New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty

6. Liberty of Conscience

chapter 6 LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE The law of love peace and libertie in the states extending to Jewes Turkes and Egiptians as they are Considered the sonnes of Adam which is the glory of the outward State of Holland, soe love peace and libertie extending to all in Christ Jesus Condems hatred warre and bondage. By the 1650s, the Dutch arrangements that had seemed so progressive to English radicals fifty years earlier looked conservative compared to what was then available in the English world. Liberty of conscience, a conservative buttress of the Dutch public church, had become a force for revolutionary change in the hands of radical English Protestants. The sudden arrival of Quakers in August 1657 provoked the only open debate over the nature of Dutch tolerance in New Netherland history. For the first time, a new and positive vision of tolerance was proposed in a document that has gone down in history as the Flushing Remonstrance. It offered a broad, if idealistic vision of what pluralism in the Dutch world was and should be, one also tailored to the needs of Quakers, a new evangelical religion bred in the revolutionary turmoil of 1640s England. With the Flushing Remonstrance, colonial English radicals held the Dutch up to these heightened expectations. It was a local culmination of the longstanding history of religious interactions between the Dutch and English. Of course, their understanding of what the Dutch were capable of drew on their knowledge of Amsterdam and Holland, not the other Dutch provinces. The ensuing clash reflected persistent tensions between cosmopolitan and provincial approaches to Dutch tolerance as much as between radical and conservative or even English and Dutch visions. Since New Netherland was closely connected to and supervised from Amsterdam, it could not avoid being held up to its example. Yet New Liberty of Conscience 157 Amsterdam was not like Amsterdam. It was, however, more typically Dutch than that cosmopolitan center of global trade, resembling a small provincial city like Kampen on the republic’s eastern frontier. In Kampen, Lutheran ministers were kept out until 1669, dissenting conventicles were repeatedly suppressed, and a strong-willed Calvinist minister, Simon Oomius, dominated the local church. Under Oomius, Kampen’s Reformed Church consistently resisted all liberalizing trends that would diminish the position of the public church, much as Megapolensis and Drisisus did in New Amsterdam . Only in the second half of the seventeenth century did Kampen’s magistrates gradually adopt a broader connivance, but even then it was reluctant and never on the scale of Amsterdam. Had New Amsterdam remained Dutch after 1664, Kampen provides an example of how religious pluralism could have evolved in the colony: slowly and irregularly.1 Of course the eastern provinces of the republic had nothing like the strong English influence that pervaded the lands around New Amsterdam. The case of the Quakers and the Flushing Remonstrance is a reminder that Dutch tolerance was never something fully determined by the Dutch authorities on the ground, regardless of how much legal and political power they wielded. The ideals and aspirations of all the inhabitants played a role as well, keeping it dynamic, contested, and shifting. Unlike the many pamphlet wars and public disputes that fill the history of toleration in Europe, the American struggle took place on a much smaller scale. On the one side was the Dutch Reformed establishment, embodied in the persons of Stuyvesant, the Reformed ministers, local magistrates, and the laws they enforced. On the other side were Quaker missionaries, Quaker propaganda, and a petition, or remonstrance, drawn up by a number of English colonists in Vlissingen in December 1657. The Flushing Remonstrance, as it has come to be known, was never printed. It was transcribed into the court records after Tobias Feake presented it to the Dutch court. Without that copy, there would be no direct evidence of the thinking of at least some of the English colonists in New Netherland about Dutch tolerance. It is a short but invaluable document that opens up a window onto some of the intellectual and religious currents running through Dutch America, even if it was in English. Minister Gutwasser had anticipated that the next ship in port would bring news from Holland about a grant of toleration for the Lutherans. Instead, it brought Quakers.2 The Quakers’ arrival on August 6, 1657, was a dramatic 158 Chapter 6 challenge to the Dutch religious order...