Dutch Reformed Church

The Dutch Reformed Church was a Calvinist branch of the Christian faith stemming from the Reformation. Because of its role in the Dutch Revolt against Spain, it was an important facet of Dutch identity and was carefully exported on the ships of the Dutch East and West India Companies. The first congregation in North America was formed in 1626 in New Amsterdam, following a pattern set by earlier congregations in Dutch Guinea and Brazil: a hierarchy of consistories, classis, provincial and national synods, and adherence to the Heidelberg Confession and the canons of the Synod of Dordrecht. The first congregation, meeting in a specially constructed room over a mill, merited only a “comforter of the sick,” a lay prayer leader and counselor, but by 1628 it merited an ordained minister, Jonas Michaelius, from the Netherlands. These early church workers were recruited by the company and by individual patroons and were expected to act not only as ministers but also as schoolteachers and community spokespeople. As the Dutch settlements expanded to Brooklyn and Flatbush, so did the church, hiring ministers, most of whom had had earlier experience in other Dutch colonies, and building new churches, frequently financed by the selling of pews and private subscriptions.

The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, New York, was built in 1685 and is now a National Historic Landmark. (Library of Congress)

In lands of the Dutch West India Company, the Reformed Church was the only legal religious establishment, although the company encouraged toleration of Lutheranism to promote emigration. While making an exception for the Swedish settlers conquered by the Dutch, who were allowed to have their own Lutheran minister, the church dealt harshly with Quakers, Jews, and Roman Catholics. However, the Palatine, Swiss, Puritan, and Huguenot settlers, many of whom had come to North America via the Netherlands, fit neatly into the Dutch Reformed Church. The 1664 change to English rule did not disturb the church’s monopoly on public funding, because it remained the majority, although it was now required to tolerate the Church of England. The church officially supported slavery but encouraged its members to educate their servants and slaves. Church missionary efforts to the Native Americans, especially the neighboring Mohawk, yielded important ethnographic information but could not compete with the work of the Jesuits. Ministers’ plans to seize and educate Native American children were discouraged by the company, which saw it as a provocation of the tribes.

Increasing diversity in the colony created problems in the late 17th century. The government of Peter Leisler, opposed by the church clergy, persecuted the Dutch Reformed Church, as did the English governor, Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, who attempted to place Anglican ministers in Dutch congregations. The church opposed the foundation of King’s College (now Columbia University) as a Church of England institution but was mollified by the foundation of Queen’s College (now Rutgers University) in New Jersey as an alternative. Eventually, problems of ordaining ministers trained in the colonies, local religious questions that the hierarchy in the Netherlands was unsuited to answer, and the decline of the Dutch language led to a formal declaration of separation of the colonial church from the Dutch establishment in 1771. The denomination continued to call itself the Dutch Reformed Church until 1867, when it became the Reformed Church in America.

Further reading: Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Erdmans, 1978).

—Margaret Sankey

1591 to spread Protestantism, expand Dutch trade and influence, and strike against Spain’s American possessions. A few military and commercial outposts were established in the early 17th century, but colonization remained uncoordinated before 1621. The company blended trade, warfare, and colonization in four principal areas: Brazil and the Wild Coast (modern-day Suriname and Guiana), the Caribbean, New Netherland, and West and Central Africa. Its earliest efforts were aimed at privateering against Spain. Between 1621 and 1637 company vessels captured more than 600 Iberian ships worth 118 million guilders. The company also pursued salt-raking in Aruba, Bonaire, Curayao, and St. Martin to support the Dutch dairy and fishing industries, trade with Virginia, Santo Domingo, and Brazil for tobacco and sugar, and fur trading at New Amsterdam and Fort Orange in New Netherland.

The capture of Pernambuco in 1630 inaugurated the company’s disastrous colony in Dutch Brazil. The need for labor on the large-scale sugar plantations established by Dutch settlers spurred the company to expand into the slave trade and to capture various African slaving factories from the Portuguese in the 1630s and 1640s. Heavy capital and military expenditures and a planter rebellion forced the company to abandon Brazil with catastrophic losses in 1654, from which the company never recovered. Three wars with England plunged the company into further debt and resulted in the loss of New Netherland in 1664; meanwhile, English and French mercantile exclusion of Dutch shipping further reduced revenue. In 1674 the States General liquidated the insolvent company and chartered a new one more tightly focused on trade.

The second Dutch West India Company concentrated its efforts in developing Curayao and St. Eustatius as free-port entrepots where goods from Spanish, French, and British colonies were exchanged for Dutch manufactures. Sugar and tropical staples production continued, but contraband trade with colonial neighbors was far more profitable, especially during war, when Dutch neutrality made them desirable shippers for European-bound Caribbean produce. With nearly 3,000 annual shipping entries and clearances, St. Eustatius was one of the busiest ports in the Americas in the 1770s. The company was finally abolished in 1791 by the States General and the company’s former colonies transferred to the Council of the Colonies.