Part 8

To complete this interesting group, which Tarrytown ought to preserve with pious care, and at no great distance from the manor-house, stands the old Dutch church, one of the most quaint and best preserved monuments of early history on the continent. He would be a bold man who would venture to state definitely the date at which the building of this ancient edifice was begun; on that point a wide latitude must be permitted and discreet silence preserved. It answers all purposes of intelligent curiosity to be told that the foundations were probably laid as early as 1684, and that the building was completed, probably, not later than 1697. The bell which still hangs in the little steeple and which may be heard on quiet Sunday afternoons in the late summer or early autumn, when services are held in the ancient structure, was cast in 1685, and bears the inscription, “Si Deus pro nobis quis contra nos.” The church was built with characteristic solidity, the walls being more than two feet thick; a great pulpit with a sounding-board projected from the eastern end; the benches on which the congregation sat were without backs; and the doctrine expounded from the sacred desk was of a kindred soundness of fibre. Some concession to human weakness was shown to the lord of the manor, in the comfortable and imposing arrangement of the large pews on the right and left of the minister. The farmers filled the body of the little church, while slaves, redemptioners, and other obscure persons, with the choir, sat in the tiny gallery. In 1697, the Rev. Guiliam Bertholf began a kind of visitorial ministry in the new church, coming three or four times a year to preach and administer the sacraments. He was a native of Sluis, in Holland, emigrated to the new world in 1684, and became a preacher nine years later. His ability and zeal gave him wide influence, and he was instrumental in organizing a number of churches of the Reformed faith and order. From this initial ministry until the present time, although the congregation has moved to a larger and modern edifice, the succession of faithful preachers has never been broken, and the historic pulpit of Tarrytown has never been more thoroughly identified with generous devotion, high character, and unusual gifts of nature and speech than during the last twenty-five years. During the stormy years of the Revolution the church was frequently closed; and at the close of the struggle the trappings which had distinguished the pews of the lord of the manor were torn down, and elders and deacons sitting in the seats once set apart for the local aristocracy emphasized the triumph of the democratic idea in Church and State. Not long afterwards another innovation was made by the substitution of English for Dutch in the services.

In October, 1897, the two hundredth anniversary of the church was celebrated with services which recalled, with unusual completeness, the varied and instructive history of the old building and of the community.

The modern village lies to the south of the church, which is hidden beneath ancient trees, and is still enveloped in an atmosphere of old-time silence and repose. The Pocantico flows beside it, almost unseen when the midsummer foliage is spread over it; while to the north, climbing a gentle slope and sinking softly down to the brook, is the ancient burying-ground, in which the first interments were made about 1645. The place is singularly peaceful and of a rare and gentle beauty; the gradual slope dotted with ancient graves, protected on the east by wooded heights, overhung with old trees, and commanding on the west glimpses of the broad expanse of the Tappan Zee, and, from its higher levels, the tree-embowered village, the long line of shining water, and the distant front of the Palisades. There is probably no other locality in America, taking into account history, tradition, the old church, the manor-house, and the mill, which so entirely conserves the form and spirit of Dutch civilization in the new world. This group of buildings ranks in historic interest, if not in historic importance, with Faneuil Hall, Independence Hall, the ruined church tower at Jamestown, the old gateway at St. Augustine, and the Spanish cabildo on Jackson Square in New Orleans; and the time will come when pilgrimages will be made to this ancient and beautiful home of some of those ideals and habits of life which have given form and structure to American civilization.

It was the misfortune of Tarrytown to lie in the path of both armies for many dreary months during the Revolution; and no section of the country felt the uncertainty and terrors of war more keenly. When Cooper looked about for an American subject for his second novel, his interest in the history of Westchester County, in the lower part of which he was for a number of years a resident, led him to a fortunate choice, and _The Spy_ remains not only one of the best of American novels of incident, but a vivid report of the suspense and misery of the country between the Highlands of the Hudson, held by the American forces, and the city of New York in the hands of the British. That section was mercilessly harried by friend and foe. The few families which made the little hamlet of Tarrytown, never knew whether the Skinners or the Cowboys would appear next; the only certainty in the situation seems to have been that, sooner or later, whatever was portable and valuable would be carried off. There was much quiet courage in the form of patient endurance in those years when church and school were closed, crops gathered by hands that had not sown, houses burned in the dead of night, and all normal community life at an end. Caught in the centre of the storm of war, Tarrytown not only suffered severely but bore her losses with conspicuous fortitude and courage. In many sudden forays, as well as in the larger movements of the American forces, the men of Tarrytown played their parts with notable pluck and daring.

The devotion of a majority of the people of the place to the American cause had its reward in the lasting association of the town with the most romantic and tragic episode of the war; and the incorruptible patriotism of three Westchester County men not only averted what might have been a crushing calamity, but immortalized the scene of their resistance to temptation. On the 24th day of September, 1780, Major André, bearing dispatches of a treasonable nature from General Benedict Arnold, then in command of the American forces at West Point, was captured on the highway at a place now marked by a monument, by John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart. These obscure militiamen, soon to become famous, were watching the road, when a horseman appeared riding toward the south. He was promptly challenged, ordered to dismount, and examined as to his business and destination. His answers to the questions put to him by his captors confirmed their suspicion that something of unusual importance was in the air. The determination to search the unfortunate young officer more thoroughly was met with offers of a large sum of money; but the militiamen were not to be bribed, and to their fidelity is due the discovery of the plot to place West Point in British hands. The moral effect of Arnold’s fall was counteracted in large measure by the incorruptibility of André’s captors, and the monument which marks this historic site commemorates the integrity of the American militiamen quite as much as the dramatic episode which ended the careers of Arnold and André.

Tarrytown has had the double good fortune to be the scene of the most striking act of the drama of Arnold’s treason, and to be the custodian of one of the few American legends. In his youth, Washington Irving knew the region intimately. He was given to solitary walks, for he was a dreamer by nature and habit. Wolfert’s Roost was even then an old farm-house, built close to the water’s edge, where the glen broadens to the river. It had colonial and revolutionary associations, and, above all, it had the charm of a situation of singular beauty. Irving seems early to have fallen under the spell of the shaded waterside and the romantic glen. In 1835, after an absence of seventeen years in Europe and an extensive journey through the South and West, which bore fruit in _A Tour on the Prairies_, the recollections and affections of his youth drew him to Sunnyside, now about a mile and a half south of the railway station of Tarrytown, and he became the possessor of a home which will always be associated with our early literary history. The house was enlarged, and began to take on that air of ripe and reposeful beauty which made it an ideal home for a man of letters. Under this roof his later books were written, and here he was sought by the most interesting men of his time.

Irving’s familiarity with the Hudson River and its historical associations had already borne fruit in the _Sketch-Book_ in two original and characteristic legends. Like his illustrious contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, Irving was a born lover of traditions of all sorts; a man with a genius for getting the poetry and romance out of the past. In _The History of New York_, impersonated in Diedrich Knickerbocker, he created a legend; in _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ he gave lasting fame to two stories full of the Dutch spirit. Sleepy Hollow lies to the north and east of Tarrytown, within easy walking distance. It is still secluded and quiet and the stir of modern times has not broken in upon its ancient seclusion.

“A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail, or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.... A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his pow-wows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual dream.”

Since the days when these words were written the air of Sleepy Hollow has not escaped the general stirring of a more hurried age; but on summer afternoons the meditative visitor still finds the valley a place of silence and peace. The master of the spell which has brought so many pilgrims to Tarrytown sleeps in the ancient graveyard; the home which he loved with a love deepened by years of exile, still stands, somewhat enlarged, but not despoiled of its secluded and ivy-clad loveliness.

Great estates have been formed about Tarrytown and stately homes line the shores of the river, but the place has kept something of its old simplicity and repose. It has never lacked the presence of those to whom its traditions of refined social habit and generous intellectual life have been sacred; and its distinction is still to be found in an atmosphere which is in no sense dependent on its later and larger prosperity.

NEW YORK CITY

THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY

BY JOSEPH B. GILDER

By comparison with London, New York is a city of the second size, lacking some millions of the population of the modern Babylon. Even Paris, though less populous, outranks the American metropolis in many of the elements that go to the making of a great city. But in drawing these comparisons it must be remembered that only three centuries ago, when the French and English capitals had been places of importance for over a thousand years, New York was a wooded island, criss-crossed by innumerable streams, indented by morasses and infested by Indians and wild beasts. European civilization was wrinkled with age long before a permanent roof was erected on the island of Manhattan; and three lives such as that of ex-Mayor Tiemann, who died here in his ninety-fifth year, in the summer of 1899, would have spanned the entire history of the town from the Dutch discovery to the reign of Richard Croker.

The first white man’s habitation in what is now New York was a grave; for the crew of Hudson’s _Half-Moon_, after their fight with the aborigines on the mainland above Spuyten Duyvil Creek, in September, 1609, buried their dead before sailing homeward from their voyage of discovery up the great river named for their commander.

Four temporary dwellings, presumably little better than wigwams, housed Skipper Block and the crew of the _Tiger_ near the lower end of the island, while they rebuilt their burned vessel, during the winter of 1613-14. The site of the present city was bought from the Indians on May 6, 1626, for trinkets worth sixty guilders, or four-and-twenty dollars—less than one tenth of the rate paid a few years since for a single square foot of land. Building was begun at once and pushed with vigor. Fort Amsterdam—a blockhouse partly shielded by palisades—marked the extreme southern limit of the island; and the first bark-roofed cottages were clustered close together under its harmless, necessary guns. A warehouse with stone walls and a thatched roof sprang up as soon as a stronghold had been built; and a horse-mill, with a loft fitted up for the simplest form of religious services.

Fort Amsterdam was a fortress in name only. Scarcely had it been completed when it began to fall into disrepair; and the pigs were forever rooting in its sodded earthworks, and threatening its very foundations. Thus early was it that these four-footed scavengers made their appearance in the history of New York, playing as picturesque, though not as patriotic, a part therein as that of the legendary Roman geese. Not till well forward in the present century did they disappear from the streets and the annals of the city.

Peter Minuit, the first Director of New Netherlands to hold his place for more than a year, and the first to organize a permanent provincial government, sent home hopeful reports, and backed them with shipments of fur and timber; but the expenses of administering the colony ultimately exceeded its earnings, and the West India Company was disappointed of the revenue it had counted upon receiving from the new settlement.

The little village grew but slowly. When it had spread so far northward as the line of what is now Wall Street—which is so far down-town to-day that many a New York woman, native-born, has yet to see it for the first time—a stockade was set up across the island, narrower then than now, to fence off the village from the farms (bouweries) of the more adventurous pioneers, and the forest that bordered them. This defense, completed in 1653, consisted of palisades and posts, twelve feet high, with a sloping breastwork of earth and a ditch on its southern side. In less than two years its height was doubled to keep the Indians from leaping over it.

But neither the Fort with its stone guns, nor this high wooden wall, was ever called upon to withstand a vigorous attack or resist a siege; for whenever the place was seriously threatened, its flag came fluttering down, and its keys were turned over to the enemy. This happened first in August, 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls appeared in the bay, as deputy of the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. had granted all the territory between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay, and demanded the Fort’s surrender. The claim of the English was nebulous to the last degree. As Freneau neatly put it,

“The soil they demanded, or threatened their worst, Insisting that _Cabot had looked at it first_.”

But the flimsiest pretension, if vigorously backed, outvalues the strongest if less sturdily maintained; and Director Stuyvesant found his people unwilling to support him in defying the intruder. So down dropped the Dutch colors and up ran the British.

Precisely nine years later, however, what had formerly been called New Amsterdam, but was now New York, yielded itself to a little Dutch fleet without striking a defensive blow. Captain Colve’s victory was so lightly won, indeed, that the English commander, Captain Manning, was courtmartialled for his apparent inefficiency, cowardice or treason, and the estates of the Governor, Colonel Lovelace, who, when the blow fell, was absent on affairs of state, were confiscated by the Duke. The triumph of the Hollanders was short-lived; for the year 1674 had not run its course when Major Edmund Andros assumed the governorship, and by the terms of a treaty of peace between England and the States-General, New Orange, as the place had been christened by the Dutch, again and finally became New York.

New York has been in turn a Dutch village, an English town, and an American city. In its infancy it was wholly Dutch; but in its early youth the population was so leavened by English immigration that the transition to English control was less violent than one might expect it to have been. English influence was powerful even in Stuyvesant’s day; and when Stuyvesant was supplanted by Nicolls, the Dutch element was still powerful in the councils of the little town. The new ruler moved slowly and cautiously in anglicizing the government, and almost all the changes he made were for the better. The brief resumption of Dutch authority in 1673 was reactionary and wholly detrimental to the interests of the community; and, all things considered, the peaceful cession of the town to England, a year later, was the happiest chance that could possibly have befallen.

A more violent and radical change was effected in 1689, when Jacob Leisler seized the occasion of the fall of the Stuart dynasty to grasp the reins of government which Andros had been forced to drop. By the aid of the militia and with the support of nearly all the less prosperous townsfolk, he administered public affairs till that good Dutchman William III. of England commissioned Governor Sloughter to hang the usurper and reign in his stead. Leisler’s rule had been in many respects an enlightened one, and years afterward his adherents succeeded in having his dishonored bones dug up and honorably reinterred. It was in this town, and at the instance of this earnest but ill-balanced and despotic champion of the poor, that the American Colonies took their first step toward concerted action, their objective being the overthrow of the French at Montreal.

The most striking characteristic of New York has always been its cosmopolitanism. As Governor Roosevelt points out in his capital review of the city’s history, no less than eighteen different languages and dialects were spoken in the streets so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century. The Dutch, the English and the Huguenot refugees from France predominated, but there were many Walloons and Germans, and a large body of black slaves. The riffraff of the Old World was to be found here, as well as the nobly adventurous; and, in fact, at all times since, the proportion of foreign-born residents has been very large.

In the period immediately preceding the Revolution, the desire for independence was far less general in New York than in Massachusetts or Virginia. The large land owners and leading merchants were mainly members of the Church of England; and while there was no state church, so called and admitted to be such, the Anglicans were first in wealth and fashion, and their organization enjoyed exclusive privileges. Even King’s College (now Columbia University) was placed officially under Church control. The court party included not only the Anglican clergy and almost all the laity, but even an influential section of the membership of the Dutch Reformed Church. It included such families as the De Peysters, the De Lanceys and the Philippses in the city and its suburbs; and the Johnsons, who dominated central New York. There were Tories even on the Committee of Fifty-one that first authoritatively proposed the assembling of a Continental Congress. In no other colony was the Tory element so numerous and powerful; in none other were the patriots opposed by so active a spirit of loyalty to the Crown, and so vast a bulk of indifference on the part of property-owners, solicitous for nothing but the security of their possessions. At first the Schuylers, the Livingstons, and Hamilton, Jay and Morris found their support almost wholly among the masses, who rose not only against England, but also against the domination of the classes, which was more oppressive in the aristocratic city of New York than in the democratic town of Boston, or in Philadelphia. Thus, it was the so-called Sons of Liberty that had led in the agitation which made the Stamp Act a dead letter, so far as this colony was concerned, and a decade later prevented the landing of taxed tea on New York wharves. And their demonstrative radicalism found little response in the minds of some of the ablest civil and military leaders contributed by this colony to the work of liberation and reconstruction. But the violence of the mob could not blind such men to the essential justice of the American cause, and the actual beginning of the war found a large majority of the best people of the colony definitely committed to a patriotic course. So when Washington and his army were driven hither from Brooklyn and hence to New Jersey, in 1776, New York was no longer the populous place it had been before their sympathizers fled from the terrors of hostile military rule.

For the next seven years this remained the chief British stronghold in America. If the eastern and southern colonies could be split apart by English control of the Hudson, the backbone of the colonial federation would be broken—as the backbone of the Confederacy was broken, nearly a century later, by Sherman’s march to the sea. So every energy was bent toward dislodging the Continentals from this dividing-line. This was the immediate object of Arnold’s treachery, as well as of many an overt movement from south and north. But Washington outgeneralled the enemy and kept the federation intact, till the capture of Yorktown made New York no longer tenable by the foe. The city was well-nigh ruined by its experiences during these seven terrible years; and the outlying country to the north—Westchester County—suffered no less severely, being exposed to raids from the opposing bodies of regulars, and to constant marauding at the hands of free-booters, who pretended affiliation with one side or the other, sometimes in good faith, but often merely as a pretext for lawless depredations.