Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [90]
In 1697 Fletcher granted New York Anglicans a corporate charter of their own. A vestry of wealthy laymen began at once to organize construction of Trinity Church, the city’s first Episcopal house of worship, on the west side of Broadway at Wall Street, overlooking the Hudson River. By 1698 the building was ready for services, with the Rev. William Vesey serving as first rector. Satisfied that the Church of England now had a foundation for future expansion in New York, the vestry happily declared that the days were over when “for want of a Temple for the public Worship according to the English Church, this seemed rather like a conquered Foreign Province held by the terrour of a Garrison, than an English Colony, possessed and settled by people of our own Nation.”
Ties between the Anglican and Reformed communions remained strong, nevertheless. During Trinity’s construction, Dutch carters were paid handsomely for transporting building materials, while Dominie Henricus Selyns made the Garden Street church available for Anglican services and assisted Fletcher at Vesey’s induction on Christmas Day of 1697. For the first three months, moreover, Vesey and Selyns preached alternately at Trinity, the former officiating in English, the latter in Dutch.
Yet this unique arrangement—really a dual establishment—failed to have the calming effect that Fletcher promised. Dissenters refused to concede the Church of England’s right to public maintenance and initiated a decades-long conflict with militant Anglicans. Provincial authorities responded by leaving Trinity to fend for itself, thus ensuring the colony’s reputation for heterodoxy and toleration. Only Roman Catholics remained officially unwelcome. In 1700, when there were still fewer than a dozen Catholics in the city, the Assembly required all priests ordained by the pope to leave before the end of the year; anyone hiding a priest was subject to a fine of two hundred pounds.
Nor did the privileged status of the Reformed Church quiet the wrath that swept New York’s Dutch population following Leisler’s execution. County sheriffs and judges, linchpins of local English government outside Manhattan, reported case after case of Dutch opposition to their authority, often to the point of open violence. On one occasion, in 1696, a party of Dutchmen armed with “swords guns and Pistoles” attacked the Kings County courthouse, and Myndert Courten, a prominent Leislerian, announced that “he didn’t value the Courts order a fart for their power will not stand long.”
More odious still for truckling to the English were the Reformed dominies themselves—Selyns of Manhattan, Varick of Long Island, and Dellius of Albany. Angry congregations tried to starve them out of office by withholding their salaries; those in Harlem, Staten Island, and New Jersey announced that they could “live well enough without ministers or sacraments” and refused to have anything to do with the three. Once the sanctuary of the Garden Street church was “attacked by violence and open force.” Thousands of men and women throughout the colony simply abandoned the Reformed communion altogether. By the mid-nineties, according to Dr. Benjamin Bullivant, a visitor from Boston, the Dutch residents of Manhattan generally ignored the Sabbath, “some shelling peas at theyr doors children playing at theyr usuall games in the streets & ye taverns filled.” As the decade came to a close, Reformed churches everywhere in the colony complained of 80 or 90 percent declines in membership, frequently because of wholesale exoduses—“ten, twenty or more families” at a time—to the wilds of Ulster County,