the Bronx river as far as White Plains. This brought on the
battle of White Plains late in October, in which Howe gained
no advantage; and from here both armies withdrew into New
Jersey, the British capturing Fort Washington on the way, the
Americans leaving behind garrisons to guard the Highlands of
the Hudson. In 1777 General John Burgoyne succeeded in
taking Ticonderoga, but in the swampy forests southward from
Lake Champlain he fought his way against heavy odds, and in
the middle of October his campaign culminated disastrously
in his surrender at Saratoga. Colonel Barry St Leger led an
auxiliary expedition from Oswego against Fort Stanwix on the
upper Mohawk, and on the 6th of August he fought at Oriskany
one of the most bloody battles of the war, but a few days later,
deserted by his terror-stricken Indian allies, he hastened back
to Montreal. The British government intended that Howe
should co-operate with Burgoyne by fighting his way up the
Hudson, but as the secretary of state for the colonies neglected
to send him such instructions this was not undertaken until
early in October, and then an expedition for the purpose was
placed under the command of Sir Henry Clinton. Clinton met
with little difficulty from the principal American defences of
the Highlands, consisting of Forts Montgomery and Clinton
on the western bank, together with a huge chain and boom
stretched across the river to a precipitous mountain (Anthony’s
Nose) on the opposite bank, and ascended as far as Esopus
(now Kingston) which he burned, but he was too late to aid
Burgoyne. The year 1778 saw the bloody operations of the
Tory Butlers and their Loyalist and Indian allies in the Mohawk
and Schoharie valleys and notably the massacre at Cherry
Valley. In retaliation a punitive expedition under Generals
John Sullivan and James Clinton in 1779 destroyed the Iroquois
towns, and dealt the Indian confederacy a blow from which
it never recovered. The American cause was strengthened this
year also by several victories along the lower Hudson of which
General Anthony Wayne’s storming of the British fort at Stony
Point was the most important. The closing episode of the war
as far as New York was concerned was the discovery of Benedict
Arnold’s attempt in 1780 to betray West Point and other colonial
posts on the Hudson to the British. On the 25th of November
1783 the British forces finally evacuated New York City, but
the British posts on Lakes Erie and Ontario were not evacuated
until some years later.
New York ratified the Articles of Confederation in 1778, and when Maryland refused to ratify unless those states asserting claims to territory west to the Mississippi agreed to surrender them, New York was the first to do so. But under the leadership of George Clinton, governor in 1777–1795, the state jealously guarded its commercial interests. The Confederation Congress appealed to it in vain for the right to collect duties at its port; and there was determined opposition to the new Federal constitution. In support of the constitution, however, there arose the Federalist party under the able leadership of Alexander Hamilton. When a majority of the constitutional convention of 1787 had approved of the new constitution Hamilton alone of the three New York delegates remained to sign it; and when, after its ratification by eight states, the New York convention met at Poughkeepsie (June 17, 1788) to consider ratification, two-thirds of the members were opposed to it. But others were won over by the news that it had been ratified by New Hampshire and Virginia or by the telling arguments of Hamilton, and on the 26th of July the motion to ratify was carried by a vote of 30 to 27.
The constitution having been ratified, personal rivalry among the great families—the Clintons, the Livingstons and the Schuylers—again became dominant in political affairs. The Clintons were most popular among the independent freeholders; the Livingstons had increased their influence by numerous marriage alliances with landed families; and the Schuylers had General Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton, his son-in-law. Originally, the Livingstons, with whom John Jay was connected by marriage, were united with the Schuylers, and yet both together were unable to defeat the Clintons in an election for governor. Later, the Livingstons, piqued at Washington’s neglect to give them the offices they thought their due, joined the Clintons, but the Federal patronage was used against the anti-Federalists or Republicans with such effect that in 1792 John Jay received more votes for governor than George Clinton, although the latter was counted in on a technicality. Jay was elected in 1795 and re-elected in 1798, but in 1801 the brief Federalist regime in the state came to an end with the election of George Clinton for a seventh term. The Republican leaders straightway quarrelled among themselves, thus starting the long series of factional strifes which have characterized the party politics of New York state; the bitterness of the factions and the irresponsible council of appointment are also responsible for the firm establishment early in the Republican regime of the “spoils system.” The leaders of the several Republican groups were Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, Aaron Burr, then vice-president, Governor George Clinton and his nephew, De Witt Clinton, who in 1802 was elected United States senator. The first break came in the spring of 1804 when Burr, who had incurred the enmity of his Republican colleagues in 1800 by seeking Federalist votes in the electoral college at Jefferson’s expense, became an independent candidate for governor against Morgan Lewis. Hamilton’s action in counselling Federalists not to vote for Burr for governor just as he had counselled them not to support Burr against Jefferson in 1800, was one of the contributary causes of Burr’s hostility to Hamilton which ended in the duel (July 1804) in which Burr killed Hamilton. Hamilton’s death marked the end of the Federalists as a power in New York. The election as governor in 1804 of Lewis, a relative of the Livingstons, was followed by a bitter quarrel with the Clintons over patronage, and resulted at the state election of 1807 in the choice of a Clintonian, Daniel D. Tompkins, for governor and the virtual elimination of the Livingstons from New York state politics. Tompkins served as governor by successive re-elections until 1817, his term covering the trying period of the second war with Great Britain. New York, whose growing shipping interests had suffered by the Embargo of 1807, was as a commercial state opposed to the war. Politically this opposition had the effect of temporarily reviving the Federalist party, which secured control of the legislature, and gave the electoral vote of the state in 1812 to De Witt Clinton, whom the Federalists had accepted as a candidate to oppose Madison for re-election on the war issue. During the war New Yorkers served with the regular troops at Niagara, Plattsburg and other places on the western and northern frontiers of the state. For some years after the war political contests in New York state as in the rest of the country were not on party lines. The opposing groups were known as “Bucktails,” whose leaders were Governor Tompkins and Martin Van Buren, and “Clintonians” or supporters of De Witt Clinton. In 1817 an act was passed which ten years later ended for ever slavery in New York state; in the same year De Witt Clinton was elected governor and, largely through his efforts, the Erie Canal was begun.
The election of Martin Van Buren as governor in 1828 marked the beginning of the long ascendancy in the state of the “Albany Regency,” a political coterie in which Van Buren, W. L. Marcy, Benjamin Franklin Butler (1795–1858) and Silas Wright were among the leaders; Thurlow Weed, their bitterest opponent and the man who gave them their name, declared of them that he “had never known a body of men who possessed so much power and used it so well.” Thurlow Weed owed his early political advancement to the introduction into state politics of the anti-Masonic issue (see Anti-Masonic Party), which also brought into prominence his co-worker W. H. Seward. In 1826 in Genesee county the disappearance of a printer named William Morgan was attributed to Free-Masons and aroused a strong antipathy to that order; and the anti-Masonic movement, through the fostering care of Weed, Francis Granger (1792–1868) and others, spread to other states and led eventually to the establishment of a political organization that by uniting various anti-Jacksonian elements, polled in the New York state election of 1832 more than 156,000 votes for Francis Granger, their
