Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [55]
In an effort to reform popular manners and morals, Stuyvesant likewise ordered all “brewers, tapsters, and innkeepers” to close their doors at nine P.M. and directed them to apply to him for proper licenses. He warned the people against “quarreling, fighting and hitting each other” and imposed harsh new penalties (up to a year and a half at hard labor on a diet of bread and water) for those convicted of fighting with knives or swords. He outlawed sexual intercourse with Indians and (because “we see and observe daily drunken Indians run along the Manhatans”) forbade the sale of liquor to them under any circumstances. Unlike officials in Amsterdam, he favored the building of a proper schoolhouse, not only (or even primarily) for the sake of learning but “to keep the youth off the street, and bring them under discipline.” He and the magistrates decreed that “no male and female shall be allowed to keep house together like man and wife, before they have legally been married,” and he summarily deported women “of bad reputation.”
Mindful that the residents of New Amsterdam were indifferent churchgoers, Stuyvesant scheduled Sunday services for the afternoon as well as the morning and charged “all officials, subjects and vassals” of the West India Company to attend both. He enjoined everyone from “going on pleasure parties in a boat, cart, or wagon” on the Sabbath and banned “all tapping, fishing, hunting and other usual occupations, handicrafts and business, be it in houses, cellars, shops, ships, yachts or on the streets and market places.” In the same spirit, he set aside the first Wednesday of every month for fasting and obligatory prayer. The travails of “our sister state of Brazil,” Stuyvesant said, should serve as a premonition of the wrath that would rain down “from a sky laden with vengeance” if the people of New Amsterdam failed to mend their ways. Observed one townsman, “Stuyvesant is starting a whole reformation here.”
The rabble continued nonetheless to have their fun, which may help to explain why Stuyvesant and the magistrates resorted to more and more draconian punishments. In 1658 a man found guilty of deserting his bride-to-be after the publication of their marriage banns was sentenced to have his head shaved and his ears bored, then to be flogged and put to work for two years with the company slaves. In 1660 a soldier convicted of a “crime condemned by God as an abomination” was ordered “to be taken to the place of execution and there stripped of his arms, his sword to be broken at his feet and he then to be tied in a sack and cast into the river and drowned till dead.” (Sodomy had been fiercely punished once before, in 1646, when a black man named Jan Creoli was sentenced “to be conveyed to the place of public execution, and there choked to death, and then burnt to ashes”; Manuel Congo, “a lad ten years old, on whom the above abominable crime was committed,” was tied to a stake and flogged.) In 1662 a runaway servant was hanged for resisting arrest and his head set on a stake as an example to others. In 1664 Lysbet Antoniosent—one of the three children of half-freed slaves whom the company had kept in bondage—set her master’s Nieuw Utrecht house on fire. The court ordered her chained to a stake, strangled, and burned, though it commuted the sentence on the day appointed for her execution.
SERVANTS OF BAAL
Vexing Stuyvesant as much as the intransigence of traditional popular culture were