THE one institution surviving from New Netherland, the depository of its authentic history and the incarnation of its spirit, is “the Reformed Church in America.” It comprises about half a million people in seven hundred congregations, chiefly in eastern New York and northern New Jersey, in the Hudson, Mohawk, and Raritan valleys, and in Michigan, Iowa, and Nebraska, with its chief seats of education at New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Holland, Michigan.
Reviewing the history of the Church from 1628 to 1792, we note the successive steps: (1) emigration from Holland (1628-64); (2) resistance to English attempts to establish the church of a small minority upon a vast majority (1664-1708); (3) the conflict within, between dead formulas and a higher moral life (1708-54); and (4) finally, the struggle to harmonize Old World ideas and New World necessities, including the change of language from Dutch to English (1754-71), resulting in the mastery of the English language and the establishment of a college and school of theology.
When “revolution” from without had been successfully overcome and civil liberty safeguarded, there came with independence new problems and responsibilities. Now the Dutch Church must become missionary. The call from the wilderness was loud and great. Piteous appeals for preachers and teachers came from the regions of the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers in New York, and from Canada, Virginia, and even Kentucky. The first outpost home-missionary church, organized in 1794, was on the line of Sullivan’s expedition of 1779, at Chenango Forks, near Binghamton. Union College, which grew out of the Schenectady Academy, was founded in 1785, chiefly by the efforts of the people of the Dutch Church in northern New York.
Between 1768 and 1800, New Jersey Dutchmen, from Bergen and Somerset counties, moved westward in a caravan of one hundred and fifty families and seven hundred souls to Conewago and Hanover, near the battlefield of Gettysburg. There they built churches and made farms. Thence, with the restless pioneer spirit, two lines of settlers moved, the one to the Genesee Country, and the other to Kentucky. In the New York lake region, Dutch churches rose at Sempronius, Ovid, Varna, Benton, Owasco, Brookton, Farmer, Geneva, and other places, and were fed for a while by streams of emigration.
Some emigration took place from Holland to America after the peace of 1783. When the debt of the United States was paid to the Dutch bankers, who had made the loan of millions of dollars to help us, the recipients preferred to keep their money invested in America. The Holland Land Company was formed by Amsterdam capitalists, and nearly four million acres were bought in New York and Pennsylvania, and opened to settlers on easy terms. On the map of New York suggestive Dutch names, such as Tromp, Barneveld, Linklaen, Scriba, Busti, Cazenovia, de Ruyter, Holland Patent, and Batavia, tell the story of pioneer activity in the days of the Batavian Republic. The city on Buffalo Creek was laid out as New Amsterdam, and its avenues named after Dutch worthies. With this enterprise may be linked the honored names of Harm Jan Huidekoper and his descendants. Settling at Meadville, Pennsylvania, they made this place the centre of relining and educational influences, of which the Meadville Theological School is a noble expression. Huidekoper’s name became the synonym of integrity. When the more liberal phases of religion stirred men’s minds, and men asked what the Unitarian term of faith was, it passed into a proverb, “Nobody knows but Huidekoper, and he won’t tell.”
When also, late in the eighteenth century, the triumphant republican ideas of the United States, spreading to Europe, occasioned disturbances in the Old World and a revolution in Holland, two leaders on the popular side, after suffering a defeat more nominal than real, made their way to America. They were Colonel Adam G. Mappa and Adrian van der Kemp, who settled at Barneveld, a few miles north of Utica, later called Trenton, and now postally renamed as at first. Mappa became agent of the Holland Land Company, and van der Kemp one of the assistant Justices of the Ulster County Court. In July, 1792, van der Kemp made a journey on horseback to Buffalo. With the hereditary instinct of a Netherlander, as well as by the eye of faith and science, foreseeing the Erie Canal, he then wrote to his friend Mappa as follows: -
“See here, then, an easy communication by water carriage open between the most distant part of this extensive commonwealth; see the markets of New York, Albany, and Schenectady glutted with the produce of the West and the comforts of the South distributed with a liberal hand among the agriculterers of this new country.” He sees also old Fort Schuyler (Utica) “transformed into an opulent mercantile city.” The “tomahawk and scalping knife shall be replaced by the chisel and pencil of the artist and the wigwam by marble palaces … Go on then and dig canals through the western district … Give me the republican wand of Capius Popilius, and I will go to the water nymph Erie and trace a beautiful canal, through which her ladyship shall be compelled to pay of her tribute to the ocean through the Genesee Country.”
Thirty years later, in 1822, Governor De Witt Clinton wrote to van der Kemp, his Dutch friend, whom he called “the most learned man in America,” “Your letter to Colonel Mappa on the canal written in 1792 is really a curiosity. It gives you the original invention of the Erie route.” Three years later, in 1825, the waters of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic were united.
A refined society of cultivated Netherlanders grew up in Barneveld, and here or near by, perhaps, Fenimore Cooper found the originals of some of his pictures of culture in that New York wilderness, at which critics have laughed, declaring them overdrawn, but which existed in fact. The Tank Memorial Home, at Oberlin, Ohio, commemorates a husband and wife, the latter a daughter of the gallant General and Baron van Boetzelaer, who in 1793 defended the fort at Willemstad against the French invaders of the Netherlands. When, at the death of the old lady, her linen, plate, miniatures, books, and household effects were sold, the revelation to the average American of the riches and elegant taste of a refined Dutch home was impressive.
The second large emigration of New Netherlanders to America took place more than two centuries after the first, not to New York, but into or near the upper Mississippi Valley, and was in this wise.
When “the Dutch took Holland,” and drove out their French oppressors and marched to Waterloo, a constitutional monarchy, which fulfilled the hopes of the Republic, gave new unity to the Dutch nation. Nevertheless, King William I, who came into power in 1816, changed the old democratic and representative government of the national Church to one that was bureaucratic; and employed cavalry, infantry, and artillery to enforce his will.
Affairs came to a crisis in 1834. Then, like the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620, Dutchmen left their native land for freedom of conscience. When the emigration had taken on large proportions, the alarmed Dutch Government secured the abdication of old King William, and persecution at once ceased.
Meanwhile the Domines, van Raalte, Scholte, and others, led colonies by way of Manhattan and the Mohawk Valley to Michigan, or from New Orleans, up the Mississippi to Iowa. These people came not as mere emigrants. They were true colonists, and made homes and became Americans. They came largely as churches with their pastors, and they named the new settlements after their old homes. Hence the Dutch names of so many localities in our Western States. Parts of the map of Michigan road like transcripts from Queen Wilhelmina’s kingdom. Amid lonely forests, wild beasts, malaria, and homesickness, they persevered. The city of refuge, to which the primitive Christians from Jerusalem fled, when destroyed by the Romans, was Pella, and the new home in Iowa was called after it.
Novel and discouraging experiences met the newcomers. Besides frosts in August, fires, floods, and wild cats, there were amusing contacts with birds and beasts, human and equine nature. When a Frisian gentleman-farmer, proud of his knowledge of horses, landed at Keokuk, he bought a wagon, picked out and harnessed to it a line pair of animals, and then, loading his goods and family aboard, gave in Dutch the usual signal to the horses to move. The dumb brutes did not even whisk their ears. He spoke louder and more clearly. Still they were deaf and immovable. Horrified to think that after all his expert knowledge he might have been deceived in his purchase, but disdaining to use a whip or pull the checkrein, he patted the horses’ necks and whispered more coaxing words in his vernacular. Not a hoof was lifted. Suddenly a native appeared and took in the whole situation. He knew that these horses understood the Keokuk dialect. At once he cried, “Get up!” Thereupon, the team moved so swiftly, that their Frisian owner had difficulty in recovering his property. His first lesson in English was in the variety understood by horses.
In April, 1848, the Michigan Domines and consistories united as a Reformed Dutch Church, and at Albany, in April, 1850, “the ancient place of treaties,” — hallowed alike to Iroquois and Dutchmen, — these modern Pilgrim Fathers came to make a new “covenant of Corlaer” and to “brighten the silver chain” of friendship with their brethren in the American Reformed Church.
These modern Pilgrim Fathers and their families constitute nearly one third of the Reformed Church in America, while the “Christian Reformed” people also thrive and do a noble work in developing the Republic. Perhaps the greatest concentration of modern Netherlanders and their descendants is in Grand Rapids, the “furniture capital” of the United States. They are, however, numerous in Chicago, all over Michigan, in Iowa, Dakota, at Paterson, New Jersey, and in a few other places. Possibly a million Netherlanders, in character above reproach, since the forties, have come to the United States.
In our day the schools, hospitals, and churches of American Dutchmen are maintained by a noble force of highly educated men and women in India, China, Japan, and Arabia. These scholars have created a new literature in the language of the people of these lands. In the translation of the Book of Books into the tongues of old and advanced civilizations, they have been pioneers and leaders. In addition, Dr. Van Dyke, direct descendant of the famous Indian fighter in Kieft’s time, completed in a style of elegant scholarship the Arabic version of the Holy Scriptures, which can be read by one hundred and thirty millions of the human race.
The nations of Europe are gradually coming to accept the American doctrine, of which the Reformed Dutch Church was so early an exponent, namely, that Indians, Africans, and the Asiatic peoples exist, not to be conquered, but to be healed, helped, taught, and made brothers.
Surveying in retrospect the story of Manhattan, we see that New York City has been in succession the Indian’s home, the Dutchman’s camp, village, and municipality, the English and the American city, and the modern metropolis of the Western world. Its population has been Indian, Dutch, and always, since the white man came, cosmopolitan. After the second war with Great Britain, the New Englanders began an exodus from their old homes, and added a permanent element of good to its composition. Then in succession, streams of Irish, Germans, Italians, Russians, and men of other nationalities, came to its hospitable board, to taste the sweets of freedom. These made it at once the greatest American, the largest German, the most populous Irish, and the richest Jewish, city in the world.
New York was the only one of the original thirteen colonies which was conquered by a foreign power, made a royal province, and left without charter or proprietors. It had, therefore, the longest struggle for law and liberty. The full story of this contest, ending in 1777, forms an unwritten chapter in the history of the United States. Having epitomized it in a former writing (in “Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations”) in 1891, I can, after a more thorough study, reaffirm that “having no royal charter, the composite people of New York, gathered from many nations, but instinct with the principles of the free Republic of Holland, were obliged to study carefully the foundations of government and jurisprudence. It is true that in the evolution of this Commonwealth the people were led by the lawyers, rather than by the clergy. Constantly resisting the invasions of royal prerogative, they formed on an immutable basis of law and right that Empire State which in its construction and general features is, of all those in the Union, the most typically American. Its historical precedents are not found in a monarchy, but in a republic. It is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.”