www.newamsterdamhistorycenter.org NEW AMSTERDAM YESTERDAY AND TODAY New Amsterdam History Center Newsletter – Vol. II, no. 2 Fall 2019 Contents: Letter from the Acting President/Executive Director Religion and Politics in Colonial New York: Sleepy Hollow Church and Domine Guiliam Bertholf, Firth Haring Fabend A Cartographic View of the Battle of Long Island, 1776, Ian Fowler The Lawyer and the Fox: A Tale of Tricks and Treachery in New Amsterdam, Jaap Jacobs NAHC Visits Dutch Sites in Westchester Amazon Smile Donates to New Amsterdam History Center NAHC Milestones and Events NAHC Patron Program Dear Friends of NAHC, Welcome to the sixth edition of New Amsterdam Yesterday and Today, the New Amsterdam History Center newsletter. In the last few months, NAHC has continued to present some fascinating talks as part of our on-going lecture series, as well as a wonderful excursion to Sleepy Hollow and Philipsburg Manor. Our spring talk held at the Netherland Club, was presented by Ian Fowler, curator and Geospatial Librarian for the Map Division of the New York Public Library, Cartographic Visions of New Netherland and New Amsterdam. It was met with great enthusiasm. For those who missed it, we have made a video recording available on our website. In this edition, we are pleased to offer you new articles and summaries of talks that you may have missed, for your reading pleasure. From NAHC Trustee Firth Fabend we have a fascinating article, Religion and Politics in Colonial New York: Sleepy Hollow Church and Domine Guiliam Bertholf. This past October, NAHC was honored to host Author and Honorary Reader in History at University of St. Andrews, Jaap Jacobs, direct from the Netherlands via Scotland, for a fascinating talk, The Lawyer and the Fox: A Tale of Tricks and Treachery in New Amsterdam. We thank him for sharing a short version of his talk with us for our readers. Our members and friends continue to be very generous. A very special word of thank you to one or our loyal members, Lynn Van Eick, for her gift of a beautiful map of New Amsterdam that was near and dear to her. She wrote, “The main map is of New Netherland, encompassing Long "Eylandt", the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, western CT. The small inset in the bottom is the map, or drawing of, New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan. This picture is the one seen on the cover of "Island in the Center of the World". We are pleased that our patron program continues to grow, and we hope more of you who are not part of the NAHC community, will consider supporting us. It is this support that enables us to offer quality programs and make them available to you and the public on our website, create this newsletter and continue in our mission to inform the public about the important early history of New York in many ways. A patron registration form is available for you at the bottom of this newsletter. On behalf of the entire Board of NAHC, I thank you for your continuing patronage. I hope you enjoy our newsletter. Esme Emmanuel Berg NEW NETHERLAND GIFT OF LYNN VAN EICK Religion and Politics in prominent New York Leislerians Colonial New York: were part of a widespread Atlantic Sleepy Hollow Church and community, with a strong Huguenot Domine Guiliam Bertholf component, of political activity, today known as Protestant Firth Haring Fabend International. The brutal massacre of Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew Day Religion and Politics: Massacre in August 1572 by French Pietism and Democracy Catholic mobs provoked widespread revulsion among moderate One of the many functions of Europeans, and Calvinism quickly merchant, Orange County coroner, became marked by a sense of and justice of the peace Theunis international solidarity characterized van Houten was to ferry Domine by “foreign aid” for the beleaguered, Guiliam Bertholf across the Tappan fundraising for broken Zee to the Sleepy Hollow Reformed congregations, the establishment of Church, which called Bertholf as its refugee hostels, and a conviction first minister in 1696 and which, like that Catholic France, Spain, and the Tappan Reformed Church and Austria, and Rome, had gone too some ten others, he organized and far. French Calvinists formed links served as supply until his death in based on shared Reformed beliefs 1724. I like to imagine what Van with Geneva, the United Provinces, Houten and Bertholf talked about as the Palatinate, and Scotland and they tacked back and forth across England, as well as commercial the Tappan Zee. I’m sure it had to links that networked merchant do with tides and currents--that is, families all over the Atlantic world. with the political and religious tides and currents that roiled New York in One of Protestant International’s the 1680s and ’90s.1 gathering places was in Rotterdam in the 1680s. Among the men who In the decade before his ordination met in the Rotterdam salon of in 1694, when he was a licensed lay Quaker merchant Benjamin Furly to reader, Bertholf organized some discuss the new ideas were various twelve Reformed churches in the English Separatists, George Fox, area. Yet, despite his achievements, father of the Quaker movement, the the ministers in the New York City English political philosopher John Reformed churches looked down on Locke, whose Two Treatises of him because he did not have a Government was to electrify the university education. Rather, he had English-speaking world at around been trained, in a common practice this time, and other luminaries of the of the day, in his home province of early Enlightenment, including Zeeland by an ordained minister, not Charles Talbot, Gilbert Burnet, and in one of the illustrious theological Huguenot theologians Pierre Jurieu schools at Utrecht and Leiden, the and Pierre Bayle. In addition, there alma maters of his betters in New were Jacob Milborne, Jacob York. The New York minister Leisler’s main supporter and future Henricus Selyns accused him of son-in-law, and none other than being a “Coelmanist” [sic], who Samuel Edsall, Jacob Milborne’s “catechize, have private exercises father-in-law.5 and special prayers; and almost say, that the public prayers are spurious. Edsall had risen from the hatter’s True believers are grieved at these trade to advise the Governor and things and look forward to very great Council of the Province of East troubles therefrom to the church of 2 Jersey. A political activist who was God.” said to have had a “better acquaintance with matters of Bertholf’s mentor and teacher back government than was possessed by in Zeeland was Jacobus Koelman, a any of his colleagues [at the time of brilliant but controversial Pietist Leisler’s Rebellion] or by Leisler minister for his novel ideas about himself,” he had turned up in the necessity of a personal born- Rotterdam, now fifty-six, rich, again salvation experience, the powerful, and in the thick of the importance of spontaneity in praying era’s political foment.6 and preaching, rather than the The Samuel Edsall connection reading of set prayers and provides food for thought regarding composed sermons, and the notion the Orange County Leislerians, of the priesthood of all believers. those men who gathered at the The latter tenet particularly irritated tavern in Tappan, at the Tappan the orthodox highly educated Church, between morning and ministers in New York City, Selyns afternoon services, at the and Rudolphus Varick, who believed courthouse to discuss the burning their years of formal training set issues of the day, and in a sailboat them apart and above the herd. Nor crossing the Tappan Zee to Sleepy did the New York ministers care for Hollow. Samuel Edsall is the Bertholf’s politics. Domine Varick particular figure who links them with angrily denounced Bertholf as the political events of Leisler’s having “violently urged on” Jacob Rebellion, just as Guiliam Bertholf is Leisler when the political upheaval the particular religious link who known as Leisler’s Rebellion connected them to the power of convulsed the city in 1689.3 Pietism with its inherent democratic bias. As for his politics, Theunis van Obscure Dutch farmers, isolated, it Houten was a member of the has been assumed, from the main Committee of Safety that put Jacob intellectual ideas of the times, they Leisler in power in New York. were, to the contrary quite abreast It all started in England, when the of them. The farmers of Tappan who so-called Glorious Revolution put listened on Sundays to the Pietist Dutch William III of Holland and his views of Guiliam Bertholf were wife Mary on the English throne in through this religious connection 1688, sending Mary’s father, privy to the ideas that anticipated Catholic James II, into exile. When the Glorious Revolution in England, news of this Protestant coup when the Protestant Dutch reached New York, wealthy stadtholder William took over the merchant and zealous Calvinist throne of Catholic James II. Now it Jacob Leisler took control of the fort appears that, through their at the foot of Manhattan intending to protect it from what he believed connection to Samuel Edsall, they were pro-Papist, anti-Pietist forces were privy also to the ideas of a in the city, while awaiting the arrival trans-Atlantic intellectual community, of a new Protestant governor to be dubbed Protestant International, that named by William and Mary. demanded in New World and Old the triumph of Protestantism over He was not paranoid. Only three Papism and that insisted on their years earlier in 1685, Catholic Louis traditional rights and privileges over XIV had revoked the 1598 Edict of royal tyranny.