New York

D

English Colony

In 1664 King Charles II of England decided to take over the entire region, basing his claim on the explorations made for England by explorer John Cabot in 1497 and 1498. Charles granted to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany, all the land between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers. To enforce the English claim, Colonel Richard Nicolls sailed into New York Harbor with four ships and 400 soldiers. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but the citizens of New Amsterdam were unwilling to resist. New Netherland and New Amsterdam were renamed New York. Beverwyck, the settlement that grew up around Fort Orange, became known as Albany.

In 1665 Nicolls, the first English governor of the colony, called a meeting of the representatives of settlers living on Long Island and in what is now Westchester County. He refused their request for an assembly, but he gave them some degree of local self-government. A document, called the Duke’s Laws, provided for the election of town boards and constables and guaranteed freedom of worship. Later these rights were granted to the rest of the province.

In 1682 Thomas Dongan was made governor. He called a representative assembly, which in 1683 adopted the Charter of Liberties and Privileges. This charter called for an elected legislature to levy taxes and make laws, and it guaranteed trial by jury and freedom of worship. Dongan gave New York and Albany charters providing for limited home rule and trading rights. He also cultivated the goodwill of the Iroquois, who were a buffer between New York and the French colony in Canada.

The guarantees of the charter never went into effect. In 1685 the Duke of York and Albany became king as James II, and he included New York within the Dominion of New England, a colony that incorporated most of New England under the close control of a royal governor. New Yorkers were infuriated when James dismissed Dongan and placed them under Sir Edmund Andros, the dominion’s governor, who ruled from Boston.

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D

1

Land Grants

The English governors of New York gave huge tracts of land to their friends, which resulted in only a small number of landowners. Many of these landlords were more interested in land speculation than in settlement, so the colony’s population grew slowly outside the major towns. Of special importance in New York’s history were the manors, large land holdings whose owners had almost unlimited power over them. Six such manors covered more than half of present-day Westchester County. The only successful Dutch patroonship, Rensselaerswyck, became a manor under the English. Located near Albany, it consisted of more than 280,000 hectares (700,000 acres). The Manor of Saint George, on Long Island, was more than 80 km (50 miles) long and covered the central part of the island from shore to shore.

The landholding aristocracy and the wealthy merchants of New York City controlled colonial affairs. Among the most prominent and influential families were the Livingstons, Schuylers, De Lanceys, and Van Cortlandts. Most of New York’s small farmers were located on Long Island and along the Hudson River in what is now Ulster County.

D

2

Leisler’s Rebellion

In 1689 news arrived in New York that James II had been overthrown in England’s Glorious Revolution and that Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, had been captured by Boston rebels. A group of armed New Yorkers called on Jacob Leisler, a German-born merchant, to take command of the colony. Leisler was stubborn and ill-tempered, but he championed the people’s rebellion against the local aristocracy of landlords and merchants. He won control over the whole colony and established an assembly.

In 1691 King William III, who had replaced James II, sent Colonel Henry Sloughter to take charge of New York. Sloughter listened to the charges of Leisler’s enemies and immediately set up a special court that convicted Leisler of treason. Leisler was executed, and for 20 years the colony remained split into two camps with hostile interests.

D

3

Anglo-French Wars

New York’s location made it important in a series of wars fought between the English and French after 1689 for domination of the North American colonies. The side that controlled lakes Champlain, Ontario, and Erie and the Mohawk and Hudson rivers had a commanding position in North America. The Iroquois, situated near many of these waterways, occupied a strategic position between the two antagonists, and both sides sought their aid. In the first wars, the Iroquois Confederacy usually remained neutral, although respected frontier trading agents, such as Sir William Johnson, sometimes secured their aid for the English. In the last war, the French and Indian War (1754-1763), some Iroquois were persuaded to side with the British, while other tribes were allied with the French. With the Iroquois’s help, Britain won the war in 1763, expelling France from North America.

However, with the threat of war gone, land speculators and settlers entered much of the Iroquois territory, provoking clashes with the Native Americans. Under the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the Iroquois ceded to New York all lands east of a line drawn southward from present-day Rome, New York.

E

American Revolution

To repay its heavy debts from the wars with the French and to meet the costs of keeping British troops in frontier forts, Great Britain passed a series of laws restricting trade and imposing higher taxes in the colonies (see Navigation Acts, Sugar and Molasses Acts, Stamp Act, Townshend Acts). These measures led to violent protests by colonists, and many New York merchants and professional men formed patriotic groups.

About half of New York’s 186,000 inhabitants in 1771 were of British descent, and many of them remained loyal to the British crown. These Loyalists, or Tories, gained control of the assembly, where they opposed the revolutionary mood within the colony. They rejected the embargo on British goods imposed by the First Continental Congress in 1774. The next year the rebel elements in New York formed a provincial congress in defiance of the assembly and sent delegates to the Second Continental Congress. After receiving news of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution in April 1775, rebellious New Yorkers took up arms to support the Massachusetts militia (see Lexington, Battle of and Concord, Battle of). In October Governor William Tryon fled New York, followed by many Tories, and the provincial congress took steps to set up a provisional government.

In July 1776 the New York congress ratified the Declaration of Independence and changed its own name to the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York. The next year, New York’s first constitution was drafted, and the first legislature met in Kingston. George Clinton, who had served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, was elected the state’s first governor.

Almost one-third of the military engagements in the American Revolution (1775-1783) took place in New York state. In the early stages of the fighting, the Americans captured Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point, on Lake Champlain. In September 1776, after the battles of Long Island and Harlem Heights, the British occupied New York City and held it until the war ended. The American victory at Saratoga in October 1777 was a turning point in the war, thwarting the British plan to occupy Albany, control the Hudson River and cut off New England from the other colonies.

When the revolution broke out, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy could not agree on whether to side with the Americans or the British, or to remain neutral. But some of the individual tribes joined the British, and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant led bands of his people and Tories in raids on unprotected frontier settlements in New York. In the summer of 1779, American generals James Clinton and John Sullivan marched against Native American villages near the Finger Lakes and present-day Elmira and decisively defeated a combined force of Tories and Native Americans.

Clinton took harsh measures against the Tories. By the end of the revolution more than 30,000 British sympathizers, including more than half of New York’s landholding aristocracy, had fled to Canada. The state seized their estates and sold the land to speculators and farmers. Most of the Iroquois who had sided with the British also settled in Canada. Those who remained signed treaties that confined them to reservations, and by 1800 they had signed away most of their land.

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