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Disparities in condition and location made it difficult for Africans in New Amsterdam to establish communities of culture, yet not impossible. Men and women formed families against great odds—there were twenty-six black marriages recorded in the Dutch Reformed Church between 1641 and 1664—although the dominies were increasingly reluctant to baptize either slaves or their children. In 1664 Dominie Henricus Selyns informed the Classis of Amsterdam that he and his colleagues had halted the latter practice altogether—“due to their lack of knowledge and faith, and because of their worldly aims. The parents wanted nothing else than to deliver their children from bodily slavery, without striving for Christian virtues.” In some instances couples adopted orphans, gathering them into kin units at great cost. In 1661 free blacks Emanuel Pietersen and his wife, Dorothy Angola, sought freedom “for a lad named Anthony Angola, whom they adopted when an infant and have since reared and educated.” Their petition was granted, after they paid the West India Company three hundred guilders (five times the original purchase price of Manhattan).

5

A City Lost, a City Gained

Although New Motherland appeared to be recovering nicely, Stuyvesant grew increasingly fearful that its very progress had undermined the authority of the West India Company. The arrival of thousands of settlers—too many, he said, lured by “an imaginary liberty in a new and, as some pretend, a free country”—seemed only to have raised the level of irreligion, immorality, and lawlessness in the colony. This was the worry as well of New Amsterdam’s Reformed dominies: Johannes Megapolensis, formerly the pastor at Rensselaerswyck, whom Stuyvesant had persuaded in 1649 to lead the “feeble lukewarm and faint hearted congregation” that still worshiped in the church in the fort; and Samuel Drisius, who came over in 1652 to assist Megapolensis. Staunch Calvinists, the two dominies would join with Stuyvesant (himself the son of one clergyman and son-in-law of another) in an attempt to establish order and righteousness in the colony before it was too late.

Stuyvesant and the dominies were especially troubled by the resurgence of popular holidays, feasts, and carnivals in the colony. For well over a century, European churches, militant Protestant and reforming Catholic alike, had been waging a campaign to stamp out or regulate all such folk pleasures, both because they had popish (or pagan) roots and because they often spilled over into riot or rebellion. Like its Puritan counterparts in England, the Dutch Reformed Church had been very vigorous in this regard. Since the 1580s—and inseparably linked to the struggle for national independence—synods of the Reformed Church had repeatedly attacked popular music, maypoles, plays, dances, and even such apparently innocent amusements as filling children’s shoes, on the feast of St. Nicholas, with sweets and toys. Ecclesiastical suppression of these traditional practices was also strongly endorsed by the Dutch upper classes, who though once willing to join in the general merriment were now cultivating distinctively genteel patterns of recreation, entertainment, speech, and conduct.

In the Netherlands, the outcome of this great conflict over the form and content of public culture was as yet far from certain, for the ever pragmatic Dutch had struck a series of compromises between religious and secular imperatives, between Calvinism and humanism, between sobriety and festivity. In New Netherland, however, Stuyvesant and the dominies had no intention of compromising. When told about a man who “last Shrove Tuesday walked along the street in woman’s clothes,” Stuyvesant announced that while such behavior “may be tolerated and looked at through the fingers in some places in the Fatherland,” he wouldn’t permit it on this side of the Atlantic.

In 1654, accordingly, Stuyvesant banned all Shrove Tuesday festivities, calling it “altogether