The great metropolis of New York owes its name not to the English city but to James, Duke of York, whose ships sailed into the harbour and seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664. Within just a few years of that conquest, James – brother to King Charles II – had converted to Catholicism, and he ruled his new province from England as a personal proprietary colony, just as Lord Baltimore ruled Maryland. In 1683, he appointed an Irishman and a fellow Catholic, Thomas Dongan, as governor of New York.
At that point in history, England’s American colonies had entered a new phase of their evolution. The precarious settlements of the previous decades were becoming more established societies. Commerce was expanding, populations were growing – with astounding birth rates overtaking trans-Atlantic migration – and colonial institutions were beginning to assume recognisable forms. At the same time, the future remained deeply uncertain and insecure. England itself had not settled the relationship between Crown, Parliament and religion, and those unresolved questions inevitably crossed the Atlantic.
Few appointments better illustrated that uncertainty than Dongan’s. Born into an old Anglo-Irish Catholic family in County Kildare in 1634, Dongan had spent much of his early life in exile following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Like many men of the dispossessed Irish Catholic gentry, he entered military service in France before being drawn unexpectedly into the service of James, Duke of York, the future James II.
When James II appointed him governor of New York, one of England’s most strategically important colonies was put into the hands of an openly Catholic governor at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment remained deeply embedded throughout the English-speaking world. Governor Dongan opened a discreet Catholic chapel near the fort at the lower tip of Manhattan, inviting three Jesuits to take up residence. On 30 October 1683, Mass was openly said for the first time in the history of the City of New York, and a year later a Catholic school was even founded.
Dongan quickly proved himself an exceptionally capable administrator. He strengthened relations with the Iroquois Confederacy, recognising that diplomacy offered a surer means of securing New York’s northern frontier than military confrontation. In the lands unsettled by the English which the Iroquois dominated, there was a very real threat that the French could gain the upper hand and seek to seize territory to the detriment of New York – and England. Dongan used his influence to ensure that the French Jesuits working to convert the Native Americans were replaced by missionaries from the Jesuits’ English province, which had been founded in 1623. He also encouraged commerce, improved the administration of justice and sought to place the colony’s government on firmer constitutional foundations.
The greatest fruit of that last desire came with the Charter of Liberties and Privileges, introduced in 1683 at the Duke’s instigation, under Dongan’s guidance, and with the consent of the first New York assembly. It vested legislative authority jointly in the governor, his council and the representatives of the people, who were to be elected at least once every three years. The Charter declared that no tax or other public charge could be imposed without the consent of the assembly, while guaranteeing trial by jury, due process and the traditional rights of English subjects. Perhaps most importantly, it promised freedom of worship to Christians who did not disturb the public peace. In one stroke, it granted liberty to James’s fellow Catholics without upsetting the existing rights of the Dutch Reformed and Anglican Churches, or the existence of Presbyterian, Lutheran, Huguenot and other congregations.
The Charter of Liberties and Privileges was one of the most advanced constitutional documents produced in England’s American colonies. It was not merely a tool of colonial administration, however. Charles II had no legitimate children – his wife, Catherine of Braganza, suffered three miscarriages, and the illegitimate offspring of Charles’s many mistresses were excluded from the succession. James, Duke of York, was the heir apparent to the throne of England, but he was a Catholic. Many in England’s Protestant elite were wary of allowing a Catholic to succeed to the throne. His legitimacy was unquestioned, but if he succeeded to the throne the slightest misstep by James could provoke rebellion or civil war.
As Duke of York and the proprietor of the New York colony, James had an opportunity to demonstrate the style of governance he would choose if he did succeed to the throne. Yes, he might appoint a Catholic like Thomas Dongan to be governor. But Dongan’s instructions were to formalise tolerance, rather than Catholic domination.
New York’s Catholic population was slight at the time compared to the Dutch Reformed, Church of England, Presbyterian, Huguenot and other Protestant congregations. Dongan – and James – realised that both civil peace and the freedom of his own coreligionists depended upon allowing Christians of different confessions to live together with equal civil protection, guaranteed in his Charter of Liberties.
It worked for a while. In 1685, Charles II died, and his brother, the Duke of York, became King James II. The entrenched opposition of a determined minority combined with some of his own missteps in power led to William of Orange’s invasion of 1688 and the consequent war that resulted in James’s defeat two years later.
For Thomas Dongan, the end of his governorship came earlier. James II lacked an intimate understanding of the English colonies on the north Atlantic seaboard, as well as the varying levels of open hostility to their Catholic monarch. He sought to unite all the colonies of New England and New York as a single dominion with a governor-general, appointing Sir Edmund Andros to the role. The plan was far-sighted – but totally unrealistic in the reality on the ground in America. The colonies baulked and resisted, and most of them were only too relieved when James II was defeated and replaced by William of Orange and his wife, James’s daughter Mary.
Dongan accepted Andros as his successor gracefully and, having grown fond of the colony, retired to his significant estate on Staten Island. In 1698, his elder brother died and Thomas inherited his peerage as the 2nd Earl of Limerick. He returned to London where he managed to regain some control over family estates in Ireland that had been forfeited by law owing to the Dongans’ faithfulness to their Catholic Faith. Nonetheless, he died in London in 1715, far from prosperous but leaving the little he had left to his niece. Dongan was buried in the old churchyard of St Pancras, which had been consecrated before the Protestant Reformation.
Though forgotten today, Thomas Dongan was well assessed by many after his death. In the late 18th century, the historian William Smith described him as “a man of integrity, moderation, and genteel manners” and that “though a professed Papist, may be classed amongst the best of our governors”. In 1859, the historian Mary Louise Booth noted that though Dongan was “at first obnoxious to many” on account of his Catholic religion, “his firm and judicious policy, his steadfast integrity, and his pleasing and courteous address, soon won the affections of the people, and made him one of the most popular of the royal governors”.
Fr Patrick Francis Dealy SJ, writing in the 1880s, drew a direct parallel between Governor Dongan’s rule and the freedoms later embodied in the American constitution:
“The highest eulogy that can be pronounced upon him is that it was he, beyond even and above his able predecessors, who, by his magnanimous statesmanship, moderation of temperament, and unaffected respect for the rights and liberties of others, prepared the way for all that is most admirable in the constitution and policy of our great Republic, which arose from out of the ruins of a neglected and ill-governed colony to be glorious in the future with the brilliant records of conquest in the domains of peace, liberty, and religious freedom.”
When Americans tell the story of their nation’s origins, Thomas Dongan almost never gets a mention. Our familiar cast of Pilgrims, Founding Fathers and revolutionary patriots leaves little room for an Irish Catholic governor who faithfully served the English Crown. Dongan presided over one of the most important periods in New York’s early development, laying constitutional and civic foundations that still endure today. More intriguingly still, his career offers a glimpse of an America that might have developed rather differently had events taken another course.
