Bowne House

Mention the Flushing Remonstrance and most people will think it's a homeowner's complaint to a plumber. Guess again. Instead, it codifies the courage of English settlers who rallied to the defense of their Quaker neighbors in what would become Queens.When these freedom writers were rebuffed, they produced a foundational document of American democracy-more than a century beforr Congress approved the Bill of Rights in New York.A petition signed in 1657 by thirty otherwise unremarkable citizens of Flushing-none of them Quakers themselves-to Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Amsterdam, triggered recriminations and a subsequent backlash that would transform a man named John Bowne from an obscure English immigrant in his mid-thirties into a consequential American historical figure. As a result, Bowne's wood-frame saltbox, built circa 1661 and home to nine generations of the family, was preserved. Today, it is the oldest house in Queens…..New Amsterdam was unique among the American colonies. The settlers lured by the Dutch West India Company didn't come to prosely-tize. They weren't escaping religious persecution. Nor were they seeking get-rich-quick gold rushes or shortcuts to China and India. Their single-minded goal was to regularly make money, and pretty much anyone who helped, or even managed not to hamper, that endeavor was more or less welcomed, or at least countenanced.By the twentieth century, utopians would extol the attitude of the Dutch as tolerance. Doubters described it as indifference. Whatever the motivation and the many exceptions, that forbearance toward ethnic, racial, and religious diversity defined the city that would become New York to the rest of the nation as the population spread westward.It would characterize what became the United States to the rest of the world. While the Puritans were expelling the religious-freedom-advocating minister Roger Williams and his followers from Massachu-setts, the Spanish were hanging Lutherans in Florida, and just about everybody else everywhere was persecuting Catholics, by the 1640s more than a dozen languages were being spoken in New Amsterdam, and within a decade Jews were settling there amicably, too.The freedom of conscience that prevailed, or was supposed to, had been enshrined in 1579 in a treaty signed in the Netherlands called the Union of Utrecht. It guaranteed that "each person shall remain free in his religion and that no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion." Practically speaking, that meant that while the Dutch Reformed Church was the established religion of the Netherlands, other religions were generally indulged if they remained unobtrusive and were worshipped privately. In New Amsterdam, the doctrine largely survived the arrival in 1647 of the new director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, who brought order and prosperity to the colony, at the price of indulging his prejudices and alienating his constituents.Stuyvesant was particularly averse to Quakers. To be fair, at the time, they were not the latter-day mild-mannered pacifists were more familiar with, but rabble-rousing proselytizers who were viewed as interlopers disruptive of Dutch traditions. In 1656, the director-general and his New Netherland Council banned all public and private religious services by any group "except the usual and authorized ones, where God's Word" was preached and taught according to the established custom of the Reformed Church. In 1657, Stuyvesant had no qualms about ordering the public whipping and jailing of Robert Hodgson, a twenty-three-year-old Quaker preacher, and then banning New Amsterdamers from harboring any other Quakers in the colony.The loudest outcry came from the mostly British newcomers to Flushing, a village whose name was an Anglicized variation of Vliss-ingen, the home port in Holland of the Dutch West India Company, which had chartered the settlement on Flushing Creek. The British signed a petition to Stuyvesant, a remonstrance (an objection or protest), that was not only pioneering politically, but was also earth-shattering theologically. "We desire therefore in this case not to judge lest we be judged, neither to condemn lest we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master, the petition stated."Therefore, if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egress and regress unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bound by the law of God and man to do good unto all men and evil to no man." Invoking the fundamental law of the Dutch States General, the petitioners specifically encompassed "Jews, Turks, and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam," and said they shall also "be glad to see anything of God" in Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers (Roman Catholics were pointedly excluded, however).The remonstrances ecumenical embrace was not only conspicuously inclusive, but advanced an innovative principle of Dutch broadminded-ness as viewed through an English Protestant prism: that religious persecution was in itself a sacrilege. As Wei Zhu wrote in 2014 for the Social Science Research Council's website the Immanent Frame, the notion that God would be angered by intolerance was novel. The prevailing orthodoxy had been precisely the opposite: that doubt, heresy, and diversity would bring on divine retribution. This new interpretation suggested that an official religion was theologically unjustified and provided an ecclesiastical foundation to separation of church and state. That the petitioners were not Quakers (though some would later convert) was also significant. While most were English, they were bound by Dutch rules under their charter from the West India Company, yet they were risking their liberty for their new neighbors, not for themselves.Stuyvesant, predictably, was unmoved by the appeal. In fact, quite the contrary. He was moved to punish the petitioners themselves. He arrested the sheriff and town clerk who handed him the document, jailed the two magistrates who had signed it, fined all the signers, and Edited to “Of moderation has alvays been the guide on ee magistrates of this ity, on the consequence has been that, from every land, people have tocked to this asylum" In plain English, what the directors were saying was, forget about the ordinance that the council passed in the interim to prevent the immigration of "vagabonds, Quakers, and other Fugitives. Just look the other way and get on with the business of making money.On January 30, 1664, fifteen months after he was exiled, John Bowne returned to New Amsterdam. Two months later, during a temporary truce in its on-again, off-again war with Holland, England's King Charles Il unilaterally awarded the land occupied by the colony to his brother, the Duke of York. The two European countries remained fierce commercial rivals, even during their battlefield sabbaticals. While the Dutch vastly outnumbered the English in the New World, by the time four English warships sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor that September, Stuyvesant was so despised because of his autocratic intolerance that few of his constituents responded to his rallying cry to defend the city. New Amsterdam surrendered on September 8, 1664, without a fight. In the generous Articles of Capitulation that Stuyvesant begrudgingly agreed to, the British guaranteed the Dutch colonists not only the right to retain their weapons and their taverns, but also "the liberty of their consciences in Divine Worship and church discipline." In 1694, nearly four decades after the Quakers began their weekly meetings in John Bowne's house at what is now 37-01 Bowne Street, they erected a modest, two-story meetinghouse of their own.