The question of the Swedish title, raised at the outset by the protest of the Dutch governor, could not long be postponed. It was suddenly precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was a fatal victory. The next year came Governor Stuyvesant with an overpowering force and demanded and received the surrender of the colony to the Dutch. Honorable terms of surrender were conceded; among them, against the protest, alas! of good Domine Megapolensis, was the stipulation of religious liberty for the Lutherans.
It was the end of the Swedish colony, but not at once of the church. The Swedish community of some seven hundred souls, cut off from reinforcement and support from the fatherland, cherished its language and traditions and the mold of doctrine in which it had been shaped; after more than forty years the reviving interest of the mother church was manifested by the sending out of missionaries to seek and succor the daughter long absent and neglected in the wilderness. Two venerable buildings, the Gloria Dei Church in the southern part of Philadelphia, and the Old Swedes' Church at Wilmington, remain as monuments of the honorable story. The Swedish language ceased to be spoken; the people became undistinguishably absorbed in the swiftly multiplying population about them.
It was a short-lived triumph in which the Dutch colony reduced the Swedish under its jurisdiction. It only prepared a larger domain for it to surrender, in its turn, to superior force. With perfidy worthy of the House of Stuart, the newly restored king of England, having granted to his brother, the Duke of York, territory already plighted to others and territory already occupied by a friendly power, stretching in all from the Connecticut to the Delaware, covered his designs with friendly demonstrations, and in a time of profound peace surprised the quiet town of New Amsterdam with a hostile fleet and land force and a peremptory demand for surrender. The only hindrance interposed was a few hours of vain and angry bluster from Stuyvesant. The indifference of the Dutch republic, which had from the beginning refused its colony any promise of protection, and the sordid despotism of the Company, and the arrogant contempt of popular rights manifested by its governors, seem to have left no spark of patriotic loyalty alive in the population. With inert indifference, if not even with satisfaction, the colony transferred its allegiance to the British crown, henceforth sovereign from Maine to the Carolinas. The rights of person and property, religious liberty, and freedom of trade were stipulated in the capitulation.
The British government was happy in the character of Colonel Nicolls, who came as commandant of the invading expedition and remained as governor. Not only faithful to the terms of the surrender, but considerate of the feelings and interests of the conquered province, he gave the people small reason to regret the change of government. The established Dutch church not only was not molested, but was continued in full possession of its exceptional privileges. And it continued to languish. At the time of the surrender the province contained "three cities, thirty villages, and ten thousand inhabitants,"[78:1] and for all these there were six ministers. The six soon dribbled away to three, and for ten years these three continued without reinforcement. This extreme feebleness of the clergy, the absence of any vigorous church life among the laity, and the debilitating notion that the power and the right to preach the gospel must be imported from Holland, put the Dutch church at such a disadvantage as to invite aggression. Later English governors showed no scruple in violating the spirit of the terms of surrender and using their official power and influence to force the establishment of the English church against the almost unanimous will of the people. Property was unjustly taken and legal rights infringed to this end, but the end was not attained. Colonel Morris, an earnest Anglican, warned his friends against the folly of taking by force the salaries of ministers chosen by the people and paying them over to "the ministers of the church." "It may be a means of subsisting those ministers, but they won't make many converts among a people who think themselves very much injured." The pious efforts of Governor Fletcher, the most zealous of these official propagandists, are even more severely characterized in a dispatch of his successor, the Earl of Bellomont: "The late governor, ... under the notion of a Church of England to be put in opposition to the Dutch and French churches established here, supported a few rascally English, who are a scandal to their nation and the Protestant religion."[79:1] Evidently such support would have for its main effect to make the pretended establishment odious to the people. Colonel Morris sharply points out the impolicy as well as the injustice of the course adopted, claiming that his church would have been in a much better position without this political aid, and citing the case of the Jerseys and Pennsylvania, where nothing of the kind had been attempted, and where, nevertheless, "there are four times the number of churchmen that there are in this province of New York; and they are so, most of them, upon principle, whereas nine parts in ten of ours will add no great credit to whatever church they are of."[80:1]
It need not be denied that government patronage, even when dispensed by the dirty hands of such scurvy nursing fathers as Fletcher and Lord Cornbury, may give strength of a certain sort to a religious organization. Whatever could be done in the way of endowment or of social preferment in behalf of the English church was done eagerly. But happily this church had a better resource than royal governors in the well-equipped and sustained, and generally well-chosen, army of missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Not fewer than fifty-eight of them were placed by the society in this single province. And if among them there were those who seemed to "preach Christ of envy and strife," as if the great aim of the preacher of the gospel were to get a man out of one Christian sect into another, there were others who showed a more Pauline and more Christian conception of their work, taking their full share of the task of bringing the knowledge of Christ to the unevangelized, whether white, red, or black.[80:2]
The diversity of organization which was destined to characterize the church in the province of New York was increased by the inflow of population from New England. The settlement of Long Island was from the beginning Puritan English. The Hudson Valley began early to be occupied by New Englanders bringing with them their pastors. In 1696 Domine Selyns, the only Dutch pastor in New York City, in his annual report congratulates himself, "Our number is now full," meaning that there are four Dutch ministers in the whole province of New York, and adds: "In the country places here there are many English preachers, mostly from New England. They were ordained there, having been in a large measure supplied by the University of Cambridge [Mass.]." The same letter gives the names of the three eminent French pastors ministering to the communities of Huguenot refugees at New Rochelle and New York and elsewhere in the neighborhood. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, more important to the history of the opening century than any of the rest, were yet to enter.
The spectacle of the ancient Dutch church thus dwindling, and seemingly content to dwindle, to one of the least of the tribes, is not a cheerful one, nor one easy to understand. But out of this little and dilapidated Bethlehem was to come forth a leader. Domine Frelinghuysen, arriving in America in 1720, was to begin a work of training for the ministry, which would result, in 1784, in the establishment of the first American professorship of theology;[81:1] and by the fervor of his preaching he was to win the signal glory of bringing in the Great Awakening.
FOOTNOTES:
[69:1] Dr. E. T. Corwin, "History of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in America" (in the American Church History Series), pp. 28-32.