BY ALBERT SHAW

The designation “Middle States” has a negative, rather than a positive, significance. In our later history, as well as in that of our colonizing and federalizing periods, the term “New England” has had a definite value for many purposes besides those of geographical convenience: and it is equally true that “the South” has meant very much in our American life besides a mere territorial expression. But the “Middle States” lack the sharply distinguishing characteristics of the other groups. In more senses than the strictly literal one, the two immense States of New York and Pennsylvania, with one or two smaller neighbors, have occupied middle ground.

If New York, on the one hand, has been somewhat closely related to New England, Pennsylvania has had many neighborly associations with Maryland and Virginia. New Jersey, meanwhile, has been a close link between Pennsylvania and New York. The development of New England was dominated in a marvellous way by a set of ideas, religious, political and philosophical, that belonged to a certain phase of the English Reformation. Virginia and other settlements to the southward had their origins in a colonizing movement that was more typically representative of contemporary English manners, views and ways of living. The aristocratic system would have disappeared rapidly enough in the South but for the gradual extension of an exotic institution,—that of African slavery.

The Middle States had a more varied origin,—one that does not lend itself so readily to the purposes of contrast and generalization. The Hudson, called by the Dutch the North River, and the Delaware, which they called the South River, were both entered by Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, in 1609; and apart from an extremely limited settlement of Swedes on the west bank of the Delaware, it was the Dutch who controlled the beginnings of European settlement along the seaboard of what afterward came to be known as the Middle States section. The Dutch colonization was not large, but it had a strong and persistent influence upon the subsequent development of New York and the region round about.

The gradual predominance in New York of men of English speech and origin came about partly by infiltration from the New England colonies and partly by direct migration from England. There resulted a natural and harmonious fusion between the Dutch pioneers on the Hudson and the English-speaking colonists. Various Dutch institutions survived long after the English language had come into general use.

Before the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, the settlers on the Delaware had been mainly Swedish, Dutch or otherwise from continental Europe. William Penn’s colonists at the outset were largely English Quakers, and some years later there arrived great numbers of Germans, some French Huguenots, and a good many Scotch-Irish Protestants.

Thus, as compared with New England on the one hand and the Southern colonies on the other, the Middle States had cosmopolitan, rather than purely English, origins. This cosmopolitanism has remained, as a leading factor in all their subsequent history. The spirit of compromise and tolerance that had been developed in the middle section by the contact of different nationalities was of incalculable value when the time came for the co-operation of the thirteen colonies in the struggle for independence, and in the subsequent formation of their federal union.

If the colony which developed into the Empire State, and that which came to be known as the Keystone State, had occupied some other geographical position than the one they held as a buffer between New England and the South, the history of America might well have taken a wholly different course. For there was almost as much difference in institutions, life and points of view between the New Englanders and the Virginians of Colonial days as between the New Englanders and the Canadian Frenchmen across the St. Lawrence. But the transition from New England to New York was easy, and involved no violent contrasts. There had been a steady movement of population from the New England States westward across the eastern boundary line of the State of New York. On the other hand, it was comparatively easy for Maryland and Virginia to co-operate with Pennsylvania. In so far, indeed, as population had extended back from the tide-water districts into the hill country and the Appalachian valleys, the settlement both of Maryland and Virginia had proceeded very largely from Pennsylvania.

Thus the Middle States had a great mission to perform in uniting and holding together the more extreme sections. In the development, after the Revolutionary War, of the country west of the Alleghanies, this harmonizing influence of the Middle States was very conspicuously shown in the creation of the great commonwealth of Ohio, and only to a less degree in the making of a number of other States in what has now come to be called the Middle West—the region that produced men of the type of Lincoln and Grant, and that joined with the old Middle States in later crises to preserve the Union and fuse its elements into a homogeneous nation.

No communities in the world lend themselves more profitably to the study of history than these which are described in the present volume. Concrete illustration aids no less in the study of history than in that of the physical sciences; and these towns of the Middle States illustrate not only the more recent tendencies that have marked the course of human history, but also lead us back by easy stages to an insight into conditions of an earlier time. For example, the survivals of the Dutch régime in New York quicken a sympathetic interest that greatly aids the comprehension of the international career of the Netherlands. On the very day when these remarks are written, the larger news of the world—that which is history in the making—concerns itself with two widely severed scenes of early Dutch colonization. From Paris comes the decision of the Venezuela arbitration tribunal, involving principally the material and legal facts as to the extent of Dutch exploration and settlement in the same general period as the Dutch colonization of New York. The relations of the Dutch and English in successions and exchanges of jurisdiction on the northern coast of South America can only be understood in the light of the history of the settlements at the mouth of the Hudson River.

In like manner the conditions of Dutch settlement in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century are best comprehended in connection with the story of contemporary Dutch colonization in America. The Knickerbockers of New York and the Boers of the Transvaal are of common origin,—a fact frankly recognized by the Holland Society of New York in its expressions of sympathy with the Dutch element in South Africa in its struggle against fate.

The history of the communities of Pennsylvania affords a convenient initiation into much of the complex religious and ecclesiastical history of Europe. Penn brought the Quakers and other fine English stock from the middle and north of England for reasons that go to the very heart of the English life of the seventeenth century. A little later the Protestant Germans of the Palatinate came in great numbers, impelled by motives to understand which is to find oneself essentially comprehending the conditions of Church and State that so disturbed and harassed Western Europe for a long period. Thus, to study the great city of Philadelphia in its origins, its later accretions and its existing conditions, is to find inviting avenues leading into many fields of historical inquiry both of the new world and the old.

What single spot could one find anywhere that would more naturally stimulate the study of political and economic history in the nineteenth century than old Castle Garden at the lower end of New York City, through which millions upon millions of immigrants have entered the Western world to find contentment and prosperity? Many of these came from Ireland; and the municipal life of New York City has been profoundly affected by that fact. To answer the question why these people left Ireland and, in leaving, why their destination was New York rather than some port in the British colonies, is to review the history of the Irish land system, the Irish Church and the political administration of Ireland for several generations.

An enormous element of the present population of New York, as well as of the country at large, is made up of a comparatively recent German immigration, to understand which one must learn something of the German revolutionary movement of 1848, the growth of German militarism and the conditions under which educational progress in Germany has outstripped the average material prosperity. Still more recently there has been a huge immigration of Russian Jews, with local effects of a most marked character in the city of New York. To know why these Jews have come is to look into racial, political, and economic conditions throughout the great empire of the Czar.

To study the main routes of communication in a region like our Middle States is to gain an insight into the relations of physical conditions to historical development that will be of no little use in the study of other origins and remoter periods. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance, for instance, of the part that the Hudson River has played in the history of the Western Hemisphere since its discovery and settlement by the Europeans. The route by way of the Hudson, Lake George and Lake Champlain afforded in the early times the one interior passage to the St. Lawrence from the settlements on our seaboard.

Much of the land adjacent to the river was granted in large tracts under the Dutch system to patroons, so called, who were virtually feudal lords. Upon some of these tracts there still survive various peculiarities of the feudal system of land tenure. To know something of what feudalism meant as respects the control of the land, the student might find a worse method than to trace back the history of one of these Hudson River estates to the period of the Dutch grant, in order to get so much nearer to the survivals of the mediæval system in Europe.

At the spot where I live on the Hudson, and where I am now writing, the environment is suggestive of almost three centuries of American history. I look out upon the great stream which Hudson navigated in the Half Moon in 1609, and upon which sailing craft have been plying almost continually ever since. I see great steamers passing where Fulton first experimented with steam navigation. The highway near by is the old Albany post-road, this immediate part of which was known as Edgar’s Lane and was opened in 1644. This morning I heard the pleasant notes of a coaching-horn, and looked out to see a stately four-in-hand on its way to the city, a forcible reminder of at least a century and a half of regular mail coaching on that same road. My home is a part of what was the old Philipse manor; and at Yonkers, a few miles below, one finds the manor-house, now in constant use as a municipal building. It was partly built in 1682, and assumed its present dimensions in about 1745.

On this very ground, and on the hills lying to the eastward, Washington’s army was encamped for a number of weeks in 1777, and near by is the well-preserved colonial house where Washington and Rochambeau sojourned for some time, and where the Yorktown campaign was planned. In the river at this point, on several occasions, the British frigates made appearance, the last of these being the final meeting between General Washington and General Sir Guy Carleton, in May, 1783, on the suspension of hostilities. A few miles farther up the road one comes to the lane that leads to Washington Irving’s “Sunnyside,” with its tablet stating that the house was first built in the year 1650.

With these older historical souvenirs in mind, I turn to the southward, and there, as a reminder that the current of American history flows on, and that our past is in no manner detached from the present and the future, I see, standing out in bold relief on the horizon, the tomb of General Grant, while anchored in the river lies the Olympia, the flag-ship of Admiral Dewey, just now returned from adventures as fraught with history-making results as was the presence of Hudson’s Half Moon in this same river two hundred and ninety years ago.

The historical significance of the Hudson might be illustrated in some such way at many another point upon its banks. The location of Albany is particularly to be noted as one evidently intended by nature for an important rendezvous. In the earlier period Albany and the Saratoga district, and certain points of advantage in the Mohawk Valley, were of great strategic importance. They were natural gateways, which had to be held first against the Indians and Frenchmen, and afterward against the British. Their later importance has had to do with canals, railroads and the development of commerce.

But of Albany it must be said that it has also the distinction of being one of the three or four chief law-making centres of the English-speaking world. In no other way has the State of New York exerted so wide an influence upon the country at large as in the working out of laws and institutions which have been re-enacted almost without change by a great number of the other States of the Union. Thus Albany has been a great training school in politics and legislation.

Before the days of railroad building, the Erie Canal was the greatest undertaking that this country had witnessed in the improvement of its transportation facilities. This waterway connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic by way of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys; and among other results of a far-reaching nature there followed the development of the city of Buffalo, a commercial and manufacturing community founded in the opening years of the nineteenth century, and destined in the twentieth to achieve such growth and splendor as few men are yet bold enough to anticipate.

We have seen in our generation fierce rivalry for the occupation of Khartoum, at the head of Nile navigation, with one expedition succeeding another until the final success of the English under General Kitchener. The possession of Khartoum was known to carry with it the control of the fertile Soudan beyond, as well as to affect the permanent mastery of the valley of the lower Nile to the Delta. In some such manner the French and English in the middle of the eighteenth century appreciated the strategic importance of the point at the junction of the Alleghany and the Monongahela rivers, where the Ohio took its start, and from which navigation was unobstructed all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was in large part the struggle for the site of Pittsburgh that gave Washington the military training and the large perception of the future of America that fitted him for his great tasks of leadership. The development of Pittsburgh and the opening of the Ohio furnish most instructive and interesting chapters in the history of our country.

The quaint or curious or heroic beginnings must always have their fascination; and it is likely enough that for a long time to come they will take a little more than their normal or proportionate share of the page of history. But real history is learning also to concern itself with other things. The story of Princeton, now so largely that of Revolutionary annals, will henceforth increasingly be the story of the life and work of a great university. That of Pittsburgh will become in expanding proportions the story of the development of the arts and crafts and of manufacturing in this country, and of the struggle of skilled labor for an ever-larger share in the advantages made possible by the enormous increase in the volume of production. The story of Philadelphia will, to an increasing extent, be that of the best housed and most contented of all the great communities in the world, full of evidences of private thrift and the domestic virtues, while exhibiting the paradox of a relatively low degree of efficiency in matters of common concern like municipal administration.

The historic towns of the Middle States are now engaged in the making of history in ways very different from those of the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, but in ways certainly not less important. But their future will be the wiser and happier for a studious devotion to the records of their honorable past, and they cannot be too zealous in the perpetuation of the old landmarks.

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE MIDDLE STATES

ALBANY

“This antient and respectable city.”—(Washington, 1782.)

BY WALTON W. BATTERSHALL

Albany, unlike the proverbial happy woman, has not only age but a history. Its age is indicated in its claim to be the second oldest existing settlement in the original thirteen colonies. The claim is fairly sustained, but we must remember that the alleged discoveries and settlements of those nomadic times are a trifle equivocal. On the other hand, the historical significance of Albany is based on two unquestioned facts: for a century it guarded the imperilled north and west frontiers of Anglo-Saxon civilization on the continent; for another century it has been the legislative seat of the most powerful State in the Republic.

On the 19th of September, 1609, old style, the yacht De Halve Maen, six months from Amsterdam, in command of Henry Hudson, dropped anchor a few miles below the present site of Albany. Four days spent in the exchange of civilities with the Indians and the taking of soundings from the ship’s boat farther up the stream, convinced the speculative explorer that the beautiful river among the hills gave no promise of a water path to China, and the Half-Moon, freighted with wild fruits, peltries and pleasant impressions, turned her prow homeward.

From the Dutch and also the English point of view, the English skipper of the Dutch ship had discovered the river. It appears however that in 1524 Verrazzano put a French keel, La Dauphine, far up the same stream, to which he gave the name La Grande, and, some time after, French fur traders built a rude château, or, as we would say, fortified trading-post, on Castle Island, just off the hills of Albany. But the France of Francis I. had no colonizing grip, and La Nouvelle France was simply a name which stretched along the Atlantic seaboard on the French charts of the sixteenth century.

On the return of Henry Hudson, his discovery was claimed by his patrons, the Dutch East India Company. They named the river the Mauritius[13] (Prince Maurice’s River), and the outlying country, known as Nieu Nederlandt, had good report in Holland for its furs and friendly savages.

The Amsterdam merchants were alert, and other Dutch vessels, following in the wake of the Half-Moon, pushed up the river to the head of navigation. There they found on the west bank the Maquaas, or Mohawks, and on the east bank the Mahicans, or Mohegans, with whom they had profitable transactions.

To consolidate and protect their ventures, a group of merchants petitioned the States-General of Holland for the exclusive privilege of traffic with the aborigines on the river. The elaborate map of Nieu Nederlandt which they presented with their petition was discovered in 1841 in the royal archives at the Hague, and a facsimile is now in the State Library at Albany.[14] A license for three years was granted. Thereupon, in 1615, the ruined château on Castle Island was rebuilt, equipped with two cannon and garrisoned with a dozen Dutch soldiers. In compliment to the Stadtholder, it received the name of Fort Nassau.

This occupancy in force of Castle Island (now called Van Rensselaer Island) was brief, for the spring freshets proved too much for even the amphibious Dutch musketeers and traders, and it hardly can be called a settlement.

It is an interesting fact, that the valley of the Hudson narrowly missed the honor of being settled by the passengers of the Mayflower. Under the November skies of 1620, that historic vessel, with its valuable cargo of religious and political seed-corn, for several days had been beating about the point of Cape Cod. Old Governor Bradford, with quaint spelling and phrasing, tells the story of the mishap:

Thus Plymouth Rock became the intellectual door-stone of the New World, and the banks of the Hudson inherited one of the sad “might-have-beens” of history. However, Douglas Campbell, in his trenchant and disturbing book, The Puritan in Holland, England and America, has told us that the distinctive principles of our American social and political life show, on critical inspection, the Dutch hall-mark.

The America of 1621 was much more of a “dark continent” than the Africa of fifty years ago. The adjective applies both to the skin of the autochthons and the mind of the explorers. In the commercial circles of Amsterdam, Nieu Nederlandt was supposed to be a part of the West Indies. Therefore it was that the new company which was devised for its exploitation and chartered in the year mentioned, took the name of The Dutch West India Company.

Under its auspices, in March, 1624, the ship Nieu Nederlandt sailed from Amsterdam by the accustomed route of the Canary Islands for the Mauritius River. She carried thirty families, chiefly Walloons, refugees from Belgium who had settled in Holland, and a few Dutch freemen. Some of the families were landed on Manhattan Island, but the majority proceeded up the river and selected for their settlement the fat meadow on the west shore above Castle Island. Under the shadow of the clay hill on which the Capitol now lifts its masses of sculptured granite, they built rude huts sheathed in bark, and a little log fort which they named Fort Orange. The Indians were friendly and eager to barter, and enthusiastic reports were at once sent over to Holland, with corroborative otter and beaver skins.

Two years after this settlement at Fort Orange, the Dutch West India Company purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for sixty guilders in high-priced goods and, planting a colony and fort on the south end of the island, brought up the population of Nieu Nederlandt to two hundred souls. The Company, desiring to stimulate colonization, in 1629 projected the manorial or patroon system; a combination of feudal idea and Latin name, patronus. Killiaen Van Rensselaer, one of the directors and a rich merchant of Amsterdam, at once obtained an extensive grant of land south of Fort Orange and, by the purchase of the land from the Indians and the planting of a colony, became the patroon of Rensselaerswyck. He never visited his “colonie,” but before his death in 1646, he had sent from Holland over two hundred artisans and farmers, and included in his manor a territory forty-eight by twenty-four miles, and also another tract of sixty-two thousand acres.

Thus Albany began with a Dutch imprint, which to this day has given to the city its distinctive mark. Forty years of Dutch sagacity and thrift rapidly developed the colony. It was on the whole a prosperous period, enlivened by chronic disputes between the garrison and the manor, and disquieting rumors regarding belligerent Indians and the French. It throws on a small canvas sturdy personages and stirring events. Brandt Van Slechtenhorst, the stiff upholder of the manor claims against the doughty Pieter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director-General; Domine Megapolensis, the first Dutch minister; and the flitting figure of the Jesuit missionary, Father Jogues with his hands mangled by the Mohawks and kissed by the Queen of France, would make any canvas picturesque. To take Washington Irving’s delicious bit of humor too seriously shows a melancholy lack of humor.

Certainly the Dutch burghers of Albany did not take very seriously the English occupation of Nieu Nederlandt in 1664. The seizure was colored by an old claim of uncertain dimensions based upon the Cabot discoveries, which for a long time had strained the relations between England and Holland concerning colonial matters. The capitulation was bloodless, and to Albany it brought little change, save that the English flag, in place of the Dutch, fluttered over the ramparts of Fort Orange, which took the name of Fort Albany in commemoration of the Scotch title of the Duke of York, the new lord of the province. The great manorial grant was confirmed, and in all its habits of thought and life the colony remained Dutch. The happiest change and perhaps the most startling shock came from the fact that the Duke of York, bigot as he was, broke the tradition of the period and introduced in his province religious toleration.

The English came, but the Dutch remained. The old Holland stock on the bank of the Hudson kept its root in the soil and has made vital contributions to the American hybrid, which have had scant recognition in our popular histories. The fact is, the Dutch were not given to writing books. They had fought for their religion and motherland, and had held them both against the assault of a powerful foe, but the recital of the story they left to the more expert tongues and more eloquent pens of Englishmen. Their type of character and social usage has proved its vigor and worth by its quiet persistence and dominance in New York life of to-day. In old Albany, even under English rule, ideas and customs which had their birth behind the dykes of Holland were conspicuously in the ascendant.

Albany became a city in 1686 by a judicious charter granted by Governor Dongan. A diagram in the Rev. John Miller’s Description of the Province and City of New York, published in London, 1695, gives us an idea of the new-born city. It consisted of about a hundred houses surrounded by a stockade, which was pierced to the north and south by narrow gateways. Above the stockade the most conspicuous objects were the pyramidal roof of the Dutch church at the foot of Jonker Street (now State Street), surmounted by three small cannon, and, on the eminence at the upper end of the street, the bastions of Fort Frederick, which had inherited the responsibilities and honors of the dismantled Fort Orange.

For about forty years after the peaceful seizure by the English, the old Dutch church, where the prosperous burghers worshipped, and a Lutheran church of somewhat intermittent life but hospitable to outsiders sufficed for the religious needs of the city. The officers of the garrison, however, and probably most of the soldiers were Church of England men. There was much in the service of the Dutch Church of that day which must have suggested pleasant reminiscence. Christmas, Easter and Whitsunday were festivals brought from Holland, and were duly celebrated in the church and at the fireside. Queerly enough, in the accounts of Pieter Schuyler, the deacon of the Dutch church in 1683 and the first mayor of the city, we read that “the 13th of January was observed as a day of fasting and prayer, to divert God’s heavy judgment from falling on the English nation for the murder of King Charles, martyr of blessed memory,” and that the expenses therefor were seventeen guilders.

[Illustration: OLD DUTCH CHURCH, ERECTED IN 1715 ON SITE OF ORIGINAL CHURCH ERECTED IN 1656.]

But the theological coin of the Synod of Dort, whether acceptable or not to the English, was more or less inaccessible, being hid in the napkin of the Dutch language. Evidently there was need of an English house of worship in Albany. In 1714, therefore, Governor Hunter issued letters patent granting a plot of ground in Jonker Street below the fort for a church and cemetery. The Common Council made protest. The point at issue was a question, not of doctrine, but of municipal rights. They issued notice to suspend the laying of the foundations. They arrested the workmen. They petitioned the Governor. They sent a messenger by express in a canoe to New York,—a journey in those days of such magnitude that the church was well under way by the time the return voyage was accomplished. Despite all obstacles, the work went on and in the course of a year the first English church west of the Hudson was built. The two churches, the Dutch at the foot and the English at the head of State Street, were the chief ecclesiastical landmarks of eighteenth-century Albany. Like rocks in a stream, they stood in the broad thoroughfare and preserved the magnificent approach to the future Capitol.

[Illustration: ST. PETER’S CHURCH, ERECTED IN 1715, FORT FREDERICK IN THE BACKGROUND.

(FROM A WATER-COLOR SKETCH IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.)]

Little as it was, Albany was the nest of important events and a maker of history in those troublous days. Second to New York in size and resources, it served as a wary sentinel and tremulous alarm-bell to the exposed province. For well-nigh a century, all beyond it to the west and north, except the hamlet of Schenectady and the French settlements on the St. Lawrence, was wilderness and savages. It occupied a post of the gravest peril and responsibility. We get a glimpse of the situation and of the current history in the scene on that Sunday morning, the 9th of February, four years after the granting of the charter, when Symon Schermerhoorn, shot through the thigh, told at the north gate of the stockade his breathless story of the night attack and the horrible massacre at Schenectady.

Between the hostile French in Canada and the little frontier city on the Hudson roamed the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, upon whose friendship and fealty in large measure hung the destiny of the English possessions. The stockade, thirteen feet high, would have been of little account if that living bulwark of savage allies had yielded to the arms or the bribes of the French. That the bulwark did not yield, that the fealty of the Indians was won and, through every peril, kept unbroken, was owing to the sagacity and honorable dealing of the government and burghers of Albany. The House of Peace—this is the name which the Mohawk sachem, at one of the council-fires, gave to the Albany of those olden days, and, in the graphic phrase of his Indian oratory, he pictured at a stroke its political value and place in history; for there, by repeated formal treaties and habitual friendly intercourse, were riveted the “Covenant Chains” which made the confederation of the Six Nations the guardians of the feeble province.

There is a scene in The History of New York, by William Dunlap, which is illustrative. The date is 1746 and the central figure is the celebrated Col. William Johnson, Indian agent, whom George II. made a “baronet of Great Britain.”

During the French wars, Albany, from a military point of view, was probably the most animated spot on the continent. It was the storehouse for munitions of war and the rendezvous for the troops. English regulars and provincial militia swarmed in and about the city. After the unsuccessful campaigns of 1756 and 1757, the town was filled with refugees, reciting the slaughter of the garrison at Fort William Henry, and the murder and havoc wrought by the Indians in pay of the French. Hundreds of loyal Indians, with their squaws and papooses, encamped under the stockade. The houses and barns were filled with wounded soldiers brought from the seat of war. In the pauses of the campaigns, notwithstanding the horrible rumors and actual disasters, the “dangerously accomplished” English officers made merry life in old Albany, picturesque details of which are given in that charming chronicle of colonial days, Memoirs of an American Lady (Mrs. Philip Schuyler), by Mrs. Grant of Laggan.

In the opening of the campaign of 1758 there was grief and consternation in the province. Tidings came that Lord Viscount Howe had been killed in a skirmish on the march against Fort Ticonderoga. The body of the brilliant soldier was brought to Albany by his friend, Captain Philip Schuyler, and was buried beneath the chancel of the English church. The stone recently unearthed in the village of Ticonderoga, which bears the inscription, evidently scratched by a knife or bayonet, Mem of Lo Howe killed Trout Brook, probably marked the spot where Lord Howe fell. There is abundant evidence that his body now lies beneath the vestibule of St. Peter’s Church. The Church Book of the parish contains the following entry: 1758, Sept. 5th. To cash Rt for ground to lay the Body of Lord how & Pall £5. 6. 0.

In the following year, the fateful victory of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham gave Canada to England and ended the hard-fought duel between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon for the sovereignty of the continent.

Some years before this, the Stadt Huys, the old City Hall of Albany, was the scene of a significant event which was the prelude of one still more momentous. There in 1754 Commissioners from the several provinces convened to renew the “Covenant Chain” with the Six Nations, and to discuss the best methods for uniting and defending the colonial interests. The foremost spirits and political prophets of the colonies composed the assembly. Numerous Indian sachems, with their stately bearing and barbaric splendor, decorated the scene of the deliberations. The “Plan” adopted by the convention was not accepted by the Crown, but it was the first attempt to articulate the idea of a colonial union, and it bore two names, Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Hopkins, which in due time were affixed to the Declaration of Independence.

Before the lightning flashed in the volley at Lexington, there were centres of influence throughout the colonies breeding storm. Albany was one of them. The heart of the old Dutch town was fired with the indignations and enthusiasms of the time. There were tories of course, but the temper of the city and the attitude of those who controlled the situation are indicated by the fact that, when the Province of New York had fairly opened the fight, the old fort on the hill was extemporized into a tory jail.

As early as November, 1774, the freeholders of the city appointed a Committee of Safety and Correspondence, which proved a vigorous agent in propagating the war spirit and furnishing men and money for the Continental army. The following names appear on its lists: John Barclay, Chairman, Jacob C. Ten Eyck, Henry I. Bogert, Peter Silvester, Henry Wendell, Volkert P. Douw, John Bay, Gysbert Marselis, John R. Bleecker, Robert Yates, Stephen De Lancey, Abraham Cuyler, John H. Ten Eyck, Abraham Ten Broeck, Gerret Lansingh, Jr., Anthony E. Bratt, Samuel Stringer, Abraham Yates, Jr., and Cornelis van Santvoordt. In the records of the committee occurs this significant minute: “Pursuant to a resolution of yesterday, the Declaration of Independence was this day read and published at the City Hall to a large Concourse of the Inhabitants of this City and the Continental Troops in this City and received with applause and satisfaction.”

At the beginning of, and all through the struggle for independence, Albany was a strategic point of the utmost importance. The war-office in London and the British commanders in the field recognized that it was the key to the situation in the north. There is a passage in the oration of Governor Seymour at the Centennial Commemoration at Schuylerville, the actual scene of Burgoyne’s surrender, which condenses and interprets one of the most important chapters in the history of the Revolution.

As sometimes happens, the blow struck the striker. Col. Philip Schuyler, the young officer who brought the body of Lord Howe to its burial, was an ardent patriot and the most distinguished citizen of Albany. On the recommendation of the Provincial Congress of New York, he had been appointed by the Continental Congress a major-general in the armies of the United Colonies and had assumed command of the Northern Department. He was displaced in favor of General Gates, but he retained the confidence of Washington, and it was he who planned and conducted the campaign which resulted in the victory of Bemis Heights and the surrender of Burgoyne. This event broke the formidable menace that hung over the province and the colonial cause. The defeated British general found himself in the hands of a courteous foe, and for several months he meditated and mitigated his disaster amid the elegant hospitalities of the Schuyler mansion in Albany.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL PHILIP SCHUYLER.

(FROM A PAINTING BY COL. TRUMBULL.)]

In 1797, “this antient and respectable city of Albany” (to quote the courtly compliment of Washington) became the capital of the State. At the close of the Revolution, New York had not yet determined its seat of government. From 1777 to 1796 it peregrinated between Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany and the city of New York. Not until the twentieth session of the Legislature was the long dispute settled. The geographical advantages of Albany finally carried the day, and for the last hundred years the site of the frontier fort has been a political arena and an illustrious seat of legislative and judicial power.

The Albany of “modern times,” as the phrase is understood in our American life in which everything is new except human nature, has preserved few of the ancient landmarks. The only souvenirs are the bronze tablets which were devised at the Bicentennial in 1886, and which now designate the historic sites in the city. If one, reverent of ancient and vanished things, make pilgrimage to the tablet near the curb on the lower edge of the Capitol Park (a block above the site of Fort Frederick), to the one on the corner of Broadway and Steuben Street (the site of the northeast gate), and to the one near the curb on lower Broadway two blocks from State Street (the site of the southeast gate), he will define quite accurately the girdle of the palisadoes which protected old Albany.

[Illustration: STEPHEN VAN RENSSELAER.

(FROM A PAINTING BY EZRA AMES.)]

If he pass the memorial of the northeast gateway, a place of memorable outgoings and incomings, and continue up Broadway about three quarters of a mile, he will find a bronze tablet bearing the inscription: “Opposite Van Rensselaer Manor-House. Erected 1765. Residence of the Patroons. This spot is the site of the First Manor-House.” It was an unpretentious one-story building of Holland brick, half fortress and half dwelling. The final Manor-House, on the other side of the road, was a structure of another fashion. At the time of its erection, 1765, it was considered the handsomest residence in the colonies. Thither Stephen Van Rensselaer brought his young bride, Catherine, daughter of Philip Livingston, and his babe, who became General Van Rensselaer. It stood amid the drooping elms of a large park and was decorated with a taste and luxury startling to the period. In 1843 the building was enlarged and enriched by the elder Upjohn. Once a stately mansion, the scene of splendid hospitalities, it has shared the American fate of obstructive antiquities in thriving towns. The railroad and the “lumber district” crowded and finally strangled it. For several years it stood empty and dismantled, and obviously had outlived both its beauty and its use. In 1893 the stone and timbers were transported to the Campus of Williams College, where they were reconstructed into the Sigma Phi Society building, which perpetuates a remote suggestion of the famous Manor-House.

In the southern part of the city, on Clinton Street, is a bronze tablet which designates the sister of the Manor-House, the Schuyler mansion, built by the wife of General Philip Schuyler while he was in England in 1760. This historic relic stands on a plateau above the street, surrounded by a remnant of the original garden, but the broad avenue, shaded by elms, which once gave approach to the mansion from the river, is overgrown with houses. Though used at present as an orphan asylum under the charge of the Order of St. Francis de Sales, it retains substantially its original features. It is a dignified and spacious house; not remarkable architecturally, but fragrant with history. Here Burgoyne enjoyed his imprisonment. Here Washington, Lafayette, Count de Rochambeau, Baron Steuben, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Aaron Burr, and other notable men of old were entertained. Here Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler were married, December 14, 1780. Besides famous guests and weddings, its chief feature of historic interest is the staircase, apropos of which, we quote from Mr. Marcus Reynolds’s article on The Colonial Buildings of Rensselaerswyck in The Architectural Record of 1895.

With all its historic associations, Albany is not conspicuous for the scenery it has furnished for the enchantments of poetry and romance; still it is not altogether destitute of literary honors. Its colonial life figures in the Satanstoe of the great Fenimore Cooper and in Harold Frederick’s In the Valley. The Normanskill, which tumbles into the Hudson at the south end of the city, flows through the Vale of Tawasentha, the scene of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The hills and forests about the city suggested many a delicate detail in the woodland rhythms of Alfred Street, who made his home and burial-place in Albany. Its old Dutch life with its sedate charm has been pictured by a living Albanian, Leonard Kip; and probably the house still stands on Pearl Street or Broadway, in which Henry James found the charming girl who stood for his Portrait of a Lady.

On the east bank of the Hudson, in old Greene Bosch, opposite the city, decays the dishonored ruin of Fort Crailo. The date, more or less mythical, is 1642. It was the headquarters of General Abercrombie, and in the garden back of the house a derisive British surgeon, Dr. Stackpole, composed the immortal jingle of Yankee Doodle. If, in 1800, one stood on the southeast corner of State and North Pearl Streets, opposite the famous elm which Philip Livingston planted in 1735, his eye glancing up the street to the north would be arrested by a picturesque relic of Dutch Albany, the Vanderheyden Palace. Of course it has joined the departed, but its ghost appears in Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall, and its old weather-vane now swings above the porch of Sunnyside.

Some of the colonial structures were fine and famous in their day, but in truth, in our American towns, imposing architecture is a thing of recent date. Few cities give more favorable sites for architectural effects than the three hills of Albany. It is not too much to say that the wealth and taste of its citizens have conspired with its peculiar advantages of position. The architecture of Albany has an exceptional value. The City Hall, with its Romanesque doorways and majestic campanile, is a fine specimen of the great Richardson. The Albany City Savings Bank, recently constructed, is a classical gem, inadequately set, but cut by a master hand. Its Corinthian monoliths and graceful dome satisfy the eye, and the whole structure is a suggestive instance of what trade can do in the interests of art.

[Illustration: WEST SIDE OF PEARL ST. FROM STATE ST. TO MAIDEN LANE, 1814.