Over the centuries Christmas in the United States has taken on a number of unique observances, some enjoyed and others lamented.  We may bemoan how Jolly Old St. Nicholas has been turned by some into an excuse for materialism, but long before these culture wars, everyone’s favorite Christmas character got his start right here in the United States as the byproduct of a different culture war from two centuries ago!

To understand where Santa Claus came from, we have to return to the days when New York was a battleground.  No, not the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, but 150 years before that, when Long Island, New York was a battleground between a different set of rival colonial powers vying for continental supremacy:  the English and the Dutch.

For forty years between 1624 and 1664, Holland, the great seafaring power of the age, attempted to colonize the swath of land between Connecticut and Delaware, using Manhattan as its base.  New Netherland, as the region was known, was always an afterthought to its Dutch rulers, however, and it never received enough supplies, people, or financing to truly flourish.  On Long Island, or Lange Eylandt in Dutch, the newly settled villages on its western tip — Brooklyn, Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and Bushwick – were insufficiently defended against attack by Native Americans and neglected in services such as the state-supported religion, sharing an overworked itinerant minister between them.

Then arrived in Dutch territory an influx of English settlers accustomed to New England’s colonial model of local townsmen participating in government affairs. During the Great Migration, English Puritans settled Boston and rapidly pushed New England’s frontiers in all directions.  Within a decade the new colony of New Haven on the southern New England coast was not only established, but also seeking to expand, which they did by crossing the Long Island Sound and settling eastern Long Island. Around the same time, other English colonists came to New Netherland, explicitly agreeing to reside under Dutch authority.  Hempstead, for example, was an early English settlement within Dutch jurisdiction, and Gravesend (now in Brooklyn), was founded by Lady Deborah Moody, who was permitted by the Dutch to settle with her fellow religious dissenters.  And there also grew heterogeneous communities like Flushing (now in Queens).

It was only a matter of time before the growing number of Anglophones on Long Island became discontent with Dutch authority — and the long-standing weaknesses of the Dutch rulers left them ill-equipped to deal with the grievances. Taxes were high, leading to tax revolts, and democratic representation was even more limited than it was under English rule, resulting in petitions to Holland against the local ruler, Peter Stuyvesant.  Quakers chafed at (Dutch) Reformed Church dominance, and most frustratingly of all, the Dutch continued to mismanage their relationship with Native Americans, leaving isolated Long Island towns vulnerable to attack.  The situation escalated to the point where some Anglophone Long Islanders connived with English authorities across the sound in New Haven and across the ocean in London to attack Manhattan, the seat of Dutch power.  They lobbied for the English to send a fleet to conquer all of New Netherland and even formed their own regiment to assist.  The English fleet sailed into New York Harbor in 1664, and Stuyvesant, greatly outnumbered, surrendered without a fight.

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The Dutch colony’s Long Island towns, insufficiently maintained from the start, were largely eroded from within by the time Stuyvesant surrendered.  However, the Dutch families of Long Island retained their unique identity for generations after the English conquest.  The mystique of that brief, but bygone era intrigued many New Yorkers, mostly notably Washington Irving in the early 19th century.  By the end of that century, when it was clear that Dutch village life was finally collapsing under the weight of modernization, historians and genealogists rushed to freeze time.

Dutch cultural influence lives on in Long Island via the Reformed Church. Flatbush Reformed Church, pictured, thrives to this day!

A seminal genealogy from this period can be found in Teunis G. Bergen’s Register…of Early Settlers of Kings County, Long Island, N.Y., first published in 1881.  Also published in 1881 was Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt’s delightfully snarky Social History of Flatbush.  In the late 19th century fraternal and heritage organizations incorporating Dutch Long Islanders burgeoned:  there’s now the Holland Society, the Knickerbocker Club, the Society of Old Brooklynites, and especially the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, whose annual reports and yearbooks dutifully transcribe and translate ship manifests and church and cemetery records from this period.  The New York State Archives has complemented this work, producing new translations of court records and government and West India Company correspondence on a regular basis.  In 1999 David Riker produced The Genealogical and Biographical Register to Persons in New Netherland, aggregating hundreds of resources into a tidy, four-volume work.  Contemporary scholars continue to document the shift from Dutch to English culture in the New York area.  Joyce Goodfriend’s Before the Melting Pot analyzes how the Dutch language was phased out of use, and Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World points out where bits of Dutch culture linger in contemporary US culture.

Which brings us back to Santa Claus!

Early 19th c. writer Washington Irving recast Dutch colonial life as a unendingly jolly, and Asher Durand created images to match. In The Island at the Center of the World Russell Shorto reminds us that the Dutch were hustling capitalists just as New Yorkers were in Irving’s time.

His creation is the result of patricians John Pintard, Washington Irving, and Clement Moore, the first to call themselves Knickerbockers, who were nostalgic even in the early 1800s for the faded Dutch culture in which, they believed, elites like themselves weren’t under siege.  The three men latched onto the winter holiday figure of Sinterklaas, celebrated by the Dutch on St. Nicholas’ Eve in early December, and their publications collectively transformed this centuries-old figure into the modern Santa Claus who flies in a sleigh pulled by reindeer and enters houses through the chimney to fill children’s stockings with presents.  Ironically, to Pintard, Irving, and Moore Santa Claus represented a better New York before capitalism transformed the city, but today, of course, the figure of Santa Claus arguably helps drive the kind of consumerism the men disdained.

So, if you think about Santa during Christmas Eve tonight, instead of picturing him and his sleigh flying overhead, think of Holland and England duking it out for control of North America!

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Eager Americans tearing down the Union Jack (nailed up to a greased flagpole by the petulant Lobsterbacks) on Evacuation Day.  In subsequent commemorations boys would compete to perform this feat themselves!

In the U.S. late November has long been defined by the Thanksgiving holiday and its message of gratitude.  But in New York for the first half of our history the defining holiday of November commemorated not this 1621 Pilgrim harvest feast, but an arguably more seminal moment in the country’s establishment:  the long-overdue evacuation of the British from New York City in 1783, more than two years after the Revolutionary War’s last major engagement at Yorktown.  It wasn’t just soldiers who evacuated on that day, though.  1,500 Loyalist civilians, the last of a months-long exodus that may have numbered 40,000, departed as well.  We know how the story continues for the Patriots who built our country.  But what of the evacuees, who risked everything simply for their desire to live under the same form of government that had been in place for generations?

Their story begins at the start of the war, when the British had conquered New York in August 1776.  Shortly thereafter, a huge and mysterious fire destroyed much of the city.  Of those who remained in town, those with Patriotic leanings were left in the slums of the “Tent City,” while British officers and prominent Loyalists occupied the choicest residences, regardless of ownership.  As a result, after the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, New York City was the most obvious destination for Loyalists from across the thirteen former colonies.  But Patriot New Yorkers returned in droves, and the passage of 1783 Trespass Act gave them a legal pathway to make claim on properties utilized by Loyalists during the war years.  Patriot claimants were even indemnified against counter-suits by known Loyalists!  Add to the mix thousands of nervous African Loyalists, whose freedom was unclear, and an unknown number of bounty hunters, and you’ll understand how occupied New York City became increasingly chaotic as the peace negotiations in Europe dragged on.

An honorable Redcoat?  Carleton freed the slaves who fought with the British and safely evacuated Loyalists.

After numerous brawls and a few coordinated attacks against the hated Tories, British General Sir Guy Carleton declared it his intention to protect the life and property of loyal subjects, and he wouldn’t relinquish the city until his job was complete.  He helped establish a joint Board of Claims, the first in a long list of ways Loyalists would attempt to win reparations for their lost property over the next fifty years.  He also remained steadfast against General George Washington’s objections to freeing the slaves who had run away from their owners when the British promised emancipation to any who would fight against the Americans.  And during that last summer of the occupation, the British government gave free passage to Loyalists to other ports in the empire, primarily Canada — a promise that flabbergasted those in charge of the retreating military’s logistics!   In the end approximately 40,000 Loyalists, including 3,500 Black Loyalists, were evacuated safely to Canada or Nova Scotia.

Washington’s triumphal entry into NYC on Evacuation Day.

All of this is a lot to take in!  Americans who hated the Declaration of Independence…a New York teeming with enemy soldiers…our most heroic Founding Father tarnishing his reputation to keep men who risked their lives for their own freedom enslaved.   Also unexpected for students of American history is the pride Canadians take in their Tory forebears:

United Empire Loyalist monument in Hamilton, Ontario. The accompanying plaque reads:
This Monument is Dedicated to the Lasting Memory of The United Empire Loyalists who, after the Declaration of Independence, came into British America from the seceded American Colonies and who, with faith and fortitude, and under great pioneering difficulties, largely laid the foundations of this Canadian nation as an integral part of the British Empire.
Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits, or divorce them from a loyalty almost without parallel.
“No country ever had such founders — no country in the world — no, not since the days of Abraham.” — Lady Tennyson

Proudly Tory Shelburne, Nova Scotia, also the site of race riots against Black Loyalists in 1784.  Half of this group took the opportunity offered by the British government to begin anew in Sierra Leone in 1792.

Loyalist genealogical associations began to blossom, particularly in Canada, with the 1847 publication of The American Loyalists, or, Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution by Lorenzo Sabine, a New England businessman and politician with no familial connection to Loyalism.   Coining the term United Empire Loyalists, Sabine invigorated descendents of Loyalists to honor their ancestors and acknowledge the hardships they endured.  Sabine’s work is now regarded as a starting point in Loyalist genealogy.  It gives the most attention to those prominent men who often managed to transfer their wealth and/or power from one imperial outpost to another:  an example is Charles Inglis, the rector of New York’s famous Trinity Church and author of The Deceiver Unmasked; or, Loyalty and Interest United: in answer to a pamphlet entitled Common Sense (as in, Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense), who became the first Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787.

Today there’s a lot more you can read about these families, whether you are researching your own roots or fascinated by this lost chapter in U.S. history.  Genealogists such as Gregory Palmer and Paul Bunnell have updated and vastly expanded Sabine’s work, taking more systematic and scientific approaches to tracking all Loyalists, regardless of economic circumstances, political stature, gender, or race.  Between them they have mined tens of thousands of Loyalists claims and found evidence of Loyalist migrations to the furthest corners of the British Empire.  Historian Philip Ranlet provides remarkable depth to New York loyalism in particular, outlining the continuum of these British subjects’ political activism, which ranged from passive obedience, to militant Toryism via regiments that weeded out disloyal neighbors and took on Continental soldiers (loyalist New York City troops alone made up four battalions!).  Further complicating the range of Tory identities, Richard Ketchum argues that many New York Loyalists began as active reformers against onerous Parliamentary acts in the 1760s, but ultimately drew the line at full-fledged revolt.  And Black Loyalists get special attention from James Walker, who researched their arduous journeys from the 13 colonies to Nova Scotia and onto Sierra Leone in a protracted effort to gain true freedom.

There is so much in this history that complicates the straightforward narrative we Americans are typically taught about the founding of our nation.  Like Evacuation Day, Thanksgiving certainly comes with its own troubling questions — the harmony between Pilgrims and Native Americans did not last much beyond that one meal, as is well known — but regardless of which holiday we observe this week, nothing is more American than thinking critically about our history to make a better world.  Let’s be grateful we live in a country where we can do so!

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