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CHAPTER VI.

THE COLONIAL CHURCH IN NEW YORK.

THE history of the Church of England in New York really begins in 1693, thirty years after the English had wrested the province from the Dutch. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an English mariner, sailing under the auspices of the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, discovered the island of Manhattan, and ascended the Hudson River as far as the present site of Albany. In 1623 the first real attempts to colonize New Netherland began. Then a company of Belgian Protestants, called Walloons, was sent over, eight of them remaining on Manhattan Island, and part ascending the river to the present site of Albany, where they built Fort Orange. Peter Minuit, a director of the company, came in 1626 and bought the island of Manhattan of the natives for twentyfour dollars. In 1628 Michaelius, a minister of the Reformed Church, arrived, and organized a church with fifty communicants; and in 1656 there were four Dutch clergymen in New Netherland sent out by the Classes of Amsterdam.1

In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant became governor; an honest and passionate man, strenuously opposed to popular rights. He warred with the Swedes and extended the jurisdiction of the Dutch over their territory on the Delaware. He was intolerant to the Lutherans and the Baptists, and fined, 1 Fisher, "Colonial Era," p. 181.

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whipped, imprisoned, and banished Quakers, after Massachusetts fashion. Persecutions only ceased when, in 1663, the company gave Stuyvesant to understand that they

must cease.

The character of his administration explains the easy conquest of the country by the English, as well as accounts for the occasion of it. It was due mainly to commercial rivalry. Charles II. had made a grant of the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers, comprehending Long Island, to his brother, the Duke of York. The duke determined, in the interests of the Navigation Act, to assert his claims and give England and her American colonies the benefit of free trading with the region held by the Dutch. In the meantime it was known that the commerce of New Netherland had not flourished under the rule of the West India Company, and that the people, comparing their situation with New England, which now contained over one hundred thousand inhabitants to seven thousand in New Netherland, were discontented. When, therefore, in 1663, the Duke of York sent four ships, containing four hundred and fifty regular troops, to take possession, he found an easy prey. Stuyvesant prepared to resist with spirit, but yielded the place at the solicitation of the authorities and clergy of the city, who, together with the officers of the burgher guard, saw that surrender was inevitable. Fort Orange, up the Hudson, and the forts on the Delaware were shortly taken; and the province, as well as New Amsterdam, was henceforth called New York. Albany was the name given to Fort Orange, that being the second title of the duke.

The internal dissensions already mentioned, together with the neglect of the Dutch home government, easily reconciled the people to the change, especially as the property and the civil rights of the citizens were guaranteed. There

was no religious establishment; and freedom of religion was conceded to all professing Christianity, though service in each parish on Sunday was obligatory. Divine service according to the English liturgy was allowed to be held in the Dutch church in the fort at New Amsterdam, after the service of the Reformed Church was over, a courtesy remembered and repaid by Trinity Church more than a hundred years afterward, when, in 1779, during the Revolutionary War, it gave the use of St. George's Chapel to the Dutch congregation, whose church at that time was taken for a hospital by the king's troops. In making this offer the vestry expressed themselves as "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."

The surrender of New York to a Dutch squadron in 1673, and its restoration to the English in 1674, changed some of the ecclesiastical arrangements. Sir Edmund Andros was appointed governor with enlarged powers; and he describes New York in 1678 as containing twentyfour towns, and adds, “religions of all sorts: one Church of England, Quakers and Anabaptists, some Jews, but Presbyterians and Independents most numerous and substantial." He was strenuous in his advocacy of the English Church; but the Assembly passed a charter guaranteeing freedom of conscience and religion to all who professed faith in God by Jesus Christ. When the Duke of York became King James II., he abolished the popular Assembly, and New York became a royal province.

Colonel Thomas Dougan, a Roman Catholic, succeeded Andros, bringing Rev. John Gordon with him as chaplain of the royal forces. The instructions of the king, though himself a papist, still guarded the interests of the Church

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of England. “You shall take especial care," he wrote, that God Almighty be devoutly and duly served throughout the government; the Book of Common Prayer, as it is now established, read each Sunday and holy day, and the blessed sacrament administered according to the rites of the Church of England." When James was dethroned, and William and Mary were proclaimed, in 1688, an insurrection, or revolution, occurred, headed by Jacob Leslie, which was finally overcome in 1691, when Leslie was executed. This insurrection did not affect the church, save to accentuate the Protestant element, of which Leslie was the devoted adherent.

Colonel Henry Stoughton, who was appointed governor by William and Mary, was directed to give religious liberty to all but Roman Catholics, who, on account of political considerations, were now discredited. He was also instructed to have the Prayer-book read in the colony. It was, however, under Governor Fletcher, who succeeded. Stoughton, that the English Church began to grow and was accorded precedence. It was the proposition of Miller, the English chaplain of the fort, that a bishop with attendant clergymen should be sent over from England; but, like all such appeals, this was never acted on. Under Governor Fletcher an attempt was made to secure a quasiestablishment of the church, which succeeded. An act of the Assembly was passed in 1693, providing that in four specified counties, New York, Westchester, Queens, and Richmond, there should be five ministers supported by the county, and that all freeholders should vote in the election of vestrymen and wardens. Governor Fletcher insisted that the act must relate to Episcopal ministers only. The Assembly repudiated this construction of the act, and declared by vote that the vestries might call a "dissenting Protestant minister." From this time on, however, it con

tinued to be maintained, under the influence of the governor, that none but Episcopal clergymen had any title to a support at the public expense. This was all the establishment of the church there was. It was under this act of 1693, and this interpretation of it, that Trinity Church was established in 1697.

The population of New York was now about eighteen thousand. The small chapel in the fort was the only place of worship, shared by the Dutch, the English, and, in a side chapel, the Roman Catholics. The sole minister of the Establishment was the garrison chaplain. The necessity of larger quarters and of more dignified accommodation for the English congregation was apparent. Governor Fletcher, therefore, in 1695, began to take steps to organize and build a church on ground which had been secured on Broadway, without the North Gate of the city, the property still occupied by Trinity Church. He was the principal promoter and most generous benefactor of it.

When, in 1696, the church building was nearly completed, the appointment of a rector became a first necessity. The choice lay in the city vestry; for the charter making the church a corporate body had not yet been obtained. This vestry had been elected, according to the act of 1693, by all the freeholders of the city without regard to religious belief. Urged by the governor to act, it had already, in January of the year previous (1695), proceeded under the act of 1693 to call "to be minister of the city of New York," Mr. William Vesey, an Independent minister preaching at Hempstead, on Long Island. This action. was confirmed as lawful by the General Assembly, and with apparent reason, as the wording of the act of 1693 for providing "a good and sufficient Protestant minister" for the city was, considering the constituency which granted

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