• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8190 0

in their dress,” Mrs. Knight wrote. “But the Dutch, especially the middling sort, differ from our women, in their habitt go loose, were [wear] French muches wch are like a Capp and a head band in one, leaving their ears bare, which are sett out wth Jewells of a large size and many in number. And their fingers hoop’t with Rings, some with large stones in them of many Coullers as were their pendants in their ears, which You should see very old women wear as well as Young.” A dozen years later John Fontaine remarked that most houses still went up “after the Dutch manner, with the gable-ends toward the street,” and in the Burgis View of 1717 it is indeed possible to make out, huddling along the waterfront below Wall Street, the stepped gables and sharply pitched roofs that bore silent witness to the days when New York was New Amsterdam.

Yet between 1700 and 1720 the Dutch component of the city’s white population fell below 50 percent for the first time, and its marginalization, underway for a generation, passed the point of no return. A select company of Dutch traders with good connections in London or the West Indies—Rip van Dam, Abraham De Peyster, Jacobus Van Cortlandt—prospered in the boom that followed Queen Anne’s War. As a group, however, Dutch merchants now formed a distinct minority of the city’s wealthiest inhabitants, and proportionally fewer Dutch New Yorkers owned slaves than either the English or the French. What was more, fully 80 percent of the families in the city’s poorer neighborhoods were Dutch. The Dutch had managed to carve ethnic niches in the labor force—they were disproportionately represented among the ranks of coopers, smiths, masons, cordwainers, cartmen, and other laboring people—but these niches were at the lower end of the city’s economy. The Dutch were losing ground politically too. Prior to Leisler’s Rebellion, most mayors of New York had been Dutch; after Leisler, not only were most mayors English or French, but as a rule the Dutch held a third or fewer of the seats on the Common Council.

After 1720 Dutch was almost exclusively reserved for private communication or worship. Subsequent attempts to provide Dutch-language schooling for the young invariably failed, and by the early 1740s even bilingualism was a thing of the past. “The Dutch tongue Declines fast among Us Especially with the Young people,” wrote a saddened Cornelius van Home, grandson of a New Amsterdam settler. “All Affairs are transacted in English and that Language prevails Generally Amongst Us.”

Affirmatively Dutch communities did survive along the Hudson River, over in New Jersey, on Staten Island, or out on Long Island. Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster counties remained predominately Dutch for years; Albany was almost exclusively Dutch, and would long remain so. Overall, nevertheless, the Dutch now constituted a clearly dwindling minority of the colony’s population, and Dutch settlements outside the city were becoming more clannishly isolated from the rest of the world.

Dwindling population and waning prosperity were accompanied by a pietist movement that tunneled through the Reformed Church during Queen Anne’s War. The pietists’ message—part denunciation of orthodox clerical authority, part attack on liturgical formalism, part summons to individual spiritual renewal—reaped bountiful harvests of souls along the rural frontiers of New York and New Jersey, home to large numbers of Leislerians who hadn’t forgotten the Church’s complicity in their leader’s defeat and execution. When an evangelical dominie named Theodore Frelinghuysen began preaching among the villages of New Jersey’s Raritan Valley in 1720, the movement erupted into an open revolt.

These afflictions, combined with the chronic shortage of Dutch-speaking dominies, the missionary efforts of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the growing social status commanded by the Church of England, helped expand Anglican congregations. Every year prominent Dutch families went over to the Church of England—Beekmans, Roosevelts, Schuylers, Stuyvesants, Van Cortlandts,