The Dutch Influence in America

AMERICAN historical literature has been mainly the work of New England men. It involves no ingratitude toward their labors to say that, as representatives of New England, they have done their work only too well. In the absence of equally vigorous champions of other claims, the public mind in most portions of the United States has allowed itself to be persuaded that, in making the country what it is, much the greatest influence was exerted by New England, or even by Massachusetts. Indeed, one occasionally sees American history treated as if Plymouth Rock underlay the whole geological.formation of the United States. Now, the open - minded man who, in the body or in the spirit, travels over the country at all, otherwise than on his own parallel of latitude, speedily perceives the narrowness and insufficiency of such a theory. Looking at our national life and institutions from as nearly central a point of view as he can attain, he sees that their characteristics and the course of their development, complex and varied, refuse to be so simply explained. Some things were settled by public debate and agreement; in these, he remembers, representatives of thirteen States participated on fairly equal terms. Others received their form through slow processes of attrition and growth ; in these silent and unconscious processes other sections, he feels sure, cannot have been less active than New England. A country which a hundred years ago had for its population a million New Englanders, a million Muddle-State men, and a million Southerners cannot, in the nature of things, be wholly —is probably not even mainly — the handiwork of any one of the three.

Any writer, therefore, who makes a careful attempt to exhibit the influence of other portions of the nation, or of other than the English elements in our population, may feel assured of a welcome from the lovers of American history. This is the service which Mr. Campbell has undertaken with respect to the Dutch element in our national life and institutions.¹ “ From their earliest schooldays,” he says in his preface, “ Americans have been told that this nation is a transplanted England, and that we must look to the motherland as the home of our institutions.” But studies in the colonial history of Now York had early shown him traces of those institutions and ideas which are regarded as distinctively American, but which, in the case of that colony, seemed clearly not to be of English origin. He became convinced that the common source must be sought in the institutions and the Puritanism of the Netherlands. The present book is the offspring of this conviction. The author rightly says that the influence of the Netherlands upon England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been largely overlooked by English historians, and their influence upon American history equally overlooked among us. This neglect he labors to repair.

In an introductory chapter upon the institutions of the United States, Mr. Campbell tells us what he intends to prove. It is no halfway doctrine which he proposes to defend. Stated in his own words, it is this : Instead of [the institutions] of the United States being derived from England, . . . we have scarcely a legal or political institution of importance which is of English origin, and but few which have come to us by the way of England.”He sets forth in forcible terms the points of contrast between the institutions of England and those of the United States. We do not have an established church. Democratic equality prevails among us. We have a written constitution. To our President and Supreme Court there are no English analogues. “ Each country has two legislative houses, but the resemblance goes no further.” Primogeniture is unknown among us. Deeds and mortgages are recorded in public offices, and peasant proprietorship is the rule. Popular education is universal. Public libraries and colleges are numerous. The simplicity of our system of local government contrasts strikingly with the fantastic disorder of English local arrangements. Religious liberty, the freedom of the press, the use of the written ballot, and the modern system of prison management were all fully established in America long before they came into vogue in England. Finally, American legal reforms, mainly due to a Roman influence alien to the common law, so far from being derived from England, have subsequently and slowly and partially been copied by the Parliament of that nation.

The contrast, drawn out with much force and pungency of expression in this introductory chapter, is an impressive one. Indeed, Mr. Campbell did not need to fortify it with petulant innuendo regarding the slowness and insularity of our cousins. But before allowing the impressiveness of the contrast to convince us that American institutions must have been derived from some third country, let us inquire if there is no fallacy in the reasoning. Is no other conclusion possible than that drawn by the author, which, frankly, will seem to many readers a paradox ? Mr. Campbell makes no allowance for the more rapid progress of political change in new countries, — a fact constantly noted from the times of the Greek colonies down. Democracy, disestablishment, religious freedom, popular education, simplicity of local administration, peasant proprietorship, and the equal partition of the landed property of persons dying intestate are all things much more easily brought about in a new country than in one of ancient civilization. Suppose we take Australia for an example. Here is a land without established churches, and in which religious liberty, freedom of the press, and democratic equality have long prevailed. The individual colonies have written constitutions, and the commonwealth of Australia will have. The organization of the colonial legislatures is of a considerably more modern type than that of the legislature in England, and the system of local government is simpler. Public education is the rule. Public libraries and the universities are highly developed. Primogeniture is unknown. The administration of prisons is in accord with modern notions. The registration of land titles is more highly developed than in the United States, and the arrangements with regard to the written ballot are those which we have at last copied. Now, no one thinks it necessary to refer all this to Dutch or other non-English influence. It is well known to have been a natural outgrowth of conditions of existence considerably different from those of England. Similarly, in the case of America, it is plain enough that many of the differences between English and American institutions of which Mr. Campbell demands the explanation are most naturally explained as resulting from the widely different conditions presented by virgin soil, new settlement, absence of traditions, or other historic accidents. Take the written constitution, for instance. It is true that the republic of the United Provinces had one, and that England had not. But, quite apart from that, can any one imagine thirteen colonies agreeing upon a union and not writing down the terms of it ? Again, as to the chief peculiarity of the Supreme Court, Mr. Bryce and Mr. Dicey have pointed out that its supposed peculiar power in constitutional cases is but a natural incident to the position of any judiciary of English traditions acting under a written constitution. Plainly, Mr. Campbell’s task shrinks a little upon examination, and he might have spared himself some trouble.

Though the preface and the introductory chapter set forth as the main object of the book the demonstration of the thesis described, the work is by title an account of Dutch and English Puritanism; for the author regards the Dutch influence, to which he attributes so much, as exerted chiefly through the Dutch and English Puritans. Indeed, one is surprised, after reading the introductory matter, to see how largely the book consists of a history of the Netherlands and England during the Puritan age. All the chapters from one to twenty are occupied with this narrative, and it is, for the most part, only in the twenty-first and twenty-second that the author proceeds to the demonstration of the positions above mentioned. His narrative chapters begin with the abdication of Charles V. and the accession of Elizabeth, and sketch Dutch and English history down to the close of the war against Spain and the establishment of the English Commonwealth. He constantly assures us that all this is necessary to his intended demonstration, but we must say he does not make us see that it is. To prove conclusively that the civilization of the Netherlands was, in the times of the Pilgrim Fathers, vastly more advanced than that of England is a genuine and valuable service, for the fact, though indisputable, is not so generally known as it should be. It is also a service to show, by many interesting little facts, that the influence of the Dutch upon the English during the Puritan period was considerable. But this did not require the author to tell again the story of the rise of the Dutch republic to readers to whom Motley is perhaps not so unsatisfactory as he seems to be to Mr. Campbell; nor does it seem to us that his declared purpose is furthered by relating any other than the institutional portions of Puritan history in England.

Considered separately, Mr. Campbell’s history of Puritanism and of the Dutch war for independence is an interesting one. His style is clear and nervous, and occasionally picturesque. His criticisms of the accepted views respecting English greatness in the Elizabethan age are often acute and instructive, though marred by an acerbity of temper that is anything but scientific. Everywhere one feels that he has a thesis to maintain, a contrast to exhibit and to heighten. For instance, he surely makes no converts by saying such things as that “ from the death of Chaucer until the destruction of the Armada England had produced scarcely an original book worthy to be classed as literature.”

Professional students of history will certainly say that Mr. Campbell’s ideas of research are those of an amateur. Apparently, however, he is fortified against such judgments by a consuming scorn of historians as a class. Never, we think, have we read a book in which phrases exposing their shortcomings so abounded: “ few historians have noticed,” “many writers make the statement that,” “ some historians have assumed,” " it has been customary, among a certain class of writers,” " modern historians who judge the transactions of two centuries ago by modern canons,” and so on, and so on. The gentle reader will be moved to inquire what are the scientific qualifications for his task which justify Mr. Campbell in thus loftily remarking upon the deficiencies of his predecessors; and, to begin with, he will scarcely be prepared to hear that Mr. Campbell evidently knows no Dutch! Truly this is astounding,— that one should undertake to prove the Dutch origin of the leading institutions of the United States, and to that end write an account of the most important century of Dutch history, and yet not provide himself with the most clearly indispensable of all tools, and that a tool so easily acquired ! It need, then, surprise no one that the author’s notions as to sources are elementary. His Dutch history is necessarily drawn from English sources. Now it so happens that, as a result of that very neglect of the Netherlands which Mr. Campbell so justly reprehends, one can get but a very imperfect notion of Dutch history from books written in English. If he had been able to read the Dutch historians, he would have seen many matters of a general nature in a different light, to say nothing of the necessity of real researches to one who undertakes to prove so much in matters depending upon details. Deficiency of research is equally apparent in other parts of the narrative. For mediæval matters, Hallam’s Middie Ages, published in 1818, seems to Mr. Campbell a sufficient authority; for matters of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Mr. Froude. If his views regarding the influence of the Dutch upon the English during the Puritan period are to be substantiated at all, it is evident that one ol the chief instruments for doing it must be the Calendars of State Papers ; but he is evidently content to use them only at second hand. The mention of “ Canon Adams, of Bremen ” may be only a slip ; but surely it is reprehensible to cite Sir Josiah Child eleven times as an authority, and each time give him the name of Joshua. If we may mention one more matter of detail in the narrative portion, it is a pity that Mr. Campbell should (i. 346) so scornfully point the contrast between the immediate acceptance of the Gregorian calendar by the intelligent Netherlanders and the slowness of the ignorant and prejudiced English; for in point of fact it was only the province of Holland that adopted the reform at once, the other six provinces wheeling into line so late as 1700, almost as tardily as the benighted islanders.

But what of Mr. Campbell’s propositions respecting the origin of American institutions, when at last, in his concluding chapters, he proceeds to the direct proof of them? For this is certainly the most significant part of his book. In the matter of free schools a case is made out, and a probability is established in the case of the institution of the governmental prosecuting officer, the registration of conveyances, and the distribution of the goods of an intestate, though in our judgment Mr. Campbell has not yet done all the work necessary to prove these points. Into the matter of the written ballot he has gone more thoroughly. He shows that in one city, Emden, which lay outside the Netherlands, but which was garrisoned by Dutch troops, the secret written ballot was employed from the beginning of the seventeenth century for the nomination of civil magistrates by the Council of Forty. But when they came to the actual selection, they voted, as each name was called, by the use of coins marked “ yes ” and “no.” This was a secret ballot, though not written ; and the secrecy is perhaps a more important part of the modern institution than the use of writing. But such an unwritten ballot, of “balls in the affirmative box” and “balls in the negative box,” was used in the elections of the Virginia Company, and such was probably the “scrutiny ” which we find mentioned in the early records of the English East India Company. There is nothing to show that the members of the Massachusetts Company derived the plan of their election of 1634 from one or from another of these sources. There is a greater probability in the author’s theory that the New England elections by written ballot, which began with the choice of a minister by the Salem church in 1629, had their source in the Dutch practice whereby congregations chose their ministers by ballot. Singularly enough, the author has nothing to say as to the history of the institution in New York before the Revolution, which we should suppose would be of much importance to his argument.

What Mr. Campbell has to say concerning the attempts made toward legal reform under the English Commonwealth, and their probable influence in America, is interesting and instructive. His arguments in support of most of his other points are decidedly flimsy, especially in view of his having “ roared so loud, and thundered in the index ” as to what he was going to prove. Take universal suffrage, for instance. What can be more extraordinary than to attribute American popular suffrage to Dutch influence, upon the strength of the fact that the suffrage was wide in the provinces of Friesland and Groningen, provinces containing about one eighth of the population of the republic, when it is well known that in the other five provinces, including those nearest and best known to the English, the suffrage was closely limited? So, of that peculiarity of the American Senate by which one third of the number go out of office at a time, Mr. Campbell says that we must derive it from Pennsylvania, " in which colony it alone prevailed. When Penn prepared his Frame of Government, he provided for a council or upper house of the legislature, one third of whose members went out of office every year, and this system was continued in the first state constitutions of Pennsylvania and Delaware. But Penn merely borrowed this idea from the Netherland cities, where it was universal.” But Penn’s Frame of Government of 1696 abolished this feature of rotation, and the council which the constitution of 1776 provided was an executive council, and not at all an upper house of the legislature. Moreover, so far from this plan being universal in the Dutch cities, so that “ in all their important bodies they changed only a fraction at a time,” we believe it was not even usual. Van Meteren preserves a letter of the States-General to the Earl of Leicester, written in 1587, in which they state the chief features of the town governments of the Netherlands, and which ought to be a sufficient authority, though of course they speak in general terms. They say: “ The city magistracies consist of from twenty to forty, the most considerable persons in the city, and hold as long as they live and continue to be citizens. Vacancies by death or removal they fill themselves.”

Between any two federal constitutions there must, in tire nature of the case, be many resemblances. Mr. Campbell states some and magnifies others, and at once concludes for direct derivation or imitation. Upon how slight grounds he is content to base such conclusions, how far the love of his thesis can carry him in the way of seeing evidence where none exists, may be seen by such an instance as that where (ii. 422) he speaks of the fact that, in the Continental Congress and in the StatesGeneral, each state had but a single vote. His footnote reads : " See, as to the influence of the Netherland republic upon this question, Jefferson’s Works (ed. 1853), i. 32, etc. See also page 16 in regard to the Netherland republic as a model for tlie colonies in declaring their independence.”The reader who turns to the passages in the hope of seeing there some evidence which really proves a connection finds that on page 16 Jefferson merely mentions that, in the discussions respecting independence, some said that “ the history of the Dutch republic, of whom three states only confederated at first, proved that a secession of some colonies would not be so dangerous as some apprehended : ” and that is absolutely all. And on page 32 he finds it mentioned, as one of eleven arguments adduced by one member, that " the Belgic confederacy voted by provinces.”

As if not to leave England a leg to stand on, Mr. Campbell adds a supplementary chapter on the Scotch-Irish, “ the Puritans of the South,” interesting, but marred by much exaggeration and a tendency to " claim everything.” We take this occasion to protest against the habit into which writers upon the influence of non - English elements in our history seem prone to fall, of claiming “ signers,” revolutionary heroes, and Presidents as belonging to these other races merely on the strength of their surnames and first known male ascendant. Thus, Mr. Campbell tells us that, of the twenty-three Presidents of the United States, the Scotch - Irish have contributed six, the Scotch three, among whom he reckons Monroe, the Welsh one (Jefferson), etc. Now, unless he knows more of the genealogy of Jefferson and Monroe than any one else does, he would find it hard work to prove, in the case of either President, that fifteen of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were not English.

We welcome all attempts to set forth duly the influence of Dutch, French, Scotch, or Irish in our history. But, in order to be successful, they must be made by writers who possess abundant scholarship, temperate judgment, and the ability to distinguish between assertion and proof.