Three Centuries of Activism
The 1645 Patent or Charter of Flushing
The Kieft Patent issued in 1645 for the town of Vissengen, later named Flushing, included a most unusual provision for the time and place. It guaranteed “liberty of conscience” to the residents, “after the manner of Holland.” It is believed to be the first such guarantee in the New World, one which influenced later Charters in New Netherland, such as that of Gravesend, founded barely two months after Flushing. The English settlers cited their Charter in the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 to protest Director-General Stuyvesant’s ban on Quakers, while John Bowne even carried a copy into exile with him, which he presented to the Dutch West India Company.
The 1657 Flushing Remonstrance
In 1656, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant passed an Ordinance declaring that any person entertaining a Quaker Meeting House for a single night was to be fined, and that vessels bringing any Quaker into the province would be confiscated. Sentiment grew in Flushing to oppose this infringement upon the right to enjoy liberty of conscience as provided in the town charter. It was decided in 1657 to send a remonstrance to Stuyvesant in protest of his action. John Bowne was not a signer of the Remonstrance, but he must have surely agreed with his fellow Flushing residents who did. In 1662, he was arrested for outrightly defying the governor’s ban by allowing Quakers to worship in his home.
The original Remonstrance manuscript is kept in the Manuscripts and History Section of the New York State Library in Albany, where it was damaged in a 1911 fire in the Capitol archives. A 21st century rendering of the Remonstrance follows.
Anti-Slavery Activism and the Underground Railroad
Robert Bowne (1744), the great-grandson of John Bowne, was both an early and prominent abolitionist in the family active in the anti-slavery movement. In 1785, he joined with Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Eddy, and George Clinton (who was married to Hannah Bowne Franklin) to form the Manumission Society of New York which in turn founded the African Free School in 1787. Robert J. Murray, Jr., father-in-law to Catherine Bowne Murray (daughter of James, another of John Bowne’s great grandsons) was also an early trustee and longstanding treasurer of the Society. Both the definition and purpose of manumission was the emancipation of slaves.
The Manumission Society’s work included protesting the widespread practice of kidnapping black New Yorkers (both slave and free), only to sell them elsewhere, and providing legal assistance to both free and enslaved blacks who were being abused. The Society additionally lobbied for passage of the 1799 law in New York which granted gradual manumission of slaves. Initially, children of New York slaves born after July 4, 1799 were freed but indentured until they were young adults. In 1817, a new law passed which freed New York slaves born after 1799, but not until 1827. Nevertheless, fugitive slaves from the South and free blacks in the North still faced significant risks and danger of captivity.
Later, a niece of Robert Bowne, Mary Bowne Parsons (1784) and her husband Samuel Parsons (1771), a Quaker minister she married in 1806, were also both known as ardent abolitionists, as were several of her children. Correspondence recently discovered in the family archives and in other Parsons’ archives show a direct involvement by her children Robert and William B. Parsons while they resided in the House in fundraising for the Underground Railroad and facilitating the movement of slaves to freedom.
For example, the archives include a letter dated September 28, 1850, soon after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, written to William by L.I. Jocelyn (believed to be Simeon S.) requesting assistance in the escape of a “colored man”. Parsons is requested to see if he can keep the man perfectly unobserved in his neighborhood as Williamsburg[h] was considered too close to the City for safety. The letter concludes by stating “ [t]his is a strong case and great care and caution is involved”. The obituary of another son of Mary Bowne Parsons, Samuel Bowne Parsons, Sr., who ran the Parsons’ nursery on land near the House with his brother Robert, noted “his boast that he assisted more slaves to freedom than any other man in Queens County”.
These courageous actions and documents link the Bowne House, the Bownes, and the Parsons to anti-slavery activism and the “Underground Railroad”, a network of sympathetic contacts and protected sites where enslaved people could be assisted in their flight to freedom. Flushing in general also sponsored many safe houses and was a conduit for African-Americans passing north to Connecticut, Canada, and freedom.
For more information on this subject, visit our Black History webpage.