Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [89]
Leisler and Milborne, heads sewed back on, were buried side by side on property Leisler owned not far from the place of their execution, in the area now bounded by Park Row, Spruce Street, and Frankfort Street. Legend says the latter was named after the place of Leisler’s birth. If so, it is the city’s only surviving monument to his memory.1
8
Heats and Animosityes
Leisler’s death split New York like an ax. Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, who succeeded Henry Sloughter as governor in the autumn of 1692, found the hostility between Leislerians and anti-Leislerians running at such a pitch that neither faction “will be satisfied with less than the necks of Theire adversaries.” An Irishman, Fletcher understood how bad these “heats and animosityes” could get, but he had no intention of remaining neutral. His job was to carry on the work of anglicizing the colony, and he needed the cooperation of the anti-Leislerian dominies and merchants who had, for the better part of thirty years now, cast their lot with the English.
CHURCH AND STATE
At the top of Fletcher’s agenda for New York was the creation of a secure Protestant establishment—“a settled Ministry”—the one guarantee, he said, “that neither heresy, sedition, schism nor rebellion be preached amongst you, nor vice and profanity encouraged.” Vice and profanity in particular were rife, observed the Rev. John Miller, newly arrived Episcopal chaplain to the fort’s two companies of grenadiers. New York had become a sink of “irreligion, drunkenness, cursing and swearing, fornication and adultery, thieving, and other evils,” he reported to the bishop of London. If the locals go to church at all, it is but “to find out faults in him that preacheth rather than to hear their own.” Too many residents believed the “sweet and unconfined pleasures of the wandering libertines” an acceptable alternative to holy matrimony, while “ante-nuptial fornication” had become so widespread that New Yorkers often didn’t marry until “a great belly” obliged them to.
In 1693 Fletcher more or less forced the Assembly to pass the Ministry Act, which provided for the public election of vestrymen and churchwardens in New York, Westchester, Queens, and Richmond counties. These county vestries (secular bodies, not to be confused with those governing individual churches) were empowered to tax all residents to pay the salaries of “good and sufficient Protestant ministers.” In England, this meant only Anglicans. Fletcher, a staunch adherent of the national church, said it meant only Anglicans in New York as well.
Anglicans were a distinct minority in New York, however. The colony’s only Anglican clergyman was the chaplain attached to the garrison on Manhattan, and his congregation comprised fewer than ninety families, at best 10 percent of the city’s twenty-one hundred white adults. Except for a comparative handful of Roman Catholics and Jews, the vast majority of New Yorkers were nonconformists or “dissenters”—Protestants not affiliated with the Church of England. The Act of Toleration, adopted by Parliament in 1689, guaranteed their right to public worship, as did legislation by the New York Assembly in 1691, which extended the same right to all orderly Christians other than Catholics. Even Fletcher’s official instructions required him to allow “a liberty of Conscience to all persons (except Papists).” Not surprisingly, then, dissenters saw the governor’s interpretation of the Ministry Act as a subterfuge for evading the law and establishing the Church of England: what good is the right of public worship, they asked, if they must pay the salaries of Anglican clergy and, worse yet, allow Anglican clergy to occupy their pulpits?
The dominies who had opposed Leisler were especially indignant, and to them the governor offered a compromise. In return for their acquiescence, the Dutch