"And if after this, he or she shall return again, then to be proceeded against as incorrigible rogues and enemies to the common peace, and shall immediately be apprehended and committed to the common gaol of the county, and at the next Court of Assistants, shall be brought to their trial, and proceeded against according to the law made Anno 1658, for their punishment on pain of death."

"It is therefore ordered and decreed by this Court, that if any Christian within this jurisdiction shall go about to subvert and destroy the Christian faith and religion, by broaching and maintaining any damnable heresy, as denying * that Christ gave himself a ransom for our sins, every such person continuing obstinate therein, after due means of conviction, shall pay to the common treasurer, during the first six months, twenty shillings a month, and for the next six months, forty shillings per month, and so to continue during his obstinacy."+

"It is ordered and enacted by authority of this Court, that no Jesuit, or spiritual, or ecclesiastical person, (as they are termed,) ordained by the authority of the Pope, or see of Rome, shall henceforth at any time repair to, or come within this jurisdiction; and if any person shall give just cause of suspicion that he is one of such society or order, he shall be brought before some of the Magistrates, and if he cannot free himself of such suspicion, he shall be committed to prison, or bound over to the next Court of Assistants, to be tried and proceeded with, by banishment or otherwise, as the Court shall see cause.

"And if any person so banished be taken the second time within this jurisdiction, upon lawful trial and conviction, he shall be put to death."‡

Such was Puritan "Freedom of Conscience!" It was the "freedom" of believing just as the Puritans believed, or being subjected to stripes, fines, imprisonment and death. No! gentlemen of the New England Society, you yourselves know that there is not the slightest foundation for such a claim. The only proof offered on the late Forefathers' Day, was some sentimental jingles by Mrs. Hemans, which, if we recollect aright, she herself, after they had been published, qualified or recalled. In the Laws cited above, we have the very thing itself; and the Churchmen, Quakers, and Romanists of that day knew, in their own bitter experience, that those Laws were not a dead letter. So far from believing in "liberty of conscience," on the contrary, a more thoroughly intolerant set of men never lived on the face of the earth than those self-same Puritans, who are now commended to our grateful reverence,

* Col. Laws, Ch. li, Sec. ii.

Ib., Ch. li, Sec. xiii.

Ib., Ch. liv.

and whose "principles," we are told, are to be enforced among us. There was neither religious freedom nor civil freedom among them. At a General Court, held in the Colony of New Haven, at New Haven, Oct. 27, 1643,

"It was agreed and concluded," [we quote their own words] "as a fundamental order not to be disputed or questioned hereafter, that none shall be admitted to be free Burgesses in any of the Plantations within this jurisdiction for the future, but such Planters as are members of some or other of the approved Churches in New England."

The Laws in the Massachusetts Colony, as we have seen above, were of the same character.

In respect to the subject of Slavery, the speakers at this meeting on "Forefathers' Day" seemed to take for granted, that that movement now going on, by which the institution of Domestic Slavery is losing forever its political power, and is fast approaching utter annihilation, is only the carrying out of the principles of the old Puritans. We have heard the same thing affirmed again and again, on other occasions, and by men who ought to know better. The real facts in the case have been given at length, in a former number of this Review, and need not be repeated here. One of the very first things which the Puritans did in this country was to establish Slavery. They enslaved the Indians. They enslaved the negroes. They even sold into bondage Irish and Scotch, who had been taken as prisoners in the old country, and sent as prisoners to New England. They enslaved, or sold into Slavery, some of their own people, for giving shelter to persecuted Quakers. In the Convention to form the National Constitution, when the question of extending the Slave Trade came up, the motion to grant such extension was seconded by a New England Puritan; and when the final vote was taken, the New England members voted unanimously for that extension, in league with the extreme Southern or Gulf States; while, on the other hand, the Middle States, which were under either Church or anti-Puritan influences, all voted against the extension of the Slave Trade, and bore manly testimony to their convictions in the debates in

* Lambert's History of the Colony of New Haven, p. 23.

the Convention on the subject. And so, also, when the Slave Trade itself was reopened in South Carolina, and African negroes were captured, and brought to this country and sold into bondage, New England was the first to engage in the traffic, and the very last to abandon it. These are the plain, naked facts of history; although, as we have said, Puritan Histories and Puritan School books habitually ignore them. Really, there is something almost of sublimity, in the cool impudence with which these men now come forward and lay exclusive claim to certain social virtues.

Now, if the "New England Society" in New York will have the honesty and candor not to insult our intelligence by such ridiculous eulogies of the Puritans, they will save us from the necessity of opening to the light of day these old records, which are a disgrace to humanity, and which may well be suffered to sink into forgetfulness. But we are living in what was once not a Puritan, but a Dutch and English Colony. That Colony had and always had its own settled policy. We do not claim for that policy entire exemption from errors and blunders; but we do claim, as one of its distinguishing and noble features, that here the citizens of every land and every Creed have been freely welcomed. Even the refugees from Puritan intolerance in New England, as the historian DeLaet says, by "whole towns," here found "that liberty denied them by their own countrymen," and this was one secret of the cruel opposition which the Dutch Colony received from that source. The spirit and genius of the government and institutions of New York have been of this broad and liberal character. English Cavaliers, Hollanders, French Huguenots, and Germans, here mingled their best blood, and they have made New York what she is to-day, the metropolis of the New World. If she has not been perpetually blowing her own trumpet, and writing School books to blazon and belie her own history, she has been doing a nobler work in making the history and moulding the destinies of a great nation. In the Cabinet and in the field, in the Council Chambers of the Nation and on the Bench, in

* Madison Papers, Vol. III., pp. 1415, 1427-29.

Literature and Art, in Commerce and in all the activities of material enterprise, her sons have been first and foremost. Her Livingstons, her Hamiltons, her Jays, her Schuylers, her Fultons, her Clintons, her Morrises, her Kents, her Irvings, if they have not resolved themselves into a "Mutual Admiration Society," if their motto has been esse quam videri, have yet done a work which will not fail of just appreciation when the real history of the country shall be written, and when that great truth-teller, Time, shall pronounce her verdict. When soldiers have been wanted for the battle-field, or gold for an exhausted treasury, when pinching want in Greece, and Ireland, and England, has called for bread, when great movements in the commercial, scientific, literary, and religious world have sought for counsel, recognition, and aid, then public sentiment has turned to New York, as promptly as the needle to the pole. We do not praise New York; New Yorkers have never yet learned to praise themselves. Yet, as the illustrious Chancellor Kent said, "If I do not greatly deceive myself, there is no portion of the history of this country which is more instructive or calculated to embellish our national character, than the history of this State. It will be found, upon examination, as fruitful as the records of any other people, in recitals of heroic actions, and in images of resplendent virtue. It is equally well fitted to elevate the pride of ancestry, to awaken deep feeling, and kindle generous emulation."

In conclusion, we beg to say to the New England Society, that we stand ready to do all proper honor to the memory of the old Puritans. They had certain stern, rugged virtues. They had certain glaring and most offensive faults. If the descendants of those old Puritans, here among us, shall prove themselves incapable of assimilating with what we know to be a different, and believe to be a nobler type of social life; if they will insist, that, on every possible occasion, this paltry, conceited, clannish provincialism, this exclusive, ungenerous, grasping claim to power, and place, and fame, shall be flaunted in our faces, and that, too, at the sacrifice of all historic truth, and of all that we owe to the founders of this Colony,-then we submit to them, whether it is not most natural to wish that

the old master of the May Flower had been bribed by the Dutch to land his cargo a good many leagues north even of Cape Cod. At any rate, we may congratulate ourselves, that this element, however disagreeable it may prove itself to be in social life at all times, and however it may manage to worm itself into a little notoriety here and there and call it fame, is yet an exotic plant in New York; and can never take deep root in such an uncongenial soil. The influences which planted New York, and have made it what it is, are too deeply inwrought, too diffusive, too powerful, to be dwarfed and cramped by the efforts of any such little coterie.

Gentlemen of the "New England Society!" If you will keep "Forefathers' Day" in New York, please pay a little decent regard to what is due to manly courtesy, and to the history of the past. But if you will insist, that even New Yorkers shall bow down before such an idol as Puritanism, we tell you honestly and frankly, that its hard, sharp features do not seem to us the highest perfection of beauty and comeliness; and that its nasal twang does not sound in our hearing like the harmony of the spheres.