[CHAPTER V]
DOMESTIC AND SOCIAL LIFE UNDER THE DUTCH
1647-1664
Beginning of Stuyvesant's Administration. Condition of the Colony. Character of the Early Dutch Houses. Household Arrangement. Dress. Funerals. Marriages. The Mixture of Races. Slavery. Religion. Attitude of Stuyvesant toward Sects other than Dutch Reformed. Triumph of Liberal Ideas. First Churches in Kings County. Troubles over the Church Tax. First Schools. The Dutch and Popular Education. End of Dutch Rule.
When Stuyvesant, followed by the principal burghers, made his first public appearance in New Amsterdam, the people saw that the new Director had but one leg, the other, which he had lost in the wars, having been replaced by a wooden affair, laced with silver bands. His manner was soldierly, and excited from those who looked askance at him the remark that his stride was "like a peacock's, with great pomp and state." Moreover he was accused of keeping the burghers bareheaded for several hours, though he was covered, "as if he were the Czar of Muscovy."
Peter Stuyvesant[17] was the son of a clergyman of the Reformed Church. He was a "self-made" man, having had a hard struggle from his boyhood. He had fought in the service of the West India Company against the Spaniards and Portuguese in South America. For a time he was Governor of the Island of Curaçoa, and it was while making an attack, during this command, on the Island of St. Thomas that he lost his leg. He had married, at Amsterdam, Judith, the daughter of Balthazzar Bayard, a French Protestant who, like so many others who came to America, had fled to Holland to escape persecution.
When Stuyvesant declared in his first speech at the Fort that he would govern the colony "as a father does his children," he gave some hint of the view of the situation which he was inclined to take. However fatherly and generous were his feelings toward the people whom he was to preside over, he intended to be master of the situation.
The people who greeted the new Director with much cordiality, and who in this demonstration were influenced as greatly by the feeling that any change must be for the better as by any definite expectation that Stuyvesant would be better than Kieft, had suffered from so many influences that tended to disorganize and disconcert them that the new Director found them in no very promising state. Indeed, he found New Netherland in a "low condition."
Breuckelen and her sister settlements were as yet merely farming communities. New Amsterdam itself had begun to present some of the characteristics of a town. Extending as far as the present line of Wall Street (from which fact the street gets its name), it was thickly settled within a narrow area toward the point. The houses were rough, the streets unkempt. "Pig-pens and out-houses were set directly on the street, diffusing unpleasant odors. The hogs ran at will, kept out of the vegetable gardens only by rough stockades."[18]
If the physical condition of the town offended Stuyvesant, so, also, did the moral condition. The new Director called for a "thorough reformation." There must be an end of drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, and the selling of liquors to the Indians. Stuyvesant saw the necessity of conciliating the Indians, and the efforts which he made to this end were gratifying to the Long Island settlers.