Part 10

Of music, vocal and instrumental, such feasts are spread before the local amateur as can be matched for quality and abundance in no other city at home or abroad, and while this is not true of the drama also, as the Comédie Française has never come hither in a body, it is yet a fact that nearly all that is best is seen, sooner or later, on the New York stage.

By what rapid strides the city is moving forward in some directions, while halting lamentably in others, needs not to be pointed out. There is expert testimony to the effect that in public morality it has at least held its own during the past half-century; we trust it may some day work out its salvation in things political, and cease to be the mild milch cow of thirsty demagogues. It can never vie in picturesqueness and historic interest with its European peers in population and importance, nor atone by its singularly fortunate situation for its poverty in little parks and its richness in rough-paved, right-angled and treeless streets and avenues; yet it may some day rival even Paris in the absolute beauty of its public and private buildings and historic monuments. A brave beginning has been made, in the Washington Arch, the Madison Square Garden, the Columbia and the New York University buildings, the Washington, Hale and Farragut statues and certain churches, club-houses and private dwellings. And in the Cathedral of St. John, the Public Library, the Academy of Design and the Botanical and Zoölogical gardens, a further stride will be made erelong in the only directions in which æsthetic leadership seems possible.

BROOKLYN

THE TOWN ON FREEDOM’S BATTLE-FIELD

BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM

The earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained in undisturbed Indian occupation.

The Dutch settlers were deterred, rather than attracted, by this magnificent stretch of green woodlands extending along the high shore. The Holland people were not accustomed to timber clearing and therefore sought access to the island by the smoother meadow-lands of Gowanus, and afterwards to the north where the sloping grasslands about the Waalboght invited the settler to essay gardening without too much preparation with the axe. The early Long Island farmers advanced on the territory of Brooklyn by flank attacks, seeking to turn the wings of the extended forest, rather than boldly to engage in the struggle with the densely wooded heights in front. These pioneers were thrifty, energetic Hollanders and Huguenots whose farms soon required regular communication with Manhattan. In 1642 a public ferry was established between the present foot of Fulton Street and a landing in Peck’s Slip. The houses clustered about this Long Island landing constituted a little settlement called The Ferry.

As the Indians were dispossessed from their maize-fields, the colonists found sites for a small village a mile or so inland. The modern visitor who comes up Fulton Street should stop about the corner of Hoyt and Smith Streets to locate this settlement and picture a primitive hamlet of small one-story frame cottages, sometimes surrounded by palisades for protection against attacks. The open lands were of small extent, with forest to the east and west, and streams running south into a wide morass, where is now Gowanus Canal. Undoubtedly the undrained land of this settlement, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests, contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes (_a paludibus_). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their western home should some day become.

Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south—near the present Fort Hamilton—and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee.

The life of these hard-working settlers was not all hardship. Their low houses with projecting roofs were strong and comfortable; the wide spacious fireplaces gave warmth to a generous hospitality that laid on the board wild turkeys and Gowanus oysters and other good eatables, followed after the repast by the long clay pipes, which, when over, left the weary toiler to be ushered to his night’s rest in a partitioned-off bunk or _betste_. But these material comforts were not all the results realized by the efforts of the first pioneers. These Dutch settlers were zealous for religion, liberty, and good schools; and from the first were not deficient in a commendable zeal for the public welfare.

Under the form of Colonial government the burghers were invited to submit all difficulties to the Governor and council, who were fond of the exercise of a strong, minute, and careful paternalism. The country folk were not expected to intrude on the authorities their own ideas of liberty, but merely to obey loyally what good, old, obstinate, arbitrary Governor Stuyvesant should command. Yet even when he had spoken with the official concurrence of his council, the eager spirits in Breuckelen would often cavil, and boldly presume to come over to Manhattan to stir up criticism and public remonstrance. So they were honored with a special order. The folk of Breuckelen, Amersfoort and Midwout (Flatbush) in 1653 were directed to forbid their residents from attending political meetings in New Amsterdam.

At this time the civic virtues were enforced in Breuckelen, and the good of the village put before the preference of a private citizen to retire from public office. The Governor would not allow any one to decline to serve in an official capacity. The schepen-elect of Breuckelen proposed not to continue in office for another term. He even said he would sooner go back to Holland than remain burdened by the duties of schepen. The Governor quickly took him at his word. The Sheriff was formally required to notify him of this order of the Governor which stated with remarkable clearness the obligation of good townsmen to the public and the penalty for its neglect:

“If you will not accept to serve as schepen for the welfare of the Village of Breuckelen, with others, your fellow residents, then you must prepare yourself to sail in the ship _King Solomon_ for Holland, agreeably to your utterance.”

No further refusals to hold office appear to have embarrassed the council.

The colonists of Breuckelen were specially solicitous for a meeting-house and domine. They insisted that they should have good measure in discourses and that if the services should be abbreviated by the preacher, then on their side no tithes should be forthcoming. The first meeting-house was begun in 1654 at Midwout (Flatbush). Soon they worshipped in the partly roofed building. After much difficulty and repeated applications to the Council it had been arranged that the Rev. Mr. Polhemus should have his morning discourse at Flatbush, with his evening service alternately at Midwout and in Breuckelen.

Governor Stuyvesant may have fancied that he had composed the difficulty. Next winter, however, the Governor was presented with a further remonstrance against the cutting-short of these alternating evening devotions. They thus complained of this brief and scanty service:

“Every fortnight on Sundays he comes here, only in the afternoon for a quarter of an hour, when he only gives us a prayer in lieu of sermon, by which we can receive very little instruction; while often, while one supposes the prayer or sermon (whichever name might be preferred for it) is beginning, then it is actually at an end, by which he contributes very little to the edification of his congregation.”

To modern ears, this seems a strange grievance for legislation.

Governor Stuyvesant, however, admonished the Breuckelen folk to pay their full tithes. Doubtless he privately reminded Mr. Polhemus of his duties and obligations to give his people full service.

In three years they obtained a domine of their own. The Rev. Henricus Selyns, a learned and devout young clergyman of a prominent Amsterdam family came to Breuckelen in 1660. At first his parishioners worshipped in a barn, but a meeting-house was soon erected. His spiritual labors and influence were successful, and the four years of Mr. Selyns’s ministrations were affectionately remembered. Compelled to return to Holland by the last illness of his father, he came to America and settled in New York eighteen years later. His warm admiration for Cotton Mather is attested by a graceful Latin poem appended to the later editions of the _Magnalia_.

Breuckelen was equally fortunate in a schoolmaster—Carel de Beauvois—a cultured French Protestant from Leyden, who was appointed in Breuckelen in 1661. Besides his duties, in the church, of precentor and Scripture reader, it was stipulated that:

“He shall properly, diligently, and industriously attend to the school, instill in the minds of the young the fear of the Lord, and set them a good example; to open the school with prayer and close with a Psalm, also to exercise the scholars in the questions in the _groat regulen_ of the Rev. pious and learned father Do. Johannes Megapolensis, Minister of the gospel in N. Amsterdam.”

Here was a hamlet of but thirty-one families who were not satisfied until they could listen to the ablest preaching of the day, and were also favored with superior educational facilities.

Meanwhile the Dutch order was changing. The neighboring village of Gravesend was being settled by the English. From Connecticut came Quakers, who sowed the seeds of non-conformity and inculcated a new and strange doctrine, that taxes should not be levied to maintain the clergy, a principle especially attractive to those whose tithes were paid with a grudging hand.

At the end of the Dutch régime there were four or five little scattered hamlets within the present borough. The Wallabout had the larger French and Huguenot population. Eastward the English settlers were coming into farming competition with their Dutch neighbors.

There was no great alarm or disappointment manifested on Long Island when on a morning in August, 1664, a British fleet was found to have assembled in the Narrows. Colonial militia under the British flag from New England came through the Sound and encamped on the Breuckelen shore. On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam yielded, and Governor Nicolls raised the flag of Great Britain on the fort. Then New Amsterdam became New York; Long Island and Staten Island, and probably part of Westchester County, were made an English “shire,” and Breuckelen, after some changes of spelling, was known as “Brooklyn in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”

This settlement of Dutch and Huguenots, maintained under the Colonial government of New Amsterdam, in the score of years before the British conquest had acquired a distinctive character. Contrary to a prevalent opinion, these first Dutch settlements, in a sound and vigorous sense, were essentially democratic. In the absence of class privileges—the spirit to refer all questions to the supreme consideration of the general welfare; to subordinate individual claims to the rights and advantage of the public—Breuckelen and Vliessingen (Flushing) compared favorably in civic life with contemporary villages in New England. As Holland had been dyked against the sea by close, unremitting, and intimate co-operation—a spirit further developed in the protracted struggle for independence—so the smaller Dutch colonies in New York, while they kept their agricultural character, retained a collective rather than an individual ideal, which tended to exclude none from equal social opportunities. They never had to struggle with the incubus of a modified feudalism, which, though inevitably breaking up, was leaving its impress of regard for rank and class privilege in the American colonies of British origin.

Colonial life under British rule was marked by more rigid laws as the communities grew. The careful protection of common-lands was strictly attended to, especially the town forests of Brooklyn against the encroachment of those who would surreptitiously cut away the timber. Trustees of the common woodlands were appointed; but in the year 1702 these lands were equitably divided and all allotted to each householder in Brooklyn to insure their better protection.

Gradually the English language was spoken in the churches and upon ceremonious occasions. A waggish tale of Domine Schoonmaker of Flatbush relates his difficulties in a wedding service. Fluent and eloquent in his mother tongue, he essayed the ceremony in English, with the manner, gestures, and all the courteous dignity of the old school. His English failed him at the very close of the service. Conscious of the literalness of his extemporized translation of the formula, he finished with a bow, adding with solemnity and modulated emphasis, “I pronounce you two to be _one beef_.”

English customs gradually came in vogue. More aristocratic usages superseded the democracy of the Dutch settlers. Slavery existed in Brooklyn as in New York. Brick and stone buildings arose along Fulton Street. Twice, in 1745 and 1752, the Colonial legislature of the Province met in Brooklyn, on account of the prevalence of smallpox in New York.

The rural character of the town is well illustrated by an event in 1759. A large bear then passed along the farms in South Brooklyn, and being pursued took to the water near Red Hook, where he was shot from a boat.

The ethics of 1774 approved the aid of lotteries to build an orthodox church in Brooklyn, which the public were assured should be of no doubtful laxity, but a church conformable to the discipline of the Church of England, and under the patronage of Trinity Church, New York.

In the matter of amusements in 1774, New Yorkers came to Brooklyn for many of their sports. Here horse-races were run. In that year an ambitious innkeeper on “Tower Hill”—a site along the present Columbia Heights between Middagh and Cranberry Streets—announced that there would be a _bull baited_ there every Thursday afternoon.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, Brooklyn numbered between three and four thousand persons grouped in four neighborhoods. There were then three ferries to New York. At the old (Fulton) ferry was a famous tavern which figured often in the times of British occupation. The two principal villages were then called Brooklyn-church and Brooklyn-ferry.

At the first movements of the Patriot party in New England the people of Kings County were little stirred. Suffolk County, at the eastern end of Long Island, more readily responded to the first news from Massachusetts. After the battle of Lexington, Brooklynites assembled and passed resolutions and elected delegates to the Provincial Congress.

The modern visitor to the Borough of Brooklyn has difficulty to realize that what is now densely built up, and covered by grading and asphalt, marks the battle-ground of one of the greatest engagements of the Revolution. The houses of Charlestown cover the battle-ground of Bunker Hill, but that was a struggle over a single redoubt, while Brooklyn is built upon a line of battle nearly three miles in length. In the Civil War, Northern people recall the great disaster of the first battle of Bull Run, fought with modern armies and improved weapons. Yet in that all-day conflict, with the disastrous rout and pursuit, the Union loss in killed, wounded and prisoners probably was not as great numerically as the loss suffered by the American forces in the half-day of fierce fighting in Brooklyn. The Federal forces at Bull Run suffered in killed, wounded, and missing 2896, while the patriot losses in this, the first pitched battle of the Revolution, were estimated at 3300 by the British, of whom 1097 were prisoners (three being generals); and late American historians are inclined to accept this estimate as approximately correct.

In the summer of 1776, a formidable fleet assembled in the lower Bay of New York. These vessels bore from Nova Scotia the armies that had evacuated Boston, and another fleet of nine war vessels and thirty-five transports brought in the forces under Clinton that had been repulsed in the attack on Fort Moultrie at Charleston. At last, on the 12th of August arrived the Hessian forces in eighty-two transport-ships guarded by six war vessels. On board were 7800 Hessians and 1000 English guards.

The observer at the Narrows must have daily beheld a naval pageant such as can no more be seen in modern warfare. From the first distant glimpse of the line of sails standing in for Sandy Hook, until they finally manœuvred to their crowded anchorage by Staten Island, the effect was most picturesque. It was not a fleet of dark, sullen sea-dogs, with only an inconspicuous hull built to carry a destructive armament. The coloring of these vessels against the green background of Staten Island in the olden days of oak and hemp would have delighted a painter. The upper works outside were sometimes dark blue or canary yellow, surmounted by waving lines of gilt. Below were black streaks running fore and aft near the water-line; as the ships slowly lifted in a seaway, they disclosed a white under-surface that must have made an admirable target for the opposing gunner. The grand air of the frigates was further enhanced by elaborate ornamentation with emblematic devices about the carved figure-head, and heavy gilded scrollwork above the stern-lights, and high stern-gallery. From the bluffs along the Narrows, the view down upon the decks would show that all inboard surfaces, even the gun-carriages and the inner side of portholes, were painted blood-red—so as not to have the carnage of battle too much _en évidence_.

At one time over four hundred transports, guarded by thirty-seven men-of-war, had gathered. Lord Howe on the land, and his brother, Admiral Howe, on the sea were in joint command.

The patriot forces had carefully entrenched a line of defensive works, laid out by General Nathaniel Greene. The good judgment with which these forts were placed was attested by the deliberate adoption of almost the same line of redoubts and forts in the subsequent defences of Brooklyn by the engineers in the campaign of 1814, when Brooklyn was again prepared to resist British attack.

The fortifications of Brooklyn in 1776 extended in an irregular line from Fort Defiance at Red Hook opposite Governor’s Island across to Fort Box on Bergen’s Hill near the corner of Court Street and First Place. At the junction of Clinton and Atlantic Streets, or a little easterly, was a steep conical hill called the Ponkiesburgh, and on top, surmounting a line of spiral trenches, a redoubt, called Corkscrew Fort. Between Atlantic, Pacific, Nevins, and Bond Streets was a redoubt mounting five guns called Fort Greene. Thence the line ran zigzag across the present Fulton Street, to the west of the junction of Flatbush and Fulton Avenues, along the hill slope to Fort Putnam, on the eminence now called Fort Greene Park, a commanding height where were mounted five guns. The number of guns mounted upon the works from Fort Putnam to Fort Defiance was thirty-five—mainly eighteen-pounders—an armament in part captured from Ticonderoga.

From this fort the line extended northwesterly to a spring at the verge of the Wallabout, near the corner of Flushing and Portland Avenues. This interior line of defence was nearly two miles long. Between these forts were lines of trenches further defended by trees and sharpened stakes, forming an abatis, in the construction of which the Continental woodsmen were always proficient. Within this line of defence was Fort Stirling, which was back near Columbia Heights.

It is difficult after a century of grading and building to conceive that an extensive morass then covered nearly all the lands south of the present Hamilton Avenue, save about the small island height at Red Hook. Gowanus, with several large ponds raised by Brower’s Mill-dam, flooded and made impassable nearly all the area extending from Fourth Avenue to Smith Street. This was crossed by a narrow causeway along Freeke’s Mill-pond. On the higher lands beyond, extending from Greenwood along Prospect Park towards East New York, were dense woodlands, that were only practicable for an advancing army by certain passes or narrow wood-roads. The principal route from the Narrows to Brooklyn was along the site of Third Avenue by a good road then known as the Shore Road.

The battle of August 27, 1776, was fought almost entirely outside this line of fortifications. Knowing that the British forces had been moving towards Brooklyn from the Narrows, General Putnam had posted troops in detachments in order to check the hostile columns as they should come through the wood-roads and passes. It was natural to expect the principal British advance by the Shore Road, as there they would be at all times within supporting distance of the fleet.

On August 26th the Hessians under de Heister had occupied Flatbush, and Lord Cornwallis had reached nearly to Flatlands.

In the forenoon of the 27th, Stirling commanded the patriot right, extending from the shore near the foot of Twenty-third Street up Greenwood Heights about to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Third Street. This position was to repel the expected attack by the route of the Shore Road. Sullivan commanded the centre, which was an irregular congeries of militia posted along the summits of hills in Prospect Park and across the Flatbush Road. Colonel Miles with the 1st Pennsylvania regiment occupied the hills near the Clove Road to the south of Bedford, with some Connecticut levies continuing the line still further eastward. Instead of a co-ordinated supporting line of battle, these dispositions were intended as little more than a body of skirmishers, too widely strung-out to be opposed to an actual attack.