Both were granted freedom to practise the Reformed Christian religion; the same system of appeals to the Director and Council
was provided for; towns must be built; fortifications erected; allegiance must be given to the West India Company and the States General; and after a period of years, taxes were to be paid to the Company.[1]
In the practice of government under the charters of the English towns, we find a much closer similarity to the local institutions of New England than to those of New Netherland. The affairs of the town were determined in town-meeting. There the people made local rules, granted lands, determined the suffrage, and elected their candidates to office. The letters presenting to the Director and Council the new nominations are not signed by the outgoing schout and schepens, but by the clerks of the towns.[2] They usually state that the nomination is "made and submitted," "by the inhabitants of said village," "by the whole community," "by the inhabitants by a plurality of votes," or similar expressions implying popular election.[3] Thus here the whole community acted in the choice of its magistrates; there was no close corporation modelled after the seventeenth-century town-corporations of Holland.
A perusal of the records leads one to the inevitable conclusion that all this democratic political development was peculiarly English. Kieft, indeed, granted these charters, but their terms are so evidently English that we cannot doubt they were dictated by the incoming New Englanders.'[4] As the Holland town customs were reproduced in the Dutch towns, so the New England town furnished the model for government in the English towns under Dutch influence. The spirit of popular government came from the English and not from the Dutch settlers.
One of the necessary concomitants of popular government is the suffrage question. For no sooner are elections vested in the people, than the question arises as to the meaning of the word people. In these English towns the New England customs were closely followed in this respect. By the charters, the privilege of the suffrage was conferred upon the original patentees and their associates, and
- ↑ In 1656 two other groups of English settlers were given town privileges similar, not to the English, but to the Dutch towns; Vreedland (Westchester), N. Y. Col. Doc, XIII. 65-66; and Rustdorp (Jamaica), Col. Doc., XIV. 339-340.
- ↑ N. Y. Col. Doc., XIV. 329, 343, 346, 425, etc.
- ↑ See New York Col. Doc., XIV., passim; e.g., 189, 296, 300, 329, 343, 345, 422, 424.
- ↑ The Gravesend charter has been called a " veritable Dutch charter of civil and religious freedom" (Elting, Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River, Johns Hopkins University Studies, IV. 26). It is Dutch in little else than the fact that a Dutch governor granted it.
