On This Day

The Flushing Remonstrance was signed on 27 December 1657 in Flushing, New Netherland (now Flushing, Queens). At the time, there as an established church, the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) in the Netherlands and that expression of Christianity was the only one allowed in the Dutch colonies. A group of residents, none of them members of the Society of Friends, petioned Director-General of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant to request an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. This document paved the way for the Bill of Rights, many years later.