Before the Sun Goes Down

On December 27, 1657, thirty residents of Flushing, a small settlement in what is now Queens, New York, put their names to a letter addressed to the governor of the Dutch colony of New Netherland.

The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, had forbidden colonists to receive or shelter Quakers. Their religious practices differed from those of the colony’s established church, and Stuyvesant regarded them as a threat to religious order.

The people who signed the letter were not themselves Quakers. They could have obeyed the governor’s instructions, kept their distance from the controversy, and gone about their lives. Instead, they objected to the treatment of people whose beliefs they did not share.

They wrote that they could not in conscience turn away those who came peacefully into their town and homes. Their obligation, they said, was to do good to others. They appealed to Jesus’ teaching that we should treat other people as we wish to be treated, calling it “the law and the prophets.”

Stuyvesant did…