USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 20
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75
Scores of firms had incorporated by 1827, including sugar-refining, chemical, textile, iron and steel, brewing, and brick-making establish- ments. The state government made little effort to regulate the corpora- tions, leaving it more or less to the courts to define their rights and privileges.
185
FOUNDING THE BUSINESS EMPIRE
The most noteworthy events in the history of labor between 1783 and 1825 were the decline and abandonment of such labor institutions as the apprenticeship system, indentured servitude, and slavery. During the colonial period many occupations had been closed except to those who paid the stiff fees for the freemanship. A state law in 1804 gave the privileges of freemen to all freeholders and to rentpayers eligible to vote in charter elections. After 1815 the New York City Common Council made no further regulations in regard to the freemanship. On the other hand, the Common Council continued to supervise strictly the charges and services of cartmen and hackmen, who were so necessary a part of the mercantile life of the seaport.
The decline of the freemanship deprived the artisans and tradesmen of the advantages resulting from the limitation upon numbers in their trade. The master craftsmen in 1785 attempted to incorporate a Me- chanics' Society, but the state Council of Revision vetoed the proposed bills in accents that sounded very much like laissez-faire doctrine. They stated, "No stranger who may choose to reside among us should, there- fore, besides the unnecessary and useless expense of taking up his free- dom, be compelled to struggle against a combination vested with corporate powers and interested in keeping him unemployed." In 1786, however, a General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was formed. It included butchers, hatters, potters, carpenters, masons, tallowchandlers, sailmakers, coachmakers, coopers, ropemakers, stonecutters, tailors, cut- lers, tanners, bookbinders, saddlers, bakers, and shipcarpenters-a list which illustrates the growing complexity of the economic life of New York City.
Employee groups also began to form associations to promote their own interests. Skilled journeymen resented the competition of unskilled workers, who no longer passed through the long stage of apprenticeship. Moreover, unemployment was a constant threat and the cost of living kept going up. Printers were among the first to organize, followed closely by the journeymen shoemakers. Other hard-pressed mechanics got to- gether from time to time to strike for higher wages.
Servitude, whether of white immigrants or of Negro slaves, could not withstand the humanitarian and egalitarian currents rising during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Some shiploads of indentured servants arrived in New York after the Revolution, but the practice of buying the service of immigrants for a certain period of time in exchange for their passage gradually died away. Merchants found it less trouble- some and equally cheap to hire day labor.
The withering away of slavery was an important development in the labor history of both the city and rural region. New York had the highest
186
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
percentage of Negroes of all the northern states. In 1790 over eleven thousand Negroes (some free) lived in rural areas, where the Dutch farmers in particular utilized their labor. Negroes on Manhattan were servants or unskilled laborers and suffered from the severe restrictions imposed upon their liberty as a result of the so-called "plot" of 1741.
The fight for emancipation of the slaves was led by the Quakers and some of the old landed families, whereas white mechanics feared that freedom would swamp the state with cheap labor. The legislature in 1785 prohibited the importation of slaves for sale and provided for the manumission of slaves, either by certificate or by will. The abolition movement gathered strength, and in 1799 the legislature provided that children of slaves born after July 4, 1799, should have the status of bond servants and eventually acquire complete freedom (males at twenty- eight, females at twenty-five). The act of 1817 was another step toward the end of slavery in New York, since it declared that "every negro, mulatto, or mustee within this state, born before the 4th day of July, 1799, shall, from and after the 4th day of July, 1827, be free." In 1841 transients and part-time residents were forbidden to hold slaves within New York.
Labor by 1800 had become free but it remained largely unorganized. The coming of the factory system would test the value of this freedom, especially in the period after 1825.
The creation of the Empire State by 1825 was the combined achieve- ment of millions of New Yorkers in scores of occupations. If two groups deserve special mention, they are the pioneer farmers and the various merchants. The former conquered the wilderness and made New York a leading agricultural state; the latter drew to New York the bulk of the transatlantic, coastal, and interior trade of the nation. After two centuries of growth and development the economic structure of New York rested on the twin underpinnings of agriculture and trade which the Dutch had firmly established.
Chapter 16
The Yankee Invasion of New York
[The Yankees] faithfully observe all the external forms of de- cency, and their taciturn, phlegmatic, and calculating dispo- sition, may render them objects of dislike. But their intelligence, self-esteem, enterprise, and perseverance fit them for a young country .- PATRICK SHIRREFF, 1835
BY 1820 both New York State and New York City had attained leading positions in population. The 340,120 inhabitants of the state in 1790 had grown to 1,372,812 three decades later. New York City developed almost as fast, increasing from 33,131 to 123,706 persons in the same period. The high birth rate was responsible for part of the increase; the census for 1800 and that for 1810 shows that over half of the white population was under sixteen years of age. A majority of families had seven or more children.
New York remained predominantly rural throughout this period. In 1825 less than 15 per cent of the population lived in centers of more than three thousand people. Nevertheless, almost all of the large cities of today had been founded. A string of cities stretched up the Hudson Valley to Albany, up the Mohawk to Rome, and fringed the newly built Erie Canal to Buffalo. One hundred years later 84 per cent of the state's population lived in this narrow belt between New York and Buffalo.
During the 1790's the most striking gains took place in the Hudson Valley, where new towns such as Hudson, Troy, and Lansingsburg and older settlements such as Albany and Catskill enjoyed a mushroom growth. At the juncture of every considerable road there grew up a cluster of houses and stores.
With the exception of Schenectady, which had long served as a trans- shipment point, the towns along the Mohawk River did not show much activity until after 1800, when the newly settled farms of central New
187
188
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
York began to pour their wheat and potash into the country stores. Utica was the starting point of the Genesee Road which the state con- structed westward toward the fabulous Genesee country. Farther west Cazenovia, Batavia, Canandaigua, Ithaca, Geneva, and Bath came into prominence as centers for turnpikes, land offices, and country stores. Syracuse grew up around its salt deposits and Rochester at the falls of ' the Genesee.
The Erie Canal not only stimulated the growth of almost all the older urban centers but also proved decisive in determining the location of the most important cities west of Utica. Towns off the canal route, such as Cazenovia, Geneva, and Auburn, did not enjoy the boom in population and trade which Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo experienced. Perhaps Rochester benefited the most from the canal, for between 1820 and 1830 its population quadrupled. It is sometimes called America's first boom town.
The Erie Canal trade had a mixed effect upon the river ports of the Hudson Valley. Hudson was unaffected and continued to send out whal- ing ships to the Antarctic until the 1830's. Albany and Troy strenuously, even viciously, competed with one another for control of the traffic coming down the canal, and the merchants of both cities reaped a golden harvest as the tonnage mounted. On the other hand, the river ports south of Albany and north of New York City-Hudson, Newburgh, Kingston, Catskill-grew even more slowly after 1820 than in the previous decade. Furthermore, settlers regarded the unimproved lands in that region as inferior to the richer lands of central and western New York opened up by the canal. Most of the farm produce west of the Catskills and in the Finger Lakes region obviously reached tidewater via the Erie Canal rather than over the turnpikes through the Catskills to the old river towns.
Immigration accounted for much of the population increase. Although the flow of migration across the North Atlantic was interrupted by the wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon between 1793 and 1815, Europe supplied New York with some settlers. Among those who came over during this period were several thousand Frenchmen fleeing the uprising in Santo Domingo and a few score French gentlemen who tried to settle tracts near the Black River. Welsh farmers, after 1796, began to till the hard scrabble lands around Steuben in Oneida County. Germans drifted to the cities and to the lands of Charles Williamson in the Genesee Valley. A few hundred Scots settled in pockets such as Caledonia. A trickle of Catholic Irish reached New York, but only a fraction of the numbers who were to arrive in the 1840's.
After the European wars ended in 1815, foreigners came to New York by the thousands, but they did not markedly change the basic Anglo-
189
THE YANKEE INVASION
Saxon-Dutch complexion of the population until the decade of the 1840's. Even in New York City, which had always had a much more cosmopolitan population than either urban or rural upstate, a majority of its in- habitants prior to 1830 claimed ancestors in the British Isles or the Netherlands.
After the Revolution, however, the immigration was chiefly from New England, and, to use the phrase of President Timothy Dwight of Yale, by 1820 New York was becoming "a colony from New-England." The "Puritan Pope" estimated that 60 to 67 per cent of the people of New York had originated in New England. The Yankees carried with them the Puritan virtues and vices and made an indelible imprint on the character and institutions of New York State.
As early as 1640 Connecticut men began to invade Long Island. Ex- cept for the Dutch settlements near Brooklyn, the population of the island was almost completely Yankee until well in the nineteenth century. Only a trickle in the seventeenth century, this migration became an important stream during the first three-quarters of the following century. By 1775 many Connecticut citizens had filtered into the eastern town- ships of Westchester and Dutchess counties and across the Hudson into Orange County. After 1783 the influx became a torrent, pouring into the Hudson Valley, sweeping up the Mohawk gateway, and spreading out across the fertile lands of central and western New York. Within a generation the sons of New England had found their way into every town and city of New York.
The Yankees came by land and by sea, in winter and in summer, in groups and as individuals. Sloops sailed up the Hudson while sleighs and oxcarts came overland through the steep hills fringing the border. The citizens of Albany watched a continual parade of restless people. During one three-day period in February 1795 about twelve hundred sleighs passed through that city on the way to the Genesee country. The mania for "turnpiking," reaching its peak between 1800 and 1807, opened up new highways to the migrants. New Englanders drove their wagons westward over the New England network until they met roads leading eastward from Greenbush (opposite Albany), Hudson, and Poughkeepsie. At almost every river landing small boats were ready to ferry them across the river. From Albany settlers struck out for the west over the Cherry Valley turnpike or to Schenectady and thence up the Mohawk Valley. Other settlers used the turnpikes leading from New- burgh and Catskill.
Most Yankees were looking for farms, although thousands headed for the commission houses of New York and the shops of craftsmen. In the first decade following the close of the Revolution newcomers swept into almost every valley except the recesses of the Adirondacks. Of course,
190
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
the Hudson Valley was the first to feel the onrush, but Yankees were planting corn on the fertile intervales along the Genesee River long before the hill towns of the Catskill region had filled up.
Although land hunger was the compelling drive, other factors swelled the number of migrants. In Massachusetts high taxes levied at a time of falling prices ruined thousands of farmers. Settlers near Lake George told a traveler that the capitation tax in Rhode Island had driven them to New York. Others wished to escape the stern keepers of the New England conscience.
Glowing reports of rich lands piqued Yankee curiosity. Missionaries to the Iroquois sent back accounts of a new Eden, and many Yankee soldiers had carefully noted the fertile lowlands as they followed General Sullivan through the Finger Lakes region in 1779. They realized that the destruction of the Senecas and their allies would open this rich area to white settlers. The first pioneers wrote stirring letters urging their relatives to join them. Hugh White, who claimed to be the first white inhabitant west of the German settlers on the upper Mohawk, sent back to Middletown, Connecticut, his tallest stalks of Indian corn, his largest potatoes and onions. Agents distributed handbills offering new farms at tempting prices and on long-term credit.
The Hudson-Mohawk valleys attracted so many New Englanders that they almost submerged the small Dutch and German settlements. Hundreds of Yankees leased hill farms from Stephen Van Rensselaer in what are now Albany and Rensselaer counties. Others filled up the area north of Albany leading to Lake Champlain. The alluvial soils along the Mohawk and Schoharie valleys also proved attractive. The im- migrants bought unoccupied tracts along the sparsely settled river bot- toms and struck out into the hill country north and south of the Mohawk. Otsego County, where William Cooper acted as agent for many land- holders, was the mecca for thousands.
In the north country the area between the St. Lawrence and the Adirondacks became another Yankee colony. So many Green Mountain residents crossed Lake Champlain to this region in search of land, timber, and millsites that it was designated as New Vermont on some early maps. Vermonters migrated to other parts of New York as well. In 1850 about fifty-two thousand natives of Vermont ( equal to one-fifth of its population ) had become citizens of the Empire State.
The region drained by the Delaware and the Susquehanna rivers likewise was overrun by New Englanders, although a number of Pennsylvanians, Jersey men, and even Marylanders worked their way up these river systems. Legend has it that the town of Penn Yan on Keuka Lake was so named as a compromise between settlers from the two areas.
191
THE YANKEE INVASION
Central New York by 1800 had become almost as Yankee in population as Connecticut itself. Timothy Dwight was delighted to find in Oneida County towns such as New Hartford and Clinton, which reproduced in the wilderness the church, the school, and the "sprightliness, thrift, and beauty" of New England.
The story of western New York is much the same. The districts west of the Property Line of 1768, exclusive of Oneida and Oswego counties, received about 60,000 inhabitants between 1790 and 1800. A decade later the population neared 200,000 and by 1820 passed 500,000. By mid- century population in this region exceeded 1,000,000. The great bulk of these people were of New England stock.
The impact of the newcomers on economic, political, professional, and social life was tremendous. Yankee woodsmen cleared most of the forests. Ledgers kept by Yankee clerks for Yankee businessmen recorded most of the expanding trade in New York and upstate cities. Leaders of the textile factories in Oneida County were former residents of Rhode Island. A high proportion of the men who preached the Gospel, pleaded before the bar, bled the patient, and used the birch rod on unruly students were trained in the academies and colleges of New England. Many ingenious craftsmen migrated westward to operate gristmills and forges and to construct homes and buildings.
Yankee brains and initiative stirred the old river ports to feverish activity. The port of New York won top place among the nation's harbors largely under their direction. After 1800 Yankees in large numbers reached Manhattan, concentrating in the shipping and mercan- tile businesses. By working hard, by seizing every opportunity, by cutting corners, by driving sharp bargains, and by avoiding the pitfalls of wine, women, and song, a considerable number of Yankee farm boys made their fortunes. Several New England families of substance moved their businesses to Manhattan or sent their younger sons to set up branch offices.
A new mercantile group gradually emerged, overshadowing the older aristocracy of New York. The Griswold, Low, Grinnell, Fish and Macy families made their fame in commerce. The old families of colonial days naturally resented this invasion by upstarts who, they felt, had no manners and chased dollars too avidly-and successfully. The newcomers were tireless in extolling the superior virtues of New England and its institutions. How the descendants of the old mercantile families must have writhed to witness the succession of Yankees occupying the presi- dential chair of the New York Chamber of Commerce almost continually between 1845 and 1875!
The landed aristocracy also disliked the Yankee speculators who got control of the choicest lands of western New York. Opening these lands
192
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
to settlement reduced the value of older tracts in eastern New York. Furthermore, Yankee settlers brought with them a desire to hold land in fee simple, an idea which threatened the large estates developed under the leasehold system. James Fenimore Cooper bitterly held the Yankee immigrant largely responsible for the antirent trouble of the 1840's.
Albany also felt the invigorating, if unsettling, effect of Yankee enter- prise. By 1803 the Yankees there outnumbered the original stock and even succeeded, in their bumptious way, in pushing through an ordinance requiring the enraged Dutch burghers to cut off the long rainspouts on their houses. Troy and Hudson were founded and inhabited by Yankees. Whalers from Nantucket banded together in 1783 to found Hudson. Canny Yankees in Troy made a strong bid for the control of the trade and transportation routes of the upper Hudson Valley. Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo likewise owe much of their early growth to the New England migration. The city of Rochester was noted for its im- ported Puritan piety. New Englanders dominated the commercial life of these upstate cities in the same way as their compatriots swept to the top in New York City.
Politics in New York felt the Yankee impact. Hardly had the settlers cleared the forests before they began organizing town governments. Soon they were unraveling the twisted skein of state politics. The first generation of New Englanders tended to join the fight for democracy because they disliked the political domination of the landed aristocracy. A majority of the members of the constitutional convention of 1821, which established manhood suffrage, were of New England stock. By the 1830's practically all the most prominent leaders stemmed from New England forebears. The Albany Regency, made up of such Demo- cratic worthies as Silas Wright, William L. Marcy, Azariah C. Flagg, John A. Dix, and Martin Van Buren, could boast of only one member, Van Buren, who traced his roots deeply into colonial New York. The outstanding leaders of the Whig and later the Republican party-William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, Hamilton Fish, and Horace Greeley-were of New England origin.
The transit of Yankee culture resulted in interesting changes. The new environment modified such typical institutions as the town, the church, and the school. The characteristics of the New England town with its jointly owned and used pasture, mowing, and forest lands seldom appeared except on Long Island. The newcomers often laid out a village green on which the church and homes fronted, but most farmers lived in isolated homesteads. The town was much less important as a unit of local government in New York because the state delegated the more important functions to the county rather than to the town.
The New England tradition influenced many of the churches in New
193
THE YANKEE INVASION
York. Most of the preachers serving the Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, and Unitarian churches were reared in New England and edu- cated in its colleges. Among the most noted religious figures were Charles Finney, Joseph Smith, John Humphrey Noyes, and William Miller, all born in New England.
The New York educational system disappointed the Yankees, who were accustomed to tax-supported schools open to all children. Gideon Hawley, a New Englander, was called to direct the first successful system of state-aided neighborhood schools. Private academies also flourished wherever New Englanders settled. Columbia College was the only institution on the college level not stamped with the Yankee im- print. Hamilton, Colgate, Rochester, Hobart, and St. Lawrence drew most of their faculty members from the east and modeled their curricula after Harvard and Yale. The development of the press was greatly in- debted to printers and editors, such as Horace Greeley, hailing from New England.
These cocksure invaders naturally antagonized the early inhabitants. They did not conceal their contempt for the "unenterprising" Germans and Dutch. Citizens of New York struck back by circulating stories about dirty "Yankee tricks," and the upper classes approved James Feni- more Cooper's descriptions of the Yankees as a particularly disagreeable race.
Gradually the passage of time softened these asperities into a feeling of good will. The transplanted Yankees became more mellow and less angular. Moreover, the Dutch and Germans gradually lost their dialects, especially after the public school system was extended. The new aris- tocracy based on trade and manufacturing began to copy some of the manners and customs of the landed aristocracy. With the influx of the Irish in the 1840's, the older population forgot their differences in their common fear of the new immigrants who were fervently Catholic and disturbingly clannish.
The same distrust of outsiders was to greet each immigrant group in the future: the Poles, Italians, and the Jews after 1900; the Negroes in the 1920's; the Puerto Ricans in the 1940's and 1950's. Fortunately the desire for "Americanization" and the spirit of tolerance among New Yorkers has usually overcome bigotry and prejudice. No group of new- comers, however, left a more permanent imprint upon the racial, cultural, political, and economic life of New York than the resolute sons of New England.
¥ Chapter 17
Social and Cultural Life
I anticipate great advantag in the defusion of useful knolege from them [the school funds], amongst the lower order of the people .- JEDEDIAH PECK, 1810
THE conquest of the wilderness and the rise of commerce were largely accomplished through the efforts of individuals, working, often, in grim and lonely isolation. But the early New Yorker was not an unsociable or unco-operative person. The citizenry showed a willingness, when it was possible, to work and play together in formal and informal groups. The church, the lodge, and the school were the most important of the organized societies. Bees, clubs, and spontaneous gatherings provided diversion and carried out co-operative neighborhood projects, such as house raisings and quilting parties.
The two decades following the close of the American Revolution constituted the "period of the lowest ebb tide of vitality in the history of American Christianity." Timothy Dwight's observation applies with particular force to New York, and he was only one of several travelers who deplored the rough, drunken men poling boats up the Mohawk, thronging the taverns, and attending logging bees and house raisings.
Several factors brought religious activity and moral standards to a low level. Invasion, Indian raids, and inflation had disrupted many com- munities and closed down many churches. British officials had persecuted the Presbyterian and other "patriotic" sects, while the exodus of thou- sands of Tories during and after the war left the Episcopal communion in a bad condition. Meanwhile, secular ideals were sweeping into Man- hattan, always tolerant of new ideas ever since the days of Dutch rule. Deism from England and Rationalism from France, neatly summarized in Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, made converts, particularly among educated people in New York. Another brake on religious activity was the fact that none of the denominations had enough clergymen to fill the pulpits in the churches already established, much less to follow the
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.