch descent in the middle colonies were unusually strong Americans.

The common English or insular term for all people of Teutonic stock was “Dutch,” a word meaning literally, the peoples. The Netherlanders were spoken of as “Neder” or “Low” Dutch, the Germans being “High Dutch.” The reference being to geographical, not moral conditions, the English were the lowest of all three levels. As English became increasingly the language of New York and accurate knowledge of Holland faded away, both New Yorkers and New Englanders, who were copyists of the English, sank to shameful depths of ignorance concerning Patria and the Netherlanders.

It was increasingly felt by the Dutch Churchmen that they must attend to church business themselves, and have student candidates and ministers raised up on this side of the Atlantic. Happily the Classis of Amsterdam was a liberal-minded body, and the Americans were urged to form a Cœtus, or Association, as had been done already in Surinam. On September 5, 1737, seven ministers met in New York and drew up a plan to heal divisions, give effective counsel, promote unity, and attract ministers from Europe to America.

While the popular hunger and thirst for education increased, there was constant fear lest the British Government should force a state church on the people and establish a sectarian college, just as in England the two older universities had been closed to all but members of one form of Christianity. This and the heterogeneousness of the population made the growth of systematic education in New York a slow one.

William Livingstone had warned the Dutch that “all pretenses of the political church people at sisterhood and identity were fallacious and hypocritical.” Hence the course of Domine Frelinghuysen, who called a meeting of the Cœtus for May 30, 1755, to take action concerning an American Classis and the university for the Dutch Church. After eleven years of debate, the American Classis, in 1766, obtained the charter. As there was a King’s College in New York City, this one in New Jersey was called Queen’s, and is now Rutgers College.

One argument for an independent Dutch Church in America was that an oath of allegiance to Great Britain was inconsistent with obedience to the foreign State Church of Holland. Yet there were other elements entering in to prepare both Dutch and English to sever their bonds with Europe.

It was difficult then, however, as it is for some of the old Dutchmen of to-day in Michigan and Iowa, to understand how the omnipotent God can be trusted to reveal truth in any language but the Dutch, or in any theology but that of Dordrecht and the seventeenth century. How, also, sound catechetics can be taught in English is still, to some fresh from the turf of Patria, a mystery passing their understanding. Nevertheless, there were loyal Dutch Churchmen on Manhattan willing to trust the Almighty and the English language, and in 1763 they called the Rev. Archibald Laidlie, a graduate of Edinburgh University, and then pastor at Flushing in Zealand. The introduction of English preaching in New York City resulted in a lawsuit, besides sad losses of temper, money, and membership, but the English side won. About the year 1770 Laidlie translated the Heidelberg Catechism into English, and the excellence and the grace of his work may be seen to this day. He was made S. T. D., by the College of New Jersey, in 1770. While in exile from the city, on account of the Revolution, he died of consumption.

The Rev. Lambertus de Ronde, a genuine “Continental” patriot, had in 1763 made an English version of the Heidelberg Catechism, and was the author of the first book in the English language published by a member of the Reformed Dutch Church in America, — a manual of theology and preparation for Communion. When driven from Manhattan by the British occupation of New York in 1776, he preached in the churches farther north in the Hudson River Valley. When “the people of the United States” had their National Government in 1787, de Ronde translated into Dutch the Constitution of the United States, and when this instrument had been adopted by six states, the Dutch version was printed in 1788, and published by order of the federal committee in the city of Albany. It had a tremendous influence among older men of the State, backing Alexander Hamilton, and securing New York for the Union and Constitution.

Meanwhile, the two parties in the Dutch Church squabbled together, and sometimes like saints who “serve the Lord as if the devil were in them,” but the peacemaker was being raised up, who was to grapple with the difficulties and bring order out of chaos.

John H. Livingston, born in Poughkeepsie in 1746 and graduated at Yale College in 1762, was the bearer of the olive branch. He spent the winter of 1765-66 on Manhattan, and was much in the society of Domine Laidlie. Then, on May 12, 1766, like our own Motley of later days, he sailed to Holland, for the sources and the masters, and entered Utrecht University. He was the last of the American youth who went to Holland for the study of theology.

Thirty-four ministers and over one hundred churches composed the Reformed Dutch Church when Livingston returned, on September 3, 1770. A preacher, a scholar, a, statesman of flue highest ability, he, as soon as affairs were ripe, proposed a plan of union which should unite all parties. A convention was called for October 15, 1771, to establish a firm and enduring church constitution. Twenty-two ministers and twenty-five elders, representing in all thirty-four churches, were present at the meeting. Of these, half a dozen had originally been French and about twenty German Reformed, most of whom were gradually Hollandized and ultimately Anglicized as to language. In these one hundred churches, during the century and a half of colonial dependence, one hundred and twelve ministers had officiated, of whom thirty-four were living at this union of the two parties.

This Dutch Church Congress in 1771, composed of the children of several European nations, the first of its kind in America, was but a prelude to that of the gathering of the fifty-five Continental delegates in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia in 1774. It certainly proved to be a powerful incentive to American freedom and law-abiding resistance to King George’s revolution, which he and Parliament forced on the colonies. As simple fact, every one of the Dutch friends of ecclesiastical independence belonged also to the “Continental” party of freedom in 1776, and throughout the war. The Dutch Church was a unit in resisting British attempts to overthrow American liberty, though there were many Dutch Tories.

At a second convention called, according to arrangement, June 16, 1772, twenty-six ministers and forty-three elders from one hundred churches were present, and almost every one subscribed to the Plan of Union. When they heard read the letter, from the mother Classis in Holland, sent to the Convention, dated January 14, 1771, they found to the joy of all that their Plan of Union was approved.

The written constitution, which grew out of this Dutch Church Congress, is a notable document in American history, and a splendid specimen of a republican and representative frame of government. It gave a model for the national Constitution of 1787.

The General Synod thus created, which met triennially, took on a decidedly American form in being not only conventional but representative, that is, consisting of all ministers in the Church and an elder from each congregation.

Article LIX is especially worthy of mention, as showing that attitude of the Church, in regard to the servitude of Africans, which gave the Reformed Dutch Church in the nineteenth century its unique position throughout the whole slavery agitation and the Civil War. “In the Church there is no difference between bond and free, but all are one in Christ. Whenever, therefore, slaves or black people shall be baptized, or become members in full communion of the Church, they shall be admitted to equal privileges with all other members of the same standing; their infant children shall be entitled to baptism, and in every respect be treated with the same attention that the children of white or free parents are in the Church. Any minister, who, upon any pretense, shall refuse to admit slaves or their children to the privileges to which they are entitled, shall, complaint being exhibited and proved, be severely reprimanded by the Classis to which he belongs.”

Thus the Church that had already welcomed the red man to font and altar showed brotherhood to the negroes. So it came to pass that on scores of old record books of the Dutch churches are hundreds of names of members who were black brethren, baptized, and communicants, and right nobly did many a Simon the Niger carry his cross. A permanent feature of the Dutch congregations was the devout colored worshiper who sat in the gallery. On baptismal and Communion Sabbaths, the children of the slaves, or the free blacks, or the new immigrants from the Indies or the Dark Continent, stood up, with their white masters in the flesh to be brethren with them in the Spirit, to take the same vows, and answer to the same questions of loyalty to a common Saviour and obedience to the church rules, “Yes, truly with all my heart.” Before the baptismal font, the dusky fathers and mothers held their babes for the same waters of covenant and consecration, making like promises, and receiving like guarantee of spiritual culture as the highest in the land.

No body of Christians on the North American continent entered more profoundly in mind, or realized more fully in practice, the spiritual democracy of believers than the people of the Reformed Dutch Church. The names of pickaninnies and papooses, adult slaves and warriors, servants, “proselytes,” black, red, and white, on the pages of Dutch Church registers sparkle among the undying glories of American colonial life. It was as though the negatives of those photographs of primeval Christianity, taken by the slave and “prisoner of Jesus Christ” at Ephesus, Corinth, or Rome, in the first century, had been developed and enlarged in the sunshine of the Western world. The prayer “Sun of Divine Justice, shine on us,” with the added “et Occidentem” (the West), was throughout every generation, from the days of the first Manhattan congregation, gloriously and repeatedly fulfilled. In the Reformed Church, by excellence, Ethiopia held her gift-laden hands unto God, and despite all human infirmities Salem’s ebony sons and daughters adorned the doctrine of their Saviour.

The story of New Netherland may be written in the history of the various towns making up the colony, province, and states of New York and New Jersey, but none in the whole country probably suffered worst than New Brunswick. Later, in place of the burnt collage, the trustees built a two-story frame house, painted white, without a cupola or belfry, facing the north. in true Dutch style, it was set with its gable end toward George Street.

During the first troublous but fruitful period, “Old Rutgers,” “on the banks of the old Raritan,” graduated over sixty young men, ten of whom became ministers. Others were leaders in politics and science. The “new” building, still called Queen’s College, not reared until 1809, was planned by the architect of the City Hall in New York. Dr. Livingston, appointed in 1784 and serving elsewhere, cane to New Brunswick and opened the theological seminary in 1810, possibly the first in America. In 1863 the State College of New Jersey, for the benefit of agriculture and mechanic arts, was founded, and in 1865 was organized as a department in Rutgers College.

Men are influenced by precedents, and gladly receive the lessons of experience, while profiting by the mistakes and successes of others. This Plan of Union, by men of the four Middle States, with its masterly written constitution of 1771 powerfully influenced the Constitutional Convention of the United States in 1787.