New Netherlands History (1613) from The Original 13-A Documentary History of Religion in America's First Thirteen States (Amerisearch, Inc., 2009):
<New York was originally New Netherlands, founded by the Dutch in 1613 with trading posts on the Hudson River. The early population was about half Dutch Reformed, a significant portion English, and a growing number of Germans, Swedes and Finns, who began immigrating after 1639, numbering about 500 out of the colony's total population of 3,500 in 1655.
A controversy arose regarding the German and Scandinavian Lutheran immigrants in Middleburg, Long Island, as they were holding Church services without an approved Preacher. The Dutch Reformed pastors of New Amsterdam protested of this to the Director General Peter Stuyvesant, insisting these services be stopped, as Dutch Reformed was the established religion. The dispute went on for years until the West India Company directors in Amsterdam decided to permit the Lutherans the right to worship by adjusting the catechism.
The Presbyterians erected their first meeting house on Eastern Long Island in 1640. Quakers, though, were prohibited in New Netherlands in the 1650's.
In 1664, the British navy, led by Admiral William Penn, father of Pennsylvania's founder, defeated the Dutch navy in the first Anglo-Dutch War. England took control of New Netherlands, renaming it New York, after King Charles II's brother, the Duke of York, who later became King James II, the last Catholic Monarch of Britain.
The property rights of the Dutch Reformed Church were preserved and other Protestant denominations were tolerated, though they attempted to establish the Church of England with varying levels of intensity.
In 1682, the General Assembly of the province under the Governor Thomas Dongan, an Irish Catholic nobleman, adopted the Charter of Liberties, which proclaimed religious liberty to all Christians. Although this charter did not receive formal royal sanction, it reflected the growing attitude of religious toleration.
In 1688, the Stuart Revolution in England reversed this policy of liberality, and the Province of New York discouraged denominations other than Church of England. A royal charter founded the Anglican Trinity Church in New York City in 1697 and gave it grants of land and civil privileges.
The Dutch Reformed Churches continued to grow so that by the time of the Revolution, Dutch were a large percentage of New York's population, including the ancestors of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
French Protestant Huguenots began arriving in 1680. Presbyterian minister, Rev. Francis Makemie founded the first Presbyterian Church in the colonies in Maryland in 1684, then founded Presbyterian Churches in New York. He was prosecuted by Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, the notorious Governor of New York known for corruption, bribes, and scandalously cross- dressing at public functions to look like his cousin Queen Anne. Viscount Cornbury arrested Francis Makemie for preaching without a license, seized a Presbyterian parsonage and a Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, New York.
New York's provincial legislature passed laws ordering Catholic priests and teachers to stay away from the province and if there, to depart at once.
Penalties included imprisonment or death.
Though directed primarily against French Catholic missionaries working among the Iroquois Indians, these laws resulted in the execution of schoolmaster John Ury, accused of being a "Popish priest" during the so-called Negro Plot of 1741. After the Revolutionary War, these laws were repealed in the first session of New York's legislature.
Catholics in New York in 1755 consisted of seafaring people, emigrants, Spanish Blacks from the West Indies, and thousands of French Acadians living along the Atlantic seaboard who were driven from Nova Scotia by the British. From 1752 to 1786, a German priest from Philadelphia, Father Ferdinand Farmer, occasionally visited them, but they had no Catholic Church or organization of any kind. Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley, a relative of both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, later wrote that "a chapel, if they had had means to erect one, would have been torn down."
The first mention of Catholic public worship in New York City was in 1781, after the American victory over the British at Yorktown. Mass was held in a carpenter shop, then later at Vauxhall Garden, near the Hudson River by Warren Street. Father Farmer listed their number at about two hundred.
The first Methodist meeting in the American Colonies was in New York City in 1766.
In 1654, twenty-three Sephardic Jewish refugees, mostly of Spanish and Portuguese origin, arrived in the city of New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, which Spain and Portugal had just taken from the Dutch.
Governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to expel them, but they were allowed to stay. The Dutch considered Spain and Portugal its main enemies, not these Jews or other dissenters. The Dutch were in a global contest over possessions from Indonesia to India to Africa and South America, and they were interested in quickly populating the colony of New Netherlands for its defense and to receive profits.
In 1663, the Dutch West India Company instructed Peter Stuyvesant regarding Quaker John Browne 'and other sectarians,' as immigration:
'...must be favored at so tender a stage of the country's existence, you may therefore shut your eyes, at least not force people's consciences, but allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbors and does not oppose the government.'
Jews began the Shearith Israel Congregation, but were not allowed to worship outside of their homes, hold office, vote, or even volunteer for the militia. Only reluctantly were they granted a burial ground.
Only after the city of New Amsterdam became New York were Jews permitted to buy land and build the small "Mill Street Synagogue" in 1730. This was the first Jewish house of worship in North America.
In 1700, there were an estimated 250 Jews in the American colonies and by the time of the Revolutionary War, the remnant was between 1,500 to 2,000 Jews out of a total American population of 3 million.
Persecution of Ashkenazic Jews in Bavaria, Germany, in the 1830's led to an estimated 250,000 Jews immigrating to the United States. It was during this time that the Jewish population divided into Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism.
The violent pogroms of Russia's Czar in the 1880's forced millions of Jews to flee. Jewish population in the United States grew from 280,000 in 1880 to 4,500,000 in 1925. In 2006, New York City's Jewish population was 1,750,000.
For a period of time New York claimed Vermont and parts of western Massachusetts and Connecticut. After the Revolution of 1776, the British system, which financially supported the Anglican Church and set the salaries of clergymen, was ended by New York's State Constitution of 1777: "that all such parts of the said Common Law...as may be construed to establish or maintain any particular denomination of Christians or their ministers, are repugnant to this constitution and hereby are abrogated and rejected."
The Constitution continued:
"Nothing herein contained shall be construed, adjudged, or taken to abridge or affect the rights of conscience or private judgment or in the least to alter or change the religious constitutions or governments of either of the said Churches, congregations or societies, so far as respects or in any wise concerns the doctrine, discipline or worship thereof."
New York was the first State to write a Constitution after the Revolution began, thus it influenced other States. In 1784, New York legislation was passed "that an universal equality between every religious denomination, according to the true spirit of the Constitution, toward each other shall forever prevail." John Jay, one of the main writers of the New York Constitution, along with George Clinton and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to include a requirement to renounce foreign authority, in order to prohibit Catholics.
Immigrants came from the British Islands and Germany in large numbers, and the population of New York City increased from 33,131 in 1790 to 202,589 in 1830, and statewide from 340,120 in 1790 to 1,918,608 in 1830. From 1820 to the late 20th century, New York was the most populous state, now exceeded by California and Texas.
New York's constitutional conventions, courts and legislatures recognized the Christian religion. In 1811, Chancellor James Kent, Chief Justice of New York's Supreme Court and the first professor of law at Columbia University, wrote in the case of People vs. Ruggles (8 Johnson 294): "We are a Christian people and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon Christianity."
Some who objected to the Ruggles decision proposed an amendment during New York's 1821 Constitutional Convention that the judiciary should not declare any particular religion to be the law of the land. This amendment was defeated, as was stated in the floor debate "that the Christian religion was engrafted upon the law and entitled to protection as the basis of morals and the strength of Government."
European immigration to New York brought a large proportion of Catholics. In 1808, the Catholic Diocese of New York was created. Father Anthony Kohlmann rebuilt St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street and built the old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott Street. In 1809, he purchased land at 5th Avenue and 50th Street to build the present St. Patrick's Cathedral. He established a boys' school named the New York Literary Institution.
In 1813, Judge DeWitt Clinton, presiding judge of the New York City Mayor's Court, ruled that priests could not be compelled to testify regarding statements made to them during confession. This was the first time since the Reformation that an English-speaking country protected the confidentiality of confessions made to priests.
In 1815, Bishop John Connolly arrived from Europe as New York's first resident Bishop and, together with four priests, they ministered to New York's 17,000 mostly Irish Catholics. By 1822, New York State had six Catholic Churches served one bishop and eight priests.
Bishop Connolly died in 1825, and was buried in under the altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral. He was succeeded in 1826 by a French Bishop, John Dubois, who had been a classmate of Robespierre and was one of the priests who fled France in 1791 during the French Revolution. With a letter of introduction from Marquis de Lafayette, he moved to Richmond, Virginia, where he tutored Patrick Henry's children while learning English. In 1794, he moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he founded Mount St. Mary's University.
In 1826, John Dubois was named New York's third Bishop. In 1830, he estimated there were 35,000 Catholics in New York City and 150,000 across the State, comprised largely of poor Irish immigrants. Bishop Dubois served in New York City during the 1832 cholera epidemic, where 3,000 people died in 4 months.
In 1836, he ordained John Neuman at St. Patrick's Cathedral, one of New York State's 36 priests serving 200,000 Catholics. John Neuman became Bishop of Philadelphia in 1852. In 1838, the fourth Bishop of New York was a native of Ireland, John Hughes. In 1850, he was made the first Archbishop of New York.
The 1846 potato famine in Ireland caused millions of Irish Catholics to immigrate to New York. By 1890, Catholics comprised 55 percent of New York's attending Church population.
This influx of Catholic immigrants gave rise to an anti-Catholic movement called Knownothingism, which pressured New York's legislature to pass a statute in 1855 preventing Catholic bishops from holding title to property in trust for Churches or congregations.
In the 1853 case of Williams v. Williams (8 New York Court of Appeals Reports, p. 525), property could not be given to incorporated Catholic Churches in exchange for Masses, as this was against the laws that "came to us by inheritance from our British ancestors and as part of our common law" (108 ibid., p. 336). This was reversed in the 1888 case of Holland vs. Alcock.
In the early 1800's, each Protestant denomination had schools for their own children, but for the inner-city poor, they had begun common public schools, where would be taught only what all Protestant denominations held in common, such as the King James Bible, considered a "non-sectarian" book.
With the arrival of large numbers of Catholic immigrants in the 1850's, Bishop John Hughes tried to remove the King James Bible from the public schools, considering it a Protestant book. When this effort failed, he pulled Catholic children out of the public schools and founded an independent Catholic parochial school system, which included St. John's College, now Fordham University.
Since Irish Catholics had become tax paying citizens, Bishop Hughes tried to get the portion of their taxes that went for education redirected to the new Catholic schools. He was not successful in this and a heated backlash resulted in the Archbishop's residence being stoned. Senator James Blaine of Maine even introduced an Amendment in the U.S. Congress to prohibit any tax revenue from going to Catholic schools.
Though Blaine's Amendment did not pass on a Federal level, many States passed "Blaine Amendments," prohibiting State tax money from going to Catholic "sectarian" schools. Over the years, progressive courts have changed the 1875 use of the word "sectarian" from its implied "anti-Catholic" meaning to a broader "anti-Christian" meaning, thereby prohibiting tax funds from supporting any Christian influence in schools.
Early records of Jews on Long Island mention Aaron Isaacs, a merchant in the 1700's who was a part owner of Sag Harbor wharf. When the British occupied New York during the Revolutionary War, he fled to Connecticut.
Beginning in 1867, Jewish settlers in Glen Cove, New York, held services in private homes and, in 1897, founded Tifereth Israel, Long Island's oldest continually operating, year-round congregation.
In 1882, a Christian named Joseph Fahys relocated his watch case factory to Sag Harbor, New York, bringing 50 Jewish immigrants who had just arrived from Ellis Island. By 1900, the factory employed 100 Jewish men, mostly of Polish, Russian and Hungarian descent.
New York's 1905 State Census listed population of 8 million, of which 4,821 were Indians on reservations. The 1910 Federal Census listed New York's population at 9 million, of which 99,232 African Americans. In 2006, New York's population was 19 million.
Through much of American history tensions existed between Protestants and Catholics. Recent efforts, though, of secularists and atheists to remove public references to Judeo-Christian faith, in addition to the growth of Islamic jihadism, has resulted in a growing accommodation of Protestants and Catholics toward each other, as well as with orthodox Jews, as many traditional views are held in common.> 1613NN001
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American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:
1613NN001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). New Netherlands, 1613. William J. Federer, The Original 13-A Documentary History of Religion in America's First Thirteen States (St. Louis, MO: Amerisearch, Inc.).