New York

D

Local Government

There are 57 counties in New York plus the 5 counties that compose New York City that no longer have functioning county governments. The 57 counties are governed by boards composed of town and city supervisors or by elected legislatures. Counties with legislatures may also have an elected executive. There are also 62 cities, 928 towns, and 554 villages. Most towns with more than 10,000 people and some others are towns of the first class, governed by a town board consisting of a supervisor and four council members. The town boards of second class towns usually have a supervisor, town justices of the peace, and two council members.

E

National Representation

New York elects two U.S. senators and 29 members of the House of Representatives, giving the state 31 electoral votes in presidential elections.

VIII

History

A

Early Inhabitants

The first human settlement of the area that is now New York probably occurred about 10,500 bc, after glaciers that had covered the region retreated. Archaeological sites from Staten Island to Lake Champlain indicate that the Paleo-Indians, who hunted mammoths and other prehistoric animals, existed until about 8000 bc. They gave way to the Archaic culture, lasting until about 1000 bc, whose people depended on deer, elk, birds and plants from the woodlands they inhabited. After that, the Northeast culture developed, and at some point hunting and gathering was replaced by agriculture as the main source of food.

Sometime after ad 1000, two major Native American language groups emerged in New York, the Algonquian and the Iroquoian. For several centuries the dominant group was the Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Mahican, Delaware, and Wappinger, who lived in the southeast section of New York and up the Hudson River valley to Lake Champlain. The Algonquian tribes were primarily farmers who raised corn, squash, and beans, but they also caught fish, hunted game, and gathered berries, nuts, and roots.

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Historians and archaeologists disagree on whether the Iroquois developed in the New York-Great Lakes region or migrated there from the mid-Mississippi Valley. Five of the tribes—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—united in about 1570 to form the Iroquois Confederacy, known as the Five Nations. From their base in central New York the Iroquois extended their domain, and during the 17th century they subdued almost all the tribes in a vast region extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and from the St. Lawrence River to the Tennessee River. Sometime in the early 1700s, the Tuscarora, an Iroquoian tribe that had migrated to New York from North Carolina, were formally admitted to the confederacy, and the name of the league was changed to the Six Nations.

The Iroquois, like the Algonquian people, had an agricultural economy, based mainly on corn. Families lived together in large bark-covered dwellings called longhouses. Each community was governed by a ruling council and a village chief. The entire confederacy was run by a fairly democratic common council of delegates, elected by members of various tribes. The league as a whole had no single leader, and decisions were usually made by a unanimous vote of the council.

Powerful in their relations with other tribes, the Iroquois began coveting guns, whiskey, and other provisions after they came in contact with Europeans. To gain these goods, the Iroquois traded beaver and other furs, first with the Dutch, then with the English. After the Iroquois wiped out the beaver in their original lands, they looked for new supplies, often attempting to conquer new tribes and territories. In the 18th century, the Iroquois often ceded land to the British and French for provisions or political concessions. The Iroquois Confederacy continued to play a central role in American history until after the American Revolution (1775-1783).

B

European Exploration

Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian ship captain in the service of France, entered New York Harbor in 1524 but did not really explore the region. In 1603 the northern boundaries of present-day New York were explored by Samuel de Champlain and a party of French fur traders. In 1609 the French explorer discovered what is now Lake Champlain. That same year an Englishman, Henry Hudson, sailed up the river that bears his name as far as the region around present-day Albany. Hudson’s report to his Dutch employers aroused much interest, and several Dutch trading vessels returned to the Hudson Valley for furs.

C

Dutch Colony

The first settlements in New York were made in 1624, when the Dutch West India Company sent out a boatload of colonists. Most of the settlers established themselves in the northern Hudson Valley, near the future site of Albany, at Fort Orange. Soon more colonists arrived and made their home on the lower tip of Manhattan, at a site that came to be known as New Amsterdam. In 1626 the governor of the colony, Peter Minuit, purchased Manhattan from the local Native Americans for trinkets valued at about $24. The Dutch colony, called New Netherland, grew slowly at first, because the Dutch West India Company neglected the northern outposts in favor of its holdings in the rich West Indies. A handful of traders supplied the Native Americans who brought in furs, the region’s prime resource. In 1629, however, the company offered its members large estates, called patroonships, if they would send settlers to New Netherland. Most of these ventures did not succeed, because few Dutch wanted to leave their homeland.

In 1637 the company appointed Willem Kieft director-general of New Netherland. A dictatorial leader, Kieft drove the colony into war in 1641 with the Algonquian tribes of the area. After a series of disputes arose between settlers and natives over land ownership, Kieft tried to impose a tax on the Native Americans to help pay for fortification of the settlements. When the tribes refused, Kieft caused the massacre of more than 100 native inhabitants. Four years of raids and reprisals by both sides followed, in which more than 1,000 Native Americans and settlers were killed.

Kieft was replaced in 1647 by Peter Stuyvesant. Although honest and efficient, Stuyvesant also used dictatorial methods in governing the colonists, who opposed high taxes on imports and demanded a voice in the government. Meanwhile, English colonists had expelled Dutch settlers from the Connecticut Valley and founded settlements on present-day Long Island. In 1650 Stuyvesant was forced to cede all of Long Island east of Oyster Bay to Connecticut, an English colony.

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