Why isn’t New York City the capital of New York State?
Because it wasn’t Dutch enough!
Downtown Albany is damnably impressive for a tiny little town. There are only 101,228 people living within the city limits and 620,914 in the urbanized area, which includes Schenectady.1 That’s a small city!
But this is what it looks like:
And around the corner, this:
Or a few blocks away, this:
The reason for its imperial monumentality, of course, is that it’s the capital of the Empire State, the great state of New York.
But why, asks Ed West? In the course of wondering why so many colonial capitals were located out in the middle of nowhere, he asked, “Obviously Washington DC was part of a deal with the Virginians, when Philadelphia was an obvious choice. But why Albany, for instance?”
Well, I was taught New York History in high school. (Thank you, Philip Scandura!) So I know the answer. I still have the notes!2
How New York City lost the state capital
New York City was the capital of New York Province before 1776. It was also surprisingly Loyalist during the Revolution. Now, that doesn’t mean that the place was fully loyalist. Oh no, not at all! The place was full of revolutionary activity. It is to say that New York City was politically divided in a way that, say, Boston was not.
As a result, the provincial General Assembly distinguished itself by being the only colonial legislature to vote down the “Petition to the King” issued by the First Continental Congress. It then proceeded to vote against sending any delegates to the Second.
This so incensed the colony’s Patriots that they abandoned the legislature and turned the local “committee of correspondence” into the New York Provincial Congress. But even then, New York’s so-called Patriots were pretty squishy. First, the Provincial Congress again voted against the actions of the First Continental Congress. (And this is after the fighting started at Lexington and Concord!) It then voted to ask London to abandon legislative power over domestic affairs, in return for which New York would agree to allow Parliament to demand a pot of money for imperial defense as long as the province got to decide how to collect it. It would also recognize London's power to regulate trade between the Empire and the outside world.
When an angry mob surrounded a group of British soldiers and “divested” them of several cartloads of guns and ammunition—Major Isaac Hamilton wisely chose not to fire on the crowd—the Provincial Congress proceeded to order the civilian patriots to return the weapons. (This order does not appear to have been followed.) New York’s delegates to the Continental Congress would go on to abstain from signing the Declaration of Independence. Oh, New York.
Now, I don’t want to underplay the situation. Things were fraught in 1775 and early ‘76. First, General Charles Lee — he has a bit-role in Hamilton — marched into the city and began administering loyalty oaths to the population of Manhattan and nearby villages in Queens. (I know not why Brooklyn was spared this indignity.) He ordered that anybody who refused be deported to Connecticut. This went over like a lead balloon and ultimately earned General Lee a censure from the Continental Congress. But Lee’s actions empowered local patriots to start harassing Loyalists. By the end of 1775, roughly 10,000 people — out of an initial population of 24,000 — had fled to Brooklyn, Staten Island, or New Jersey.
Under these circumstance, moderation from the Provincial Congress didn’t help. Independence was declared in Philadelphia. The fighting intensified. The British landed unopposed on Staten Island on July 3rd, 1776. It didn’t take a military mastermind to see that Manhattan was in danger — and possessed a huge reservoir of Loyalist sympathizers — so the Fourth Provincial Congress decamped north to White Plains and declared the independent State of New York on July 9th.3 White Plains wasn’t quite far enough north; Washington would retreat through the town in October. They therefore decamped further up towards Kingston.
Do you trust those people in the City?
The British kept New York City for the rest of the war. There was no open resistance. The revolutionary state capital would move around with the exigencies of military activity. Nonetheless, after the war, most state government offices and officials rapidly returned to New York City. In fact, the first legislature elected after the British withdrew met at Federal Hall in lower Manhattan. It would continue to meet in Manhattan until 1787, when the legislature voted to hold their next session in Poughkeepsie.
The thing to remember is that New York City may have been the logical place for the capital — that is why state offices opened there right after the British left and stayed there until the late 1790s — but after the departure of Loyalist refugees it didn’t have the population heft that it does today. Manhattan’s population in 1790 was 33,131 … compared to 75,736 in Albany County, the most populous in the state, and the city enjoyed only nine votes in the state Assembly (out of 65).4
Brooklyn was a primarily Dutch-speaking county that had no particular identification with Manhattan. (Staten Island, on the other hand, was an English-speaking Loyalist bastion. Some things really do change.)
But having only a tenth of the state’s population was only a necessary condition for losing the capital. The sufficient one was that nobody trusted downstaters. Did they fight the British down in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island? No, no they did not. Did they somehow nonetheless get the national capital in 1785? Yes, yes they did. Did they put their primary loyalties to this nebulous “United States” thing rather than the concrete mother country of the State of New York? They sure did. New York City was a Federalist hotbed whereas much of the rest of the state didn’t quite trust that newfangled Constitution coming out of Philadelphia. Governor Clinton was from Ulster County and a prominent anti-Federalist.
And they didn’t speak Dutch anymore down there.
English wiped the floor with Dutch well before the 1770s in Manhattan (and was taking over Long Island), but Kingston still kept town records in Dutch when the Provincial Congress arrived. (Well, the town officially stopped in 1774, but not really.) North of the Harlem River, Dutch was so common that in order to properly debate the federal constitution in 1788, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the anti-Federalist manifestos had to be translated.5 Brooklyn was still predominantly Dutch-speaking, but Brooklyn was not Manhattan — it was a rural county whose total population was less than 5,000.
To be clear, there is no record of serious linguistic conflict. The English never made any moves to eliminate or restrict the use of Dutch. The Dutch, meanwhile, accepted the language’s slow decline. (This would be rather unlike, say, the later reaction of German-American immigrants in the Midwest. The difference is all the more striking because the Germans were immigrants, whereas the Dutch had been there before English arrived.) Dutch-Americans distrusted Manhattanites, and Manhattanites spoke English, but intermarriage was increasingly common. For example, both Lewis Morris (of the family that gave Morrisania its name) and Robert Livingston were half-Dutch. (Gouverneur Morris was not half-Dutch, but it was widely-believed at the time —and even 142 years later!—that he was.)
Albany would finally get the seat in 1797.
So why did New York City lose the state capital? Add up (1) NYC’s loyalist perfidy, (2) the fact that those bastards were forgiven and made the site of the national capital anyway (until Philly snatched the honor in 1790), (3) distrust of Federalists, with the latter being intimately tied up with residual Dutch loyalty and the fact that Albany was actually the biggest county at the time.
If I may be allowed to put this in modern New York terms, suggestions to keep the statehouse in Manhattan were greeted with the 18th-century Dutch version of “Are you frickin’ kidding me here? Psssht.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
“Metropolitan areas” are defined by county boundaries and the number of commuters traveling across counties. “Urban areas” conform better to what people will see on the ground. The census bureau defines urban areas as a bunch of contiguous census blocks. These are small, with an average size across the U.S. of 200 acres, or a little under one-third of a square mile — but in urban and suburban areas they literally are city blocks. Here is a map for my neighborhood in Brooklyn:
“Urban” census blocks have to meet one of the following characteristics:
More than 425 housing units per square mile;
Structures or pavement covering at least 33% of its surface area;
More than 500 people per square mile living there.
Urban areas can hop over water. They can also hop down roadways through rural areas as long as the road doesn’t stretch by more than 1½ miles, although that rule isn’t always followed.
Here is a map of Albany’s urban area, including Schenectady but not Saratoga Springs, Mechanicville, or Ravena:
I lost the comic books that I sketched during that period, stuff my son is angry at me for losing, but some high school history notes, those I still have. Oy vey.
The acts and minutes of the Provincial Congress can be found here. A nice review of its constitutional work can be found in Charles Lincoln, The Constitutional History of New York, Volume 1, (1905).
Technically, the Provincial Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence on July 9th. On July 10th, it voted to change its name from the “ Provincial Congress of the Colony of New York” to the “Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York.”
It should have been 70 but the counties that became today’s Vermont were in the process of declaring independence from New York and their delegates refused to take their seats.
“Wy, het volk van de Vereenigde Staten, ten einde om een vohnaaktere Vereeniging te formeren, gerechtigheid te staven, inlandsche rust in verseekering te stellen, om zorg te dragen voor de gemeene verdeedeging, het algemeen welvaren te bevorderen, en de zeegeningen van vryhyd te beveiligen, voor ons en ons nageslaft, ordoneren en stellen vast deeze Constitutie voor de Vereenigde Staaten van Amerika.”
Thus reads the translation distributed to the citizens of the great State of New York.
In 2014, Brooklyn College commissioned a reverse translation of the New York version published in Dutch and the Pennsylvania edition published in German. They are fascinating to read! The article, “Founding-Era Translations of the U.S. Constitution,” can be found here, and the detailed translations comparing the Dutch and the German versions can be found here.