In order to assess the relative success of the mission work of the predikanten (preachers) among the Indians of the Northeastern Woodland, it is essential to determine how many Indians were baptized, married, made profession of faith, and became communicant members of the Dutch Reformed churches in Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) and New York between 1609 and 1750. The purpose of table B.1 is to provide a measure of the success of the predikanten in grafting Gentiles onto the proverbial olive tree of Reformed Christianity. The data was gleaned from the available baptism and marriage records of the historic Dutch Reformed churches in New York. The bulk of the data comes from the Extracts from the Doop-Boek, or Baptismal Register of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in Schenectady, N. Y., which was published in Dutch in 1864, the Records of the Reformed Dutch Church Albany, New York, 1683–1809, which were published in 1904, the Marriage Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Schenectady, N.Y., which were edited by Charlotte Luckhurst in 1917, and the Baptismal and Marriage Records of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York, 1660–1809, which were translated and edited by Roswell Hoes in 1997.

It is important to note that in orthodox Calvinism, children born into the Reformed Church community were considered innate citizens who were already grafted into the kingdom of God. They thus had the right to be baptized as infants as a sign of their membership in the community of Christ. However, children were not able to partake of the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist), which was preserved for those who had made profession of faith in which the individual professed that Jesus Christ was the son of God sent to redeem the world and that the Bible was the word of God, affirmed their union with Christ and with his church, and promised to do all they could to strengthen their love and commitment to Christ by sharing faithfully in the life of the church and honoring and submitting to its authority.

The following research represents the early findings of my current monograph project in which I propose that Visigothic Catholicism – and perhaps Catholicism more broadly in Late Antiquity – functioned, or intended to function, as secular ideology and not as religion. Instead of reflecting the History-shattering Truth Event that was the Christ Event and the alternative truths that Jesus demanded of his faithful subjects – such as the full renunciation of wealth – Visigothic Catholicism advocated and performed as a false commitment to the Christ Event, as a commitment, instead, to other prevailing truths of Late Antiquity but with the appearance of being Christian (i.e. faithful to the radical Christian Truth). As such, this means two things:

• 1. Visigothic Catholicism operated as secular ideology that used the identifier ‘Christian’ as an Imaginary Subjectivity to prevent the encounter with the Real, with the genuine Christian Truth.

• 2. It is in this gap between conservative, ideological operation and professed commitment to a radical, anti-historical (i.e. anti-ideological) Event that we can see the essence of Visigothic Catholicism, its real intentions, the meaning of its acting-out, and its anti-Christian, non-transformative discourse.

Sometime towards the end of the sixth century a wandering holy man and his small band of companions came to the court of a Frankish king. The holy man was going to continue on his journey, but the king begged him to stay – everything would be provided for if he remained within the bounds of the kingdom. At length, the holy man was persuaded by the king’s arguments – he would satisfy his desire to follow Christ by finding an ascetic retreat in the wilderness, while his presence would contribute to the salvation of the king and his people.

Whatever the truth of this story about the encounter between the Irish peregrinus Columbanus and King Sigibert I (d. 575) that led to the establishment of Annegray, Columbanus’s first monastic foundation on the Continent, its author, Jonas of Bobbio, used it to illustrate the reciprocal relationship that, by the mid-seventh century, had now become commonplace between monastic founders and the Frankish elite. Annegray was the first in a series of monastic foundations that continued well into the seventh century that would transform the inter-relationship between monastic groups and secular authorities in the early Middle Ages.

Within a century of Columbanus’s death in 615, more than a hundred new monasteries had been founded in the Merovingian kingdom.

Why do people marry? Or better: Why do they couple? While marriage and coupling practices seem to correspond with obvious biological and social necessities, a more targeted question might include: Why do they choose to couple or marry with the people that they do? And, what happens when they marry someone who is perceived as different from themselves?

Admittedly, such overgeneralized questions are, of course, accompanied by the underpinning assumption that the modern, Western social practice of marriage is largely accepted as a contract between two individuals based on both their free will and their affection for or commitment to one another. However, the cultural normative characterizations of both marital practices and courtship rituals show great variability in different historical contexts, and as Stephanie Coontz shows in her work, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, marriage as an emotion-based, state-sanctioned union is a relatively recent social invention. This leaves the task of defining marriage a difficult one. Over time, courtship and marital practices have taken many forms. In some contexts, to marry was a privilege, in others a necessity. Even in the present time, the tension between its dual meaning—both as a legal contract and as an emotional relationship— persists, and academic definitions vary. Anthropologist, Edmund Leach, for example, defines marriage as “a set of legal rules” that largely determines inheritance between generations. Coontz, by contrast, notes the limitations of this definition and goes further to define it instead as a social practice that “determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children.” However, no matter the changing legal or social characterizations, the practice of marriage has always, at its core, represented the connectedness of individuals—connectedness between participants, between families, between larger kinship and social networks, and even between societies. The marriages that make up the subject of this work transcended national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and connected individuals across the Atlantic.

History written within the framework of the nation is as distorted as it is incomplete. From these caged perspectives, instances of transnational coupling and marriage were too often treated as curious anomalies that violated norms and could only be explained by the economic motives of the participants. The marriages examined here however were deeply embedded in a profound cultural relationship between these two societies. Of course, these subjects were only a small subset of a larger population that occupied the Atlantic space, but by carving out these small moments in the past, and examining them through cultural and emotional lens, a more fruitful historical perspective of recent discussions about the nature of transnational cultures and the definitions of marriage and family formation emerges.

This book has provided an examination of two different patterns of Franco-American marriage that occurred in two very different historical contexts. In the nineteenth century, transnational marriages between France and the United States largely occurred between wealthy, elite Americans and those that they perceived to be their socio-economic equivalent—European aristocrats. Linked within same social networks, these elite transnationalmarriage participants often spoke the same languages, shared common values, read similar literature, and performed similar cultural rituals. This paired with their unrestricted movement between different urban centers such as New York, London, and Paris meant that their marital unions often emerged out of spaces that were not entirely defined by national boundaries. The coming of World War I then effectively ended elite domination of the transnational space that existed between France and the United States and allowed for a geographic mobility of the working, rural, and middle classes who engaged in the conflict. By bringing an entire new group of people into the sphere of transnationality, World War I and its consequences changed not only the power relations between France and the United States but also the dimensions of broader cultural encounters and social spaces that existed between the two. In this context, wartime-marriage participants were not members of a socially homogenized, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries as their nineteenth-century counterparts had but were instead American soldiers and local French women who were largely restricted by both the conflict around them and the national boundaries that were tangibly manifested in their everyday lives.

Amsterdam, 1660

On March 29, 1660 Dominees (Reverends) Hermannus Blom and Henricus Selijns boarded De Vergulde Bever (The Gilded Beaver) in Amsterdam with the Testaments in nine volumes. The volumes contained the formula for baptism to which the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber expected the predikanten (preachers) of Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) to adhere and a letter in which the directors informed Stuyvesant that Blom was to be sent to the Esopus and Selijns to Lange Eylandt (Long Island) to advance the gospel. Letters such as these underscore the fact that the directors of the Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company or WIC) hoped to harvest both commercial and spiritual fruit in North America. Yet, there is no evidence to suggest that the dominees in and around Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam)—Johannes Polhemus (Lange Eylandt: 1654–1676), Henricus Selijns [Breuckelen (Brooklyn): 1660–1664; New York: 1682–1701], Samuel Megapolensis (New York: 1664–1668), Agidius Luyck (New York: 1671–1672), and Wilhelmus van Nieuwenhuysen (New York: 1671–1681)—carried on any significant missionary work among Indians in the latter part of the seventeenth century. This was due, in part, to the shortage of ministers and the deterioration of Indian–Dutch relations on the lower Muhheakantuck (Hudson River).

Nieuw Amstel, 1660

Less than two weeks after Dominees Blom and Selijns departed Amsterdam, the Council in Nieuw Amsterdam heard testimony from colonists living on the Zuid Rivier (South River—known as the Delaware by the English). They told the Council members that brandy was being openly sold to Indians throughout the region.

As these words of Bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636) suggested, charity was considered to be essential to episcopal office. Many of his writings were concerned with ecclesiastical duties, both moral and spiritual, and addressed the responsibilities involved in pastoral care. He vehemently exhorted bishops to engage in charity, one of the highest virtues, which since Early Christianity had been closely connected to episcopacy. Emphasis on charity, therefore, was not new in the seventh century. Its importance can be traced back to Jesus’s teachings found in the Synoptic tradition and the Pauline texts, and revived later in the writings of the Church Fathers during the Early Christian centuries.

As bishops were becoming central figures within the Christian Church and within the communities where they lived and preached, an episcopal model focused on virtues – and particularly on charity – was also being shaped. As a result of extended and heated controversies that sought to define the scope of episcopal authority, bishops strengthened their positions in local communities by concentrating wealth, acquiring privileges, and assuming old practices and social responsibilities. Among the duties that fell under the jurisdiction of the bishops were Christian education and the moral guidance of the flock, the administration of liturgical rites, the protection of marginal and essential groups, the administration of ecclesiastical resources, and the foundation of churches and monasteries.

As long as the modern nation-states of France and the United States have existed, people have constructed families across their borders. For example, in 1782, Elizabeth Livingston of New York married the Comte de Mosloy, attaché to the French Minister. During the French Revolution, Edmond- Charles Genêt, French ambassador to the United States, married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of New York Governor George Clinton (1794), and soon after, Betsy Patterson of Baltimore married Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of Emperor Napoleon I (1803). In the early nineteenth century, Maria Bingham of Philadelphia first married Jacques Alexandre, Comte de Tilly and later wed the Marquis de Blaizel (1826); whereas Prince Napoleon Lucien Charles Murat married Caroline Georgina Fraser of Charleston (1831). While these early marriages likely occurred by chance and in relatively small numbers, as the nineteenth century continued—a century marked by growing nationalism and heightened boundary-making—a noticeable pattern of transnational marriages began to emerge between wealthy American women and European aristocrats. According to contemporary American commentator Gustavus Meyers, by 1909, five hundred American heiresses had married titled nobility and had taken nearly $220 million out of the United States to Europe. While these women entered into matrimonial contracts with nobility from all over Europe, an overwhelming majority of these marriage contracts were established with men from Great Britain and France.

Even though these mixed marriages were not entirely exceptional, they remained (and in many ways continue to remain) exceptional in public discourse as contemporaries and historians struggled to explain their occurrence. For example, in January of 1887 the American newspaper Town Topics: Journal of Society published the following story:

Direct from the banks of the Seine: M. le Duc de Charenton is a nobleman of the type common in the palmy days of the Second Empire. Paris laughed at his eccentricities then, and Paris is laughing still […] This gay old dog of Napoleon’s court has been living for years “au troisième,” apparently dead broke, in a slum at Montmartre. He has been seen at odd intervals late at night on the Boulevards, evidently on the prowl: but he has always dodged old acquaintances and was generally written off by society as a bad debt.

Nieuw Amsterdam, 1664

Fed by trade with the Caribbean, the Dutch Republic, and the Indians, Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) nearly flourished. With the arrival of so many small, young families who had not realized the affluence and prosperity of the Gouden Eeuw (Golden Age), the population approached 9,000 souls. Here many achieved a measure of security and status thanks, in no small part, to their Indian neighbors. In an increasingly competitive market, however, the Indians who brought furs to Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam) were frequently assaulted. When they came to the shores of Manaháhtaan (Manhattan), traders such as Tomas Lambertsz, Juriaen Blanck, Jan Dircks Meijer, Harmen Douwensz, Juriaen Blanck de Jonge, and Jan Evertsz would not allow them to exchange their furs with whomever they wished. Rather Indians were frequently grabbed by the arm, taken to the home of a trader, and forced to exchange their furs. Such actions must have reinforced the image of the savage Dutch among the Lunaapeew (Lenape). Hoping to maintain the peace Dominee (Reverend) Selijns celebrated in his letter to the Classis of Amsterdam, the Council passed an ordinance to better regulate the Indian trade on June 23.

The English, on the other hand, did not remain quiet. After his brother, King Charles II of England, granted him vast tracts of land in North America that included Nieuw Nederland, James, Duke of York, sent Colonel Richard Nicolls to seize and administer the colony on his behalf.

In the late sixteenth century the Dutch Republic was inundated with Indian images. Bartolomé de las Casas's account of Spanish atrocities against American Indians, first published in Antwerp in 1578 as Seer cort verhael vande destructie van d’Indies, was subsequently published in Amsterdam in 1607, 1609, 1620, and 1640. In 1588 Hans Staden's account of his captivity among the Tupi Indians of Brazil came off a press in Antwerp as Warachtige historie ende beschrijvinge eens lants in America ghelegen. Ten years later, José de Acosta's account of the natural history of the West Indies was published in Haarlem. Given the popularity of these works among the literati in the Dutch Republic, it is quite clear that there were many people in the Nederlanden (Low Countries) who were just as curious about Indians as their European neighbors.

Dutch Reformed theologians were also curious and looked to the Bible to incorporate Indians into a Reformed worldview. The biblical “Other” were the Gentiles, or non-Jews, to whom Christ had called his followers to bring the good news of salvation. When Johannes Dyrkinus translated the Bible into the Dutch vernacular in 1562, he chose the term heydenen to describe the biblical “Other.” Subsequent translators did the same. Thus, when predikanten (preachers) conceptualized Indians in their sermons and pamphlets they presented Indians as blinde heydenen (blind Gentiles) to whom the Dutch were being called, by God, to present the gospel through the preaching of the Bible and the Christian conduct of colonists, which of course necessitated social interaction. These sermons and pamphlets were intended to convince the hearers and readers—including members of the Staten-Generaal (States General), the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company or VOC), the Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company or WIC)—that spreading the gospel among American Indians ought to be a priority.

Since many of the founders and leaders of the WIC and the colony of Rensselaerswijck were ardent Calvinists themselves, their sermons did not fall on deaf ears. In fact, Dutch ziekentroosters (comforters of the sick) and predikanten were consistently given instructions to proselytize among the Indians over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These instructions were followed, to various degrees, by the ziekentroosters and predikanten who served in Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland).