The picturesqueness of the population was accentuated by the presence of a growing number of negro slaves which a Dutch vessel had been the first to bring to America.[22] But, as we shall see later, slavery never was welcomed as an institution in this region, and never gained a firm foothold. Tobacco culture and other causes, which operated to the encouragement of slavery in Virginia and Maryland, did not appear in the northern colonies; where, moreover, the temper and taste of the people were not such as to make easy the development of slavery. As in early New England, the domestic and social affairs of the Dutch colony were always intimately associated with religious traditions, and, as in New England, the theory of religious liberty found a varying and often a grotesque application. The early theory of the colony was that of complete religious liberty, and at no time was there an intolerance comparable to that which prevailed among the Puritans, who sought liberty but yielded little; but the laws of the colony favored the Protestant Reformed Church, and it alone. To be sure, the West India Company commended freedom of belief, and the early Governors, partly, doubtless, because they were too busy with other matters, and partly because occasion had not yet arisen, caused little trouble by any attitude toward questions of faith or worship. But when the colony grew to considerable proportions, and the mixture of races brought about by the advertised liberality of the Dutch settlements began to bring up the social and religious questions inevitable in such a community, there were many clashings and disputes and bitternesses. Stuyvesant was as definite and immovable in his ideas about church-going as about everything else. He believed in established authority, and personally resented the impertinence of people who saw fit to take a position at variance with what seemed to be set forth and settled by the established power. When the Lutherans, in 1654, sought to hold meetings of their own, Stuyvesant reminded them of the duty of attending the good Dutch church, and refused them premises for their meetings. Appeal to Holland, whose position Stuyvesant's mental methods certainly did not represent in this instance, forced the Director to let the Lutherans alone; and possibly the rebuke was responsible for the fact that the Anabaptists on Long Island escaped serious trouble shortly afterward. But Stuyvesant hated the "cursed Quakers," with whom he had many bitter differences, going so far as to hang up one preacher by the arms and lash him for defying his authority. Of Catholics Stuyvesant had an even greater horror. In 1654, he passed an ordinance forbidding the keeping of Ash Wednesday and all other holy days, as "heathenish and popish institutions, and as dangerous to the public peace."