NYNew York History

A province that changed hands without a shot

In September 1664 four English warships anchored off New Amsterdam, and Peter Stuyvesant, whose burghers flatly refused to load the town's cannon, signed articles of surrender. The Dutch province of New Netherland became the English province of New York, named for the king's brother James, Duke of York, and the fifteen hundred or so people in the town kept their houses, their trade and their Reformed church. The Dutch seized it back in 1673 and briefly renamed it New Orange, then bargained it away for good in the Treaty of Westminster. A little over a century later that same colony would see more fighting than any other in the war for independence.

The Longhouse and the river

The interior belonged to the Haudenosaunee, five nations bound by the Great Law of Peace into a single council that met at Onondaga: the Mohawk keeping the eastern door, then Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca at the western door. The Tuscarora, driven north out of Carolina, were taken in around 1722 to make six. Along the lower Hudson and western Long Island were Munsee-speaking Lenape communities, on the upper river the Mahican, on the eastern end of Long Island the Montaukett.

In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed the Halve Maen up the river as far as present-day Albany looking for a passage to Asia for the Dutch East India Company. That same summer Samuel de Champlain came south down the lake now named for him and fired into a Mohawk war party. The Dutch built Fort Orange at Albany in 1624 and a town at the tip of Manhattan the following year, and the whole colony was organised around one commodity, beaver pelts brought down from Iroquoia. The patroon system handed enormous manors to a few families, and Rensselaerswyck around Albany was still collecting rent from tenant farmers in the 1840s.

Zenger, Long Island, Saratoga

In 1735 the printer John Peter Zenger stood trial for seditious libel over attacks on the royal governor in his New-York Weekly Journal. His lawyer Andrew Hamilton persuaded the jury it could weigh whether the printed charges were true, Zenger walked free, and colonial printers took the point.

The Battle of Long Island in August 1776 was the largest of the entire war by numbers engaged, and after it the British held New York City as their headquarters for seven years and did not sail out until Evacuation Day, 25 November 1783. In October 1777 John Burgoyne surrendered close to six thousand men at Saratoga after coming down from Canada, the result that convinced France to enter the war openly. The Haudenosaunee council fire was covered for the first time in its history as the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the rebels and the other four nations with the Crown, and in 1779 the Sullivan expedition burned some forty Iroquois towns and the cornfields around them.

The eleventh ratification and Clinton's ditch

New York very nearly stayed out of the United States. Its convention at Poughkeepsie ratified the Constitution on 26 July 1788 by thirty votes to twenty-seven, the narrowest margin of any state, and only after Virginia had already supplied the ninth ratification and after Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay had spent eight months publishing the Federalist essays in New York newspapers to move exactly those delegates. The city then served as the national capital, and George Washington took the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall on 30 April 1789.

The state's fortune was made by a ditch. Ground was broken at Rome on 4 July 1817 for a canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie that critics called Clinton's folly after the governor who pushed it, DeWitt Clinton. It opened on 26 October 1825, three hundred and sixty-three miles with eighty-three locks, and the cost of moving a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City fell from about a hundred dollars to under ten. Grain from the Ohio country now reached the Atlantic through New York rather than New Orleans, and Rochester, Syracuse and Utica grew up along the line. Slavery, meanwhile, ended in stages under an act of 1799, with the last enslaved New Yorkers freed on 4 July 1827.

Burned-over ground

The canal counties were swept by revival so often that preachers called the belt across western New York the burned-over district, and it produced an extraordinary amount of American religion and reform. Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon at Palmyra in 1830. The Millerites waited for the world to end in 1843, and John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in 1848. Frederick Douglass moved to Rochester and started The North Star in 1847, Harriet Tubman settled at Auburn, and on 19 and 20 July 1848 a convention at Seneca Falls adopted the Declaration of Sentiments demanding, among much else, the vote for women.

New York sent more soldiers to the Union army than any other state and also produced the worst civil disorder in American history. When the federal draft lottery resumed in July 1863, four days of rioting in Manhattan turned from attacks on the draft office into a hunt for Black New Yorkers, with the Colored Orphan Asylum burned and at least a hundred and nineteen people killed before regiments came up from Gettysburg.

Ellis Island, a locked door, and the rust

The federal immigration station at Ellis Island opened on 1 January 1892 and processed roughly twelve million arrivals before it closed in 1954. On 25 March 1911 a fire on the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory off Washington Square killed a hundred and forty-six workers, most of them young Italian and Jewish women, some of whom found an exit door locked. The state's Factory Investigating Commission, run by Robert F. Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, wrote more than thirty labour laws in four years, and Frances Perkins, who watched from the street, carried the lesson into the New Deal as secretary of labour.

The twentieth century then pulled the state in two directions. Harlem became the centre of Black American writing and music in the 1920s, and Robert Moses spent four decades laying parkways and housing across the region. Upstate went the other way. Chemical waste buried in an abandoned canal bed at Niagara Falls forced the evacuation of the Love Canal neighbourhood in 1978 after a campaign by a local mother, Lois Gibbs, and Congress answered with the Superfund law in 1980. Bethlehem Steel closed its Lackawanna works near Buffalo in 1983, Kodak shrank Rochester by tens of thousands of jobs, and New York City itself nearly went bankrupt in 1975.

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