Bowne House is currently celebrating the 375th anniversary of the 1645 Flushing Town Charter. This weekly blog will introduce Flushing’s founding document and feature biographical profiles of its 18 original signers.
2020 marks the 375th anniversary of the Town of Flushing, or “Vlissingen,” as it was originally known. On October 10, 1645, Director-General Willem Kieft of the New Netherland colony granted 18 mostly English settlers the right to found a town on the western end of Long Island. The Flushing Charter, also known as the Patent of Flushing, was a contract between the Dutch authorities and the new owners of the land. It spelled out the boundaries of the settlement; the tithes to be paid (in crops, butter, or cheese); the rights to “hawking, hunting, fishing and fowling” conferred; even the weights and measures (Dutch) and calendar (“New Style,” or Gregorian) to be used in official records. Most importantly, however, it guaranteed the residents “liberty of conscience,” a rare offer of tolerance in an era beset by Europe’s religious wars.
Director-General Willem Kieft
Director Kieft was not motivated by lofty ideals regarding religious freedom. The sparsely populated colony of New Netherland needed settlers. The Netherlands themselves were relatively peaceful and prosperous in this period, so it was hard to induce the Dutch to emigrate to a harsh wilderness. To survive, the colony had to attract other nationalities, who might worship outside the Reformed Church. Kieft’s policy of tolerance drew religious non-conformists who chafed under the strict discipline of the Puritan English colonies. Just two months after the Flushing Charter, the same provision was incorporated into the Charter of Gravesend, another majority-English town founded by the religious dissident Lady Deborah Moody. Clashing interpretations of “liberty of conscience” soon arose across the cultural divide. It turned out that the “custom and manner of Holland” was to accommodate variation in private belief, not in public expression, a distinction lost on some of the transplants. For two decades the pragmatic toleration of the Dutch met with the idealist zeal of New England’s non-conformists and “seekers,” alongside French Huguenots, Swedish Lutherans, and Portuguese Jews, among others. Amid conflict and compromise, a spirit arose that one day would embrace not just a private liberty of conscience, as conceded by the Dutch, but public free exercise of religion, as expressed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But who were the 18 original settlers named as patentees in the Flushing Charter? What motivated them to migrate to a foreign colony, where they would comprise a religious, linguistic, and cultural minority? The Charter lists the following names: Thomas Farrington, John Townsend, Thomas Stiles, Thomas Saul, John Marston, Robert Field, Thomas Applegate, Thomas Beddard, Laurence Dutch, John Lawrence, William Lawrence, William Thorne, Henry Sawtell, William Pigeon, Michael Millard (Milner), Robert Firman, John Hicks, and Edward Hart.
Some of these individuals stayed in Flushing and became prominent citizens, such as Edward Hart, the Town Clerk who served as draughtsman of the Flushing Remonstrance in 1657. Eight of the original eighteen signed the Remonstrance, today regarded as a landmark expression of the principle of religious freedom. Others soon moved elsewhere, or were largely lost to the historical record. Together this group comprise a checkerboard of characters, occupations and motivations. They include the literate and the illiterate, farmers and magistrates, diplomats and former privateers, patriarchs and bigamists- the full panoply of frontier society. In the run-up to the October 10th anniversary of the signing, we will examine what is known of each man’s story and how it may relate to our theme of “Liberty.”
Our research is a work in progress, and the Bowne House team welcomes new information about the signers and their legacies from historians and descendants alike. If you have sources to share, please contact the Bowne House Historical Society via the website, or send an email office@bownehouse.org
Flushing Creek as it appeared in 1765. (Original watercolor at the Winterthur Museum.)