Chapter VI: Introduction: By Albert Shaw (4)

Precisely nine years later, however, what had formerly been called New Amsterdam, but was now New York, yielded itself to a little Dutch fleet without striking a defensive blow. Captain Colve’s victory was so lightly won, indeed, that the English commander, Captain Manning, was courtmartialled for his apparent inefficiency, cowardice or treason, and the estates of the Governor, Colonel Lovelace, who, when the blow fell, was absent on affairs of state, were confiscated by the Duke. The triumph of the Hollanders was short-lived; for the year 1674 had not run its course when Major Edmund Andros assumed the governorship, and by the terms of a treaty of peace between England and the States-General, New Orange, as the place had been christened by the Dutch, again and finally became New York.

New York has been in turn a Dutch village, an English town, and an American city. In its infancy it was wholly Dutch; but in its early youth the population was so leavened by English immigration that the transition to English control was less violent than one might expect it to have been. English influence was powerful even in Stuyvesant’s day; and when Stuyvesant was supplanted by Nicolls, the Dutch element was still powerful in the councils of the little town. The new ruler moved slowly and cautiously in anglicizing the government, and almost all the changes he made were for the better. The brief resumption of Dutch authority in 1673 was reactionary and wholly detrimental to the interests of the community; and, all things considered, the peaceful cession of the town to England, a year later, was the happiest chance that could possibly have befallen.

A more violent and radical change was effected in 1689, when Jacob Leisler seized the occasion of the fall of the Stuart dynasty to grasp the reins of government which Andros had been forced to drop. By the aid of the militia and with the support of nearly all the less prosperous townsfolk, he administered public affairs till that good Dutchman William III. of England commissioned Governor Sloughter to hang the usurper and reign in his stead. Leisler’s rule had been in many respects an enlightened one, and years afterward his adherents succeeded in having his dishonored bones dug up and honorably reinterred. It was in this town, and at the instance of this earnest but ill-balanced and despotic champion of the poor, that the American Colonies took their first step toward concerted action, their objective being the overthrow of the French at Montreal.

The most striking characteristic of New York has always been its cosmopolitanism. As Governor Roosevelt points out in his capital review of the city’s history, no less than eighteen different languages and dialects were spoken in the streets so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century. The Dutch, the English and the Huguenot refugees from France predominated, but there were many Walloons and Germans, and a large body of black slaves. The riffraff of the Old World was to be found here, as well as the nobly adventurous; and, in fact, at all times since, the proportion of foreign-born residents has been very large.

In the period immediately preceding the Revolution, the desire for independence was far less general in New York than in Massachusetts or Virginia. The large land owners and leading merchants were mainly members of the Church of England; and while there was no state church, so called and admitted to be such, the Anglicans were first in wealth and fashion, and their organization enjoyed exclusive privileges. Even King’s College (now Columbia University) was placed officially under Church control. The court party included not only the Anglican clergy and almost all the laity, but even an influential section of the membership of the Dutch Reformed Church. It included such families as the De Peysters, the De Lanceys and the Philippses in the city and its suburbs; and the Johnsons, who dominated central New York. There were Tories even on the Committee of Fifty-one that first authoritatively proposed the assembling of a Continental Congress. In no other colony was the Tory element so numerous and powerful; in none other were the patriots opposed by so active a spirit of loyalty to the Crown, and so vast a bulk of indifference on the part of property-owners, solicitous for nothing but the security of their possessions. At first the Schuylers, the Livingstons, and Hamilton, Jay and Morris found their support almost wholly among the masses, who rose not only against England, but also against the domination of the classes, which was more oppressive in the aristocratic city of New York than in the democratic town of Boston, or in Philadelphia. Thus, it was the so-called Sons of Liberty that had led in the agitation which made the Stamp Act a dead letter, so far as this colony was concerned, and a decade later prevented the landing of taxed tea on New York wharves. And their demonstrative radicalism found little response in the minds of some of the ablest civil and military leaders contributed by this colony to the work of liberation and reconstruction. But the violence of the mob could not blind such men to the essential justice of the American cause, and the actual beginning of the war found a large majority of the best people of the colony definitely committed to a patriotic course. So when Washington and his army were driven hither from Brooklyn and hence to New Jersey, in 1776, New York was no longer the populous place it had been before their sympathizers fled from the terrors of hostile military rule.

For the next seven years this remained the chief British stronghold in America. If the eastern and southern colonies could be split apart by English control of the Hudson, the backbone of the colonial federation would be broken—as the backbone of the Confederacy was broken, nearly a century later, by Sherman’s march to the sea. So every energy was bent toward dislodging the Continentals from this dividing-line. This was the immediate object of Arnold’s treachery, as well as of many an overt movement from south and north. But Washington outgeneralled the enemy and kept the federation intact, till the capture of Yorktown made New York no longer tenable by the foe. The city was well-nigh ruined by its experiences during these seven terrible years; and the outlying country to the north—Westchester County—suffered no less severely, being exposed to raids from the opposing bodies of regulars, and to constant marauding at the hands of free-booters, who pretended affiliation with one side or the other, sometimes in good faith, but often merely as a pretext for lawless depredations.

The most joyously celebrated event in the annals of Manhattan was the city’s evacuation by the British at the close of the war. On the day that this occurred, November 25, 1783, General Washington arrived in town and dined at Fraunces’s Tavern; and hither he repaired again, ten days later, on the eve of his departure for Annapolis, to bid farewell to his officers. In this same building, and in the same Long Room, the first meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce had been held, in 1768, fifteen years before any similar association was organized in Great Britain. This hostelry had, indeed, been the fashionable rendezvous of New Yorkers since 1762, when the shop at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl Streets was converted to still more public uses by Samuel Fraunces (“Black Tom”), who in later years was to become the first President’s steward. At the beginning it was known as the Queen’s Head Tavern, its sign bearing a portrait of Queen Charlotte. Enlarged, and otherwise altered, but not improved, Fraunces’s Tavern is still, as it has always been, a public-house, though fashion has long since deserted it. It would be most deplorable if the march of improvement (in whose name, as in Liberty’s, so many offences are committed) should ever be allowed to obliterate this most aged and interesting relic of old New York.

The war of 1812 was by no means popular with the representative merchants of New York, despite the fact that the enforcement of England’s pretended right of search had acted almost as a blockade of the port for some years before the outbreak of hostilities. It had been a common occurrence for merchantmen in the lower bay to be stopped by a shot across their bows, and searched for possible British subjects among their crews. But when war came the fighting spirit was aroused, and many a privateer was fitted out to prey upon the enemy’s merchant marine. Rich prizes were taken, and desperate engagements were fought between the crews of brigs and schooners from New York and British men-of-war’s men who interfered with their privateering practices. A few years earlier (1807), Fulton had demonstrated on the Hudson the practicability of steam navigation; and now he built in New York, under Congressional direction, a steam frigate, iron-clad and heavily armed. This formidable craft might have been depended upon to raise the British blockade, had it not been raised still more effectually by a declaration of peace. The city did not suffer in this second war with England as it had suffered in the first. Instead of waiting for years, as before, to recuperate, it entered at once upon a period of unprecedented growth. The return of peace stimulated immigration, and local prosperity was vastly augmented by the opening in 1825 of the Erie Canal.

Until 1822, the mayor was appointed by a State council, presided over by the Governor; thereafter, until 1834, he was chosen by the municipal council; since then he has been elected by the people. But democratic rule was not always found to work satisfactorily, and in 1857 the control of local affairs was largely delegated to the legislature. This precaution proved of comparatively little value, however, and the Tweed ring of local office-holders found little difficulty in running things as they wished and robbing the tax-payers of millions upon millions. The charter of the city recently created by the amalgamation of New York, Brooklyn, etc., professed to restore home rule, in large measure; but so much of the supposed boon as it confers may be withdrawn at any time by State legislation, and bills withdrawing it piecemeal are, in fact, introduced at every session of the legislature.

When secession threatened, in 1861, the Democratic city of New York was the least friendly of Northern communities in its attitude toward the federal government. The common council, indeed, rapturously applauded the mayor’s formal suggestion that the city itself secede. But the first overt act of hostility at the South showed that, beneath this surface sympathy with the secessionists, the great mass of earnest citizens were ardent in adherence to the Union. Life and treasure were poured out more than abundantly. The Seventh Regiment—the “crack” militia organization of the city, if not of the nation—hurried off to Washington to guard the capital from surprise; and tens of thousands of volunteers followed to the front. No one city contributed more to the national cause. In fact the city’s contributions were too liberal for her own good; for the consequent dearth of able-bodied honest men at home left the community a prey to the enemies of society, and regiment after regiment had to be called back to restore order. The worst outbreaks were the so-called draft riots, caused by the enforced enlistment of troops; in these uprisings, negroes were the special object of the mob’s hostility.

The first few huts in New Amsterdam were huddled together beneath the sheltering walls of the Fort. There was but one general direction in which the hamlet could extend; yet it was long before the northward movement filled with shops and houses the space between the Fort and the line of Wall Street, and for several years thereafter the great Wall marked the boundary of the village. The Revolution found the border pushed forward to the edge of the Common, where the post-office stands to-day. The chief outlet from this point lay eastward, through what is now Park Row to the Bowery, and thence through the outlying farms to Westchester County, Connecticut and Boston.

On the west side there was another outlet, skirting the Hudson River and extending to the little village of Greenwich; and the occasional outbreak of yellow fever in New York made this a popular resort. The influx of twenty thousand refugees during one of these scares, early in the present century, completely changed the character of this village, and although most of the newcomers returned to the lower end of the island, Greenwich had practically become, by 1830, an integral part of the city. The northward spread via Greenwich Street, the Bowery and Broadway continued, till Yorkville and Harlem on the east and Manhattanville and Bloomingdale on the west were absorbed by the growing city. In 1874 the Harlem was crossed, and New York ceased to be an island; in 1895 still further accessions were made in Westchester County. But the crowning event in the expansion of the city was the legislation by which, on January 1, 1898, Brooklyn and the outlying towns and villages on Long Island, and all of Staten Island, were brought within the limits of New York—an act that raised the population at a stroke from less than 1,900,000 to near 3,400,000, and incidentally brought almost half the people of the State under the immediate rule of Tammany Hall.

A word should be said as to the Society, named in honor of Tamanend, an Indian chief who signed one of the treaties by which William Penn acquired the site of the city of Philadelphia. One of many societies of the same name, organized for social and political purposes toward the close of the eighteenth century, it reflected, to a certain extent, a spirit which had prevailed among the younger officers of the Revolution who had felt the force of Rousseau’s idealization of primitive man. Its first meeting was held on “St. Tammany’s day” (May 12), 1789. In membership it was allied with the Sons of Liberty and the Sons of 1776, and it has always professed “intense Americanism,” so far as that phrase is synonymous with Anglophobia. At first its ranks were recruited from among the small merchants, retailers and mechanics of the city; and by coming into close touch with the mass of immigrants that form so large a proportion of the population, giving the newcomers employment in some cases, in others charitable aid, instructing the alien voter as to his political rights and privileges, and directing him in their exercise, it has built up an enormous voting machine, insufficient to defeat a united opposition, but almost invariably so fortunate in local contests as to find its opponents divided. While nominally Democratic in national affairs, Tammany has never scrupled to oppose the Democratic party in the pursuit of its own immediate end—the control of local offices and revenues. This powerful machine has now for several years been dominated by an illiterate immigrant.

Comparatively recent as were the beginnings of the city, hardly a trace of the original village remains. Not a single building has come down to us from the Dutch period. It was to have been expected that something would survive the flight of less than three centuries. A happy chance might easily have preserved the stone “temple” erected within the walls of the Fort in 1652, or the slightly older warehouse, or some one of the many curious little stone or brick houses in which the burly burghers of the seventeenth century smoked their long pipes by the chimney-side, while their wives plied the spinning-wheel, their daughters spread the board, and their children, in padded breeches, played about the sanded floor.

The Stadt Huys, originally built as an inn, to relieve Director Kieft of the burden of overmuch entertaining, dated back to the same year as the Dutch Reformed Church in the fortified enclosure. The organization of the old church is still maintained, and the functions of the city government have been performed in successive buildings to the present day; but the picturesque old government house—fifty feet square, three stories high in the walls and two in the attic, with windows in the gable of its crow-stepped roof,—that should have been cherished as a most interesting relic of the city’s earliest period, lasted but a little way into the present century, having then been used for over a hundred years for commercial purposes.

SHOWING GREEN ABOUT 1760.]

Chief among the few other survivals from the early days, and antedating all of them, is Bowling Green. This oldest bit of park land in the city dates from the Dutch occupation. It lay immediately in front of the Fort, and no building has ever stood upon its diminutive, oblong site. The relatively old row of buildings (Steamship Row) which overlooks it from the south will ere long be replaced by a Custom House worthy of the second port of entry in the world. This will occupy the site of the old government house, which once served the purpose for which the new building is designed. In 1771, it was found advisable to enclose the Green with an iron fence. Bereft of the crowns that surmounted the posts, the fence still surrounds it, though the equestrian statue of George III., which it was put up to protect, vanished in 1776. In the excitement that followed the reading of the Declaration of Independence, in that year, the crowd marched down Broadway from the Common, and tumbled the King from his pedestal. The leaden carcass was shipped to Connecticut, where the wife and daughter of Governor Wolcott cannily converted it into rebel bullets. An indignity similar in degree though different in kind was offered to America’s eloquent Parliamentary advocate, William Pitt, whose marble effigy at Wall and William Streets was decapitated during the Revolution by the Tories, and left standing for years as a mere “disturber of traffic.”

The house at No. 1 Broadway, looking eastward over the lower end of Bowling Green, built in 1760 by Colonel Kennedy, afterward Earl of Cassilis, and occupied in turn by the American leaders, including Washington, and by the English, including Cornwallis, Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, was the scene of Major André’s last interview with the British commander before his fatal journey to West Point. And in another house in Broadway overlooking the Green, Benedict Arnold had his quarters after his flight and the exposure of his infamous plot. Mention of the gallant young British officer, André, naturally suggests the name and fate of Nathan Hale, whose heroism is commemorated by a noble statue by MacMonnies, which faces Broadway from the lower corner of City Hall Park, not far from the spot where the American spy was hanged from an apple-tree. The Beekman “Mansion,” overlooking the East River near what is now Fifty-first Street, the scene of Hale’s trial and condemnation, survived till 1874; the Kennedy House, identified with André’s memory, lasted eight years longer.

A picturesque feature of the old town was the canal that ran from the city wall to the bay, becoming first an artery of trade, and then a centre of fashionable life, as Broad Street, which took its place, has since been a centre of commercial activity. It was directly opposite Broad Street, in Wall, that the foundations of the new City Hall were laid in 1699, the sale of the Stadt Huys helping to defray the cost of the more pretentious structure. The arms of the English Governor, Lord Bellomont, were blazoned on its walls; but two years later the marshal was called upon to remove and destroy them. When New York became the seat of the national government, the ninety-year-old City Hall, partly reconstructed and lavishly decorated, became the meeting-place of Congress. The most memorable day in its history was the 30th of April, 1789, when, attended by Chancellor Livingston and the committees of Senators and Representatives, standing upon its balcony in the presence of a great concourse, not merely of New Yorkers, but of Americans from all the colonies, gathered together from far and near, George Washington took the oath of office as first President of the United States. Where the Capitol then stood now stands the Sub-Treasury, with Ward’s bronze Washington looking gravely down from its steps upon the feverish turmoil of Wall Street.

The oldest existing municipal building in New York is the Hall of Records, in City Hall Park, whose contents are erelong to be housed in a spacious, fire-proof edifice. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its site formed a part of the Common, and it stood appropriately convenient to the gallows, for it was originally a jail—the first building on the island ever designed exclusively for the detention of law-breakers. In popular parlance, as in practical use, it soon became the Debtors’ Prison. When the British occupied the town during the Revolution, it was turned to account as their principal military prison, being known as The Provost, in reference to the title of the brutal Cunningham, who was charged with the custody of American prisoners of war—amongst others, “that d—d rebel, Ethan Allen.” The building was a debtors’ jail again from 1787 to 1830; on the completion of alterations projected at the latter date, it became, in 1835, the Register’s office, and as such will probably see the close of the nineteenth century.

Vastly more attractive to the eye than this treasury of real-estate records, and not wholly lacking in historic interest, is the adjacent City Hall. This really handsome building, in the style of the Italian Renaissance, was begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The likelihood of the city’s extending beyond it seemed too slight to warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly constructed of a cheaper stone. In the “Governor’s room” on the second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal Congress.

In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street. Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon the “topless towers” of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President Washington attended service there on the day of his first inauguration. These heaven-aspiring structures were only beginning to turn the street into a canyon when the first President’s successor in office sat in the same pew on the same day a century later (April 30, 1889).

Private houses of historic interest abounded not many years ago, notable among them the country-seat called Richmond Hill, near the long since absorbed village of Greenwich—a stately dwelling, identified with many familiar names. John Adams lived there during a part of his first term as Vice-President, and Aaron Burr started thence on that fateful July morning in 1804 that saw the death of Hamilton at his hand, and the end of his own political career. Of equal note was the house on Murray Hill, where Mrs. Murray detained the British commander at lunch while the American troops, under Putnam, made their escape from the island in 1776.

The so-called Jumel Mansion, built for Washington’s whilom flame, Miss Mary Philippse, by her successful suitor, Col. Roger Morris, and afterwards occupied by Washington as his headquarters, became in turn the property of the nation (Morris having been a royalist), of John Jacob Astor, and of Stephen Jumel, whose erratic widow married Aaron Burr, but soon tired of him, turned him out of doors and dropped his name. From its coign of vantage on Harlem Heights at 169th Street, this dignified colonial dwelling still looks down upon the Harlem River and across to Long Island Sound. And at the foot of East 61st Street is yet to be seen—vine-covered, and embowered in trees and shrubs—the substantial stone residence of Col. William Smith, who married the daughter of President Adams, and ruined himself by speculating in east-side real estate. But the scarcity of such relics, and their glaring incongruity with their surroundings, emphasize the divergence between the old New York and that which is termed the Greater.

In the hall of Cooper Institute, Abraham Lincoln made that great speech which first fully revealed him to the people of the Eastern States; and hither he was brought, to lie in state in the City Hall, when a martyr’s death had disclosed his greatness still more clearly to all his countrymen.

Here have lived, for longer or shorter periods, sundry Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Cleveland; the city has been the permanent or occasional home of statesmen such as Jay and Livingston, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; of political agitators such as Aaron Burr and “Commonsense” Paine, and political leaders like DeWitt Clinton and Samuel J. Tilden; of authors such as Washington Irving, whose burlesque local history marked him out as the father of American light literature, Fenimore Cooper, the most popular of American romance-writers, and Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, most individual of American poets. Here, for longer or shorter periods, have lived and labored Curtis, and Bayard Taylor, and Stoddard, and Stedman, and Aldrich, and Howells, and that greatest of poets among journalists and journalists among poets, William Cullen Bryant, editor of _The Evening Post_ and one of the founders of the Century Club; and Horace Greeley, founder of _The Tribune_, and most famous of American editors since Benjamin Franklin. As a resident of Brooklyn, and editor of a metropolitan religious weekly, the best-known preacher of the century, Henry Ward Beecher, was virtually a citizen of New York. In the annals of invention, the names of four New Yorkers stand out conspicuously—Fulton and Ericsson and Edison and Morse. And of all the free-booters that ever terrorized the sea, none has left a more awful and enduring fame than a once respectable resident of Liberty Street, renowned in song and story for two centuries as Captain Kidd.

The hospitality of New York and her people is proverbial. Every distinguished visitor to America for more than a century past has been entertained here, officially or informally. Among the city’s guests have been William IV. of England, while yet a sailor prince; Lafayette, Louis Kossuth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Emperor of Brazil, the Princess Eulalia, the Duke of Veragua, Li Hung Chang and the Marquis Ito. Almost all the greatest preachers, orators, players, singers, and instrumental performers of the nineteenth century have added to their fame or wealth by facing New York audiences; and among the great writers who have visited us have been Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling.

While New York is easily first among the cities of the New World in commercial importance, it is not on material bases only that her supremacy rests. No community throughout the world responds more generously to every appeal for sympathy or help, whether the call be local, national or foreign. Her interest is keen in educational work of every kind. Columbia University—one of the oldest of local institutions, and more than local in its aims and fame and influence—has of late, through the liberality of her sons and other citizens, been housed in a manner commensurate with her requirements and aspirations; and so also has the less venerable but justly honored New York University. And the past few years have seen Barnard College for women and the Teachers College (both allied with Columbia) emerge from the chrysalis state into forms of beauty and power. The public-school system, moreover,—thanks to a recent brief respite from Tammany control,—is in better condition to-day than at any previous period of Tammany administration.

Of American literary activity, despite Boston’s ancient and deserved prestige, it cannot be denied that New York is to-day the centre, as it is the centre of the publishing trade, in books and periodicals. Boston, with her splendid Public Library, has set an example which the metropolis has been slow to follow; but the consolidation of the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections, and their prospective housing in a magnificent and admirably situated building, has gone far to remove the reproach incurred during long years of public indifference to popular needs. The venerable Society Library, the modern and many-branched Free Circulating Library and kindred institutions have helped to create and in part to meet the demand which the Public Library in its new home may reasonably be expected to satisfy. Equally important in their way are those half-social, half-educational essays toward the solution of some of the problems of the slums—the University Settlement of men and the College Settlement of women. As a further indication that New York is not wholly given over to the worship of Mammon, it may be mentioned that the Greek Club, with its fortnightly meetings for the reading and discussion of the classics, has been for more than three decades the only circle of its kind in existence.

In art, the invaluable treasures of the Metropolitan Museum foster the love of what is enduringly beautiful in sculpture, painting, architecture, etc.; while the schools of this museum and of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, to say nothing of the more utilitarian classes of Cooper Institute and the School of Artist Artisans, afford instruction in art of such a sort as to render foreign study no longer indispensable, albeit no less attractive than of old.

Of music, vocal and instrumental, such feasts are spread before the local amateur as can be matched for quality and abundance in no other city at home or abroad, and while this is not true of the drama also, as the Comédie Française has never come hither in a body, it is yet a fact that nearly all that is best is seen, sooner or later, on the New York stage.

By what rapid strides the city is moving forward in some directions, while halting lamentably in others, needs not to be pointed out. There is expert testimony to the effect that in public morality it has at least held its own during the past half-century; we trust it may some day work out its salvation in things political, and cease to be the mild milch cow of thirsty demagogues. It can never vie in picturesqueness and historic interest with its European peers in population and importance, nor atone by its singularly fortunate situation for its poverty in little parks and its richness in rough-paved, right-angled and treeless streets and avenues; yet it may some day rival even Paris in the absolute beauty of its public and private buildings and historic monuments. A brave beginning has been made, in the Washington Arch, the Madison Square Garden, the Columbia and the New York University buildings, the Washington, Hale and Farragut statues and certain churches, club-houses and private dwellings. And in the Cathedral of St. John, the Public Library, the Academy of Design and the Botanical and Zoölogical gardens, a further stride will be made erelong in the only directions in which æsthetic leadership seems possible.

BROOKLYN

THE TOWN ON FREEDOM’S BATTLE-FIELD

BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM

The earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained in undisturbed Indian occupation.

The Dutch settlers were deterred, rather than attracted, by this magnificent stretch of green woodlands extending along the high shore. The Holland people were not accustomed to timber clearing and therefore sought access to the island by the smoother meadow-lands of Gowanus, and afterwards to the north where the sloping grasslands about the Waalboght invited the settler to essay gardening without too much preparation with the axe. The early Long Island farmers advanced on the territory of Brooklyn by flank attacks, seeking to turn the wings of the extended forest, rather than boldly to engage in the struggle with the densely wooded heights in front. These pioneers were thrifty, energetic Hollanders and Huguenots whose farms soon required regular communication with Manhattan. In 1642 a public ferry was established between the present foot of Fulton Street and a landing in Peck’s Slip. The houses clustered about this Long Island landing constituted a little settlement called The Ferry.

As the Indians were dispossessed from their maize-fields, the colonists found sites for a small village a mile or so inland. The modern visitor who comes up Fulton Street should stop about the corner of Hoyt and Smith Streets to locate this settlement and picture a primitive hamlet of small one-story frame cottages, sometimes surrounded by palisades for protection against attacks. The open lands were of small extent, with forest to the east and west, and streams running south into a wide morass, where is now Gowanus Canal. Undoubtedly the undrained land of this settlement, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests, contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes (_a paludibus_). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their western home should some day become.

Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south—near the present Fort Hamilton—and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee.

THE FIRST PLACE AT WHICH THE BRITISH AND HESSIANS LANDED ON LONG ISLAND, AUGUST 22, 1776. NOW FORT HAMILTON.]

The life of these hard-working settlers was not all hardship. Their low houses with projecting roofs were strong and comfortable; the wide spacious fireplaces gave warmth to a generous hospitality that laid on the board wild turkeys and Gowanus oysters and other good eatables, followed after the repast by the long clay pipes, which, when over, left the weary toiler to be ushered to his night’s rest in a partitioned-off bunk or _betste_. But these material comforts were not all the results realized by the efforts of the first pioneers. These Dutch settlers were zealous for religion, liberty, and good schools; and from the first were not deficient in a commendable zeal for the public welfare.

Under the form of Colonial government the burghers were invited to submit all difficulties to the Governor and council, who were fond of the exercise of a strong, minute, and careful paternalism. The country folk were not expected to intrude on the authorities their own ideas of liberty, but merely to obey loyally what good, old, obstinate, arbitrary Governor Stuyvesant should command. Yet even when he had spoken with the official concurrence of his council, the eager spirits in Breuckelen would often cavil, and boldly presume to come over to Manhattan to stir up criticism and public remonstrance. So they were honored with a special order. The folk of Breuckelen, Amersfoort and Midwout (Flatbush) in 1653 were directed to forbid their residents from attending political meetings in New Amsterdam.

At this time the civic virtues were enforced in Breuckelen, and the good of the village put before the preference of a private citizen to retire from public office. The Governor would not allow any one to decline to serve in an official capacity. The schepen-elect of Breuckelen proposed not to continue in office for another term. He even said he would sooner go back to Holland than remain burdened by the duties of schepen. The Governor quickly took him at his word. The Sheriff was formally required to notify him of this order of the Governor which stated with remarkable clearness the obligation of good townsmen to the public and the penalty for its neglect:

“If you will not accept to serve as schepen for the welfare of
the Village of Breuckelen, with others, your fellow residents,
then you must prepare yourself to sail in the ship _King
Solomon_ for Holland, agreeably to your utterance.”

No further refusals to hold office appear to have embarrassed the council.

The colonists of Breuckelen were specially solicitous for a meeting-house and domine. They insisted that they should have good measure in discourses and that if the services should be abbreviated by the preacher, then on their side no tithes should be forthcoming. The first meeting-house was begun in 1654 at Midwout (Flatbush). Soon they worshipped in the partly roofed building. After much difficulty and repeated applications to the Council it had been arranged that the Rev. Mr. Polhemus should have his morning discourse at Flatbush, with his evening service alternately at Midwout and in Breuckelen.

Governor Stuyvesant may have fancied that he had composed the difficulty. Next winter, however, the Governor was presented with a further remonstrance against the cutting-short of these alternating evening devotions. They thus complained of this brief and scanty service:

“Every fortnight on Sundays he comes here, only in the
afternoon for a quarter of an hour, when he only gives us a
prayer in lieu of sermon, by which we can receive very little
instruction; while often, while one supposes the prayer or
sermon (whichever name might be preferred for it) is beginning,
then it is actually at an end, by which he contributes very
little to the edification of his congregation.”

To modern ears, this seems a strange grievance for legislation.

Governor Stuyvesant, however, admonished the Breuckelen folk to pay their full tithes. Doubtless he privately reminded Mr. Polhemus of his duties and obligations to give his people full service.

In three years they obtained a domine of their own. The Rev. Henricus Selyns, a learned and devout young clergyman of a prominent Amsterdam family came to Breuckelen in 1660. At first his parishioners worshipped in a barn, but a meeting-house was soon erected. His spiritual labors and influence were successful, and the four years of Mr. Selyns’s ministrations were affectionately remembered. Compelled to return to Holland by the last illness of his father, he came to America and settled in New York eighteen years later. His warm admiration for Cotton Mather is attested by a graceful Latin poem appended to the later editions of the _Magnalia_.

Breuckelen was equally fortunate in a schoolmaster—Carel de Beauvois—a cultured French Protestant from Leyden, who was appointed in Breuckelen in 1661. Besides his duties, in the church, of precentor and Scripture reader, it was stipulated that:

“He shall properly, diligently, and industriously attend to the
school, instill in the minds of the young the fear of the Lord,
and set them a good example; to open the school with prayer
and close with a Psalm, also to exercise the scholars in the
questions in the _groat regulen_ of the Rev. pious and learned
father Do. Johannes Megapolensis, Minister of the gospel in N.
Amsterdam.”

Here was a hamlet of but thirty-one families who were not satisfied until they could listen to the ablest preaching of the day, and were also favored with superior educational facilities.

Meanwhile the Dutch order was changing. The neighboring village of Gravesend was being settled by the English. From Connecticut came Quakers, who sowed the seeds of non-conformity and inculcated a new and strange doctrine, that taxes should not be levied to maintain the clergy, a principle especially attractive to those whose tithes were paid with a grudging hand.

At the end of the Dutch régime there were four or five little scattered hamlets within the present borough. The Wallabout had the larger French and Huguenot population. Eastward the English settlers were coming into farming competition with their Dutch neighbors.

There was no great alarm or disappointment manifested on Long Island when on a morning in August, 1664, a British fleet was found to have assembled in the Narrows. Colonial militia under the British flag from New England came through the Sound and encamped on the Breuckelen shore. On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam yielded, and Governor Nicolls raised the flag of Great Britain on the fort. Then New Amsterdam became New York; Long Island and Staten Island, and probably part of Westchester County, were made an English “shire,” and Breuckelen, after some changes of spelling, was known as “Brooklyn in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”

This settlement of Dutch and Huguenots, maintained under the Colonial government of New Amsterdam, in the score of years before the British conquest had acquired a distinctive character. Contrary to a prevalent opinion, these first Dutch settlements, in a sound and vigorous sense, were essentially democratic. In the absence of class privileges—the spirit to refer all questions to the supreme consideration of the general welfare; to subordinate individual claims to the rights and advantage of the public—Breuckelen and Vliessingen (Flushing) compared favorably in civic life with contemporary villages in New England. As Holland had been dyked against the sea by close, unremitting, and intimate co-operation—a spirit further developed in the protracted struggle for independence—so the smaller Dutch colonies in New York, while they kept their agricultural character, retained a collective rather than an individual ideal, which tended to exclude none from equal social opportunities. They never had to struggle with the incubus of a modified feudalism, which, though inevitably breaking up, was leaving its impress of regard for rank and class privilege in the American colonies of British origin.

Colonial life under British rule was marked by more rigid laws as the communities grew. The careful protection of common-lands was strictly attended to, especially the town forests of Brooklyn against the encroachment of those who would surreptitiously cut away the timber. Trustees of the common woodlands were appointed; but in the year 1702 these lands were equitably divided and all allotted to each householder in Brooklyn to insure their better protection.

Gradually the English language was spoken in the churches and upon ceremonious occasions. A waggish tale of Domine Schoonmaker of Flatbush relates his difficulties in a wedding service. Fluent and eloquent in his mother tongue, he essayed the ceremony in English, with the manner, gestures, and all the courteous dignity of the old school. His English failed him at the very close of the service. Conscious of the literalness of his extemporized translation of the formula, he finished with a bow, adding with solemnity and modulated emphasis, “I pronounce you two to be _one beef_.”

English customs gradually came in vogue. More aristocratic usages superseded the democracy of the Dutch settlers. Slavery existed in Brooklyn as in New York. Brick and stone buildings arose along Fulton Street. Twice, in 1745 and 1752, the Colonial legislature of the Province met in Brooklyn, on account of the prevalence of smallpox in New York.

The rural character of the town is well illustrated by an event in 1759. A large bear then passed along the farms in South Brooklyn, and being pursued took to the water near Red Hook, where he was shot from a boat.

The ethics of 1774 approved the aid of lotteries to build an orthodox church in Brooklyn, which the public were assured should be of no doubtful laxity, but a church conformable to the discipline of the Church of England, and under the patronage of Trinity Church, New York.

In the matter of amusements in 1774, New Yorkers came to Brooklyn for many of their sports. Here horse-races were run. In that year an ambitious innkeeper on “Tower Hill”—a site along the present Columbia Heights between Middagh and Cranberry Streets—announced that there would be a _bull baited_ there every Thursday afternoon.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, Brooklyn numbered between three and four thousand persons grouped in four neighborhoods. There were then three ferries to New York. At the old (Fulton) ferry was a famous tavern which figured often in the times of British occupation. The two principal villages were then called Brooklyn-church and Brooklyn-ferry.

At the first movements of the Patriot party in New England the people of Kings County were little stirred. Suffolk County, at the eastern end of Long Island, more readily responded to the first news from Massachusetts. After the battle of Lexington, Brooklynites assembled and passed resolutions and elected delegates to the Provincial Congress.

The modern visitor to the Borough of Brooklyn has difficulty to realize that what is now densely built up, and covered by grading and asphalt, marks the battle-ground of one of the greatest engagements of the Revolution. The houses of Charlestown cover the battle-ground of Bunker Hill, but that was a struggle over a single redoubt, while Brooklyn is built upon a line of battle nearly three miles in length. In the Civil War, Northern people recall the great disaster of the first battle of Bull Run, fought with modern armies and improved weapons. Yet in that all-day conflict, with the disastrous rout and pursuit, the Union loss in killed, wounded and prisoners probably was not as great numerically as the loss suffered by the American forces in the half-day of fierce fighting in Brooklyn. The Federal forces at Bull Run suffered in killed, wounded, and missing 2896, while the patriot losses in this, the first pitched battle of the Revolution, were estimated at 3300 by the British, of whom 1097 were prisoners (three being generals); and late American historians are inclined to accept this estimate as approximately correct.

In the summer of 1776, a formidable fleet assembled in the lower Bay of New York. These vessels bore from Nova Scotia the armies that had evacuated Boston, and another fleet of nine war vessels and thirty-five transports brought in the forces under Clinton that had been repulsed in the attack on Fort Moultrie at Charleston. At last, on the 12th of August arrived the Hessian forces in eighty-two transport-ships guarded by six war vessels. On board were 7800 Hessians and 1000 English guards.

The observer at the Narrows must have daily beheld a naval pageant such as can no more be seen in modern warfare. From the first distant glimpse of the line of sails standing in for Sandy Hook, until they finally manœuvred to their crowded anchorage by Staten Island, the effect was most picturesque. It was not a fleet of dark, sullen sea-dogs, with only an inconspicuous hull built to carry a destructive armament. The coloring of these vessels against the green background of Staten Island in the olden days of oak and hemp would have delighted a painter. The upper works outside were sometimes dark blue or canary yellow, surmounted by waving lines of gilt. Below were black streaks running fore and aft near the water-line; as the ships slowly lifted in a seaway, they disclosed a white under-surface that must have made an admirable target for the opposing gunner. The grand air of the frigates was further enhanced by elaborate ornamentation with emblematic devices about the carved figure-head, and heavy gilded scrollwork above the stern-lights, and high stern-gallery. From the bluffs along the Narrows, the view down upon the decks would show that all inboard surfaces, even the gun-carriages and the inner side of portholes, were painted blood-red—so as not to have the carnage of battle too much _en évidence_.

At one time over four hundred transports, guarded by thirty-seven men-of-war, had gathered. Lord Howe on the land, and his brother, Admiral Howe, on the sea were in joint command.

The patriot forces had carefully entrenched a line of defensive works, laid out by General Nathaniel Greene. The good judgment with which these forts were placed was attested by the deliberate adoption of almost the same line of redoubts and forts in the subsequent defences of Brooklyn by the engineers in the campaign of 1814, when Brooklyn was again prepared to resist British attack.

The fortifications of Brooklyn in 1776 extended in an irregular line from Fort Defiance at Red Hook opposite Governor’s Island across to Fort Box on Bergen’s Hill near the corner of Court Street and First Place. At the junction of Clinton and Atlantic Streets, or a little easterly, was a steep conical hill called the Ponkiesburgh, and on top, surmounting a line of spiral trenches, a redoubt, called Corkscrew Fort. Between Atlantic, Pacific, Nevins, and Bond Streets was a redoubt mounting five guns called Fort Greene. Thence the line ran zigzag across the present Fulton Street, to the west of the junction of Flatbush and Fulton Avenues, along the hill slope to Fort Putnam, on the eminence now called Fort Greene Park, a commanding height where were mounted five guns. The number of guns mounted upon the works from Fort Putnam to Fort Defiance was thirty-five—mainly eighteen-pounders—an armament in part captured from Ticonderoga.

THE YELLOW MILL IS SEEN IN THE DISTANCE.]

From this fort the line extended northwesterly to a spring at the verge of the Wallabout, near the corner of Flushing and Portland Avenues. This interior line of defence was nearly two miles long. Between these forts were lines of trenches further defended by trees and sharpened stakes, forming an abatis, in the construction of which the Continental woodsmen were always proficient. Within this line of defence was Fort Stirling, which was back near Columbia Heights.

It is difficult after a century of grading and building to conceive that an extensive morass then covered nearly all the lands south of the present Hamilton Avenue, save about the small island height at Red Hook. Gowanus, with several large ponds raised by Brower’s Mill-dam, flooded and made impassable nearly all the area extending from Fourth Avenue to Smith Street. This was crossed by a narrow causeway along Freeke’s Mill-pond. On the higher lands beyond, extending from Greenwood along Prospect Park towards East New York, were dense woodlands, that were only practicable for an advancing army by certain passes or narrow wood-roads. The principal route from the Narrows to Brooklyn was along the site of Third Avenue by a good road then known as the Shore Road.

The battle of August 27, 1776, was fought almost entirely outside this line of fortifications. Knowing that the British forces had been moving towards Brooklyn from the Narrows, General Putnam had posted troops in detachments in order to check the hostile columns as they should come through the wood-roads and passes. It was natural to expect the principal British advance by the Shore Road, as there they would be at all times within supporting distance of the fleet.

On August 26th the Hessians under de Heister had occupied Flatbush, and Lord Cornwallis had reached nearly to Flatlands.

In the forenoon of the 27th, Stirling commanded the patriot right, extending from the shore near the foot of Twenty-third Street up Greenwood Heights about to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Third Street. This position was to repel the expected attack by the route of the Shore Road. Sullivan commanded the centre, which was an irregular congeries of militia posted along the summits of hills in Prospect Park and across the Flatbush Road. Colonel Miles with the 1st Pennsylvania regiment occupied the hills near the Clove Road to the south of Bedford, with some Connecticut levies continuing the line still further eastward. Instead of a co-ordinated supporting line of battle, these dispositions were intended as little more than a body of skirmishers, too widely strung-out to be opposed to an actual attack.

The beginning of a movement of British troops at daylight on the Shore Road, and the evident efforts of the fleet to sail up the Bay, which the light wind and ebb tide prevented, indicated that the hardest fighting would be by the right under Stirling. The entire patriot force inside and without the entrenchments was 5500. The British force was over 16,000 men. While the troops were facing each other along this position, a strong flanking column under Sir Henry Clinton, with Lord Howe the commander-in-chief, had stealthily marched from Flatbush to East New York, during the night, and had followed a sunken road through the present Cemetery of the Evergreens, called the Jamaica Pass. This was about five miles to the east of Sullivan’s position. Before daylight, at about a mile from the Pass, the column halted and sent forward a force which captured the American patrol and officers, and soon after a detachment secured the Pass. The light infantry advanced at the first appearance of day, and occupied the heights of Bushwick, followed by the guards with the field-pieces under Lord Percy, and the 49th regiment with four guns and the baggage brought up the rear.

After breakfasting, the flanking column marched along the turnpike to Bedford, where they arrived at half-past eight o’clock; thence they advanced along the rear of Miles’s troops, who were unconscious that they were being surrounded.