Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [110]
These nighttime ceremonies were disturbingly outside white jurisdiction, although whites themselves habitually foreclosed other options. In 1722, for example, the Common Council passed a law requiring that “all negroes and Indian slaves dying within this corporation on the South side of the fresh water be buried by daylight at or before sunset,” while three years later a Bushwick town meeting resolved that “no negro at all shall be buried in this aforesaid churchyard.” Similarly, whites attempted, with at best mixed success, to prevent slaves from coming together in great and occasionally raucous gatherings, especially on the Sabbath. “On Sundays while we are at our Devotions,” Elias Neau remarked in 1703, “the streets are full of Negroes, who dance and divert themselves.” In 1710 they were said to “feast and Revell in the Night time.”
“BONNY COUNTRY”
The same demand for labor that led New Yorkers to purchase slaves in record numbers stimulated an upsurge of immigration from Europe in the early decades of the eighteenth century. First to arrive were the Palatine Germans. Mostly Lutherans and Calvinists, they had barely recovered from the terrible devastation of the Thirty Years War when they were overrun, again and again, by the armies of Louis XIV during Queen Anne’s War. In the wake of the catastrophic epidemics and famines that followed the French invasion of the Rhineland in 1707, they appealed to the British government for help. Queen Anne, eager to rescue Protestants from the clutches of a Catholic despot, said the Palatines could take up land in British North America; Parliament, eager to populate the colonies, passed a law naturalizing foreign Protestants.
No one was prepared for the response. By the end of 1709 at least thirteen thousand German refugees had already crowded into London, and thousands more were said to be on the way. All manner of schemes were developed for putting the Palatines to work in Ireland, Wales, or one of Britain’s overseas possessions. Most promising was a proposal to settle them in communities along the Hudson River in New York, “where they might be useful to this kingdom, particularly in the production of naval stores, and as a frontier against the French and their Indians.” A small advance party reached New York in 1708 and began a settlement at Newburgh, fifty-five miles north of the city.
The main body of Palatines, some twenty-five hundred in all, arrived in the summer of 1710 with Governor Hunter. Flabbergasted at the sheer magnitude of this invasion, which amounted to roughly 40 percent of the city’s population, and frightened by an outbreak of typhus among the exhausted and malnourished newcomers, the Common Council quarantined the Palatines on Nutten (Governors) Island. There they languished while Hunter tried to find them land and city merchants cashed in on their desperate need for food, clothing, and shelter. Several hundred Palatines died in the course of the summer and were buried in unmarked graves. Of those who survived, about eighteen hundred were subsequently transported up to several tracts of land lying along the Hudson, where they founded half a dozen small communities. The rest, around 350 individuals, settled in New York City. Forty or so were apprenticed out to local residents, including John Peter Zenger, who went to work in William Bradford’s printshop. The others were probably widows and children.
Things got worse. The Palatines soon learned that they weren’t to be independent proprietors but indentured servants of the crown, obliged to work at the pleasure of the governor until the costs of transporting and relocating them had been paid off. Hunter’s agents herded them into