Educu 4030.10.45 Read before the New York Historical Society, April 5th, 1887. HARVARD COLLECT 23.190 LIBRARY Bright fil COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY TROW'S PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, NEW YORK. THE ORIGIN AND EARLY HISTORY OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE. HE New York Historical Society has published two "histories" of New York, both very valuable contributions of materials for the future historian, although their partisan character deprives them of such authority as belongs to the standards of historical literature. Widely as they differ, however, in almost every point of view, a careful study of the pages of William Smith and Thomas Jones will reveal a substantial agreement on one point-that the middle of the eighteenth century was the Golden Age of Colonial New York, the happiest period in its eventful history. Nearly a century and a half had gone by after Henry Hudson, under the flag of the Dutch East India Company, entered the harbor and passed up the great river which still proudly bears his honored name. Almost a century earlier still, its waters had been ploughed by the keel of a Spanish ship in which Estevan Gomez, once pilot of the great Magellan, first displayed the flag of an European sovereign in this region thence known in some of the earlier maps as "The Land of Gomez." "For the time has been here (to the world be it known) When all a man sailed by, or saw, was his own." The Dutch colonized and controlled the country for half a century, at the end of which the English rule was established, and continued, with a trifling interruption, for another quarter of a century after the period to which I have referred. Yet colonial New York, succeeding New Netherland as the heir and successor of all its past, had reached the serene and self-satisfying plane of its Golden Age-with little or no provision for education, beyond the simplest rudiments of learning and catechistic instruction. The most competent contemporary authority is emphatic in his declaration of the utter disregard of education. He says that the schools were of the lowest order-the instructors wanted instruction; and, through the long shameful neglect of all the arts and sciences, the common speech was extremely corrupt, and the evidences of a bad taste, both as to thought and language, were visible in all the proceedings of the people, public and private. The earliest public act in New Netherland on the subject of education to which I am able to refer, is the ordinance of Director General Stuyvesant and his Council, passed a few months before the conquest of the country by the English, for the better and more careful instruction of youth in the principles of the Reformed Religion. Its preamble indicates the very narrow curriculum in which the youthful Dutchmen were exercised. "Whereas it is most highly necessary and most important that the youth from childhood up be instructed not only in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but es pecially and chiefly in the principles and fundamentals of the Reformed Religion, according to the lesson of that wise King, Solomon-Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it so that in time such men may proceed therefrom, as may be fit to serve their Fatherland as well in the Church as in the State" &c. Ordinance of the 17th March, 1664. The earliest English laws, promulgated a few months later, strictly required the Constable and Overseers appointed in every town, "frequently to admonish the inhabitants of instructing their children and servants in matters of religion, and the laws of the country;" thus keeping up the Dutch method of training for service in Church and State. The royal instructions to the governors of the plantations absolutely forbade the admission of any person to keep school without the license of the Lord Bishop of London or of the said governors respectively; but it is evident that the restriction was often disregarded here, where it was certainly good policy to encourage English preachers and schoolmasters, among so many Dutch. I find a petition to the Court of Assizes in 1677 that there may be some way established for the maintenance of a schoolmaster in each town, which was met by a reference to the towns themselves and the Court of Sessions. As early as 1691, April 8th, the House of Assembly directed the Attorney General to prepare a bill appointing a schoolmaster to teach English to youth in every town in the Province. The bill was framed, but no other trace of the scheme is now to be found: no such law was ever passed. The brief sketch which I shall give of actual legislation on the subject will only punctuate and emphasize |