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By Root 7803 0

answer. That New York possessed one of the best harbors in the world—deep, directly accessible to the open sea, and rarely blocked by ice, even in the depths of winter—was an old story. But those assets counted for relatively little until the final decade of the eighteenth century, when merchants began to employ big, deep-draft vessels—brigs, barks, and ships—that could make Philadelphia, one hundred miles from the mouth of Delaware Bay, only on a flood tide. The bottom-line case for New York was simple: larger cargoes could move in and out more rapidly and surely than elsewhere.

This efficiency helped New York reestablish its old commercial partnership with Great Britain. By the early 1790s more ships were leaving Liverpool for New York than for any other American port, and New York had regained its former role as the American terminus of the transatlantic postal “packet” service from Falmouth, providing city merchants with vital mercantile information days, even weeks, ahead of competitors in other seaports. Ratification of the Jay Treaty, followed by the appointment of Rufus King (another pro-British New Yorker) as American ambassador to the Court of St. James, all but sanctified this special neocolonial relationship.

Equally critical was the expansion of New York’s continental hinterlands. In the mid-1790s, following Anthony Wayne’s victory over the Indians at Fallen Timbers and ratification of the Jay Treaty, tens of thousands of settlers began occupying western territories wrested from the Six Nations of the Iroquois after the Revolution. Most were land-hungry New England Yankees, squeezed off their rocky farmsteads by overpopulation and declining yields. Up the Mohawk Valley and over the Adirondacks they raced, aiming for the rich country below Lake Ontario, a few even setting their sights as far west as Ohio.

This migration dwarfed anything of its kind in the previous history of the New World. During the winter of 1794-95 alone, sometwenty thousand migrants flooded through Albany, and that was only a hint of what lay ahead. All told, between 1790 and 1800 the population of New York State rose from 340,000 to 589,000—the great majority of the increase attributable to the rapid occupation of the frontier. By 1810 the state had 959,000 inhabitants, nearly three times as many as when Washington was first inaugurated.

From this vast region’s burgeoning towns and villages—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Elmira, Ithaca—an ever-widening stream of farm produce cascaded down toward the Atlantic seaboard, where New York merchants hustled it out along well-traveled sea routes to markets in the West Indies and Europe. So relentless was the pressure for improved transportation between the coast and the interior that in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the legislature granted charters of incorporation to hundreds of bridge and turnpike companies; as early as 1808 New Yorkers had already invested more money in road company stock than had the residents of any other state. The legislature also handed out exclusive franchises for stagecoach service that markedly improved the city’s connections with Albany, Boston, and Philadelphia. In 1792, moreover, the state subsidized two private canal companies, one to link the Hudson with Lake Champlain, the other to connect the Hudson with Lake Ontario. Both did much to facilitate trade and communication, further helping the city establish dominion over an agricultural hinterland that stretched, at its fullest extent, from the upper Connecticut River Valley to the shores of Lake Erie, encompassing sizable portions of northern and western Pennsylvania as well.

For wealthy and well-connected residents of New York City, the rapid settlement of the state’s northern and western territories brought additional rewards from land speculation and development. In 1791 state commissioners, chaired by Governor Clinton, auctioned off 5.5 million acres of Iroquois land for better than a million dollars. Syndicates of city investors grabbed most of it, some purchases dwarfing the grants made