HOLIDAYS
The most important holidays of the early years of the colony were,
apparently, New Year’s Day and May Day, for we find them named through
frequent legislation about rioting on these days, repairing of damages,
etc. It has been said that New Yorkers owe to the Dutch an everlasting
gratitude for our high-stoop houses and the delights of over two
centuries of New Year’s calling. The latter custom lived long and
happily in our midst, died a lingering and lamented death, is still
much honored in our memory, and its extinction deeply deplored and
unwillingly accepted.
The observance of New Year’s Day was, without doubt, followed by both
Dutch and English from the earliest settlement. We know that Governor
Stuyvesant received New Year’s calls, and we also know that he
prohibited excessive “drunken drinking,” unnecessary firing of guns,
and all disorderly behavior on that day. The reign of the English did
not abolish New Year’s visits; and we find Charles Wolley, an English
chaplain, writing in his journal in New York in 1701, of the addition
of the English custom of exchange of gifts:--
“The English in New York observed one anniversary custom and that
without superstition, I mean the strenarum commercium, as Suetonius
calls them, a neighborly commerce of presents every New Year’s Day.
Some would send me a sugar-loaf, some a pair of gloves, some a bottle
or two of wine.”
A further celebration of the day by men in New York was by going in
parties to Beekman’s Swamp to shoot at turkeys.
New Year’s calling was a new fashion to General Washington when he came
to New York to live for a short time, but he adopted it with approval;
and his New Year’s Receptions were imposing functions.
For a long time the New Year was ushered in, in country towns, with
great noise as well as rejoicing. All through the day groups of men
would go from house to house firing salutes, and gathering gradually
into large parties by recruits from each house until the end of the
day was spent in firing at a mark. The Legislature in March, 1773,
attempted to stop the gun-firing, asserting that “great damages are
frequently done on the eve of the last day of December and on the first
and second days of January by persons going from house to house with
guns and other firearms.” In 1785 a similar enactment was passed by the
State Legislature.
In the palmiest days of New Year’s calling, New York City appeared
one great family reunion. Every wheeled vehicle in the town seemed
to be loaded with visitors going from house to house. Great four and
six horse stages packed with hilarious mobs of men went to the house
of every acquaintance of every one in the stage. Target companies had
processions; political bodies called on families whose head was well
known in political life. The newspaper-carriers brought out addresses
yards long with rhymes:--
“The day devoted is to mirth,
And now around the social hearth
Friendship unlocks her genial springs,
And Harmony her lyre now strings.
While plenty spreads her copious hoard,
And piles and crowns the festive board,”
etc., etc., for hundreds of lines.
The “copious hoard” of substantial food, with decanters of wine, bowls
of milk punch, and pitchers of egg-nog, no longer “crown the festive
board” on New Year’s Day; but we still have New Year’s Cakes, though
not delivered by singing bakers’ ’prentices as of yore.
May Day was observed in similar fashion,--by firing of guns, gay
visiting, and also by the rearing of maypoles.
A very early mention of a maypole is in June, 1645, when one William
Garritse had “sung a libellous song” against Rev. Francis Doughty, the
preacher at Flushing, Long Island, and was sentenced in punishment
therefor to be tied to the maypole, which in June was still standing.
Stuyvesant again forbade “drunken drinking,” and firing of guns and
planting of maypoles, as productive of bad practices. I don’t know
whether the delight of my childhood, and of generations of children
in Old and New England up to this present May Day on which I am now
writing,--the hanging of May baskets,--ever made happy children in New
York.
There was some observance in New York of Shrovetide as a holiday-time.
As early as 1657 we find the sober Beverwyck burghers deliberating
on “some improprieties committed at the house of Albert de Timmerman
on Shrovetide last.” As was the inevitable custom followed by the
extremely uninventive brain of the seventeenth and eighteenth century
rioter, were he Dutch or English, these “improprieties” took the
form of the men’s parading in women’s clothes; Pieter Semiensen
was one of the masqueraders. Two years later the magistrates were
again investigating the “unseemly and scandalous” celebration of
Shrovetide; and as ever before, the youth of early Albany donned
women’s clothes and “marched as mountebanks,” as the record says, just
as they did in Philadelphia and Baltimore and even in sober Boston.
We find also for sale in Beverwyck at this time, noisy Shrovetide
toys--_rommelerytiens_, little “rumbling-pots,” which the youth and
children doubtless keenly enjoyed.
At an early date Shrovetide observances, such as “pulling the goose,”
were prohibited by Governor Stuyvesant in New York. A mild protest
on the part of some of the burgomasters against this order of the
Governor brought forth one of Stuyvesant’s characteristically choleric
edicts in answer, in which he speaks of having “interdicted and
forbidden certain farmers’ servants to ride the goose at the feast
of Backus and Shrovetide ... because it is altogether unprofitable,
unnecessary, and criminal for subjects and neighbors to celebrate such
pagan and popish feasts and to practise such customs, notwithstanding
the same may in some places of Fatherland be tolerated and looked at
through the fingers.” Domine Blom, of Kingston or Wyltwyck, joined
in the governor’s dislike of the game. But there were some of the
magistrates who liked very well to “pull the goose” themselves, so
it is said. It was a cruel amusement. The thoroughly greased goose
was hung between two poles, and the effort of the sport was to catch,
snatch away, and hold fast the poor creature while passing at great
speed. In Albany in 1677 all “Shrovetide misdemeanors were prohibited,
viz.: riding at a goose, cat, hare, and ale.” The fine was twenty-five
guilders in sea-want. What the cat, hare, and ale part of the sport
was, I do not know.
In New York by the middle of the eighteenth century Shrove Tuesday was
firmly assigned to cocking-mains. The De Lanceys were patrons of this
choice old English sport. Cock-gaffs of silver and steel were freely
offered for sale in New York and Maryland newspapers, and on Shrove
Tuesday in 1770 Jacob Hiltzeheimer attended a famous cock-fight on the
Germantown road. We cannot blame honest New Yorkers if they did not
rise above such rude sports, when cock-fighting and cock-throwing and
cock-squoiling and cock-steling obtained everywhere in Old England at
Shrovetide; when school-boys had cock-fights in their school-rooms;
and in earlier days good and learned old Roger Ascham ruined himself
by betting on cock-fights, and Sir Thomas More boasted proudly of his
skill in “casting a cock-stele.”
Mr. Gabriel Furman, writing in 1846, told of an extraordinary
observance of Saint Valentine’s Day by the Dutch--one I think unknown
in folk-lore--which obtained on Long Island among the early settlers.
It was called _Vrouwen dagh_, or Women’s day, and was thus celebrated:
Every young girl sallied forth in the morning armed with a heavy cord
with knotted end. She gave to every young man whom she met several
smart lashes with the knotted cord. Perhaps these were “love-taps,”
and were given with no intent of stinging. Judge Egbert Benson wrote,
in 1816, that in New York this custom dwindled to a similar Valentine
observance by New York children, when the girls chased the boys with
many blows. In one school the boys asked for a _Mannen dagh_ in which
to repay the girls’ stinging lashes. I hazard a “wide solution,” as Sir
Thomas Browne says, that this custom is a commemorative survival of an
event in the life of Saint Valentine, one of the two traditions which
are all we know of his life, that about the year 270 he was “first
beaten with heavy clubs and then beheaded.”
The English brought a political holiday to New York. In the code of
laws given to the province in 1665, and known as “The Duke’s Laws,”
each minister throughout the province was ordered to preach a sermon on
November 5, to commemorate the English deliverance from Guy Fawkes and
the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.
From an early entry in the “New York Gazette” of November 7, 1737, we
learn how it was celebrated that year, and find that illuminations, as
in England, formed part of the day’s remembrance. Bonfires, fantastic
processions, and “burning a Guy” formed, in fact, the chief English
modes of celebration.
“Saturday last, being the fifth of November, it was observed here
in Memory of that horrid and Treasonable Popish Gun-Powder Plot to
blow up and destroy King, Lords and Commons, and the Gentlemen of
his Majesty’s Council; the Assembly and Corporation and other the
principal Gentlemen and Merchants of this City waited upon his Honor
the Lieutenant-Governor at Fort George, where the Royal Healths were
drunk, as usual, under the discharge of the Cannon, and at the Night
the city was illuminated.”
All through the English provinces bonfires were burned, effigies were
carried in procession, mummers and masqueraders thronged the streets
and invaded the houses singing Pope Day rhymes, and volleys of guns
were fired. In some New England towns the boys still have bonfires on
November 5th.
In the year 1765 the growing feeling with regard to the Stamp Act
chancing to come to a climax in the late autumn, produced in New York
a very riotous observance of Pope’s Day. The demonstrations really
began on November 1st, which was termed “The Last Day of Liberty.”
In the evening a mob gathered, “designing to execute some foolish
ceremony of burying Liberty,” but it dispersed with noise and a few
broken windows. The next night a formidable mob gathered, “carrying
candles and torches in their hands, and now and then firing a pistol at
the Effigy which was carried in a Chair.” Then the effigy was set in
the Governor’s chariot, which was taken out of the Fort. They made a
gallows and hung on it an effigy of the Governor and one of the Devil,
and carried it to the Fort, over which insult soldiers and officers
were wonderfully patient. Finally, gallows, chariot and effigies were
all burnt in the Bowling Green. The mob then ransacked Major James’s
house, eating, drinking, destroying, till £1500 of damage was done.
The next day it was announced that the delivery and destruction of the
stamps would be demanded. In the evening the mob started out again,
with candles and a barber’s block dressed in rags. The rioters finally
dispersed at the entreaties of many good citizens,--among them Robert
R. Livingstone, who wrote the letter from which this account is taken.
In 1774, November 5th was still a legal holiday.
There still exists in New York a feeble and divided survival of the
processions and bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. The police-prohibited
bonfires of barrels on election night, and the bedraggled parade of
begging boys on Thanksgiving Day are our reminders to-day of this old
English holiday.
There was one old-time holiday beloved of New Yorkers whose name is now
almost forgotten,--Pinkster Day. This name was derived from the Dutch
word for Pentecost, and must have been used at a very early date; for
in a Dutch book of sermons, written by Adrian Fischer, and printed
in 1667, the title of one sermon reads: _Het Eersts Tractact; Van de
Uystortnge des Yeyligen Geests over de Apostelen op ben Pinckster
Dagh_,--a sermon upon the story of the Descent of the Holy Ghost on the
Apostles on Pinkster Day.
The Jewish feast of Pentecost was observed on the fiftieth day after
the celebration of the Passover, and is the same as the Christian
holy-day Whitsunday, which is connected with its Jewish predecessor
historically (as is so beautifully told in the second chapter of
Acts), and intrinsically through its religious signification. The week
following Whitsunday has been observed with great honor and rejoicing
in many lands, but in none more curiously, more riotously, than in old
New York, and to some extent in Pennsylvania and Maryland; and, more
strangely still, that observance was chiefly by an alien, a heathen
race,--the negroes. It was one of our few distinctively American
folk-customs, and its story has been told by many writers of that
day, and should not now be forgotten. Nowhere was it a more glorious
festival than at Albany, among the sheltered, the cherished slave
population in that town and its vicinity. The celebration was held on
Capitol Hill, then universally known as Pinkster Hill. Munsell gives
this account of the day:--
“Pinkster was a great day, a gala day, or rather week, for they used
to keep it up a week among the darkies. The dances were the original
Congo dances as danced in their native Africa. They had a chief,--Old
King Charley. The old settlers said Charley was a prince in his own
country, and was supposed to have been one hundred and twenty-five
years old at the time of his death. On these festivals old Charley
was dressed in a strange and fantastical costume; he was nearly
barelegged, wore a red military coat trimmed profusely with variegated
ribbons, and a small black hat with a pompon stuck on one side. The
dances and antics of the darkies must have afforded great amusement
for the ancient burghers. As a general thing, the music consisted of
a sort of drum, or instrument constructed out of a box with sheepskin
heads, upon which old Charley did most of the beating, accompanied by
singing some queer African air. Charley generally led off the dance,
when the Sambos and Phillises, juvenile and antiquated, would put in
the double-shuffle heel-and-toe break-down. These festivals seldom
failed to attract large crowds from the city, as well as from the
rural districts.”
Dr. Eights, of Albany, wrote still further reminiscences of the day.
He said that, strangely enough, though all the booths and sports
opened on Monday, white curiosity-seekers were, on that first day, the
chief visitors to Pinkster Hill. On Tuesday the blacks all appeared,
and the consumption of gingerbread, cider, and applejack began. Adam
Blake, a truly elegant creature, the body-servant of the old patroon
Van Rensselaer, was master of the ceremonies. Charley, the King, was a
“Guinea man” from Angola,--and I have noted the fact that nearly all
African-born negroes who became leaders in this country, or men of
marked note in any way, have been Guinea men. He wore portions of the
costume of a British general, and had the power of an autocrat,--his
will was law. Dr. Eights says the Pinkster musical instruments were
eel-pots covered with dressed sheepskin, on which the negroes pounded
with their bare hands, as do all savage nations on their tom-toms.
Their song had an African refrain, “Hi-a-bomba-bomba-bomba.” Other
authorities state that the dance was called the “Toto Dance,” and
partook so largely of savage license that at last the white visitors
shunned being present during its performance.
These Pinkster holidays became such bacchanalian revels in other ways
that in 1811 the Common Council of Albany prohibited the erection of
booths and all dancing, gaming, and drinking at that time; and when the
negroes could not dance nor drink, it was but a sorry holiday, and
quickly fell into desuetude.
Executions were held on Pinkster Hill, and other public punishments
took place there.
In the realm of fiction we find evidence of the glories of Pinkster Day
in New York. Cooper, in his “Satanstoe,” tells of its observance in New
York City. He calls it the saturnalia of the blacks, and says that they
met on what we now know as City Hall Park, and that the negroes came
for thirty or forty miles around to join in the festivities.
On Long Island Pinkster Day was widely observed. The blacks went, on
the week previous to the celebration, to Brooklyn and New York to sell
sassafras and swingling-tow, to earn their scanty spending-money for
Pinkster. They were everywhere freely given their time for rioting, and
domestic labor was performed by the masters and mistresses; but they
had to provide their own spending-money for gingerbread and rum. They
gathered around the old market in Brooklyn near the ferry, dancing for
eels, blowing fish-horns, eating and drinking. The following morning
the judge’s office was full of sorry blacks, hauled up for “disorderly
conduct.”
On Long Island the Dutch residents also made the day a festival,
“going to pinkster fields for pinkster frolics,” exchanging visits,
and drinking schnapps, and eating “soft-wafels” together. About twelve
years ago, while driving through Flatlands and New Lots one beautiful
day in May, I met a group of young men driving from door to door of the
farm-houses, in wagons gayly dressed with branches of dogwood blossoms,
and entering each house for a short visit. I asked whether a wedding or
a festival were being held in the town, and was answered that it was an
old Dutch custom to make visits that week. I tried to learn whence this
observance came, but no one knew its reason for being, or what holiday
was observed. Poor Pinkster! still vaguely honored as a shadow, a ghost
of the past, but with your very name forgotten, even among the children
of those who gave to you in this land a name and happy celebration!
Various wild flowers were known as Pinkster flowers. The beautiful
azalea that once bloomed--indeed does still bloom--so plentifully
throughout New York in May, was universally known as “pinkster flower”
or “pinkster bloom,” and along the banks of the Hudson till our own
day was called “pinkster blummachee.” The traveller Kalm noted it in
1740, and called it by that name. Mrs. Vanderbilt calls it “pinkster
bloomitze.” I was somewhat surprised to hear a Rhode Island farmer,
in the summer of 1893, ask me whether he should not pick me “some
pinkster blossoms,” pointing at the same time to the beautiful swamp
pink that flushed with rosy glow the tangles of vines and bushes on
the edge of the Narragansett woods. It is interesting to know that by
many authorities the name “pink,” of our common garden flower, is held
to be derived from the Dutch _Pinkster_, German _Pfingsten_, and owes
its name, not to its pink color, but to the season of its blooming. In
other localities in New York and New Jersey the blue flag or iris was
known as “pinkster bloom.”
Throughout New England the black residents, free and in bondage, held
high holiday one day in May, or in some localities during the first
week in June; but the day of revelry was everywhere called “Nigger
’Lection.” In Puritandom the observance of Whitsunday was believed
to have “superstition writ on its forehead;” but Election Day was a
popular and properly Puritanical May holiday; therefore the negro
holiday took a similar name, and the “Black Governor” was elected on
the week following the election of the white Governor, usually on
Saturday.
There was some celebration of days of thanksgiving in New Netherland as
in Holland; they were known by a peculiar double name, fast-prayer and
thank-day. These days did not develop among the Dutch in the new world
into the position of importance they held among English colonists. In
1644 the first public Thanksgiving Day whose record has come down to us
was proclaimed in gratitude for the safe return of the Dutch warriors
after a battle with the Connecticut Indians on Strickland’s Plains near
Stamford. A second Thanksgiving service was announced for the 6th of
September, 1645, whereon God was to be “specially thanked, praised, and
blessed for suffering” the long-wished-for peace with the Indians.
This service was held on Wednesday, which was usually the chosen day of
the week. In 1654, at a Thanksgiving ordered on account of the peace
established between England and the Netherlands, services were to be
held in the morning; the citizens were to be permitted “to indulge in
all moderate festivities and rejoicings as the event recommends and
their Situation Shall permit.” That these festivities were not always
decorous is shown by the fining and punishment of some young lads for
drunkenness on one Thanksgiving Day.
Various were the causes of the commemorative services: peace between
Spain and the Fatherland; the prosperity of the province, its peace,
increased people, and trade; a harvest of self-sown grain (the fields
having been deserted for fear of Indians). In 1664 Domine Brown, of
Wyltwyck, asked for an established annual Thanksgiving; but there are
no records to show that this desire was carried out, though from 1690
to 1710 they were held almost every year.