Colonial Days in Old New York

Colonial Days in Old New York

Colonial Days in Old New York, by Alice Morse Earle, is a richly detailed portrait of everyday life in the Dutch and English settlements of colonial New York, drawing on court records, church documents, diaries, letters, inventories, newspaper advertisements, and the accounts of contemporary travelers to reconstruct the texture of domestic, social, civic, and commercial existence in New Amsterdam, Albany, and their surrounding communities from the seventeenth century through the eve of the Revolution. The book opens with an evocation of daily rhythms in early Albany and New Amsterdam, where a town cowherd roused the settlement each morning with his horn, Dutch housewives tended their hearth fires and knitting, and burghers smoked their long pipes while trading in peltries or fishing the river. Earle dwells on the material culture of these households, describing the deep-hooded cradles, the alcove bedsteads called betste, the trundle beds on rollers, the vast supplies of household linen, the cupboards furnished with Delft earthenware, the pewter garnishes, the spoon racks and knife boxes, and the remarkable collections of silver plate that served both as domestic luxury and financial investment. She traces the construction of the Dutch farmhouse itself, with its steep roof, low ceilings, important cellar stocked with barrels of cider, salt pork, corned beef, pickles, and salted fish, and its kitchen centered on a vast fireplace dressed each Saturday with a fresh linen chimney valance for the Sabbath. Earle examines education in the colony at length, beginning with the first schoolmasters of New Amsterdam, several of whom were drunkards, and tracing the development of public and private schools, Latin academies, dame schools, and church-sponsored instruction. She notes that girls received far less schooling than boys, that the Dutch language long competed with English in classrooms, and that schoolmasters devised ingenious punishments to suppress Dutch speech among their pupils. Contractual agreements for schoolmasters, such as the detailed 1682 indenture with Johannis Van Eckellen at Flatbush, are reproduced in full, revealing the interlocking duties of teacher, church chorister, bell ringer, baptism assistant, and funeral invitation-giver that fell to a single man for a modest salary payable in wheat. The book gives considerable attention to marriage customs, including the publishing of banns versus the more fashionable use of a governor's license, the role of arbitrators in settling marital disputes, the tendency of courts to favor husbands over runaway wives, the practice of joint wills between spouses, and the various wedding festivities including May trees, bride-visiting on horseback through flowering spring lanes, and the custom of appearing in bridal dress at church the Sunday after the ceremony. Divorce was extremely rare, and Earle documents the handful of cases she discovered in colonial records, as well as breach-of-promise suits and the curious legal constraints placed on couples who wished to dissolve a betrothal. A substantial portion of the work concerns commerce, medicine, and the role of women in public life. Earle argues forcefully that Dutch colonial women were not confined to the domestic sphere, documenting a remarkable array of female merchants, traders, attorneys, innkeepers, interpreters, and businesswomen. She devotes particular attention to Margaret Philipse, who owned her own ships and sailed as supercargo to Holland; to Maria Provoost, later Madam James Alexander, whose shop was considered the finest in New York and who conducted business from her sickbed the day after giving birth; to Jane Colden, who became the first woman to master the Linnaean botanical system and corresponded with learned societies in Europe; and to the women of the Schuyler family who managed estates, lent money to governments, and negotiated with Native Americans in the wilderness. Earle describes the food and drink of the colony in detail, celebrating samp porridge, suppawn, olykoeks, crullers, waffles, rolliches, head cheese, and the extraordinary abundance of game, fish, oysters, and fruit available to early settlers. She documents the universal and excessive consumption of alcohol at every transaction of public and private life, from house raisings to elections, and reproduces the astonishing liquor bill for the construction of the first stone fort at Albany in 1656. The book closes with chapters on amusements and holidays, including New Year's calling, Pinkster Day as celebrated primarily by enslaved Black New Yorkers in a week of African dancing and music on Capitol Hill in Albany, May Day festivities, the observance of Guy Fawkes Day, the early history of theatrical performance in New York, sleighing parties, horse racing on Hempstead Plains, fox hunting, bull baiting, and the convivial outdoor excursions of Albany youth by canoe to the islands of the Hudson. Throughout, Earle measures the vitality, thrift, cleanliness, business acumen, and quiet domestic happiness of the Dutch colonial character against the more formal and sometimes harsher English society that gradually superseded it, arriving at a portrait of early New York that is affectionate, well documented, and consistently attentive to the lives of women, children, servants, enslaved people, and ordinary householders alongside those of governors and merchants.

By Alice Morse Earle · First published 1896 · Genre: History, Cultural History, Local History · 14 chapters · 69,357 words

First lines

At the first break of day, every spring and summer morn, the quiet Dutch sleepers in the old colonial town of Albany were roused by three loud blasts of a horn sounded far and wide by a sturdy cow-herd; and from street and dooryard came in quick answer the jingle-jangle, the klingle-klangle of scores of loud-tongued brass and iron bells which hung from the necks of steady-going hungry Dutch cows who followed the town-herder forth each day to pastures green.

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colonial history · New York history · American history · daily life · social history · 17th century · 18th century · settlement · customs · traditions · cultural history · early America

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