Martin Van Buren

Slave-holding New York State Congressional Representatives: A Complete List

February 6, 2022 by Alan J. Singer 2 Comments

According to a Washington Post report in the early years of the American republic over 1,700 Congressional representatives, Senators and Congressmen owned enslaved people. Despite a very clear conflict of interest they voted on the laws governing the country and the enslaved population. Some Representatives served in Congress long after slavery was finally abolished in New York State.

Five of the first seven U.S. Presidents were definitely slaveholders and at least five other later Presidents had family connections to slavery. Five of the Supreme Court Justices who ruled that African Americans had no citizenship rights under the Constitution in the 1857 Dred Scott decision were slaveholders. [Read more…] about Slave-holding New York State Congressional Representatives: A Complete List

Wall Street History: The Bank War & The Shift of Financial Power to New York

January 19, 2022 by James S. Kaplan 3 Comments

At the time construction of the Erie Canal was begun in 1817, Philadelphia (the second largest city in the United States) was the nation’s financial center. Although there were successful banks in New York, Philadelphia, one of America’s leading seaports, had been the capital during the American Revolution and of the nation (1790 to 1800), and so was considered the financial center of the country.

This is not to say there was not some rivalry between financial institutions located on Wall Street in New York and Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, but the latter was the site of the first bank established in the nation in 1781, the Bank of North America, and more importantly became the site of the First Bank of the United States, which Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had promoted. [Read more…] about Wall Street History: The Bank War & The Shift of Financial Power to New York

Thurlow Weed, Stephen Van Rensselaer III and the Disputed Election of 1824

October 7, 2021 by Peter Hess Leave a Comment

Thurlow Weed was born on November 15, 1797, the son of Joel and Mary (Elis) Weed, in Cairo, Greene County, NY where his grandfather settled after the Revolutionary War. His father was a farmer who was apparently hard working but never prosperous, occasionally spending time in jail for debt.

In 1799, the family moved to Catskill where young Weed received a small amount of schooling. His first job was pumping a blacksmith’s bellows while the blacksmith formed heated iron. He made six cents per day. At nine, he got a job as a cabin boy on a Hudson River sloop. [Read more…] about Thurlow Weed, Stephen Van Rensselaer III and the Disputed Election of 1824

Martin Van Buren and New York’s Irish Community

May 16, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Martin Van Buren’s relationship with the Irish community in New York was rather incidental, developing in parallel to the rise of his career.

The root of what became a favorable association between the two seems to be an inadvertent outcome grounded in political events that shook Ireland and America beginning in 1798 and continued throughout Van Buren’s career/life. [Read more…] about Martin Van Buren and New York’s Irish Community

When Did New York Stop Speaking Dutch?

December 18, 2019 by Kieran O’Keefe 52 Comments

In the late summer of 1664, four English frigates arrived off shore New Amsterdam. Rather than resisting, the Director-General of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered the city and colony to the English.

Although the Dutch briefly regained control of the colony in 1673, it was restored to English rule in the Treaty of Westminster the following year, marking the end of Dutch New York.

Despite the English conquest, the Dutch language continued to thrive in New York and northern New Jersey for generations, persisting into the twentieth century in certain areas. [Read more…] about When Did New York Stop Speaking Dutch?

New Book Of Kinderhook History

September 3, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Inhabited by the Mohicans before Europeans arrived (before 1651), Kinderhook, in Columbia County, NY, has an intriguing historical past.

Lisa LaMonica’s new book Kinderhook: Images of America (Arcadia Publishing, 2019), which is set to publish in August 2019, looks at one of the oldest towns in New York State and its significance to our nation’s history and culture. [Read more…] about New Book Of Kinderhook History

The Forgotten War Between the United States and Canada

July 29, 2019 by Stan Evans Leave a Comment

William Lyon MacKenzie strode into a packed theater in Buffalo, NY on the night of Dec. 12, 1837, his blue eyes blazing beneath his high, broad forehead, his sandy whiskers a chinstrap beard. The short, wiry 42-year-old native of Scotland had arrived in the booming border city a day earlier, a fugitive with a price on his head, after launching an ill-fated rebellion against the oligarchy that ruled colonial Canada.

More than 2,000 Buffalo residents waited anxiously to hear him speak, quite a crowd for a city of not even 18,000 souls. [Read more…] about The Forgotten War Between the United States and Canada

Historians Podcast: Presidential Campaign Songs

October 28, 2016 by Bob Cudmore 2 Comments

This week on “The Historians” podcast, Tom Lindsay, who performs with Michael Eck as the folk duo Lost Radio Rounders, has songs from American Presidential elections going back to an 1840 musical tribute to Martin Van Buren. You can listen to the podcast here. [Read more…] about Historians Podcast: Presidential Campaign Songs

Charles Shaw: Ace Adirondack Attorney

January 5, 2015 by Lawrence P. Gooley 1 Comment

Among those to rise from humble Adirondack roots and pursue life in the big city was Charles P. Shaw, a native of Jay, New York, where he was born in 1836. “Humble,” meaning relative poverty, aptly described most North Country citizens in those early days. Shaw may have had an advantage since there were two doctors in the family: his father, Daniel, and his grandfather, Joshua Bartlett. As schooled professionals, they were more likely to emphasize among their family the importance of education.

For whatever reason, Charles was an excellent and precocious student. There survives in old newspapers an anecdote suggesting he was indeed an unusually bright pupil. [Read more…] about Charles Shaw: Ace Adirondack Attorney

Washington Irving’s Spooky Tale of Mamakating Hollow

October 23, 2014 by John Conway Leave a Comment

It was once without question the best known ghost story set in Sullivan County, written by one of America’s most respected writers, and yet it is largely unknown today.

It combines detailed descriptions of the rich and bountiful beauty of this area in the 19th century with cleverly conceived ghouls as hideous as any in American literature.

It is Washington Irving’s 1838 short story “Hans Swartz: A Marvelous Tale of Mamakating Hollow” and it is still appropriate reading this Halloween season, more than 170 years after it was penned. [Read more…] about Washington Irving’s Spooky Tale of Mamakating Hollow