COLONIAL DAYS
IN
OLD NEW YORK

BY
ALICE MORSE EARLE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1896

Copyright, 1896,
By Charles Scribner’s Sons.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

TO
THE SOCIETY OF COLONIAL DAMES
OF THE
STATE OF NEW YORK
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY A LOYAL
AND LOVING MEMBER
THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

This book should perhaps have been “intituled” Colonial Days in New Netherland, for much of the life described herein was in the days of Dutch rule. But it was New Netherland for scarce half a century, and the name is half-forgotten, though it remained, both in outer life and in heart, a Dutch colonie, even when the province was New York and an English governor had control. In New Netherland, as in every place where the Dutch plant a colony, as in South Africa to-day, Dutch ways, Dutch notions, the Dutch tongue lingered long. To this day, Dutch influence and Dutch traits, as well as Dutch names, are ever present and are a force in New York life.

Fair and beautiful lay the broad harbor centuries ago before the eyes of Hendrick Hudson and his sea-weary men; a “pleasant place” was Manhattan; “’t lange eylandt was the pearel of New Nederland;” the noble river, the fertile shores, all seemed to the discoverers and to the early colonists to smile a welcome and a promise of happy homes. Still to-day the bay, the islands, the river, the shores welcome with the same promise. In grateful thanks for that welcome and for the fulfilment of that promise of old,—for more years of life in New York than were spent in my birth-place in New England,—and in warm affection for my many friends of Dutch descent, have I—to use the words of Rabelais—“adjoined these words and testimony for the honour I bear to antiquity.”

ALICE MORSE EARLE.

Brooklyn Heights,
September, 1896.

CONTENTS

COLONIAL DAYS
IN
OLD NEW YORK

CHAPTER I
THE LIFE OF A DAY

At the first break of day, every spring and summer morn, the quiet Dutch sleepers in the old colonial town of Albany were roused by three loud blasts of a horn sounded far and wide by a sturdy cow-herd; and from street and dooryard came in quick answer the jingle-jangle, the klingle-klangle of scores of loud-tongued brass and iron bells which hung from the necks of steady-going hungry Dutch cows who followed the town-herder forth each day to pastures green.

On the broad town-commons or the fertile river-meadows Uldrick Heyn and his “chosen proper youngster,” his legally appointed aid, watched faithfully all day long their neighbors’ cattle; and as honest herdsmen earned well their sea-want and their handsel of butter, dallying not in tavern, and drinking not of wine, as they were sternly forbidden by the schepens, until when early dews were falling they quit their meadow grasses mellow, for “at a quarter of an hour before the sun goes down the cattle shall be delivered at the church.” Thence the patient kine slowly wandered or were driven each to her own home-stall, her protecting cow-shed.

In New Amsterdam the town’s cow-herd was Gabriel Carpsey; and when his day’s work was done, he walked at sunset through the narrow lanes and streets of the little settlement, sounding at each dooryard Gabriel’s horn, a warning note of safe return and milking-time.

Until mid-November did the morning cow-horn waken the burghers and their vrouws at sunrise; and when with cold winter the horn lay silent, they must have sorely missed their unfailing eye-opener.

Scarce had the last cow departed in the early morn from her master’s dooryard, before there rose in the gray light from each vast-throated chimney throughout the little town a faint line of pale, wavering smoke blown up in increasing puffs with skilful bellows from last night’s brands upon the hearth. And quickly the slender line of smoke grew and grew to a great cloud over each steep-roofed house, and soon with the smell of the burning brush and light pine that were coaxing into hot flames the sturdy oak back and fore logs, were borne forth also appetizing odors of breakfast to greet the early morn, telling of each thrifty huys-vrouw who within the walls of her cheerful kitchen was cooking a good solid Dutch breakfast for her mann.

Cans of buttermilk or good beer, brewed perhaps by the patroon, washed down this breakfast of suppawn and rye-bread and grated cheese and sausage or head-cheese; beer there was in plenty, in ankers, even in tuns, in every household. Soon mynheer filled his long pipe with native tobacco, and departed with much deliberation of movement; a sturdy, honest figure, of decent carriage, neatly and soberly and warmly clad, with thrift and prosperity and contentment showing in every curve of his too-well-rounded figure. Adown the narrow street he paused to trade in peltries or lumber, if he were middle-aged and well-to-do; and were he sturdy and young, he threshed grain on the barn-floor, or ground corn at the windmill, or felled wood on the hillside; or perchance, were he old or young, he fished in the river all day long,—a truly dignified day’s work, meet for any sober citizen, one requiring much judgment and skill and reflection.

And as he fished, again he smoked, and ever he smoked. “The Dutch are obstinate and incessant smokers,” chronicles the English clergyman Wolley, Chaplain of Fort James, New York, in 1678, “whose diet, especially of the boorish sort, being sallets and brawn and very often picked buttermilk, require the use of that herb to keep their phlegm from coagulating and curdling.” The word “boorish” was not a term of reproach, nor was the frequent appellation “Dutch bore,” over which some historians of the colony have seen fit to make merry, both boor and bore meaning simply boer, or farmer. “Knave meant once no more than lad; villain than peasant; a boor was only a farmer; a varlet was but a serving-man; a churl but a strong fellow.”

What fishing was to the goodman of the house, knitting was to the goodwife,—a soothing, monotonous occupation, ever at hand, ever welcome, ever useful. Why, the family could scarce be clothed in comfort without these clicking needles! A goodly supply of well-knit, carefully dyed stockings was the housekeeper’s pride; and well they might be, for little were they hidden. The full knee-breeches of father and son displayed above the buckled shoes a long expanse of sturdy hosiery, and the short petticoats of mother and daughter did not hide the scarlet clocks of their own making. From the moment when the farmer gave the fleece of the sheep into the hands of his women-kind, every step of its transformation into stockings (except the knitting) was so tiresome and tedious that it is wearying even to read of it,—cleaning, washing, dyeing, carding, greasing, rolling, spinning, winding, rinsing, knotting,—truly might the light, tidy, easy knitting seem a pastime.

The endless round of “domesticall kind of drudgeries that women are put to,” as Howell says, would prove a very full list when made out from the life of one of these colonial housewives. It seems to us, of modern labor-saved and drudgery-void days, a truly overwhelming list; but the Dutch huys-vrouw did not stagger under the burden, nor shrink from it, nor, indeed, did she deem any of her daily work drudgery. The sense of thrift, of plenty, of capability, of satisfaction, was so strong as to overcome the distaste to the labor of production.

She had as a recreation, a delight, the care of

“A garden through whose latticed gates

The imprisoned pinks and tulips gazed,”

a trim, stiff little garden, which often graced the narrow front dooryard; a garden perhaps of a single flower-bed surrounded by aromatic herbs for medicinal and culinary use, but homelike and beloved as such gardens ever are, and specially beloved as such gardens are by the Dutch. Many were the tulip bulbs and “coronation” pink roots that had been brought or sent over from Holland, and were affectionately cherished as reminders of the far-away Fatherland. The enthusiastic traveller Van der Donck wrote that by 1653 Netherlanders had already blooming in their American garden-borders “white and red roses, stock roses, cornelian roses, eglantine, jenoffelins, gillyflowers, different varieties of fine tulips, crown-imperials, white lilies, anemones, bare-dames, violets, marigolds, summer-sots, clove-trees.” Garden-flowers of native growth were “sunflowers, red and yellow lilies, morning-stars, bell-flowers, red and white and yellow maritoffles.” I do not know what all these “flower-gentles” were, but surely it was no dull array of blossoms; nor were their glories dimmed because they opened ever by the side of the homely cabbages and lettuce, the humble cucumbers and beans, that were equally beloved and tended by the garden-maker.

And the housewife had her beloved and homelike poultry. Flocks of snowy geese went waddling slowly down the town streets, seeking the water-side; giving rich promise of fat holiday dinners and plumper and more plentiful feather-beds; comfortable and thriving looking as geese always are, and ever indicative of prosperous, thrifty homes, they comported well with the pipe-smoking burgher and his knitting huys-vrouw and their homelike dwelling.

There was one element of beauty and picturesqueness which idealized the little town and gave it an added element of life,—

“Over all and everywhere

The sails of windmills sink and soar

Like wings of sea-gulls on the shore.”

The beauty of the windmills probably was not so endearing to the settlers as their homelikeness. They made the new strange land and the new little towns seem like the Fatherland. The Indians greatly feared them; as one chronicler states, “they durst not come near their long arms and big teeth biting the corn in pieces.” Last, and not least in the minds of the thrifty Dutch, the windmills helped to turn to profit the rich harvests of grain which were the true foundation of the colony’s prosperity,—not the rich peltries of beaver, as was at first boastfully vaunted by the fur-traders.

As the day wore on, the day’s work was ended, and a neighborly consultation and exchange of greetings formed the day’s recreation. The burgher went to the little market-house, and with his neighbors and a few chance travellers, such as the skippers on the river-sloops, he smoked again his long pipe and talked over the weighty affairs of the colonie. In the summer-time goodman and goodwife both went from stoop to stoop of the close-gathered houses, for a klappernye, or chat all together. This was a feature of the colony, architectural and social, and noted by all travellers,—“the benches at the door, on which the old carls sit and smoke.” Here the goodwife recounted the simple events of the day,—the number of skeins of yarn she had spun; the yards of linen she had woven; the doings of the dye-pot; the crankiness of the churning, to which she had sung her churning charm,—

“Buitterchee, buitterchee, comm

Alican laidlechee tubichee vall.”

Perhaps she told her commeres, her gossips, of a fresh suspicion of a betrothal, or perhaps sad news of a sick neighbor or a funeral. This was never scandal, for each one’s affairs were every one’s affairs; in the weal or woe of one the whole community joined, and in many of the influences or effects of that weal or woe all had a part. It was noted by historians that the Dutch were most open in discussion of all the doings of the community, and had no dread of publicity of every-day life.

Of this habit of colonial neighborliness, Mrs. Anne Grant wrote in her “Memoir of an American Lady”—Madam Schuyler—from contemporary knowledge of early life in Albany:—

“The life of new settlers in a situation like this, when the very foundations of society were to be laid, was a life of exigencies. Every individual took an interest in the general welfare, and contributed their respective shares of intelligence and sagacity to aid plans that embraced important objects relative to the common good. This community seemed to have a common stock, not only of sufferings and enjoyments, but of information and ideas.”

When the sun was setting and the cows came home, the family gathered on stools and forms around the well-supplied board, and a plentiful supper of suppawn and milk and a sallet filled the hungry mouths, and was eaten from wooden trenchers and pewter porringers with pewter or silver spoons. The night had come; here were shelter and a warm hearthstone, and, though in the new wild world, it was in truth a home.

Sometimes, silently smoking with the man of the house, there sat in the winter schemer-licht, the shadow-light or gloaming, around the great glowing hearth, a group of dusky picturesque forms,—friendly Mohawks, who, when their furs were safely sold, could be welcomed, and were ever tolerated and harbored by the kindly Swannekins; and as the shadows gathered into the “fore-night,” and the fierce wind screamed down the great chimney and drew out into the darkness long tongues of orange and scarlet flames from the oak and hickory fires (burning, says one early traveller, half up the chimney), there was homely comfort within, and peace in the white man’s wigwam.

“What matter how the North-wind raved,—

Blow high, blow low, not all its snow

Could quench that hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.”

And the blanketed squaw felt in her savage breast the spirit of that home, and gently nursed her swaddled pappoose; and the silent Wilden, ever smoking, listened to the Dutch huys-moeder, who, undressing little Hybertje and Jan and Goosje for their long night’s sleep, sang to them the nursery song of the Hollanders, of the Fatherland:—

“Trip a troup a tronjes,

De vaarken in de boonjes,

De koejes in de klaver,

De paarden in de haver,

De kalver in de lang gras,

De eenjes in de water plas,

So groot myn klein poppetje was.”

Or if it were mid-December, the children sang to Kriss-Kringle:—

“Saint Nicholaes, goed heilig man,

Trekt uw’ besten tabbard aan,

En reist daamee naar Amsterdam,

Von Amsterdam naar Spange,

Waar Appellen von Orange

En Appellen von Granaten

Rollen door de straaten.

“Saint Nicholaes, myn goeden vriend,

Ik heb uwe altyd wel gediend,

Als gy my nu wat wilt geben

Zal ik un dienen als myn leben.”

Then the warming-pan was filled with hot coals, and thrust warily between the ice-cold sheets of the children’s beds, and perhaps they were given a drink of mulled cider or simmering beer; and scarcely were they sleeping in their warm flannel cosyntjes, or night-caps with long capes, when the curfew rang out from the church belfry. It was eight o’clock,—’t Is tijdt te bedde te gaen. The housewife carefully covered “the dull red brands with ashes over” for the fire of the morrow, and went to bed. The “tap-toes” sounded from the fort, and every house was silent.

And as the honest mynheer and his good vrouw slept warmly in their fireside alcove, and softly between their great feather-beds, so they also slept serenely; for they were not left unprotected from marauding Indian or Christian, nor unwatched by the ever-thoughtful town authorities. Through the little town marched boldly every night a sturdy kloppermann, or rattle-watch, with strong staff and brass-bound hourglass and lighted lanthorn; and, best of all, he bore a large klopper, or rattle, which he shook loudly and reassuringly at each door all through the dark hours of the night, “from nine o’clock to break of the day,” to warn both housekeepers and thieves that he was near at hand; and as was bidden by the worshipful schepens, he called out what o’clock, and what weather;—and thus guarded, let us leave them sleeping, these honest Dutch home-folk, as they have now slept for centuries in death, waiting to hear called out to them with clear voice “at break of the day” from another world, “A fair morning, and all’s well.”

CHAPTER II
EDUCATION AND CHILD-LIFE

As soon as the little American baby was born in New Netherland, he was taken to the church by his Dutch papa, and with due array of sponsors was christened by the domine from the doop-becken, or dipping-bowl, in the Dutch Reformed Church. New Yorkers had a beautiful silver doop-becken in 1695, and the church on the corner of Thirty-Eighth Street and Madison Avenue has it still. It was made in Amsterdam from silver coin and ornaments brought by the good folk of the Garden Street Church as offerings. For it Domine Henricus Selyns, “of nimble faculty,” then minister of that church, and formerly of Breuckelen, and the first poet of Brooklyn, wrote these pious and graceful verses, which were inscribed on the bowl:

“Op’t blote water stelt geen hoot

’Twas beter noyt gebooren.

Maer, ziet iets meerder in de Dorp

Zo’ gaet nien noÿt verlooren.

Hoe Christús met sÿn dierbaer Bloedt

Mÿ reÿniglt van myn Zonden.

En door syn Geest mÿ leven doet

En wast mÿn Vuÿle Wonden.”

Which translated reads:—

“Do not put your hope in simple water alone, ’twere better never to be born.

But behold something more in baptism, for that will prevent your getting lost.

How Christ’s precious blood cleanses me of my sins,

And now I may live through His spirit and be cleansed of my vile wounds.”

This christening was the sole social or marked event of the kindeken’s infancy, and little else do we know of his early life. He ate and slept, as do all infants. In cradles slept these children of the Dutch,—deep-hooded cradles to protect from the chill draughts of the poorly heated houses. In cradles of birch bark the Albany babies slept; and pretty it was to see the fat little Dutch-men sleeping in those wildwood tributes of the Indian mothers’ skill to the children of the men who had driven the children of the redmen from their homes.

Children were respectful, almost cowed, in their bearing to their parents, and were enjoined by ministers and magistrates to filial obedience. When the government left the Dutch control and became English, the Calvinistic sternness of laws as to obedience to parents in maturer years which was seen in New England was also found in New York.

“If any Child or Children, above sixteen years of age, and of Sufficient understanding, shall smite their Natural Father or Mother, unless provoked and forct for their selfe preservation from Death or Mayming, at the Complaint of the said Father or Mother, and not otherwise, they being Sufficient witness thereof, that Child, or those Children so offending shall be put to Death.”

A few prim little letters of English children have survived the wear and tear of years, and still show us in their pretty wording the formal and respectful language of the times. Martha Bockée Flint, in that interesting and valuable book, “Early Long Island,” gives this letter written to Major Ephenetus Platt “at Huntting-town” by a little girl eleven years old:—

Ever Honored Grandfather;

Sir: My long absence from you and my dear Grandmother has been not a little tedious to me. But what renders me a Vast Deal of pleasure is Being intensely happy with a Dear and Tender Mother-in-Law and frequent oppertunities of hearing of your Health and Welfair which I pray God may long Continue. What I have more to add is to acquaint you that I have already made a Considerable Progress in Learning. I have already gone through some Rules of Arithmetic, and in a little Time shall be able of giving you a Better acct of my Learning, and in mean time I am Duty Bound to subscribe myself

Your most obedient and
Duty full Granddaughter
Pegga Treadwell.

In the Lloyd Collections is a charming little letter from another Long Island miss, ten years of age. The penmanship is elegant and finished, as was that of her elders at that date.

We have, however, scant sources from which to learn of the life of children in colonial New York. No diarist of Pepysian minuteness tells of the children of New Netherland as does the faithful Samuel Sewall of those of New England; no collections of letters such as the Winthrop Papers and others recount the various items of domestic life. There are none of the pious and garrulous writings of ministers such as Cotton Mather, who in diary and various literary compositions give another side of their life. We have no such messages from the colonial Dutch. In whatever depended on the use of “a flourit pen,” posterity is neither richer nor wiser for the Dutch settlers having lived. Nor were their English successors much fonder of literary composition. Nothing but formal records of churches, of courts, of business life, offer to us any pages for study and drawing of inference. And from these records the next hint of the life of these colonial children, sad to relate, is to their discredit. The pragmatic magistrates kept up a steady prying and bullying over them. In New Orange, in 1673, “if any children be caught on the street playing, racing, and shouting previous to the termination of the last preaching, the officers of justice may take their hat or upper garment, which shall not be restored to the parents until they have paid a fine of two guilders,” which, we may be sure, would insure the miserable infants summary punishment on arriving home.

Matters were no better in New Amsterdam. One amusing complaint was brought up against “y^e wretched boys” of that settlement, and by one high in authority, Schout De Sille. One of his duties was to patrol the town of New Amsterdam at night to see that all was peaceful as befitted a town which was the daughter of the Dutch government. But the poor schout did not find his evening stroll altogether a happy one. He complained that the dogs set upon him, and that tantalizing boys shouted out “The Indians!” at him from behind trees and fences,—which must have startled him sorely, and have been most unpleasantly suggestive in those days of Indian horrors; and his chief complaint was that there was “much cutting of hoekies” by the boys,—which means, I fancy, playing of tricks, of jokes, of hoaxes, such as were played on Hock-day in England, or perhaps “playing hookey,” as American boys of to-day have been known to do.

As years passed on, I fear some of these young Dutch-Americans were sad rogues. They sore roused the wrath of Albany legislators, as is hereby proven:—

“Whereas y^e children of y^e s^d city do very unorderly to y^e shame and scandall of their parents ryde down y^e hills in y^e streets of the s^d city with small and great slees on the lord day and in the week by which many accidents may come, now for pventing y^e same it is hereby publishd and declard y^t it shall and may be lawful for any Constable in this City or any other person or persons to take any slee or slees from all and every such boys and girls rydeing or offering to ryde down any hill within y^e s^d city and breake any slee or slees in pieces. Given under our hands and seals in Albany y^e 22th of December in 12th year of Her Maj’s reign Anno Domini 1713.”

In 1728 Albany boys and girls still were hectored, still were fined by the bullying Albany constable for sliding down the alluringly steep Albany streets on “sleds, small boards, or otherwise.”

Mrs. Grant, writing of about the year 1765, speaks of the custom of coasting, but not of the legislation against it, and gives a really delightful picture of coasting-joys, which apparently were then partaken of only by boys. The schepens and their successors the constables, joy-destroying Sivas, had evidently succeeded in wresting this pleasure from the girls.

“In town all the boys were extravagantly fond of a diversion that to us would appear a very odd and childish one. The great street of the town sloped down from the hill on which the fort stood, towards the river; between the buildings was an unpaved carriage-road, the foot-path beside the houses being the only part of the street which was paved. In winter the sloping descent, continued for more than a quarter of a mile, acquired firmness from the frost, and became very slippery. Then the amusement commenced. Every boy and youth in town, from eight to eighteen, had a little low sledge, made with a rope like a bridle to the front, by which it could be dragged after one by the hand. On this one or two at most could sit, and this sloping descent being made as smooth as a looking-glass, by sliders’ sledges, etc., perhaps a hundred at once set out from the top of this street, each seated in his little sledge with the rope in his hand, which, drawn to the right or left, served to guide him. He pushed it off with a little stick, as one would launch a boat; and then, with the most astonishing velocity, precipitated by the weight of the owner, the little machine glided past, and was at the lower end of the street in an instant. What could be so delightful in this rapid and smooth descent I could never discover; though in a more retired place, and on a smaller scale, I have tried the amusement; but to a young Albanian, sleighing, as he called it, was one of the first joys of life, though attended by the drawback of walking to the top of the declivity, dragging his sledge every time he renewed his flight, for such it might well be called. In the managing this little machine some dexterity was necessary: an unskilful Phaeton was sure to fall. The conveyance was so low that a fall was attended with little danger, yet with much disgrace, for an universal laugh from all sides assailed the fallen charioteer. This laugh was from a very full chorus, for the constant and rapid succession of this procession, where every one had a brother, lover, or kinsman, brought all the young people in town to the porticos, where they used to sit wrapt in furs till ten or eleven at night, engrossed by this delectable spectacle. I have known an Albanian, after residing some years in Britain, and becoming a polished fine gentleman, join the sport and slide down with the rest.”

Mrs. Grant tells of another interesting and unusual custom of the children of Albany:

“The children of the town were divided into companies, as they called them, from five to six years of age, until they became marriageable. How those companies first originated, or what were their exact regulations, I cannot say; though I, belonging to none, occasionally mixed with several, yet always as a stranger, notwithstanding that I spoke their current language fluently. Every company contained as many boys as girls. But I do not know that there was any limited number; only this I recollect, that a boy and girl of each company, who were older, cleverer, or had some other pre-eminence among the rest were called heads of the company, and as such were obeyed by the others.... Children of different ages in the same family belonged to different companies. Each company at a certain time of the year went in a body to gather a particular kind of berries to the hill. It was a sort of annual festival attended with religious punctuality. Every company had a uniform for this purpose; that is to say, very pretty light baskets made by the Indians, with lids and handles, which hung over one arm, and were adorned with various colors. Every child was permitted to entertain the whole company on its birthday, and once besides, during winter and spring. The master and mistress of the family always were bound to go from home on these occasions, while some old domestic was left to attend and watch over them, with an ample provision of tea, chocolate, preserved and dried fruits, nuts and cakes of various kinds, to which was added cider or a syllabub; for these young friends met at four and amused themselves with the utmost gayety and freedom in any way their fancy dictated.”

From all the hints and facts which I have obtained, through letters, diaries, church and court records, of child-life in any of the colonies or provinces among English, German, Swedish, or Dutch settlers, I am sure these Albany young folk were the most favored of their time. I find no signs of such freedom in any other town.

It has been asserted that in every town in New York which was settled under the Dutch, a school was established which was taught by a competent teacher who received a small salary from the government, in addition to his other emoluments; and that after the reign of the English, begun in 1664, this public salary ceased, and many of the towns were schoolless.

This statement is not confirmed by a letter of Domine Megapolensis written from Albany in 1657. He says plainly that only Manhattan, Beverwyck, and Fort Casimir had schoolmasters, and he predicts, as a result, “ignorance, a ruined youth, and bewilderment of men’s minds.” Other authorities, such as Mr. Teunis G. Bergen, state that this liberality where it existed should be accredited to the Dutch church, not the Dutch state, or Dutch West India Company. In truth, it was all one matter. The church was an essential power in the government of New Netherland, as it was in Holland; hence the West India Company and the Classis of Amsterdam conjoined in sending domines with the supply of burgomasters, and likewise furnished school-teachers.

When Wouter van Twiller arrived in 1633 with the first military garrison for New Amsterdam, he brought also envoys of religion and learning,—Domine Everardus Bogardus and the first pedagogue, Adam Roelandsen. Master Roelandsen had a schoolroom assigned to him, and he taught the youthful New Amsterdamites for six years, when he resigned his position, and was banished from the town and went up the river to Renssellaerwyck. I fear he was not a very reputable fellow, “people did not speak well of him;” and he in turn was sued for slander; and some really sad scandals were told about him, both in and out of court. And some folk have also made very merry over the fact that he took in washing, which was really one of the best things we know about him, for it was not at all a disreputable nor unmanly calling in those times. It doubtless proved a very satisfactory source of augmentation of the wavering school-salary, in those days of vast quarterly or semi-annual washings and great bleeckeryen, or laundries,—which his probably was, since his bills were paid by the year.

A carpenter, Jan Cornelissen, tired of his tools and trade, left Renssellaerwyck upon hearing of the vacant teacher’s chair in New Amsterdam, went down the river to Manhattan, and in turn taught the school for ten years. Jan was scarcely more reputable than Adam. He lay drunk for a month at a time, and was incorrigibly lazy,—so aggravated Albanians wrote of him. But any one was good enough to teach school. Neither Jan nor Adam was, however, a convicted and banished felon, as were many Virginian schoolmasters.

This drunken schoolmaster was only the first of many. Until this century, the bane of pedagogy in New York was rum. A chorus of colonial schoolmasters could sing, in the words of Goldsmith,—

“Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains

With grammar and nonsense and learning;

Good liquor I stoutly maintain

Gives genius a better discerning.”

Occasionally a certain schoolmaster would be specified in a school-circular as a sober man; proving by the mentioning the infrequency of the qualification.

As the colony grew, other teachers were needed. Governor Stuyvesant sent to the Classis of Amsterdam for “a pious, well-qualified, and diligent schoolmaster.” William Vestens crossed the ocean in answer to this appeal, and taught for five years in one room in New York; while Jan de la Montagne, with an annual salary of two hundred florins, taught at the Harberg—later the Stadt-Huys—and occupied the position of the first public-school teacher.

For years a project of building a schoolhouse was afloat. A spot had been fixed upon, and some money subscribed. In 1649 the Commonalty represented to the West India Company that “the plate was a long time passed around for a common school which has been built with words, for as yet the first stone is not laid.” In response to this appeal, a schoolhouse was at last erected. Still another school was opened by Master Hoboocken, who taught in the Governors’ bowery, where Dutch-American children were already beginning to throng the green lanes and by-ways. He was succeeded by Evert Pietersen, who was engaged as “Consoler of the Sick, Chorister and Schoolmaster;” and all persons without distinction were ordered not to molest, disturb, or ridicule him in either of these offices, but to “deliver him from every painful sensation.” Many of the other schoolmasters had filled similar offices in the church and community.

This public school, maintained with such difficulty and so many rebuffs through these early days, was successfully continued by the Collegiate Dutch Church after the English possession of New York; and it still exists and flourishes, as does the church. This should be a matter of civic pride to every New Yorker. The history of that school has been carefully written, and is most interesting to read.

Many other teachers were licensed to give private lessons, but these public and private schools did not satisfy ambitious New Yorkers. A strong longing was felt in New Amsterdam for a Latin School. A characteristic petition was sent by the burgomasters and schepens to the West India Company:

“It is represented that the youth of this place and the neighborhood are increasing in number gradually, and that most of them can read and write, but that some of the citizens and inhabitants would like to send their children to a school the principal of which understands Latin, but are not able to do so without sending them to New England; furthermore, they have not the means to hire a Latin schoolmaster expressly for themselves from New England, and therefore they ask that the West India Company will send out a fit person as Latin schoolmaster, not doubting that the number of persons who will send their children to such a teacher will from year to year increase until an academy shall be formed whereby this place to great splendour will have attained, for which, next to God, the Honorable Company which shall have sent such teacher here shall have laud and praises. For our own part we shall endeavor to find a fit place in which the schoolmaster shall hold his school.”

The desired “gerund-grinder”—to use Tristram Shandy’s word—was soon despatched. The fit place was found,—a good house with a garden. He was promised an annual salary of five hundred guilders. Each scholar also was to pay six guilders per quarter. But Dr. Curtius’s lines fell in difficult places; he could keep no order among his Latin-school pupils, those bad young New Amsterdamites, who “beat each other and tore the clothes from each other’s backs,” and he complained he was restrained by the orders of parents from properly punishing them. (I may say here that I have not found that New York schoolmasters were ever as cruel as were those of New England.) A graver matter to honest colonists was his charging a whole beaver-skin too much per quarter to some scholars, and soon he was packed back to Holland. His successor, a young man of twenty-two, who had been tutor to Stuyvesant’s sons, had better luck, better control, and a better academy; and New Amsterdam to “great splendour was attained,” having pupils from other towns and colonies, even from so far away as Virginia.

The relations between church, school, and state were equally close throughout all New Netherland. Thus, in 1661, Governor Stuyvesant recommended Charles De Bevoise as schoolmaster for Brooklyn; and when Domine Henricus Selyns left the Brooklyn church, Schoolmaster De Bevoise was ordered to read prayers and sermons, “to read a postille” every Sabbath until another minister was obtained. He was also a krankebesoecker, or comforter of the sick. Even after the establishment of English rule in the colony, the connection of Dutch church and school was equally close. When Johannis Van Eckellen was engaged by the Consistory of the Dutch church in Flatbush in October, 1682, as a schoolmaster for the town, it was under this extremely interesting and minute contract, which, translated, reads thus:—

Articles of Agreement made with Johannis Van Eckellen, schoolmaster and clerk of the church at Flatbush.

1st. The school shall begin at eight o’clock in the morning, and go out at eleven o’clock. It shall begin again at one o’clock and end at four o’clock. The bell shall be rung before the school begins.

2nd. When the school opens, one of the children shall read the morning prayer, as it stands in the catechism, and close with the prayer before dinner. In the afternoon it shall begin with the prayer after dinner, and close with the evening prayer. The evening school shall begin with the Lord’s Prayer, and close by singing a Psalm.

3rd. He shall instruct the children in the common prayers and the questions and answers of the catechism, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, to enable them to say their catechism on Sunday afternoons in the church before the afternoon service, otherwise on the Monday following, at which the schoolmaster shall be present. He shall demean himself patient and friendly towards the children in their instruction, and be active and attentive to their improvement. 4th. He shall be bound to keep his school nine months in succession, from September to June, one year with another, or the like period of time for a year, according to the agreement with his predecessor, he shall, however, keep the school nine months, and always be present himself.

CHURCH SERVICE.

Art. 1st. He shall be chorister of the church, ring the bell three times before service, and read a chapter of the Bible in the church, between the second and third ringing of the bell; after the third ringing he shall read the ten commandments and the twelve articles of Faith, and then set the Psalm. In the afternoon, after the third ringing of the bell, he shall read a short chapter, or one of the Psalms of David, as the congregation are assembling. Afterwards he shall again set the Psalm.

Art. 2nd. When the minister shall preach at Brooklyn or New Utrecht, he shall be bound to read twice before the congregation a sermon from the book used for the purpose. The afternoon sermon will be on the catechism of Dr. Vander Hagen, and thus he shall follow the turns of the minister. He shall hear the children recite the questions and answers of the catechism, on that Sunday, and he shall instruct them. When the minister preaches at Flatlands, he shall perform the like service.

Art. 3rd. He shall provide a basin of water for the baptisms, for which he shall receive twelve stuyvers, in wampum, for every baptism, from the parents or sponsors. He shall furnish bread and wine for the communion, at the charge of the church. He shall furnish the minister, in writing, the names and ages of the children to be baptized, together with the names of the parents and sponsors; he shall also serve as a messenger for the consistories.

Art. 4th. He shall give the funeral invitations, and toll the bells, for which service he shall receive, for persons of fifteen years of age and upwards, twelve guilders; and for persons under fifteen, eight guilders. If he shall invite out of the town, he shall receive three additional guilders for every town; and if he shall cross the river to New York, he shall have four guilders more.

SCHOOL MONEY.

He shall receive for a speller or reader in the day school three guilders for a quarter, and for a writer four guilders.

In the evening school, he shall receive for a speller or reader four guilders for a quarter, and for a writer five guilders.

SALARY.

The remainder of his salary shall be four hundred guilders in wheat, of wampum value, deliverable at Brooklyn Ferry; and for his service from October to May, two hundred and thirty-four guilders in wheat, at the same place, with the dwelling, pasturage, and meadow appertaining to the school to begin the first day of October.

I agree to the above articles, and promise to observe the same to the best of my ability.

Johannis Van Eckellen.

Truly we have through this contract—to any one with any powers of historic imagination—a complete picture of the duties of the schoolmaster of that day.

When the English came in power in 1664, some changes were made in matters of education in New York, but few changes in any of the conditions in Albany. Governor Nicholls, on his first visit up the river, made one significant appointment,—that of an English schoolmaster. This was the Englishman’s license to teach:—

“Whereas the teaching of the English Tongue is necessary in this Government; I have, therefore, thought fitt to give License to John Shutte to bee the English Schoolmaster at Albany: and upon condition that the said John Shutte shall not demand any more wages from each Scholar than is given by the Dutch to their Dutch Schoolmasters. I have further granted to the said John Shutte that hee shall bee the only English Schoolmaster at Albany.”

The last clause of this license seems superfluous; for it is very doubtful whether there was for many years any other English teacher who eagerly sought what was so far from being either an onerous or lucrative position. Many generations of Albany children grew to manhood ere the Dutch schoolmasters found their positions supererogatory.

Women-teachers and girl-scholars were of small account in New York in early days. Girls did, however, attend the public schools. We find Matthew Hillyer, in 1676, setting forth in New York that he “hath kept school for children of both sexes for two years past to satisfaction.” Dame-schools existed, especially on Long Island, where English influences and Connecticut emigration obtained. In Flushing Elizabeth Cowperthwait was reckoned with in 1681 for “schooling and diet for children;” and in 1683 she received for thirty weeks’ schooling, of “Martha Johanna,” a scarlet petticoat,—truly a typical Dutch payment. A school bill settled by John Bowne in Flushing in 1695 shows that sixpence a week was paid to the teacher for each scholar who learned reading, while writing and ciphering cost one shilling twopence a week. This, considering the usual wages and prices of the times, was fair pay enough.

We have access to a detailed school bill of the Lloyd boys in 1693, but they were sent away from their Long Island home at Lloyd’s Neck to New England; so the information is of no value as a record of a New York school; but one or two of these items are curious enough to be recounted:—

Wormwood and rhubarb for the boys and a feast and wine for the schoolmistress, albeit the wine was but tenpence a bottle, seems somewhat unfair discrimination.

There is an excellent list of the clothing of a New York schoolboy of eleven years given in a letter written by Fitz-John Winthrop to Robert Livingstone in 1690. This young lad, John Livingstone, had also been in school in New England. The “account of linen & clothes” shows him to have been very well dressed. It reads thus:—

• Eleven new shirts
• 4 p^r laced sleves
• 8 plane cravets
• 4 cravets with lace
• 4 stripte wastecoats with black buttons
• 1 flowered wastecoat
• 4 new osinbrig britches
• 1 gray hat with a black ribbon
• 1 gray hat with a blew ribbon
• 1 dousin black buttons
• 1 dousin coloured buttons
• 3 pr gold buttons
• 3 pr silver buttons
• 2 p^r fine blew stockings
• 1 pr fine red stockins
• 4 white handkerchiefs
• 2 speckled handkerchiefs
• 3 pair gloves
• 1 stuff coat with black buttons
• 1 cloth coat
• 1 pr blew plush britches
• 1 pr serge britches
• 2 combs
• 1 pr new shoees
• Silk & thred to mend his clothes.

In 1685 Goody Davis taught a dame-school at Jamaica; and in 1687 Rachel Spencer died in Hempstead, and her name was recorded as that of a schoolmistress. In 1716, at the Court of Sessions in Westchester, one of the farm-wives, Dame Shaw, complained that “a travelling woman who came out of y^e Jerseys who kept school at several places in Rye parish, hath left with her a child eleven months old, for which she desires relief from the parish.”

It is easy to fancy a vague romance through this short record of the life of this nameless “travelling woman” who, babe in arms, earned a scanty living by teaching, and who at last abandoned the school and the child whose birth may, perhaps, have sent her a nameless wanderer in a strange country,—for “the Jerseys” were far away from Rye parish in those days.

There was a schoolmistress in Hempstead at a later date. She was old in 1774. I don’t know her name, but I know of the end of her days. The vestry allowed her forty shillings, “to be dealt out to her a little at a time, so as to last her all winter.” She lived through that luxurious winter, and died in 1775. Her coffin cost twelve shillings, and Widow Thurston was paid six shillings for digging the grave for her old crony and gossip. Schoolmistresses were not many on Long Island,—can we wonder at it? Had this dame been one of the penniless church-poor in a Dutch community (which Hempstead was not), she would probably have had forty shillings a month instead of a winter, and a funeral that would have been not only decent in all the necessities of a funeral, but a triumph of prodigality in all the comforts and pleasures of the mortuary accompaniments of the day, such as wine, rum, beer, cakes, tobacco, and pipes.

The “book-learning” afforded to colonial girls in New York was certainly very meagre. Mrs. Anne Grant wrote of the first quarter of the eighteenth century:—

“It was at that time very difficult to procure the means of instruction in those island districts; female education was, of consequence, conducted on a very limited scale; girls learned needlework (in which they were indeed both skilful and ingenious) from their mothers and aunts; they were taught, too, at that period to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and few were taught writing.”

William Smith, the historian of New York, writing during the year 1756 of his fellow townswomen, and of education in general in New York, gives what was doubtless a true picture of the inelegance of education in New York:—

“There is nothing they [New York women] so generally neglect as Reading, and indeed all the Arts for the improvement of the Mind, in which I confess we have set them the Example. Our Schools are in the Lowest Order, the Instructors want Instruction, and through a long, shameful neglect of the Arts and Sciences our Common Speech is very corrupt, and the Evidences of a Bad Taste both as to thought and Language are visible in all our Proceedings publick and private.”

One obstacle to the establishment and success of schools and education was the hybridization of language. New Yorkers spoke neither perfect Dutch nor good English. It was difficult in some townships to gather an English-speaking jury; hence, naturally, neither tongue could be taught save in the early and simpler stages of education. It was difficult for those little Dutch-men who heard Holland-Dutch spoken constantly at home to abandon it entirely and speak English in the schools. The Flatbush master (himself a Dutchman, but bound to teach English) invented an ingenious plan to crowd out the use of Dutch in school. He carried a little metal token which he gave each day to the first scholar whom he heard use a Dutch word. That scholar could promptly turn the token over to any other scholar whom he likewise detected in using Dutch, and he in turn could do the same. Thus the token passed from hand to hand through the day; but the unlucky wight who chanced to have possession of it when the school day was over was soundly whipped.

In default of “spilling,” as one master wrote in his receipts, and in which he was somewhat shaky himself, he and all other colonial teachers took a firm stand on “cyphering.” “The Bible and figgers is all I want my boys to know,” said one old farmer. When the school session opened and closed, as we have seen in Flatbush, with prayer and praise, with catechism every day, and special catechising twice a week, even “figgers” did not have much of a chance. All the old Dutch primers that I have seen, the Groot A B C boeks zeer bekwaam voor de yongekinderen te leeren, contain nothing (besides the alphabet) but religious sentences, prayers, verses of the Bible, pious rhymes, etc.; and dingy little books they are, not even up to the standard of our well-known New England Primer.

Though the Dutch were great printers of horn-books, I do not find that they were universal users of those quaint little “engines of learning.” If used in Dutch-American schools, none now survive the lapse of two centuries; and indeed only one can be found in a Holland museum. Mr. Tuer, the historian of the horn-book, states that there is one in the museum at Antwerp, printed by H. Walpot, of Dordrecht, Netherlands, in 1640; and a beautiful silver-backed Dutch horn-book in the collection of an English clergyman at Coombe Place, England; and a few others in public libraries that are probably Dutch. Dutch artists show, by their frequent representations of horn-books in paintings of children, that the little a-b-boordje was well known. In the “Christ blessing Little Children,” by Rembrandt, the presentment of a child has a horn-book hanging at his side. In several pictures by Jan Steen, 1626-79, horn-books may be noted; in one a child has hung his horn-book on a parrot’s perch while he plays. In 1753 English children used horn-books in New York as in the other provinces, for they were advertised with Bibles and primers in the New York newspapers at that time.

Printed arithmetics were rarely used or seen. Schoolmasters carried with them carefully executed “sum-books” in manuscript, from which scholars copied the sums and rules into small blank-books of their own. One, of a Gravesend scholar in 1754, has evidently served to prove the pupil’s skill both in arithmetic and penmanship. The book is prefaced by instructive aphorisms, such as “Carefully mind to mend in every line;” “Game not in school when you should write.” The wording of the rules is somewhat curious. One reads:—

“Rule of Bartar, which is for exchanging of ware, One Commodity for another. This Rule shows the Merchants how they may Proportion their Goods so that neither of them may sustain loss. Sum. Two Merchants A. and B. bartar. A. hath 320 Dozen of Candles @ ⁴⁄₆ per Dozen; for which B. giveth him £30 in Cash and y^e Rest in Cotton @ 8d per lb. I demand: how much Cotton B. must give A. more than the £30 in Cash.”

As commerce increased and many young men sought a seafaring life, navigation was taught, and advanced mathematics. In 1749 the notice of a Brooklyn “Philomath” on Nassau Island shows that he could teach “Arithmetick vulgar and decimal; Geometry plain and Spherical; Surveying, Navigation in 3 kinds, viz: Plain Mercator and Great Circle Sailing, Astronomy, and Dialling.” Thus did this Philomath meet the demand of the day. In 1773 the Flatbush Grammar School was taught by John Copp, who also took scholar-boarders, who “have the advantage of being taught geography in the winter evenings, with many other useful particulars that frequently occur to the teacher,” which seems to present a rather melancholy picture when we reflect on the other particulars of good coasting and skating that then were around Flatbush, on the Steenbakkery for instance, which, doubtless, would frequently occur on winter evenings to the scholar-boarder.

CHAPTER III
WOOING AND WEDDING

The domestic life of the Dutch settlers flowed on in a smooth-running and rather dull stream, varying little through either honor-bearing or discreditable incident from day to day. Any turbulence of dissension or divorce between husband and wife was apparently little known and certainly little noted. Occasionally an entry which tells of temporary division or infelicity can be unearthed from the dingy pages of some old court-record, thereby disclosing a scene and actors so remote, so shadowy, so dimmed with the dust of centuries, that the incident often bears no semblance of having happened to real living folk, but seems rather to pertain to a group of inanimate puppets. One of these featureless, colorless, stiff Dutch marionettes is Anneke, the daughter of boisterous old Domine Schaets, the first minister at Fort Orange. A fleeting glimpse of her marital infelicity is disclosed through the record of her presence in Albany under the shadow of some unexplained and now forgotten scandal. To satisfy her father’s virtuous and severe congregation, she refrained from contaminating attendance at Communion. The domine resented this condition of affairs, and refused to appear before the Consistory though summoned four times by the bode. He persisted in irritatingly “ripping up new differences and offences;” and he disregarded with equal scorn the summons of a magistrate to appear before the Court; and he was therefore suspended from his clerical office. All was at last “arranged in love and friendship,” leaving out the dispute about “Universal Grace,” which I suppose could not be settled; but daughter Anneke was ordered off to New York to her husband, “with a letter of recommendation; and as she was so headstrong, and would not depart without the Sheriff’s and Constable’s interference, her disobedience was annexed to the letter.” It is pleasing to know, from the record of an “Extraordinary Court holden in Albany” a month later,—in July, 1681,—of a very satisfactory result in the affairs of the young couple.

“Tho: Davidtse promisses to conduct himself well and honorably towards his wife Anneke Schaets, to Love and never neglect her, but faithfully and properly to maintain and support her with her children according to his means, hereby making null and void all questions that have occurred and transpired between them both, never to repeat them, but are entirely reconciled: and for better assurance of his real Intention and good Resolution to observe the same, he requests that two good men be named to oversee his conduct at New York towards his said wife, being entirely disposed and inclined to live honorably and well with her as a Christian man ought, subjecting himself willingly to the rule and censure of the said men. On the other hand his wife Anneke Schaets, promisses also to conduct herself quietly and well and to accompany him to New York with her children and property, not to leave him any more, but to serve and help him and with him to share the sweets and the sours as becomes a Christian spouse: Requesting all differences which had ever existed between them both may be hereby quashed and brought no more to light or cast up, as she on her side is heartily disposed to. Their Worship of the Court Recommend parties on both Sides to observe strictly their Reconciliation now made, and the gentleman at New York will be informed that the matter is so far arranged.”

We can certainly add the profound hope, after all this quarrelling and making up, after all those good promises, that Anneke’s home was no longer “unregulated and poorly kept,” as was told of her by the Labadist travellers during their visit to Albany at that time. The appointing of “two good men” as arbitrators or overseers of conduct was very usual in such cases; thereby public adjustment in open court of such quarrels was avoided.

Tender parents could not unduly shelter a daughter who had left her husband’s bed and board. He could promptly apply to the court for an order for her return to him, and an injunction to her parents against harboring her. It has been plain to see in all such cases which I have chanced upon in colonial records that the Court had a strong leaning towards the husband’s side of the case; perhaps thinking, like Anneke Schaets, that the wife should “share the sweets and the sours like a Christian spouse.”

In 1697 Daniel Vanolinda petitioned that his wife be “ordyred to go and live with him where he thinks convenient.” The wife’s father was promptly notified by the Albany magistrates that he was “discharged to shelter her in his house or elsewhere, upon Penalty as he will answer at his Perill;” and she returned to her husband.

In the year 1665 a New Amsterdammer named Lantsman and his wife, Beletje, were sorely estranged, and went to the courts for settlement of these differences. The Court gave the matter into the hands of two of the Dutch ministers, who were often assigned the place of peacemakers. As usual, they ordered the parents of Beletje to cease from harboring or abetting her. The husband promised to treat her well, but she answered that he always broke his promises to her. He was determined and assiduous to retrieve her, and finally was successful; thus they were not made “an example to other evil housekeepers.” A curious feature of this marriage quarrel is the fact that this Lantsman, who was so determined to retain his wife, had been more than recreant about marrying her. The banns had been published, the wedding-day set, but Bridegroom Lantsman did not appear. Upon being hauled up and reprimanded, his only proffered excuse was the very simple one that his clothes were not ready.

When Anniatje Fabritius requested an order of court for her husband to vacate her house with a view of final separation from him, it was decided by the arbitrators that no legal steps should be taken, but that “the parties comport themselves as they ought, in order that they win back each other’s affections, leaving each other in meanwhile unmolested”—which was very sensible advice. Another married pair having “met with great discouragement” (which is certainly a most polite expression to employ on such a subject), agreed each to go his and her way, after an exact halving of all their possessions.

Nicasius de Sille, magistrate of New Utrecht and poet of New Netherland, separated his life from that of his wife because—so he said—she spent too much money. It is very hard for me to think of a Dutch woman as “expensefull,” to use Pepys’ word. He also said she was too fond of schnapps,—which her respected later life did not confirm. Perhaps he spoke with poetic extravagance, or the nervous irritability and exaggeration of genius. Albert Andriese and his wife were divorced in Albany in 1670, “because strife and difference hath arisen between them.” Daniel Denton was divorced from his wife in Jamaica, and she was permitted to marry again, by the new provincial law of divorce of 1672. These few examples break the felicitous calm of colonial matrimony, and have a few companions during the years 1670-72; but Chancellor Kent says “for more than one hundred years preceding the Revolution no divorce took place in the colony of New York;” and there was no way of dissolving a marriage save by special act of Legislature.

Occasionally breach-of-promise suits were brought. In 1654 Greetje Waemans produced a marriage ring and two letters, promissory of marriage, and requested that on that evidence Daniel de Silla be “condemned to legally marry her.” He vainly pleaded his unfortunate habit of some days drinking too much, and that on those days he did much which he regretted; among other things, his bacchanalian love-making of Greetje. François Soleil, the New Amsterdam gunsmith, another recreant lover, swore he would rather go away and live with the Indians (a terrible threat) than marry the fair Rose whom he had left to droop neglected—and unmarried.

One curious law-case is shown by the injunction to Pieter Kock and Anna van Voorst. They had entered into an agreement of marriage, and then had been unwilling to be wedded. The burgomasters and schepens decided that the promise should remain in force, and that neither should marry any other person without the permission of the other and the Court; but Anna did marry very calmly (when she got ready) another more desirable and desired man without asking any one’s permission.

It certainly gives us a great sense of the simplicity of living in those days to read the account of the suit of the patroon of Staten Island in 1642 against the parents of a fair young Elsje for loss of services through her marriage. She had been bound out to him as a servant, and had married secretly before her time of service had expired. The bride told the worshipful magistrates that she did not know the young man when her mother and another fetched him to see her; that she refused his suit several times, but finally married him willingly enough,—in fact, eloped with him in a sail-boat. She demurely offered to return to the Court, as compensation and mollification, the pocket-handkerchief which was her husband’s wedding-gift to her. Two years later, Elsje (already a widow) appeared as plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit; and offered, as proof of her troth-plight, a shilling-piece which was her second lover’s not more magnificent gift. Though not so stated in the chronicle, this handkerchief was doubtless given in a “marriage-knot,”—a handkerchief in which was tied a gift of money. If the girl to whom it was given untied the knot, it was a sign of consent to be speedily married. This fashion of marriage-knots still exists in parts of Holland. Sometimes the knot bears a motto; one reads when translated, “Being in love does no harm if love finds its recompense in love; but if love has ceased, all labor is in vain. Praise God.”

Though second and third marriages were common enough among the early settlers of New Netherland, I find that usually attempts at restraint of the wife were made through wills ordering sequent loss of property if she married again. Nearly all the wills are more favorable to the children than to the wife. Old Cornelius Van Catts, of Bushwick, who died in 1726, devised his estate to his wife Annetje with this gruff condition: “If she happen to marry again, then I geff her nothing of my estate, real or personal. But my wife can be master of all by bringing up to good learning my two children. But if she comes to marry again, then her husband can take her away from the farm.” John Burroughs, of Newtown, Long Island, in his will dated 1678 expressed the general feeling of husbands towards their prospective widows when he said, “If my wife marry again, then her husband must provide for her as I have.”

Often joint-wills were made by husband and wife, each with equal rights if survivor. This was peculiarly a Dutch fashion. In Fordham in 1670 and 1673, Claude de Maistre and his wife Hester du Bois, Pierre Cresson and his wife Rachel Cloos, Gabriel Carboosie and Brieta Wolferts, all made joint-wills. The last-named husband in his half of the will enjoined loss of property if Brieta married again. Perhaps he thought there had been enough marrying and giving in marriage already in that family, for Brieta had had three husbands,—a Dane, a Frieslander, and a German,—and his first wife had had four, and he—well, several, I guess; and there were a number of children; and you couldn’t expect any poor Dutchman to find it easy to make a will in all that confusion. In Albany may be found several joint-wills, among them two dated 1663 and 1676; others in the Schuyler family. There is something very touching in the thought of those simple-minded husbands and wives, in mutual confidence and affection, going, as we find, before the notary together and signing their will together, “out of love and special nuptial affection, not thereto misled or sinisterly persuaded,” she bequeathing her dower or her father’s legacy or perhaps her own little earnings, and he his hard-won guilders. It was an act significant and emblematic of the ideal unison of interests and purposes which existed as a rule in the married life of these New York colonists.

Mrs. Grant adds abundant testimony to the domestic happiness and the marital affection of residents of Albany a century later. She states:—

“Inconstancy or even indifference among married couples was unheard of, even where there happened to be a considerable disparity in point of intellect. The extreme affection they bore their mutual offspring was a bond that forever endeared them to each other. Marriage in this colony was always early, very often happy, and very seldom indeed interested. When a man had no son, there was nothing to be expected with a daughter but a well brought-up female slave, and the furniture of the best bed-chamber. At the death of her father she obtained another division of his effects, such as he thought she needed or deserved, for there was no rule in these cases.

“Such was the manner in which those colonists began life; nor must it be thought that those were mean or uninformed persons. Patriots, magistrates, generals, those who were afterwards wealthy, powerful, and distinguished, all, except a few elder brothers, occupied by their possessions at home, set out in the same manner; and in after life, even in the most prosperous circumstances, they delighted to recount the ‘humble toils and destiny obscure’ of their early years.”

Weddings usually took place at the house of the bride’s parents. There are some records of marriages in church in Albany in the seventeenth century, one being celebrated on Sunday. But certainly throughout the eighteenth century few marriages were within the church doors. Mrs. Vanderbilt says no Flatbush marriages took place in the church till within the past thirty or forty years. In some towns written permission of the parents of the groom, as well as the bride, was required by the domine before he would perform the marriage ceremony. In the Guelderland the express consent of father and mother must be obtained before the marriage; and doubtless that custom of the Fatherland caused its adoption here in some localities. The minister also in some cases gave a certificate of permission for marriage; here is one given by “ye minister at Flatbush,”—

Isaac Hasselburg and Elizabeth Baylis have had their proclamation in our church as commonly our manner and custom is, and no opposition or hindrance came against them, so as that they may be confirmed in y^e banns of Matrimony, whereto we wish them blessing. Midwout y^e March 17th, 1689.

Rudolph Varrick, Minister.

This was probably to permit and authorize the marriage in another parish.

Marriage fees were not very high in colonial days, nor were they apparently always retained by the minister; for in one of Domine Selyns’s accounts of the year 1662, we find him paying over to the Consistory the sum of seventy-eight guilders and ten stuyvers for fourteen marriage fees received by him. The expenses of being married were soon increased by the issuing of marriage licenses. During the century dating from the domination of the British to the Revolutionary War nearly all the marriages of genteel folk were performed by special permission, by Governor’s license, the payment for which (a half-guinea each, so Kalm said) proved through the large numbers a very welcome addition to the magistrates’ incomes. It was in fact deemed most plebeian, almost vulgar, to be married by publication of the banns for three Sundays in church, or posting them according to the law, as was the universal and fashionable custom in New England. This notice from a New York newspaper, dated December 13, 1765, will show how widespread had been the aversion to the publication of banns:—

“We are creditly informed that there was married last Sunday evening, by the Rev. Mr. Auchmuty, a very respectable couple that had published three different times in Trinity Church. A laudable example and worthy to be followed. If this decent and for many reasons proper method of publication was once generally to take place, we should have no more of clandestine marriages; and save the expense of licenses, no inconsiderable sum these hard and depressing times.”

Another reason for “crying the banns” was given in Holt’s “New York Gazette and Postboy” for December 6, 1765.

“As no Licenses for Marriage could be obtained since the first of November for Want of Stamped Paper, we can assure the Publick several Genteel Couple were publish’d in the different Churches of this City last Week; and we hear that the young Ladies of this Place are determined to Join Hands with none but such as will to the utmost endeavour to abolish the Custom of marrying with License which Amounts to many Hundred per annum which might be saved.”

Severe penalties were imposed upon clergymen who violated the law requiring license or publication ere marriage. The Lutheran minister performed such a marriage, and the schout’s “conclusion” as to the matter was that the offending minister be flogged and banished. But as he was old, and of former good services, he was at last only suspended a year from power of preaching.

Rev. Mr. Miller, an English clergyman writing in 1695, complains that many marriages were by justices of the peace. This was made lawful by the States-General of Holland from the year 1590, and thus was a law in New Netherland. By the Duke’s Laws, 1664, it was also made legal. This has never been altered, and is to-day the law of the State.

Of highly colored romance in the life of the Dutch colonists there was little. Sometimes a lover was seized by the Indians, and his fair betrothed mourned him through a long life. In one case she died after a few years of grief and waiting, and on the very day of his return from his savage prison to his old Long Island home he met the sad little funeral procession bearing her to the grave. Another humbler romance of Gravesend was when a sorrowing widower fell in love with a modest milkmaid at first sight as she milked her father’s cows; ere the milking was finished he told his love, rode to town on a fast horse for a governor’s license, and married and carried off his fair Grietje. A century later a fair Quakeress of Flushing won in like manner, when milking, the attention and affection of Walter Franklin of New York. Another and more strange meeting of lovers was when young Livingstone, the first of the name in New York, poor and unknown, came to the bedside of a dying Van Rensselaer in Albany to draw up a will. The dying man, with a jealousy stronger than death, said to his beautiful wife, Alida Schuyler, “Send him away, he will be your second husband;” and he was,—perhaps the thought provoked the deed.

Even if there were few startling or picturesque romances or brilliant matches, there was plenty of ever-pleasant wooing. New Amsterdam was celebrated, just before its cession to the English, for its young and marriageable folk and its betrothals. This is easily explained; nearly all the first emigrants were young married people, and the years assigned to one generation had passed, and their children had grown up and come to mating-time. Shrewd travellers, who knew where to get good capable wives, wooed and won their brides among the Dutch-American fair ones. Mr. Valentine says: “Several of the daughters of wealthy burghers were mated to young Englishmen whose first occasions were of a temporary character.” The beautiful surroundings of the little town tempted all to love-making, and the unchaperoned simplicity of society aided early “matching.” The Locust-Trees, a charming grove on a bluff elevation on the North River a little south of the present Trinity Churchyard, was a famous courting-place; or tender lovers could stroll down the “Maiden’s Path;” or, for still longer walks, to the beautiful and baleful “Kolck,” or “Collect,” or “Fresh Water,” as it was sequentially called; and I cannot imagine any young and susceptible hearts ever passing without some access of sentiment through any green field so sweetly named as the “Clover Waytie.”

There were some curious marriage customs,—some Dutch, some English. One very pretty piece of folk-lore, of bride-honoring, was brought to my notice through the records of a lawsuit in the infant town of New Harlem in 1663, as well as an amusing local pendant to the celebration of the custom. It seems that a certain young Harlem couple were honored in the pleasant fashion of the Fatherland, by having a “May-tree” set up in front of their dwelling-place. But certain gay young sparks of the neighborhood, to anger the groom and cast ridicule on his marriage, came with unseemly noise of blowing of horns, and hung the lovely May-tree during the night with ragged stockings. We never shall know precisely what special taunt or insult was offered or signified by this over-ripe crop of worn-out hosiery; but it evidently answered its tantalizing purpose, for on the morrow, at break of day, the bridegroom properly resented the “mockery and insult,” cut down the hateful tree, and committed other acts of great wrath; which, being returned in kind (for thrice was the stocking-full tree set up), developed a small riot, and thus the whole affair was recorded. Among the State Papers at Albany are several letters relating to another insulting “stocking-tree” set up in Albany at about the same date, and also fiercely resented.

Collections for the church poor were sometimes taken at weddings, as was the universal custom for centuries in Holland. When Stephanus Van Cortlandt and Gertrude Schuyler were married in Albany, in 1671, thirteen guilders six stuyvers were contributed at the wedding, and fifteen guilders at the reception the following day. At the wedding of Martin Kreiger, the same year, eleven guilders were collected; at another wedding the same amount. When the daughter of Domine Bogardus was married, it was deemed a very favorable time and opportunity to take up a subscription for building the first stone church in New Amsterdam. When the wedding-guests were all mellow with wedding-cheer, “after the fourth or fifth round of drinking,” says the chronicle, and, hence generous, each vied with the other in good-humored and pious liberality, they subscribed “richly.” A few days later, so the chronicle records, some wished to reconsider the expensive and expansive transaction at the wedding-feast, and “well repented it.” But Director Kieft stiffly held them to their contracts, and “nothing availed to excuse.”

It is said that the English drink of posset was served at weddings. From the “New York Gazette” of February 13, 1744, I copy this receipt for its manufacture:—

“A Receipt for all young Ladies that are going to be Married. To Make a

SACK-POSSET.

From famed Barbadoes on the Western Main

Fetch sugar half a pound; fetch sack from Spain

A pint; and from the Eastern Indian Coast

Nutmeg, the glory of our Northern toast.

O’er flaming coals together let them heat

Till the all-conquering sack dissolves the sweet.

O’er such another fire set eggs, twice ten,

New born from crowing cock and speckled hen;

Stir them with steady hand, and conscience pricking

To see the untimely fate of twenty chicken.

From shining shelf take down your brazen skillet,

A quart of milk from gentle cow will fill it.

When boiled and cooked, put milk and sack to egg,

Unite them firmly like the triple League.

Then covered close, together let them dwell

Till Miss twice sings: You must not kiss and tell.

Each lad and lass snatch up their murdering spoon,

And fall on fiercely like a starved dragoon.”

Many frankly simple customs prevailed. I do not know at how early a date the fashion obtained of “coming out bride” on Sunday; that is, the public appearance of bride and groom, and sometimes entire bridal party in wedding-array, at church the Sunday after the marriage. It certainly was a common custom long before Revolutionary times, in New England as well as New York; but it always seems to me more an English than a Dutch fashion. Mr. Gabriel Furman, in his manuscript Commonplace Book, dated 1810, now owned by the Long Island Historical Society, tells of one groom whom he remembered who appeared on the first Sunday after his marriage attired in white broadcloth; on the second, in brilliant blue and gold; on the third, in peach-bloom with pearl buttons. The bride’s dress, wholly shadowed by all this magnificence, is not even named. Mrs. Vanderbilt tells of a Flatbush bride of the last century, who was married in a fawn-colored silk over a light-blue damask petticoat. The wedding-waistcoat of the groom was made of the same light-blue damask,—a delicate and deferential compliment. Often it was the custom for the bridal pair to enter the church after the service began, thus giving an opportunity for the congregation to enjoy thoroughly the wedding-finery. Whether bride and groom were permitted to sit together within the church, I do not know. Of course ordinarily the seats of husband and wife were separate. It would seem but a poor show, with the bride in a corner with a lot of old ladies, and the groom up in the gallery.

On Long Island the gayety at the home of the bride’s parents was often followed on the succeeding day by “open house” at the house of the groom’s parents, when the wedding-party, bridesmaids and all, helped to keep up the life of the wedding-day. An old letter says of weddings in the city of New York:—

“The Gentlemen’s Parents keep Open house just in the same manner as the Bride’s Parents. The Gentlemen go from the Bridegroom’s house to drink Punch with and give Joy to his Father. The Bride’s visitors go in the same manner from the Bride’s to her mother’s to pay their compliments to her. There is so much driving about at these times that in our narrow streets there is some danger. The Wedding-house resembles a bee-hive. Company perpetually flying in and out.”

All this was in vogue by the middle of the last century. There was no leaving home by bride and groom just when every one wanted them,—no tiresome, tedious wedding-journey; all cheerfully enjoyed the presence of the bride, and partook of the gayety the wedding brought. In the country, up the Hudson and on Long Island, it was lengthened out by a bride-visiting,—an entertaining of the bridal party from day to day by various hospitable friends and relations for many miles around; and this bride-visiting was usually made on horseback.

Let us picture a bride-visiting in spring-time on Long Island, where, as Hendrick Hudson said, “the land was pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever seen, and very sweet smells came therefrom.” The fair bride, with her happy husband; the gayly dressed bridesmaids, in silken petticoats, and high-heeled scarlet shoes, with rolled and powdered hair dressed with feathers and gauze, riding a-pillion behind the groom’s young friends, in satin knee-breeches, and gay coats and cocked hats,—all the accompanying young folk in the picturesque and gallant dress of the times, and gay with laughter and happy voices,—a sight pretty to see in the village streets, or, fairer still, in the country lanes, where the woods were purely starred and gleaming with the radiant dogwood; or roads where fence-lines were “white with blossoming cherry-trees as if touched with lightest snow;” or where pink apple-blossoms flushed the fields and dooryards; or, sweeter far, where the flickering shadows fell through a bridal arch of the pale green feathery foliage of the abundant flowering locust-trees, whose beautiful hanging racemes of exquisite pink-flushed blossoms cast abroad a sensuous perfume like orange blossoms, which fitted the warmth, the glowing sunlight, the fair bride, the beginning of a new life;—let us picture in our minds this June bride-visiting; we have not its like to-day in quaintness, simplicity, and beauty.

CHAPTER IV
TOWN LIFE

The earlier towns in New Netherland gathered usually closely around a fort, both for protection and companionship. In New Amsterdam, as in Albany, this fort was an intended refuge against possible Indian attacks, and also in New Amsterdam the established quarters in the new world of the Dutch West India Company. As the settlement increased, roads were laid out in the little settlement leading from the fort to any other desired point on the lower part of the island. Thus Heere Straat, the Breede Weg, or Broadway, led from the fort of New Amsterdam to the common pasture-lands. Hoogh Straat, now Stone Street, was evolved from part of the road which led down to the much-used Ferry to Long Island, at what is now Peck Slip. Whitehall Street was the shortest way to the East River. In front of the fort was the Bowling Green. Other streets were laid out, or rather grew, as needs increased. They were irregular in width and wandering in direction. They were not paved nor kept in good order, and at night were scarcely lighted.

In December, 1697, city lamps were ordered in New York “in the dark time of the moon, for the ease of the inhabitants.” Every seventh house was to cause a lanthorn and candle to be hung out on a pole, the expense to be equally shared by the seven neighbors, and a penalty of ninepence was decreed for every default. And perhaps the watch called out in New York, as did the watch in Old York, in London and other English cities, “Lanthorne, and a whole candell-light! Hang out your lights here.” An old chap-book has a watchman’s rhyme beginning,—

“A light here! maids, hang out your light,

And see your horns be clear and bright

That so your candle clear may shine,” etc.

Broad Street was in early days a canal or inlet of the sea, and was called De Heere Graft, and extended from the East River to Wall Street. Its waters, as far as Exchange Place, rose and fell with the tide. It was crossed by several foot-bridges and a broader bridge at Hoogh Straat, or Stone Street, which bridge became a general meeting-place, a centre of trade. And when the burghers and merchants decided to meet regularly at this bridge every Friday morning, they thus and then and there established the first Exchange in New York City. It is pleasant to note, in spite of the many miles of city growth, how closely the exchange centres have remained near their first home. In 1660 the walks on the banks of the Graft were paved, and soon it was bordered by the dwellings of good citizens; much favored on account of the homelikeness, so Mr. Janvier suggests, of having a good, strong-smelling canal constantly under one’s nose, and ever-present the pleasant familiar sight of squat sailor-men and squat craft before one’s eyes. In 1676, when simple and primitive ways of trade were vanishing and the watercourse was no longer useful or needful, the Heere Graft was filled in—reluctantly, we can believe—and became Broad Street.

The first mention of street-cleaning was in 1695, when Mr. Vanderspiegle undertook the job for thirty pounds a year. By 1701 considerable pains was taken to clean the city, and to remove obstructions in the public ways. Every Friday dirt was swept by each citizen in a heap in front of his or her house, and afterwards carted away by public cartmen, who had threepence a load if the citizen shovelled the dirt into the cart, sixpence if the cartman loaded his cart himself. Broad Street was cleaned by a public scavenger at a salary of $40 per annum paid by the city; for the dirt from other streets was constantly washed into it by rains, and it was felt that Broad Street residents should not be held responsible for other people’s dirt. Dumping-places were established. Regard was paid from an early date to preserving “the Commons.” It was ordered that lime should not be burnt thereon; that no hoopsticks or saplings growing thereon should be cut; no timber taken to make into charcoal; no turfs or sods carried away therefrom; no holes dug therein; no rubbish be deposited thereon.

Within the city walls all was orderly and quiet. “All persons who enter y^e gates of y^e citty with slees, carts and horses, horseback, not to ride faster than foot-tap.” The carters were forced to dismount and walk at their horses’ heads. All moved slowly in the town streets. Living in a fortified town, they still were not annoyed by discharge of guns, for the idle “fyring of pistells and gunns” was prohibited on account of “ill-conveniants.”

The first houses were framed and clap-boarded; the roofs were thatched with reeds; the chimneys were catted, made of logs of wood filled and covered with clay; sometimes even of reeds and mortar,—for there were, of course, at first no bricks. Hayricks stood in the public streets. Hence fires were frequent in the town, breaking out in the wooden catted chimneys; and the destruction of the inflammable chimneys was decreed by the magistrates. In 1648 it was ordered in New Amsterdam that no “wooden or platted chimney” should be built south of the Fresh-water Pond. Fire-wardens—brandt-meesters—were appointed, who searched constantly and pryingly for “foul chimney-harts,” and fined careless housekeepers therefor when they found them.

It is really surprising as well as amusing to see how the citizens resented this effort for their safety, this espionage over their hearthstones; and especially the wives resented the snooping in their kitchens. They abused the poor schout who inspected the chimney-hearths, calling him “a little cock, booted and spurred,” and other demeaning names. In 1658 Maddaleen Dirck, as she passed the door of the fire-warden, called out tantalizingly to him, “There is the chimney-sweep at his door,—his chimney is always well-swept.” She must have been well scared and truly repentant at the enormity of her offence when she was brought up before the magistrates and accused of having “insulted the worshipful fire-warden on the highway, and incited a riot.”

In spite of vigilance and in spite of laws, foul chimneys were constantly found. We hear of the town authorities “reciting that they have long since condemned flag-roofs, and wooden and platted chimneys, but their orders have been neglected, and several fires have occurred; therefore they amplify their former orders as follows: All flag-roofs, wooden chimneys, hay-barracks, and hay-stacks shall be taken down within four months, in the penalty of twenty-five guilders.”

The magistrates further equipped the town against conflagration by demanding payment of a beaver skin from each house, to purchase with the collected sum two hundred and fifty leather fire-buckets from the Fatherland. But delays were frequent in ocean transportation, and the shoemakers in town finally made the fire-buckets. They were placed in ten groups in various houses throughout the town. For their good order and renewal, each chimney was thereafter taxed a guilder a year. By 1738, two engines with small, solid wooden wheels or rollers were imported from England, and cared for with much pride.

In Albany similar wooden chimneys at first were built; we find contractors delivering reeds for roofs and chimneys. “Fire-leathes” and buckets were ordered. Buckets were owned by individuals and the town; were marked with initials for identification. Many stood a century of use, and still exist as cherished relics. The manner of bucket-service was this: As soon as an alarm of fire was given by shouts or bell-ringing, all citizens of all classes at once ran to the scene of the conflagration. All who owned buckets carried them, and from open windows other fire-buckets were flung out on the streets by persons who were delayed for a few moments by any cause. The running crowd seized the buckets, and on reaching the fire a double line was made from the fire to the river. The buckets filled with water were passed up the line to the fire, the empty buckets down. Any one who attempted to break the line was promptly soused with a bucket of water. When all was over, the fire-warden took charge of the buckets, and as soon as possible the owners appeared, and each claimed and carried home his own buckets.

There was a police department in New Amsterdam as well as a fire department. In 1658 the burgomasters and schepens appointed a ratel-wacht, or rattle-watch, of ten watchmen, of whom Lodewyck Pos was Captain. Their wages were high,—twenty-four stuyvers (about fifty cents) each a night, and plenty of firewood. The Captain collected fifty stuyvers a month from each house,—not as has since been collected in like manner for the private bribing of the police, but as a legalized method of paying expenses. The rules for the watch are amusing, but cannot be given in full. They sometimes slept on duty, as they do now, and paid a fine of ten stuyvers for each offence. They could not swear, nor fight, nor be “unreasonable;” and “when they receive their quarter-money, they shall not hold any gathering for drink nor any club meeting.”

Attention is called to one rule then in force: “If a watchman receive any sum of money as a fee, he shall give the same to the Captain; and this fee so brought in shall be paid to the City Treasurer”—oh the good old times!

The presence of a considerable force of troops was a feature of life in some towns. The soldiers were well cared for when quartered within the fort, sleeping on good, soft, goose-feather beds, with warm homespun blankets and even with linen sheets, all hired from the Dutch vrouws; and supplied during the winter with plentiful loads of firewood, several hundred, through levy on the inhabitants; good hard wood, too,—“no watte Pyn wood, willige, oly noote, nor Lindewood” (which was intended for English, but needs translation into “white pine, willow, butternut, nor linden”).

No doubt the soldiers came to be felt a great burden, for often they were billeted in private houses. We find one citizen writing seriously what reads amusingly like modern slang,—that “they made him weary.” Another would furnish bedding, provisions, anything, if he need not have any soldier-boarders assigned to him. One of the twenty-three clauses of the “Articles of Surrender” of the Dutch was that the “townsmen of Manhattans shall not have any soldiers quartered upon them without being satisfied and paid for them by their officers.” In Governor Nicholl’s written instructions to the commander at Fort Albany, he urges him not to lend “too easey an eare” to the soldiers’ complaints against their land-lords.

Since in the year 1658 the soldiers of New Amsterdam paid but twenty cents a week for quarters when lodged with a citizen, it is not surprising that their presence was not desired. A soldier’s pay was four dollars a month.

They were lawless fellows, too lazy to chop wood for their fires; they had to be punished for burning up for firewood the stockades they were enlisted to protect. Their duties were slight,—a drill in the morning, no sentry work during the day, a watch over the city gates at night, and cutting wood. The military code of the day reveals a very lax condition of discipline; it wasn’t really much of an army in Dutch days. And as for the Fort and the Battery in the town of New Amsterdam, read Mr. Janvier’s papers thereon to learn fully their innocuous pretence of warlikeness.

There was very irregular foreign and in-land mail service. It is with a retrospectively pitying shiver that we read a notice, as late as 1730, that “whoever inclines to perform the foot-post to Albany this winter may make application to the Post-Master.” Later we find the postmaster leisurely collecting the mail during several weeks for “the first post to Albany this winter.” Of course this foot-post was only made when the river was frozen over; swift sloops carried the summer mail up the river in two or three weeks,—sometimes in only ten days from New York to Albany. I can fancy the lonesome post journeying alone up the solemn river, under the awe-full shadow of old Cro’nest, sometimes climbing the icy Indian paths with ys-sporen, oftener, I hope, skating swiftly along, as a good son of a Hollander should, and longing every inch of the way for spring and the “breaking-up” of the river.

In 1672, “Indian posts” carried the Albany winter mail; trustworthy redmen, whose endurance and honesty were at the service of their white friends.

The first regular mail started by mounted post from New York for Boston on January 1, 1673. His “portmantles” were crammed with letters and “small portable goods” and “divers bags.” He was “active, stout, indefatigable, and honest.” He could not change horses till he reached Hartford. He was ordered to keep an eye out for the best ways through forests, and accommodations at fords, ferries, etc., and to watch for all fugitive soldiers and servants, and to be kind to all persons journeying in his company. While he was gone eastward a locked box stood in the office of the Colonial Secretary at New York to collect the month’s mail. The mail the post brought in return, being prepaid, was carried to the “coffee-house,” put on a table, well thumbed over by all who cared to examine it, and gradually distributed, two or three weeks’ delay not making much difference any way.

As in all plantations in a new land, there was for a time in New Netherland a lack of servants. Complaints were sent in 1649 to the States-General of “the fewness of boors and farm-servants.” Domestic servants were not found in many households; the capable wife and daughters performed the housework and dairy work. As soon as servants were desired they were speedily procured from Africa. The Dutch brought the first negro slaves to America. In the beginning these slaves in New Netherland were the property of the Dutch West India Company, which rented their services. The company owned slaves from the year 1625, when it first established its authority, and promised to each patroon twelve black men and women from ships taken as prizes. In 1644 it manumitted twelve of the negroes who had worked faithfully nearly a score of years in servitude. In 1652 the Government in Holland consented to the exportation of slaves to the colony for sale. In 1664 Governor Stuyvesant writes of an auction of negroes that they brought good prices, and were a great relief to the garrison in supplying funds to purchase food. Thus did the colony taste the ease of ill-gotten wealth. Though the Duke of York and his governors attempted to check the slave-trade, by the end of the century the negroes had increased much in numbers in the colony. In the Kip family were twelve negro house-servants. Rip van Dam had five; Colonel de Peyster and the Widow Van Courtlandt had each seven adult servants. Colonel Bayard, William Beeckman, David Provoost, and Madam Van Schaick each had three.

On Long Island slaves abounded. It is the universal testimony that they were kindly treated by the Dutch,—too kindly, our English lady thought, who rented out her slaves. Masters were under some bonds to the public. They could not, under Dutch rule, whip their slaves without authorization from the government. The letters in the Lloyd Collection in regard to the slave Obium are striking examples of kindly consideration, and of constant care and thought for his comfort and happiness.

The wages of a hired servant-girl in New York in 1655 were three dollars and a half a month, which was very good pay when we consider the purchasing power of money at that time. It is not till the eighteenth century that we read of the beginning of our vast servant-supply of Irish servants.

There was much binding out of children and young folk for terms of service. In Stuyvesant’s time several invoices of Dutch children from the almshouses were sent to America to be put to service, and the official letters concerning them show much kindliness of thought and intent towards these little waifs and strays. Early in the next century a sad little band of Palatines was bound out in New York families. It may prove of interest to give one of the bonds of indenture of a house-servant in Albany.

“This Indenture witnesseth that Aulkey Hubertse, Daughter of John Hubertse, of the Colony of Rensselaerwyck deceased hath bound herself as a Meniall Servant, and by these presents doth voluntary and of her own free will and accord bind herself as a Meniall Servant unto John Delemont of the City of Albany, weaver, by and with the consent of the Deacons of the Reformed Dutch Church in the Citty of Albany, who are as overseers in the disposal of the said Aulkey Hubertse to serve from the date of these present Indentures unto the full end and term of time that the said Aulkey Hubertse shall come to Age, all which time fully to be Compleat and ended, during all which term the said servant her said Master faithfully shall serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands gladly everywhere obey, she shall do no Damage to her said Master nor see it to be done by others without letting or giving notice thereof to her said Master: she shall not waste her Master’s goods or lend them unlawfully to any. At Cards, Dice, or any unlawful Game she shall not play whereby her said Master may have Damage: with her own goods or the goods of others during the said Term, without License from her said Master she shall neither buy or sell: she shall not absent herself day or night from her Master’s service without his Leave, nor haunt Ale-houses, Taverns, or Play-houses, but in all things as a faithful servant, she shall behave herself towards her said Master and all his during the said Term. And the said Master during the said Term, shall find and provide sufficient Wholesome and compleat meat and drink, washing, lodging, and apparell and all other Necessarys fit for such a servant: and it is further agreed between the said Master and Servant in case the said Aulkey Hubertse should contract Matrimony before she shall come to Age then the said Servant is to be free from her said Master’s service by virtue thereof: and at the expiration of her said servitude, her said Master John Delemont shall find provide for and deliver unto his said servant double apparell, that is to say, apparell fit for to have and to wear as well on the Lords Day as working days, both linning and woolen stockings and shoes and other Necessarys meet for such a servant to have and to wear, and for the true performance of all and every of said Covenant and Agreements the said parties bind themselves unto each other by these presents.”

This indenture was signed and sealed in the year 1710, and varied little from those of previous years. Sometimes the apparel was fully described, and was always good and substantial—and Sunday attire was usually furnished. Sarah Davis, bound out in Albany in 1684, was to be taught to read and knit stockings; was to have silk hoods and a silk scarf for church wear, and substantial petticoats and waistcoats, some of homespun, some of “jersey-spun,” others of “carsoway,” which was kersey.

“Redemptioners,” bound for a term of service as domestic and farm servants, also came from the various European States; and good servants often did they prove, and good citizens, too, when their terms of service expired. There also opened in this emigration of redemptioners a vast opportunity for adventure. In the “New York Gazette” of March 15, 1736, we read of one servant-girl adventurer:—

“We hear that about two years ago a certain Irish gentlewoman was brought into this province a servant, but she pretended to be a great fortune worth some thousands (was called the Irish Beauty). Her master confirming the same a certain young man (Mr. S***ds), courted her; and she seemingly shy, her master for a certain sum of money makes up the match, and they were married and go to their country-seat; but she not pleased with that pursuades her husband to remove to the city of New York and set up a great tavern. They did so. Next she pursuades her husband to embark for Ireland to get her great portion. When he comes there he finds her mother a weeder of gardens to get bread. In his absence Madam becomes acquainted with one Davis, and they sell and pack up her husband’s effects, which were considerable, and embark for North Carolina. When they come there they pass for man and wife, and he first sells the negroes and other effects, then sells her clothes and at last he sells her for a servant, and with the produce returns to his wife in Rhode Island, he having made a very good voyage.”

They were constantly eloping with their masters’ or mistresses’ wardrobes, sometimes with portions of both, and setting up as gentlefolk on their own account. We find one Jersey girl running a fine rig: dressed in a velvet coat and scarlet knee-breeches, with a sword, cocked hat, periwig, and silken hose, she had a gay carouse in New York tap-houses and tea-gardens, as long as her stolen twenty pounds lasted; but with an empty stomach, she ceased to play the lad, and went sadly to the stone ketch. I turn regretfully from the redemptioners; they were the most picturesque and romance-bearing element of the community.

But little is known of the early practice of medicine in New Netherland, less than of the other American colonies, and that little is not of much importance. It must be remembered that the times were what Lowell has felicitously termed the twilight through which alchemy was passing into chemistry, and the science of medicine partook of mysticism. Astrology and alchemy were not yet things of the past. From the beginning of the settlement the West India Company paid a surgeon (Jacob Varravanger was the name of one) to live in New Amsterdam and care for the health of the Company’s “servants.” But soon so many “freemen” came—that is, not in the pay of the Company—that some doubts arose in the minds of the Council whether it would not be better to save the salary, by trusting to independent practitioners. There were three such in New Amsterdam in 1652. They made pills and a terrible dose of rhubarb, senna, and port-wine, called “Vienna Drink.” But folk were discouragingly healthy in the little town in spite of poor water, and lack of drainage, and filth in the streets, and the Graft. Van der Donck said, “Galens have meagre soup in that country;” and soon the poor doctors, to add to their income, petitioned the Director that none but surgeons should be allowed to shave people. This was a weighty matter, and after profound consideration, the Council gave the following answer:—

“That shaving doth not appertain exclusively to chirugery, but is only an appanage thereof. That no man can be prevented from operating herein upon himself, or doing another this friendly act, provided that it be through courtesy, and that he do not receive any money for it, and do not keep an open-shop of that sort, which is hereby forbidden, declaring in regard to the last request, this act to belong to chirugery and the health of man.”

And the surgeons on shore were protected against the ship barbers, who landed and who made some pretty grave mistakes when attempting to doctor in the town. In 1658 Dr. Varravanger, somewhat disgusted at the treatment of the sick, who, if they had no families, had to trust to the care of strangers, established the first New York Hospital, which was, after all, only a clean and suitable house with fire and wood and one good woman to act as matron.

There was no lack of physicians,—half a dozen by 1650. A century later, the historian of the province pronounced the towns to be swarming with quacks.

One tribute to old-time medicine and New York medical men we owe still. The well-known Kiersted Ointment manufactured and sold in New York to-day is made from a receipt of old Dr. Hans Kiersted’s, the best colonial physician of his day, who came to New York in 1638. The manufacture of this ointment is a closely guarded family secret. He married the daughter of the famous Anneke Jans; and, in the centuries that have passed, the descendants have had more profit from the ointment than from the real estate. There were plenty of “wise women” to care for the increase of the populace; the New Amsterdam midwife had a house built for her by the government. It was a much respected calling. The mother of Anneke Jans was a midwife. They were licensed to practise. Here is an appointment by the Governor in 1670:—

“Whereas I am given to understand that Tryntje Meljers ye wife of Wynant Vander pool a sworn and approved midwife at Albany in which Imployment she hath Continued for y^e span of fourteen years past in good reputation not refusing her assistance but on y^e contrary affording her best help to y^e poorer sorte of people out of Christian Charity, as well as to ye richer sorte for reward, and there being severall other less skilfull women who upon occasion will pretend to be midwives where they can gain by it but refuse their helpe to y^e poore. These presents Certifye That I doe allow of y^e said Tryntje Meljers to be one of y^e profest sworne midwives at Albany, and that she and one more skilfull woman be only admitted to Undertake ye same there except upon Extraordinary occasions. They continuing their Charitable assistance to y^e poore & a diligent attendance on their calling.”

The small number of settlers, the exigencies and hardships of a planter’s life, the absence of luxuries, as well as the simplicity of social manners among the Dutch, prohibited anything during the rule of the Dutch in New Netherland which might, by a long and liberal stretch of phraseology or idealization of a revered ancestry, be termed fashionable life.

They occasionally had a merry dinner. Captain Beaulieu, a gay Frenchman who brought a prize into port, gave a costly one for fourteen persons; and as he did not pay for it, it has passed into history. Governor Stuyvesant had a fine dinner given to him on the eve of one of his “gallant departures.” De Vries has left us an amusing account of a quarrelsome feast given by the gunner of the Fort. Eating and drinking were ever the Dutchman’s pleasures.

With the establishment of English rule there came to the town of the Governor’s residence, in the Province of New York as in the other provinces, a little stilted attempt at the semblance of a court.

Formal endeavors to have something of the nature of a club were made under the English governors, to promote a social feeling in the town. A letter of the day says, “Good correspondence is kept between the English and Dutch; to keep it closer sixteen families (ten Dutch and six English) have had a constant meetting at each other’s houses in Turnes twice every week in winter and now in summer once. They meet at six at night, and part at about eight or nine.” The exceedingly early hours of these social functions seem to accent the simplicity of the life of the times even more than the absence of any such meetings would have done. The arrival of a new Governor was naturally an important and fashionable event. When the Earl and Countess of Bellomont landed in New York in 1698 they were, of course, greeted first with military salutes; four barrels of gunpowder made sufficient noise of welcome. Then a great dinner to a hundred and fifty people was given. It was presided over by the handsomest man in town. Mayor de Peyster, and the fare consisted of “venison, turkey, chicken, goose, pigeon, duck and other game; mutton, beef, lamb, veal, pork, sausages; with puddings, pastry, cakes and choicest of wines.” It was a fine welcome, but such dinners did not come every day to the Governor; he had other and sorrier gatherings in store. Soon we hear of him shut up eight days in succession in Albany (as he said in his exceedingly plain English) “in a close chamber with fifty sachems, who besides the stink of bear’s grease with which they were plentifully bedaubed, were continually smoking and drinking of rum,” and coming back to town in a “nasty slow little sloop.” No wonder he fell dangerously sick with the gout.

Mrs. Grant, writing of New York society in the middle of the eighteenth century, said:—

“At New York there was always a governor, a few troops, and a kind of little court kept; there was a mixed, and in some degree polished society. To this the accession of many families of French Huguenots rather above the middling rank, contributed not a little.”

This little important circle had some fine balls. On January 22, 1734, one was given at the Fort on the birthday of the Prince of Wales, which lasted till four in the morning. Another was given in honor of the King’s birthday. “The ladies made a splendant appearance. Sometimes as many as a hundred persons were present and took part.”

Occasionally a little flash of gossiping brightness shows us a picture of the every-day life of the times in the capital town. Such a bit of eighteenth-century scandal is the amusing account, from Mrs. Janet Montgomery’s unpublished Memoirs, of Lady Cornbury, wife of the Governor, Lord Cornbury. She died in New York in 1706, much eulogized, and most ostentatiously mourned for by her husband. Mrs. Montgomery’s account of her is this:—

“The lady of this very just nobleman was equally a character. He had fallen in love with her ear, which was very beautiful. The ear ceased to please and he treated her with neglect. Her pin-money was withheld and she had no resource but begging and stealing. She borrowed gowns and coats and never returned them. As hers was the only carriage in the city, the rolling of the wheels was easily distinguished, and then the cry in the house was ‘There comes my lady; hide this, hide that, take that away.’ Whatever she admired in her visit she was sure to send for next day. She had a fancy to have with her eight or ten young ladies, and make them do her sewing work, for who could refuse their daughters to my lady.”

What a picture of the times! the fashionable though impecunious Englishwoman and the score of industrious young Dutch-American seamstresses sitting daily and most unwillingly in the Governor’s parlor.

One of the most grotesque episodes in New York political history, or indeed in the life of any public official, was the extraordinary notion of this same Governor, Lord Cornbury, to dress in women’s clothes. Lord Stanhope and Agnes Strickland both assert that when Cornbury was appointed Governor and told he was to represent her Majesty Queen Anne, he fancied he must dress as a woman. Other authorities attribute his absurd masquerade to his fond belief that in that garb he resembled the Queen, who was his cousin. Mrs. Montgomery said it was in consequence of a vow, and that in a hoop and head-dress and with fan in hand he was frequently seen in the evening on the ramparts. A portrait of him owned by Lord Hampton shows him in the woman’s dress of the period, fan in hand. Truly it was, as Lewis Morris wrote of him to the Secretary of State, “a peculiar and detestable magot,” and one which must have been most odious and trying to honest, manly New Yorkers, and especially demoralizing to the soldiers before whom he paraded in petticoats. When summarily deposed by his cousin from his governorship, he was promptly thrust into a New York debtor’s prison, where he languished till the death of his father made him third Earl of Clarendon.

CHAPTER V
DUTCH TOWN HOMES

The first log houses of the settlers, with their “reeden roofs,” were soon supplanted by a more substantial form of edifice, Dutch, naturally, in outline. They were set with the gable-end to the street and were often built of Dutch brick, or, at any rate, the gable-ends were of brick.

Madam Knights’ description of the city of New York and the houses is wonderfully clear, as is every account from her graphic pen, but very short:—

“The Buildings are Brick Generaly, very stately and high though not altogether like ours in Boston. The Bricks in some of the Houses are of divers Coullers and laid in Checkers, being glazed, look very agreable. The inside of them is neat to admiration; the wooden work, for only the walls are plaster’d, and the Sumers and Gist are planed and kept very white scour’d as so is all the partitions if made of Bords.”

Albany long preserved its Dutch appearance and Dutch houses. Peter Kalm’s description of the city of Albany is a good one, and would well answer for other New York towns:—

“The houses in this town are very neat, and partly built with stones covered with shingles of the White Pine. Some are slated with tiles from Holland, because the clay of this neighborhood is not reckoned fit for tiles. Most of the houses are built in the old way, with the gable-end towards the street; the gable-end of brick and all the other walls of planks. The gutters on the roofs reach almost to the middle of the street. This preserves the walls from being damaged by the rain, but it is extremely disagreeable in rainy weather for the people in the streets, there being hardly any means of avoiding the water from the gutters.

“The street doors are generally in the middle of the houses and on both sides are seats, on which, during fair weather the people spend almost the whole day, especially on those which are in the shadow of the houses. In the evening these seats are covered with people of both sexes, but this is rather troublesome, as those who pass by are obliged to greet everybody unless they will shock the politeness of the inhabitants of this town. The streets are broad and some of them are paved; in some parts they are lined with trees. The long streets are almost parallel to the river, and the others intersect them at right angles.”

Rev. Samuel Chandler, chaplain of one of the Massachusetts regiments, stopped several days in Albany in the year 1755. He tells of the streets with rows of small button-trees, of the brick houses curiously flowered with black brick and dated with the same, the Governor’s house having “two black brick-hearts.” The houses one story high with their gable-ends “notched like steps” (he might have said with corbel-steps), were surmounted with vanes, the figures of horses, lions, geese, and sloops. There were window shutters with loop-holes outside the cellars. Smith, the historian of New York, writing at the same time, calls the houses of all the towns, “built of brick in Dutch taste.” Daniel Denton, writing as early as 1670, tells of the “red and black tile (of New York) giving at a distance a pleasing aspect to the Spectators.” All the old sketches of the town which exist, crude as they are, certainly do present a pleasing aspect.

The chief peculiarity of these houses were the high roofs; some were extraordinarily steep and thus afforded a garret, a loft, and a cock-loft. There was reason and economy in this form of roof. The shingle covering was less costly than the walls, and the contraction in size of second-story rooms was not great.

Very few of the steep roofs in the earliest days had eave-troughs, hence the occasional use in early deeds and conveyances of the descriptive term “free-drip.” At a later date troughs were made of sections of the bark of some tree (said to be birch) which the Indians brought into town and sold to house builders. Then came metal spouts projecting several feet, as noted by Kalm. In 1789, when Morse’s Geography was issued, he speaks of the still projecting water-spouts or gutters of Albany, “rendering it almost dangerous to walk the streets on a rainy day;” but in New York more modified fashions obtained long before that time.

The windows were small; some had two panes. When we learn that the ordinary panes of glass imported at that time were in size only six inches by eight inches, we can see that the windows were only loop-holes.

The front doors were usually divided as in Holland, into an upper and lower half. They were in early days hung on strap-hinges, afterwards on heavy iron hinges. In the upper half of the door, or in a sort of transom over the door, were set two round bull’s-eyes of heavy greenish glass, just as are seen in Holland. Often the door held a knocker of brass or of iron. The door usually opened with a latch.

The inventories of the household effects of many of the early citizens of New York might be given, to show the furnishings of these homes. I choose the belongings of Captain Kidd to show that “as he sailed, as he sailed” he left a very comfortable home behind him. He was, when he set up housekeeping with his wife Sarah in 1692, not at all a bad fellow, and certainly lived well. He possessed these handsome and abundant house furnishings:—

• One dozen Turkey work chairs.
• One dozen double-nailed leather chairs.
• Two dozen single-nailed leather chairs.
• One Turkey worked carpet.
• One oval table.
• Three chests of drawers.
• Four looking-glasses.
• Four feather beds, bolsters, and pillows.
• Three suits of curtains and valances.
• Four bedsteads.
• Ten blankets.
• One glass case.
• One dozen drinking-glasses.
• Four tables.
• Five carpets or rugs.
• One screen frame.
• Two stands.
• One desk.
• Two dressing boxes.
• One close stool.
• One warming pan.
• Two bed pans.
• Three pewter tankards.
• Four kettles.
• Two iron pots.
• One skillet.
• Three pairs of fire irons.
• One pair of andirons.
• Three chafing dishes.
• One gridiron.
• One flesh fork.
• One brass skimmer.
• Four brass candlesticks.
• Two pewter candlesticks.
• Four tin candlesticks.
• One brass pestle.
• One iron mortar.
• 2¹⁄₂ dozen pewter plates.
• Five pewter basins.
• Thirteen pewter dishes.
• Five leather buckets.
• One pipe Madeira wine.
• One half-pipe ” ”
• Three barrels pricked cider.
• Two pewter salt-cellars.
• Three boxes smoothing irons.
• Six heaters.
• One pair small andirons.
• Three pairs tongs.
• Two fire shovels.
• Two fenders.
• One spit.
• One jack.
• One clock.
• One coat of arms.
• Three quilts.
• Parcel linen sheets, table cloths, napkins, value thirty dollars.
• One hundred and four ounces silver plate, value three hundred dollars.

The early New Englanders sat in their homes on stools and forms, and very rarely on chairs. It is not so easy to know of Dutch furnishings, for the words stoel and setel and banck, which are found in early inventories, all mean a chair, but also may not have meant in colonial days what we now designate as a chair. A stoel was really a seat of any kind; and stoels there were in plenty among the first settlers. As Cowper says:

“Necessity invented stools,

Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,

And Luxury the accomplished Sofa last.”

In this natural succession came the seats of the colonists. The leather chairs with double rows of nails—in Captain Kidd’s list—were a very substantial and handsome piece of furniture.

Tables there were in all houses, and looking-glasses in all well-to-do homes. The stands of Captain Kidd were small tables. The carpets named after the tables were doubtless table-covers. The early use of the word was always a cover for a table.

A truly elegant piece of furniture—one in use by well-to-do folk in all the colonies—was a cupboard. Originally simply a table for the display of cups and other vessels, it came to have shelves and approach in form our sideboard. An inventory of a New York citizen of the year 1690 names a “Holland cupboard furnished with earthenware and purslin” worth fifteen pounds. Another owned a French nut-wood cupboard of about the same value. Cupboard-cloths usually accompanied them. A few of these cupboards still exist, usually their exact history forgotten, but still known as “Holland cupboards.” As long as the inventories of estates of deceased persons were made out and registered with much minuteness of detail, a single piece of furniture could be traced readily from heir to heir, but unfortunately only the older inventories display this minuteness.

One unusual word may be noted, which is found in New York inventories, boilsted, bilsted, or billsted—as “a boilsted bed,” “a boilsted bureau.” The “Century Dictionary” gives bilsted as the native name of the American sweet-gum tree, the liquidambar, but Mr. Watson says boilsted or bilsted meant maple,—hence these articles meant a bureau of maplewood, etc.

A very common form of bedstead in early days, both in town and farm houses, was the one built into the house, scarcely more than a bench to hold the bedding, usually set into an alcove or recess. In a contract for the “Ferry House,” built in Brooklyn in 1665 (the house in which the ferry-master lived), we read one clause thus: “to wainscot the east side the whole length of the house, and in the recess two bedsteads (betste) one in the front room and one in the inside room, with a pantry at the end of the bedstead.”

This alcove betste was much like a cupboard; it had doors which closed over it when unoccupied and shut it from view. This does not seem very tidy from our modern point of view, but the heavily curtained and upholstered beds of other countries gave but little more opportunity of airing. Adam Roelandsen, the first New York schoolmaster, had these betste built in his house; and Jan Peeck, the founder of Peekskill, had four betste in his country home, as certainly were needed by a man who had—so he said—“a house full of children and more besides.”

The sloep-banck, or slaw-bunk, was another form, a folding-bed. This was also set within closet doors or hanging curtains. It was an oblong frame filled in with a network of rope or strips of wood, set apart like the slats of a bed. This frame was fastened to the wall at one end, the bed’s head, with heavy hinges; and at night it was placed in a horizontal position, and the unhinged end, or foot of the bed, was supported on heavy turned legs which fitted into sockets in the frame. When not in use, the frame was hooked up against the wall and covered with the curtains or doors.

Other sloep-bancks were stationary. One sold in Albany in 1667 to William Brouwer was worth ten guilders. Parson Chandler as late as 1755 said the beds in Albany were simply wooden boxes, each with feather-bed, undersheet, and blanket cover. The kermis bed, on which the Labadist fathers slept in Brooklyn, was a pallet bed. Another bedstead often named was the trecke-bedde, or the sloep-banck ap rollen, which, as its name implies, was on rollers. It was a trundle-bed, and in the daytime was rolled under a high-post bedstead, if there were one in the room, and concealed by the valance of calico or chiney.

The beds were deep and soft, of prime geese feathers. For many years the custom obtained of sleeping on one feather-bed and under another of somewhat lighter weight. The pillow-cases, called “pillow-bears,” or pillow-clothes, were often of checked linen. The hangings of the bed when it was curtained were also, in families of moderate means, of checked and striped linen, in wealthier houses of kidderminster, camlet, and harrateen. With English modes of living came English furniture; among other innovations the great carved four-poster, which, richly hung with valances and tester, was, as Mrs. Grant said, “the state-bed, the family Teraphim, secretly worshipped and only exhibited on rare occasions.” The bedsteads of Captain Kidd with valances and curtains were doubtless four-posters.

A notable feature in the house-furnishing of early colonial days was the abundance and good quality of household linen. The infrequency of regular washing seasons and times (often domestic washing took place but once in three or four months) made a large amount of bed, table, and personal linen a matter of necessity in all thrifty, tidy households. One family, in 1704 (not a very wealthy one), had linen to the amount of five hundred dollars. Francis Rombout, one of the early mayors of New York, had, at the time of his death, in the year 1690, fifty-six diaper napkins, forty-two coarse napkins and towels, thirteen table-cloths of linen and diaper, fifty-one “pillow-bears,” thirty sheets, four bolster-covers, ten checked “pillow-bears,” two calico cupboard-cloths, six table-cloths, four check chimney-cloths, two of linen; worth in all, twenty-one pounds eleven shillings.

Mynheer Marius, who was worth about fifteen thousand dollars,—a rich man,—had eight muslin sheets, twenty-three linen sheets, thirty-two pillow-cases, two linen table-cloths, seven diaper table-cloths, sixty-one diaper napkins, three “ozenbergs” napkins, sixteen small linen cupboard-cloths. Colonel William Smith of Long Island was not so rich as the last-named Dutch merchant, but he had six hundred dollars’ worth of linen. John Bowne, the old Quaker of Flushing, Long Island, recorded in his diary, in 1691, an account of his household linen. He had four table-cloths, a dozen napkins, a dozen towels, six fine sheets, two cotton sheets, four coarse linen sheets, two fine tow sheets, two bolster cases, nine fine pillow-biers, four coarse pillow-biers.

In 1776, the house furnishings of a house in Westchester County in the “Neutral Ground,” were removed on account of the war. The linen consisted of fifty-one linen sheets, eleven damask table-cloths, one linen table-cloth, twenty-one homespun cloths, four breakfast cloths, twelve damask napkins, fifty-six homespun napkins, fifteen towels, twenty-nine pillow-cases.

This linen was usually kept in a great linen chest often brought from Holland. Made of panelled oak or of cedar, these chests were not only useful, but ornamental. They were substantial enough to have lasted till our own day, unless wantonly destroyed as clumsy and cumbersome, and a few have survived.

There was one display of wealth which was not wholly for the purpose of exhibiting the luxury and refinement of the housekeeper, but also served as a safe investment of surplus funds,—household silver. From early days silver tankards, spoons, dram-cups, and porringers appear in inventories. Salt-cellars and beakers are somewhat rare; but as years crept on, candlesticks, salvers, coffee-pots, teakettles, snuffers, bread-baskets, and punch-bowls are on the list. When Captain Kidd, the pirate, was a happy bridegroom in 1692, as a citizen of respectability and social standing, he started housekeeping with three hundred dollars’ worth of silver. Magistrate Marius had at the same time a silver tankard, three salt-cellars, two beakers, a mustard pot and spoon, twenty-seven sweet-meat spoons, four tumblers, nine cups each with two ears, a salver, a mug and cover, a baby’s chafing-dish, a fork and cup. Governor Rip van Dam had in silver three tankards, a chafing-dish, three castors, two candlesticks, snuffers and tray, two salvers, a mug, salt-cellar and pepper-pot, and a large number of spoons. Abraham de Peyster had a splendid array: four tankards, two decanters, two dishes, three plates, eleven salvers, two cups and covers, two chafing-dishes, six porringers, four sauce-boats, two punch-bowls, three mugs, four sugar-dishes, a coffee-pot and tea-pot, seven salts and shovels, a saucepan, four pairs snuffers and stand, a mustard-pot, a bread-basket, a dram-bottle, tobacco-dish, nine castors, six candlesticks, one waiter, twenty-three forks, three soup-spoons, two punch ladles, ten table-spoons, ten teaspoons, two sugar-tongs; truly a display fit for a fine English hall. We may note in this, as in many other inventories, that the number of small pieces seems very small and inadequate; ten teaspoons and twenty-three forks appear vastly disproportioned to the great pieces of plate.

These outfits of silver were, of course, unusual, but nearly all families had some pieces; and even on farms there would be seen fine pieces of silver.

Curious forms of Dutch silver were the “bite and stir” sugar boxes, often shell-shaped, with a partition in the middle. On one side was placed the loaf sugar, which could be nibbled with the tea; on the other, the powdered or granulated sugar, which could be stirred into the teacup with a tea-spoon. Another graceful piece was the ooma, or sifter, for the mixed cinnamon and sugar with which many sprinkled their hot waffles. An ooma resembled a muffineer. The name was derived from the Dutch oom, an uncle, and the article was a favorite gift of an uncle on the wedding day of niece or nephew. We find Dutch dames leaving by will “milk-pots shaped like a cow,” a familiar form of Dutch silver, and can readily believe that much silver owned in New York was made in Holland.

Coming from a country where the manufacture of porcelain and stone-ware was already of much importance, and the importation of Oriental china was considerable, it is not strange that we find more frequent mention of articles of china than in the English colonies. For instance, Mayor Francis Rombouts came to this country as clerk for a Dutch commercial house and died in 1690. He had a cupboard furnished with earthenware and “purslin:” twenty-six earthen dishes, earthen pots, twelve earthen “cupps,” six “purslin cupps,” six earthen “juggs,” six pitchers, which was really a very pretty showing. Doubtless the “purslin” was Delft. In the list of early sales at Fort Orange, earthen-ware appears. In New England, in similar sales, its name would never be seen.

Trim and orderly pieces of furniture, as well as pretty ones, were the various hanging wall-racks for plates, knives, and spoons. I presume they were shaped like the ones still in use in Holland. We find in inventories lepel-borties (which were spoon-racks) as early as 1664. When an oaken plate-rack was filled with shining pewter plates, Delft dishes, or even red earthen “Portugese ware,” it made a thoroughly artistic decoration for the walls of the old Dutch kitchen. There were also stands or boxes with divisions for holding knives and forks.