ENGLAND COLONIZED MORE OF NORTH AMERICA than Jamestown: a second prong of settlers, also with a charter from the Virginia Company, and known to history as the Pilgrims, landed at Plymouth in what is now Massachusetts in 1620. But between these two anchor settlements lay the domain of a rival imperial power—Holland.
Holland itself was a newly independent nation, freed after a decades-long war of independence from Spain. The liberated Dutch quickly became a commercial and naval power, owning a string of outposts from Brazil to the Indian Ocean, and to the Malay Straits.
Holland’s colonies were trading posts, designed to extract whatever the locals had to offer. What the Dutch got from North America was furs. Their traders settled as far north as Fort Orange (now Albany, New York), 145 miles up the river explored and later named after Henry Hudson. But the headquarters of their enterprise was the trading post on the island of Manhattan at the river’s mouth, New Amsterdam.
Like Jamestown, New Amsterdam was operated by a company—the Dutch West India Company. According to the legendary story of its founding, Manhattan was bought from the Indians for sixty guilders’, or twenty-four dollars’, worth of trade goods—history’s greatest real estate deal. In some versions of the story, the Indians who sold it were just passing through, so there was sharp dealing on both sides. The story in this barebones version is a myth. In fact, no one was cheated; the trade goods were worth considerably more than twenty-four dollars—knives and kettles were valuable prizes on the frontier—and the native sellers expected, and continued, to live and hunt on the island alongside its purchasers for years to come.1 But like most myths, this one captured a truth: New Amsterdam was, from day one, transactional. It was founded to enrich the company’s investors, and they maintained it for that reason. Their agent in charge was a director-general, appointed in Holland. The colony had the polyglot population of a port: Dutch, French, German, and English, and after conquering a smaller Swedish trading post on the Delaware River, it added Swedes and Finns.
Many of New Amsterdam’s residents were transients, there to work and move on. One director-general, after a dispute with his employers, hired himself out to rival Sweden. But other New Amsterdamers wanted to put down roots. As at Jamestown, there were reformers who wanted the company to pay attention to the prosperity and good government of its permanent population.
This the company was slow to do. But in 1647, after the disastrous tenure of a director-general who had embroiled the colony in a bloody Indian war, the company sent the colony a new and more effective man: Peter Stuyvesant.
Stuyvesant, the son of a village minister in Holland’s bleak northern rim, had attended a Dutch university (hence his use of the Latin form of his given name, Petrus). In his early twenties he went to work for the Dutch West India Company, first in Brazil, then in Curaçao, the headquarters of its Caribbean operations. He showed energy and ambition, and in 1642, at only thirty-two years old, he became acting governor there. He raided the Spaniards on the coast of Venezuela and led an expedition to conquer St. Martin, one of their islands in the Lesser Antilles. That operation marked him for life when, as he was planting the Dutch flag on a rampart, a “rough ball” fired from a Spanish cannon crushed his right leg.2 The limb was amputated, and he took a furlough home to allow the wound to heal. The company, impressed with his grit, decided to transfer him to New Amsterdam.
Stuyvesant had an aesthetic, even romantic streak. In his new posting, he made sure that he was supplied with parakeets and parrots from Curaçao. He also maintained a years-long correspondence, in verse, with an admiring younger male friend, another company employee.
The company had not sent him to New Amsterdam to cultivate birds or write poetry. They wanted him to bring efficiency and order to their North American settlement. This he did. He improved its infrastructure by transforming the improvised pathways of the town into regular streets and a creek in its center into a canal (naming it the Heere Gracht, or Lords’ Canal, after a much grander one in Amsterdam). He attended to health and safety, forbidding householders to build wooden chimneys (“very dangerous,” he noted) or to throw “rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animal[s] or anything like it” into his new thoroughfares.3 He built public services, including a hospital and a post office, and opened the Heere Gracht to a weekly market where farmers from Long Island could bring their produce. For security against attack, he built a palisade across the island along the town’s northern edge (the path of this wall is now Wall Street in New York City). Stuyvesant, in the words of a modern scholar, turned New Amsterdam “from a seedy, beleaguered trading post into a well-run Dutch town.”4
His vision of a well-run town came at a price. The day he arrived he told the assembled residents who greeted him that he would rule them “like a father over his children.”5 From a combination of military experience and the example of his own father, he was both a martinet and a bigot. He could be patient, even devious, but he meant to keep power firmly in his hands. He believed in the Dutch Reformed Church in which he had been born and raised and was determined to uphold it where he ruled.
The Dutch Reformed Church was the established religion of Holland. A child of Calvin, it was rationalistic and rigorous. All outside its fold, fellow Calvinists excepted, were destined for eternal fire. Yet the Dutch state, perhaps reacting to its long persecution by Catholic Spain and certainly recognizing that money is the same whoever spends it, allowed believers in other faiths to worship as they wished so long as they did so in the privacy of their homes.
Those were the rules in Amsterdam. In New Amsterdam Stuyvesant regularly overstepped them, arresting Lutherans and keeping out Jews. The Dutch Reformed dominie, or pastor of the colony, encouraged him, condemning other sects as “servants of Baal.”6 Whenever the company, which had Lutheran directors and Jewish investors, learned of Stuyvesant’s prohibitions, they ordered him to relent; only then did he comply with home country practice. Ten years into his governorship, he was confronted with a new set of believers: Quakers.
During and after the English civil war that toppled Charles I, religious convictions, unorthodox or lunatic, that would once have been quashed luxuriated. Independents advocated a bishopless congregational structure, each church responsible for its own affairs. Baptists maintained that the sacrament of admission to the church should be administered only to willing adults, not infants. Fifth Monarchy Men expected the rule of Christ on Earth to begin in 1666 (the four human monarchies, which His would supersede, had been Babylon, Persia, Macedon, and Rome). John Robins, a farmer, claimed to be the reincarnation of Adam, able to raise the dead; two friends of his, John Reeve and Ludowicke Muggleton, tailors, claimed to be the two witnesses of the eleventh chapter of the book of Revelation, whose curses entailed damnation.
Quakers, simultaneously mystical and activist, claimed that God spoke directly to them; when they preached or exhorted, they urged their listeners to tremble at their words, which were the words of the Lord (hence the term Quakers, originally a hostile nickname). Since all believers were equal, they rejected the forms of social hierarchy, such as formal pronouns and doffing hats. Since any one of them, women included, could exhort, they had no clergy. They called themselves Friends, but not surprisingly, given their radicalism, every person was against them except those they won over.
In April 1657, Robert Fowler, a Quaker from the north of England, sailed with a small party of Friends from London across the Atlantic. In an account he wrote of his voyage, he expressed the essence of Quaker immediatism. Whenever he “ent[ered] into reasoning” about his journey, “it brought me as low as the grave, and laid me as one dead.” But when he surrendered himself to God’s guidance, all went well. At the end of May, his ship landed in New Amsterdam, passing from Long Island Sound into the East River through a channel known, due to its narrowness and rough currents, as Hell Gate. Thus, wrote Fowler, was “the Scripture fulfilled in our eyes, in the figure Hell’s gates cannot prevail against you.”7 Fowler interpreted a school of fish following his rudder to be another sign of the prayers of Quakers supporting his voyage. God spoke to Quakers in everything, and they were called to speak to everyone.
This enthusiast duly presented himself to Director-General Stuyvesant. In the words of the dominie, “He stood still with his hat firm on his head, as if a goat.”8 Stuyvesant encouraged him to keep voyaging, and Fowler sailed with the next tide back through Hell Gate and down the sound to Rhode Island. He left behind two women in their twenties, Dorothy Waugh and Mary Wetherhead, who, according to the dominie, “began to quake and go into a frenzy and cry out loudly in the middle of the street, that men should repent, for the day of judgment was at hand.”9 These Stuyvesant arrested, then expelled from the colony.
That summer another young Quaker, Robert Hodgson, appeared on the western end of Long Island. There, across the East River from Manhattan, lay four towns belonging to Stuyvesant’s domain: Gravensand (Gravesend), Middleburgh (Newtown), Vlissingen (Flushing), and Heemstede (Hempstead), to give their Dutch and English names. They bore two sets of names because although they were ruled by the Dutch West India Company, they were populated by English settlers, invited by Stuyvesant’s predecessor in the expectation that they would act as buffers against Indian and pirate attacks.
Heemstede/Hempstead had a Calvinist minister, a Presbyterian who, wrote the dominie, agreed with the Dutch Reformed Church “in everything.”10 But once Hodgson began speaking there, he “brought several under his influence.”11 Stuyvesant had Hodgson arrested and brought to Manhattan, where he was treated far worse than his female coreligionists. Stuyvesant sentenced him to a hundred-guilder fine—more than the price of Manhattan—or two years’ labor in a work gang. When Hodgson refused to accept either punishment, Stuyvesant had him whipped, in private and in public, for days on end. An anonymous letter writer appealed to the director-general for mercy, asking whether it would not be better to send the hapless Quaker to Rhode Island, “as his labor is hardly worth the cost.”12 What good could Hodgson do in a work gang if he had been beaten almost to death? Stuyvesant released him and sent him away.
Stuyvesant had encountered four Quakers and dealt with them in three different ways: he had let Fowler go, expelled Waugh and Wetherhead, and brutalized and expelled Hodgson. Now he announced a new policy: keeping Quakers out altogether. Any ships that arrived bearing Quakers would be seized; anyone hosting them would be fined. Since there were no Quaker directors or investors in the company, who would rebuke him?
Rebuke came at the end of the year from his own people. On December 27, 1657, thirty inhabitants of Vlissingen/Flushing signed a remonstrance deploring his new orders.
The source was not surprising. Founded thirteen years earlier by English families, Flushing had strayed from the Calvinist path. The town’s Presbyterian minister had left for Virginia because not enough residents had been willing to pay him. “Many” in Flushing, wrote the dominie disapprovingly, “have become imbued with divers opinions.” He expressed his scorn in a Latin tag: quod homines tot sententiae (as many men, so many opinions).13
The form of the rebuke from Flushing was legalistic. Remonstrances are statements of grievance. Although they are not laws or even proposed laws, they are formal protests or petitions for redress. Magna Carta allowed barons to remonstrate with the king of England. Jews in the Bible remonstrated with the kings of Israel. Now Stuyvesant was on the receiving end.
“Right Honorable,” the remonstrance began, “You have been pleased to send unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people.” Here already in the first sentence was a whiff of defiance: Peter Stuyvesant himself considered Quakers seducers of the people, and his word was law; he would not appreciate being lumped among “some.” Defiance became forthright in the next sentence. “For our part we cannot condemn them in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them, for out of Christ God is a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” In the course of their remonstrance, the men of Flushing would give several reasons for challenging Stuyvesant, but they began with their most important: God told them to do it, and they obeyed—and feared—the Almighty more than their director-general.
Then the remonstrance introduced a new argument. In defying Stuyvesant, were Flushing’s signers in fact breaking the law? The remonstrance admitted that it looked as though that were the case. “For the present we seem to be unsensible for the law and the Law giver.” Yet the men of Flushing argued that they were following the tolerant laws of Holland. “The Lord hath taught… the civil power to give an outward liberty in the state.… The law of love, peace, and liberty… extending to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians… is the glory of the outward state of Holland.” Even Jews, Muslims (Turks), and gypsies (Egyptians) could worship as they liked in Holland, so long as they did so in the privacy of their homes; surely Quakers enjoyed the same liberty. In a community as small as New Amsterdam, everybody knew everything; the men of Flushing must have known, or surmised, that the company had corrected Stuyvesant’s anti-Lutheran and anti-Jewish edicts in the past. If the law of Holland governed the possessions of the Dutch West India Company, Stuyvesant was breaking the law, not them.
They bolstered this argument by referring to their town charter, granted by Stuyvesant’s predecessor as director-general in 1645. According to this document, the residents of Flushing were to “have and enjoy the free libertie of conscience according to the costome and manner of Holland, without molestation or disturbance from any Madgistrate… or any other Ecclesiasticall Minister.”14 Now, in 1657, the remonstrance cited “the patent and charter of our Towne… which we are not willing to infringe and violate.”
Like a good legal brief, the remonstrance offered multiple justifications for the case it was making: the laws of the home country and the words of the village’s founding document. But these were justifications drawn from the outward liberties of the outward state. The law that mattered most to the men of Flushing was the inner law, the law with which they had begun—the law of God.
They returned to the point again and again. “When death and the Law assault us… the powers of this world can neither attach us [attach—a legal term meaning seize], neither excuse us, for if God justifye who can condem and if God condem there is none can justifye.… Our desire is not to offend one of [our Saviour’s] little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us, which is the true law both of Church and State; for our Saviour sayeth this is the law and the prophets.”15
The remonstrance was loaded with allusions to the Bible: God the consuming fire was from Deuteronomy 4:24 and Hebrews 12:29; God alone justified or condemned in Romans 8:33–34; the comparison of Protestant sectaries to Christ’s “little ones” drew on Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42, and Luke 17:2; Christ declared the golden rule to be “the law and the prophets” in Matthew 22:40.
Accounts of the origin of religious liberty in America typically ascribe it to enlightenment rationalism: to John Locke, whose Letter Concerning Toleration would resonate powerfully in English thought and politics at the end of the seventeenth century, or to René Descartes, whose free-thinking Discourse on Method was published in Holland ten years before Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam. These gave an educated gloss to the concept of religious liberty, impressing minds of philosophical bent who wished to shake free of the religious ferment and controversies of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Our religious liberty in America is considered a simple side effect of the number of religions that are in fact here. All keep each other free by resisting the efforts of any one to dominate. As James Madison would put it 130 years after the Flushing Remonstrance, “security… for religious rights” depends on “the multiplicity of sects.” When “society itself [is] broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens… the rights of individuals or of the minority will be in little danger.”16
But philosophy did not make the men of Flushing take action. Neither did practical sociology. It took God to do that. In America religious liberty without the force of God’s injunction is a discussion topic or, at best, a habit.
The remonstrance was written by Edward Hart, the town clerk, on December 27, 1657, and signed by Tobias Feake, the schout (a Dutch legal office, equivalent to district attorney), and William Noble and Edward Farrington, two of the town’s magistrates. They were joined by twenty-six other men: William Thorne Sr. and Jr., Edward Tarne, John Store, Nathaniel Hefferd, Benjamin Hubbard, William Pidgion, George Clere, Elias Doughtie, Antonie Field, Richard Stocton, Edward Griffine, John Townesend, Nathaniell Tue, Nicholas Blackford, Michah Tue, Philip Ud, Robert Field Sr. and Jr., Nicholas Parsell, Michael Milner, Henry Townsend, George Wright, John Foard, Henry Semtell, and John Mastine.
None of these men, except the first four, were officials. They were ordinary men speaking up for other ordinary men. Liberty in America sometimes comes from the top (as discussed in chapter 1, Governor Yeardley had a commission to call an assembly in Jamestown), sometimes from the middle (the assembly he called took up its new job with a will). Sometimes it comes from the masses. The status of the men who remonstrated is suggested by the fact that six of them did not sign their names but made marks instead: William Thorne Jr.’s mark, for example, is a scrawl. Philip Ud’s is a stylized capital P. George Clere’s looks like three letters of an alphabet unknown to ordinary men. They could not write their names, but they laid down a marker.
The Flushing Remonstrance was a greater challenge to Stuyvesant’s statesmanship than the intrusions of Hodgson and the other Quakers because the remonstrators were not Quakers. Hodgson and his fellows preached their outré doctrines; the Flushing Remonstrance asserted a right for them and for believers in myriad doctrines to live and worship in New Amsterdam. Contrary to what Madison would say, they were not speaking for themselves but for a principle.
Hart presented the remonstrance to Stuyvesant on December 29. According to the official records of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant “immediately” ordered Hart to be arrested and held in the fort at Manhattan’s southern tip, “which was done.” Stuyvesant then proceeded with a general crackdown. His own meticulous records supply the details. On New Year’s Day 1658, the two magistrates, Noble and Farrington, appeared before him, in response to a summons, and were “immediately arrested.”17
On January 3, Hart appeared before Stuyvesant and was grilled. The purpose of the interrogation was to find out who was behind the remonstrance; Hart answered as evasively as he could. Who wrote the remonstrance? Hart said he did, “according to the intentions of the people.” Did all the signers individually tell him what to write? Hart said “no one in particular” gave him directions, but he “gathered the utterances of the people” at a town meeting. Where was the meeting held? Michael Milner’s house. Where was the document signed? Some signed at Milner’s house, others at their own homes (signers and locations were reviewed in detail). Who called the town meeting? Hart did not know. Who suggested writing the remonstrance? Hart did not know. Had Hart shown it to Feake, Noble, and Farrington, the schout and the magistrates, before the meeting? Hart had read it to them but did not know whether they approved it. “Having heard the answers of the clerk,” the record concluded, “it was resolved to send him to prison until further order.”18
On January 8, Noble and Farrington began to crack; they asked for permission to leave their confinement in the fort and move about Manhattan, promising to appear whenever they might be summoned. Permission was granted. Two days later they submitted a “humble petition” in which they said that they had been misled by Feake; they thought the remonstrance was simply an inquiry to know Stuyvesant’s mind, not an attempt to change it. They promised to “offend no more,” adding that they would “ever pray” for Stuyvesant’s “health and happiness.”19
Stuyvesant received a letter from Flushing on January 22 asking whether the town court should proceed with business in view of Noble’s and Farrington’s “trubell.” Stuyvesant directed it to suspend its operations until he could come to Long Island himself and “give there some necessary orders.”20
Hart cracked on January 23. He now testified that it was Feake who had advised him to draw up the remonstrance. He begged forgiveness. “Forasmuch as I have written a writing whereat you take offense… my humble request is for your mercy.”21 In recognition of his past service, his large family, his timely obeisance, and—most important—his laying the blame on Feake, Hart was pardoned.
On January 28, Feake formally became the scapegoat. Stuyvesant condemned the schout in a statement that was a drumroll of accusation. “Tobias Feake… had the audacity… to be a leader and instigator in the conception of a seditious, mutinous, and detestable letter of defiance… signed by himself and his [ac]complices… wherein they justify and uphold the abominable sect of Quakers, who vilify both the authorities and the Ministers of the Gospel and undermine the State and God’s service.… As an example to others he deserves severe punishment.”
But Feake had cracked too, “confessing his wrongdoing and promising hereafter to avoid such errors.”22 Feake was dismissed from his job and fined two hundred guilders (twice the fine levied on the Quaker Robert Hodgson). If he did not pay, he would be banished from New Amsterdam.
By his own lights, Stuyvesant had been politic, even merciful. He had stifled dissent in his domain without corporal punishment or prison sentences longer than a few weeks. Quakers, shorn of their allies, would be easier to isolate and expel whenever they reappeared. More important, their sympathizers, propagators of a dangerous doctrine of religious liberty, had been intimidated into silence.
The collapse of Hart, Feake, Noble, and Harrington is disheartening. We want bold thoughts and inspiring words to be sustained by brave actions. Unlike the Quakers they defended, the men of Flushing were unwilling to wear the martyr’s crown.
Actual martyrdom was a reality among the English to the northeast. By the late 1650s, New England had become home to half a dozen English colonies. One of them, Rhode Island—where Fowler had sailed and where Waugh, Wetherhead, and Hodgson had been sent—allowed Quakers in its midst. (The dominie of New Amsterdam called Rhode Island “the latrina of New England.”)23 But Massachusetts Bay, the largest of them, expelled Quakers and condemned to death those who returned. From 1659 to 1661, four recidivist Quakers, one of them a woman, were hanged on Boston Common.
Stuyvesant enjoyed his victory for four and a half years. Then in August 1662, trouble returned to Flushing. The magistrates of Rustdorp, a neighboring village, reported that “the abomnible sect, called of Quakers” were meeting every Sunday at the home of John Bowne. Bowne, an Englishman, had recently arrived in Flushing, building a farmhouse there in 1661. He had married Hannah Feake, a relative of Tobias (some accounts call her his daughter, others his niece). Hannah had gone beyond Tobias in sympathy for Quakers by becoming one herself. In time her husband joined her as a convert. The informers who reported the meetings at Bowne’s house asked Stuyvesant to prevent them “one way or another.”24 The way Stuyvesant chose was to order the new schout of Flushing, Resolved Waldron, to arrest Bowne and bring him to New Amsterdam.
When Bowne appeared before the director-general, he would not remove his hat. Stuyvesant had it removed for him and fined him 150 guilders, plus court costs, with the threat of doubling the fine in case of a second offense and banishment in case of a third. Bowne refused to pay.
Bowne was a true believer, which made Stuyvesant hesitate. When Robert Hodgson had similarly refused to acknowledge the sentence meted out to him, Stuyvesant had applied the whip, but the only result of that savagery had been that one of his own subjects had complained in sympathy. Stuyvesant now held his hand, keeping the new Quaker in prison for five months, perhaps hoping that he would crack. In January 1663, when it became clear that Bowne would not, Stuyvesant shipped him off to Holland to be tried by the company at its Amsterdam headquarters.
At his trial, Bowne, like the signers of the remonstrance before him, relied on both inward and outward law. He argued that his treatment at Stuyvesant’s hands was “contrary… to justice and righteousness.” It also violated “that liberty promised us” in Flushing’s founding charter.25
Ignoring inward law, the company decided on pragmatic grounds. In a double-minded letter to Stuyvesant, the company began by declaring that it shared his aversion to Quakers. “We heartily desire that these and other sectarians remained away” from its New World outpost. Yet the sectarians continued to settle there. “We doubt very much whether we can proceed against them rigorously without diminishing the population and stopping immigration, which must be favored at a so tender stage” of the colony’s existence. Amsterdam, the company noted, “has always practiced this maxim of moderation and consequently has often had a considerable influx of people.”26 New Amsterdam would benefit from a similar policy.
The company accordingly directed Stuyvesant to “shut your eyes” and “allow everyone to have his own belief,” so long as he gave no offense to his neighbors and obeyed the government.27 Stuyvesant might have objected that disobeying him was precisely what the Quakers and their sympathizers had done, but, good company man that he was, he obeyed his bosses. Bowne returned to his house in Flushing. Quaker fervor and Flushing’s principles had created facts on the ground to which the company and even its rigorous man on the spot finally bowed.
In 1664 Stuyvesant was ordered to bow again, this time by superior enemy force. England’s post–civil war interval of republican government had ended; the restored royal dynasty revived her imperial ambitions. An English armada sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam and demanded that Stuyvesant hand over his domain.
As on the island of St. Martin twenty-two years earlier, once again there was Stuyvesant, a Dutch flag, and a cannon (this one, his). He stood on the rampart of his fort with a gunner, resolved to fight the invader. But the dominie, speaking for Stuyvesant’s frightened subjects, persuaded him to surrender peacefully.
The articles of capitulation guaranteed that the people of New Amsterdam, renamed New York after Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, “shall enjoy the liberty of their Consciences.”28 What Stuyvesant had resisted with such determination survived him. Two decades later an English governor of the new colony described its patchwork religious makeup thus: “New York has first a Chaplain, belonging to the Fort, of the Church of England; secondly a Dutch Calvinist [minister], thirdly a French Calvinist, fourthly a Dutch Lutheran; abundance of Quakers preachers men and women especially; Ranting Quakers; Singing Quakers… some Independents, some Jews; in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part, of none at all.”29
Stuyvesant died in 1672, at his bouwerie, or farm, north of town; the road that led to it is still called the Bowery. Bowne died in 1695 at his farm, which still stands in what is now Queens, in a neighborhood thick with Chinese restaurants.
England’s colonies, especially Virginia and Massachusetts, conquered the American creation story, as England conquered New Amsterdam; as they became considered sole sources of the American experience, the Flushing Remonstrance faded from the map of the American mind. Its importance is the effect that its principles had on New York and that New York would have on the country. Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were religiously tolerant colonies—Rhode Island small and sui generis, Pennsylvania large and influential. But New York became and remains the nation’s most populous city, as New York State was for over a century (1810–1960) its most populous state. For many years, New York had the largest megaphone, thanks to its cultural and media prominence. From Alexander Hamilton, writing Federalist essays in New York newspapers, to Hamilton, An American Musical, what New Yorkers thought, other Americans would think or react to.
Flushing’s Quakers suffered for religious liberty; the Flushing Remonstrance proclaimed it; John Bowne practiced it. It became the norm, then the rule, for their town, and for its country.