• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7714 0

arrived in New York only months behind Duer, Hamilton, Varick, and Burr. A native of Jamaica, Long Island, Smith had moved to Poughkeepsie in his teens and set himself up as a merchant. Well-to-do if not wealthy when the Revolution began, he joined the local Sons of Liberty and, like so many other “new men,” saw his public career accelerate. Dutchess voters sent him to the Provincial Congress, where he sat on the Committee for Detecting Conspiracies and developed a reputation as one of the most articulate radical Whigs in the state as well as a close adviser to Governor George Clinton. He also served as a contractor and purchasing agent for the new state government (in which capacity he struck a number of profitable deals with William Duer). In 1784, though, Smith abandoned Poughkeepsie and shifted his business to New York City. One year later, city voters sent him to Congress.

Another Dutchess transplant was Edward Livingston, younger brother of the chancellor, who forsook life among the upstate landed gentry to open a law office in the city. William Constable, born in Dublin but raised in Schenectady, moved up from Philadelphia (where, among other things, his name had been linked with Duer’s in a smuggling scheme) to take over the New York business of an English firm, Phyn and Ellice. John Pintard, a fourth-generation Huguenot born in New York but raised on Long Island and educated at Princeton, got to know the city while serving as the American deputy commissary for prisoners of war. Well before the last British troops had pulled out, Pintard had set himself up in trade. By the end of the decade he presided over one of the city’s leading mercantile houses.

A procession of merchants came down from New England, among them Daniel Parker, a native of Watertown, Massachusetts, who had prospered during the war selling flour and forage to the Continental Army, most of the time in partnership with Duer; early in 1783, spurred by news of the impending peace, Parker moved to New York and lobbied Sir Guy Carleton for a contract to supply the British army.

This migration also figured in the founding of Olympia, a speculative development just across the East River from Manhattan. Its story began with two Long Island brothers of New England extraction, Comfort and Joshua Sands, who had clerked with city merchants before the Revolution, taken part in the resistance to British policy, and left when New York fell in 1776. During the war they made a fortune in military provisioning (Washington, among others, considered them crooks), and when they returned to New York in 1783 they founded the highly successful firm of Comfort and Joshua Sands. They also bought the former Rapelje farm, a 160-acre tract lying northeast of the road (now Fulton Street) that ran down to the Brooklyn Ferry.

There the brothers laid out the “City of Olympia,” dividing the property into lots and selling them off to a group of interrelated Connecticut families. Many came from the New London area, where they had been employed in the maritime trades, and they seem to have envisioned Olympia as a shipbuilding center; the Sands themselves erected wharves, warehouses, and a huge ropewalk for the production of rigging and cables. A New England-style Independent church followed within a year or two, and by the end of the decade the little community appeared to be thriving.

In addition to this migration from New England there was an influx of well-to-do, ambitious businessmen from the British Isles. Some had settled in town during the war and collaborated with the British yet chose to stay after Evacuation Day, often to carry on the business of or manage property belonging to departed Tories. Others came over as soon as the outcome of the war was certain.

John Delafield, a thirty-five-year-old English merchant, arrived in the spring of 1783, traveling on the same ship that brought the provisional treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States. Dominick Lynch, the son of a rich Galway merchant with extensive connections on the Continent, had been in Bruges