rural families and many notable city families continued, till recent times with little or no infusion of British blood.78

At the beginning of the 18th century the little isolated community of New Harlem consisted of half a hundred homes. "Intermarriage," says Riker, "among the resident families was the rule, and he was thought a bold swain truly who ventured beyond the pale of the community to woo a mate." . . Fifty years after the village was settled, or about the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, there was scarcely one of the families of the patentees that was not related to every other of the twenty-five or thirty families that first settled the village.79

Doctor Douglass, in colonial days, had a visionary scheme for affiliation with the Indians. He said:

Our young missionaries may procure a perpetual alliance and commercial advantage with the Indians, which the Roman Catholic clergy cannot do, because they are forbid to marry. I mean our missionaries may intermarry with the daughters of the sachems and other considerable Indians, and their progeny will forever be a certain cement between us and the Indians.

William Johnson married a German girl by whom he had several children. After her death he had several mistresses of whom the favorite was a beautiful Indian girl, Molly Brant, sister of Joseph Brant. She bore him eight children and he lived with her until his death.80

The presence of the negroes also suggested miscegenation. But in some regions at least this practice must have been tabooed by the colonists if we are to believe the assertion that after the Revolution the path of the British army could be traced by the presence of mulattoes.81

78 Van Rensellaer. History of the City of New York, vol. ii, 142.

79 Pierce. New Harlem Past and Present, 313.

80 Fisher. Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times, vol. ii, 96.

IX. FAMILY LIFE AND PROBLEMS IN

COLONIAL NEW YORK

The marriage ritual among the Dutch was full of realism. The groom was told to lead, instruct, comfort, protect, and love his wife and maintain his home honestly. The bride was warned against lording it over her spouse. Domestic life in the colony was in the main quiet and commonplace. Family troubles seldom came to court. Mrs. Grant testifies to the hap

piness of marital life in Albany:

Inconstancy or even indifference among married couples was unheard of. . . The extreme affection they bore their mutual offspring was a bond that forever endeared them to each other. Marriage in this colony was always early, very often happy, and very seldom, indeed "interested."

The Dutch women were strongly influential, active in affairs, and respected by their husbands. In Dutch neither party is married to the other: bride or groom marries with the other. In New Netherlands both sexes received education and men and women were more equal than later under the English fashion. (In New York, 1780, the men monopolized the seats on the mall leaving the ladies to stand.) 82 To the end of the colonial period the enjoyment by women of greater independence than in communities of English origin attested the Dutch sources of New York.83 The wife was her husband's equal in the eyes of the law which rec

82 Earle. Colonial Dames and Goodwives, 200.

83 Van Rensellaer. History of the City of New York, vol. ii, 157.

ognized a community in possessions if there was no ante-nuptial contract. Such a contract often provided that the wife and husband should inherit absolutely from each other. Often joint wills of like tenor were made. This was a distinctively Dutch usage. Such wills are significant of the mutuality that characterized married life in the New York colony. But in church the seats of husband and wife were ordinarily separate. Women's high ambition was to be able housewives. Married women were distinguished from maidens by their dress. They stayed at home, read their Bibles and managed. Every good housewife made the apparel of her family. The wife was the head of the household, the sovereign of domestic affairs. Smith, writing after nearly a century of the English régime, says:

The ladies

are comely and dress well, and scarce any

of them have distorted shapes. Tinctured with a Dutch education, they manage their families with becoming parsimony, good providence, and singular neatness.

Marriage had a sedative effect on men. In Albany when a man married he was supposed to lose two pleasures, coasting and pig- and turkey-stealing. Nothing was allowed to disturb the serenity of Dutch housekeeping or the spotless order of the parlor. For a time New Netherlands experienced lack of servants; so wife and daughters performed the work of house and dairy. Mrs. Grant says: "A woman in very easy circumstances, and abundantly gentle in form and manners, would sow, and plant, and rake incessantly." Home was home. Irving says: "Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable signs of disapprobation and uneasiness at being 84 Van Rensellaer. History of the City of New York, vol. i, 480.

surprised by a visit from a neighbor on such occasions.' Especially did wives resent the visits of fire-prevention inspectors to their homes, and abuse these men. diers, often billeted in private homes, were a nuisance. One citizen wrote that "they made him weary."

Sol

It was in the home and in business that woman shone rather than in intellectual affairs. Women teachers and girl-scholars were not eminent in New York in early days. But women were active as shop-keepers, merchants, ship-owners, Indian traders. It was common for a wife to hold her husband's power of attorney in his absence, to help him in business, or to carry on the business after his death. It is said that widows in New Amsterdam often assumed the management of considerable estates. Widow DeVries carried on her deceased husband's Dutch trade making repeated trips to Holland as supercargo on her own ships. She married Frederick Phillipse and by her keenness, thrift, and profitable business helped to make him the richest man in the colony. Widow Provoost enjoyed equal success at the beginning of the eighteenth century. She had a huge business correspondence. New York records other noteworthy examples of woman's ability. Jane Colden was a distinguished botanist and "She makes the best cheese I ever ate in America." 85 Several women in New Amsterdam were tavern-keepers and tapsters.

The court records of Brooklyn contain a scandalous instance of female militancy: Mistress Jonica Schampf and Widow Rachel Luguer assaulted Peter Praa, the captain of the militia, when he was at the head of his troops on training day in 1690. They pulled his hair and beat him and their "Ivill Inormities" brought him

85 Earle. Colonial Dames and Goodwives, 86-87.

within an inch of his life. Among the Dutch, people were brought before the court for saying of another such uncomplimentary things as "He hath not half a wife." One couple sued a woman for saying that the wife in crossing a muddy street raised her petticoats too high.

Pioneer conditions - the emptiness of the country and the shortage of hands-put a premium on large families. Besides in 1650 the West India Company offered one year's exemption from tenths for each child conveyed to or born in New Netherlands. There was no "race suicide" among the colonists tho children seem to have been less numerous than in New England. We are told that in New Harlem at the beginning of the eighteenth century "the small two-story Dutch homes generally sheltered each a half-score or more of sturdy youngsters." But this was a small isolated community. At Albany the Dutch had fewer children than had the people in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Dutch kept a record of births in the family Bible and also a church register. But by the time of the English régime the heterogeneity of the population left gaps in the record. In 1712, Governor Hunter reported to the Lords of Trade: "As to births and burials has never been any register kept that I can hear of."

It may be that the absence of Puritan rigor allowed a larger proportion of children to survive and that accordingly the Dutch had settled to a lower fecundity. But the repeated marriages guaranteed a sufficient posterity. Dongan had heard of one woman "yet alive" who had "upwards of 360 living descendants." Small families were rare. Mothers nursed their offspring and they flourished. Irving says:

86 Fisher. Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times, vol. ii, 57.