Federal Hall

Washington and the First Presidency

Federal Hall marks the spot where America’s first president took the oath. But to many contemporaries Washington’s assumption of power mattered far less than his rejection of it. Learned colonials saw him as a new Cincinnatus, the famed Roman consul who returned power to the Senate and then retired instead of remaining emperor. At several moments in his career, Washington similarly declined offers to abolish democratic control of the military and of his own power. When George III heard that he planned to resign at the end of the war and retire to Mount Vernon, the King exclaimed “if He did He would be the greatest man in the world.” When Washington did just that, it marked the first time since ancient Rome that a triumphant general had not become a dictator or monarch. When political leaders decided, on their own, to scrap the Articles of Confederation for a new constitution, Washington likewise had to be convinced that only he could give them such authority. When he stepped down as presider of the convention, he again sought retirement, but then was convinced that only he could legitimately stand as the first president. By the point at which he was elected, unanimously (by the Electoral College), he had built a reputation on rejecting power, a large part of the reason many Americans entrusted the new republic to his care. As a result, this National Monument is as much a tribute to democracy as it is a place of honor to the man who assumed leadership of the United States.

Moving the Capital: the “Compromise" of 1790

Historians still debate the reasons for moving the US capital from New York, and the major players involved. The reigning explanation holds that Hamilton struck the compromise with Madison and Jefferson at the latter’s home in NYC, in exchange for nationalization of the states’ debt. Recent work argues that Washington’s speculative land investments were a more important factor. Regardless, once the political headquarters of the nation moved to the swamps of the Potomac, New York’s future as the seat of the government ended. New Yorkers wielded enormous power in the early years of the republic, and with the beginning of industrialization a generation later the city would eventually become the nation’s unofficial capitol in every other respect. But its history as the capital, and in many ways the center of the Revolution, would fade along with its colonial landscape. Lamenting that no other city was suitable as a capital, Abigail Adams complained to her daughter before the temporary move to Philadelphia, “when all is done, it will not be Broadway.”

Perhaps this intensifying animus convinced Hamilton the folly of maintaining the nation’s capital. Seeking votes for his economic agenda, he agreed to move the capital of the United States out of New York, temporarily to Philadelphia and eventually to a new federal district along the Potomac River. On August 12, 1790, Congress met for the last time at Federal Hall. If New York’s obligations as federal capital restrained its economic, political, architectural ambitions, the removal of the capital ushered in a new era of transformation. New York was no longer a “capital city” but become a “city of capital” explained historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace. Throughout the United States, the triumph of revolution inspired a millennialist commitment to remaking the world for present and future generations. As Thomas Jefferson summarized, “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Scholars have long emphasized the ways New York heeded Jefferson’s call to remake the city and reject the tired past.

The Fading of NYC Revolutionary Memory

Near the end of his life, New York’s great journalist and poet Walt Whitman wrote an ode in which he described the colonial POWs he learned to revere as a child in Brooklyn as “The stepping stones to thee to-day… America.” Like many, Whitman felt the city had lost any true regard for its Revolutionary history. This fading of memory spoke to a larger physical absence. Unlike Boston or Philadelphia, few colonial buildings remained by the late 1800s. And by the early to mid-1900s, New York likewise disappeared largely from the nation’s origin story, despite the fact that some of the most consequential acts of the founding, the war, and the rebellion took place in the city. This vacancy remains. Unlike Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell or Boston’s Old North Church, there is no truly iconic emblem of the Revolution in New York. Government officials and tour guides rarely spotlight this heritage, and the symbols of the age do not appear in promotional literature, digital media, or street iconography. Locals are often no less surprised than others to learn of its Revolutionary history. How did the central location in so much of this drama vanish from public imagination?

Displacement as the capital was one reason. Another was a resurgence of anti-urbanism. Cities had been symbols of imperial power since the earliest states. But for that reason and others, democratic political culture in the US elevated the rural over the urban.

Cities were viewed as “stinking dens of commerce and corruption.” With the speculative real estate frenzy unleashed by nationalization of the wartime debt, New York gained a reputation as a hive of English-style greed and financial intrigue preying on the rest of the nation. ⁠Local politicians capitalized on these divides, too, with New York’s first governor, George Clinton, billing himself as a fierce antagonist of the City’s selfish interests. Its needs were no longer that of the state, let alone the nation.

Still one more factor was land use policy. In Boston and Philadelphia, residents attempted to shape their cities’ identities around their revolutionary pasts, to some degree at least. New York was a different story. As the city expanded up the island, planners began holding lower Manhattan in contempt, viewing its crooked streets and old buildings as relics of a colonial past. They advocated instead for a uniform city that would rationalize urban life, ironically arguing that they were adhering to republican values of accessibility, visibility, and transparency. Perhaps no project captured this contradiction more than the Plan of 1811, for development of New York’s famous “grid.” Commissioners planned a vast, organized series of numbered streets and avenues stretching throughout Manhattan, arguing that “Beauty, order and convenience seem to have been little valued by our ancestors.”

The new governmental rules allowed financial speculators to predict the course of New York’s expansion, enriching antebellum real estate developers and landlords. It also meant that its Revolutionary battlefields fell under rowhomes, and, eventually, concrete. Memorials for soldiers, rebels, and POWs took decades to start, and even longer to erect.

As New Yorkers tore down the old colonial landscape, political groups fought continually over the Revolution’s meaning. Parades and orations showcased rival organizations vying for control of the streets and the message, particularly on the Fourth of July. Controlling this history became one of the most significant arenas of political combat in the early republic. The intense political battles of those decades would frustrate every attempt to define a singular narrative or interpretation. This was especially true in New York. Evacuation Day, for example, became one of the most important celebrations in the city. Yet hardly devoid of factionalism. And for all the popular anti-British fervor, it would take more than a century to erect the monument that now stands in Ft. Greene Park, honoring “America’s first P.O.W.’s,” the “prison ship martyrs” eulogized by Whitman. Elites objected to Tammany’s attempts to memorialize those soldiers, and Evacuation Day became increasingly privatized as the century progressed. Ordinary New Yorkers lost control as the yearly celebration became the prerogative of elite groups like the Sons of the American Revolution. The establishment of the New-York Historical Society in 1805 signaled the early desire of the city’s patricians to control the narrative. As before, during, and after the Revolution itself, leaders warred among themselves, and faced repeated challenges from the unenfranchised majority, to control popular ideology.

Legacies of the Revolution

The First Nations and the “Empire of Liberty”

The Articles of Peace with Britain settled a war that included thousands of Native combatants and transferred vast stretches of territory — north to the Great Lakes, west to the Mississippi, and south to the Floridas — without so much as a single mention of their part in the struggle. Loyalist tribes reacted with shock and outrage. The “King could not pretend to cede to America what was not his own to give,” Iroquois emissaries shouted in disgust. The British, said Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, “Sold the Indians to Congress.” Patriots, meanwhile, did their best to cast the new relationship as that of conqueror and subject. A 1783 special committee advised Congress to tell Indigenous leaders that they had been “aggressors in the war.” Their only means for “atonement” would be accepting the new “boundaries.” General Philip Schuyler of New York put the matter more bluntly to the Haudenosaunee in 1784: “We are now Masters of this Island [North America], and can dispose of the Lands as we think proper or most convenient to ourselves.”

G. Dagli Orti, Mohawk “squaw,” De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images

Indigenous leaders feared extinction, the Seneca chief Sayengeraghta arguing, they mean to “extirpate us from the Earth,” and its Mohawk leader Thayendanegea saying likewise, they intend “to exterminate the People of the Long House.” But just as with the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, French, British, and Russian colonies, the balance of power on the frontier continued to seesaw between peace and conquest. While underwriting the commercial expansion, US government officials, like their royal forbears, attempted to restrain white settlement at times, fearing that uncontrolled violence, like the destruction of Cherokee towns in 1776 or the massacre at Gnadenhutten in 1783, would produce an unstable region, and even more worrisomely, an unruly class of independent farmers. New York’s John Jay said: “Shall we not fill the Wilderness with white Savages, and will they not become more formidable to us than the tawny ones who now inhabit it?”

For the newly minted leaders of the Early Republic, the need was thus to find an orderly, controlled means of empire. Starting in 1784, Congress passed a series of Northwest Ordinances that established these rules. Rather than holding native lands and peoples in a colonial status, Congress promised statehood to territories that accepted US governors, judges, and federal officials until they reached a certain population threshold. The capstone legislation of 1787 unleashed a flood of settlement into present-day Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and established the precedent used until the closing of the frontier. In order to attract settlers from New England, Congress outlawed slavery in the Territory. And to mollify slaveowners, they demanded runaways in those lands be returned to bondage, an early version of the Fugitive Slave Act replicated in the Constitution. During its time in New York, Congress thus not only recognized the lands once protected by the British, seized by the new states, which effectively doubled the size of the country, but passed legislation essentially guaranteeing the rest of the continent would be taken in a few generations.

The conquest of New York’s upstate peoples, especially the Iroquois Confederation, was a blueprint for this policy, which came to be known as “Indian Removal.” With few allies in government, the state’s Indigenous were again pushed westward to make way for “settlement.” Much of North America would remain outside the US until the late 1800s, because, like the British, the government lacked the manpower, will, or budget to dispossess so many without a permanent standing army or extensive occupation force. For their part Native groups and individuals disagreed about the best way to navigate between the US, remaining European colonies, and enemy Indigenous. But advising New York’s Mohawks to flee to Canada after the war, the British agent Daniel Claus recognized the legacy of the Revolution for native peoples. Abandoning the country “left them… by their ancestors from Time immemorial,” they were forced to leave “the Graves of their deceased Friends and Relations” to be “demolished and abused by their enemies.” Over the next few generations, the US spread across the continent at a speed nearly unrivaled in history, depriving all the Indigenous of the rights for which the Revolution had been waged —- for an historically large, but relatively small cut of the population, even among rebels.

Joseph Brant Monument in Brantford, Canada, erected 1886

The Persistence of Slavery and the Rise of Antislavery

The Revolution’s consequences for slavery in the US were just as great as for conquest of North America. But while Independence ultimately meant the downfall of Native America (particularly, with industrialization), the Revolution, and developments in the north Atlantic, saw the birth of the first abolition movement since the advent of slavery. The institution became increasingly regional, setting in motion the economic and political forces that would precipitate the Civil War.

Vermont, with only a tiny population of slaves, provided immediate emancipation in 1777. Pennsylvania enacted gradual emancipation in 1780, followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. Massachusetts’s Supreme Court declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783. But the acquisition of fertile Native soils, plus the rise of English industrialization, also sped the growth of slavery in the US.

These contradictions were best exemplified in New York. Reliance on slave labor in the City and in the Lower Hudson Valley obstructed the possibility of gradual emancipation in the state constitution, which John Jay and other slaveowners, like Gouverneur Morris, had proposed in 1777. The early postwar legislatures revisited the question in 1784 and ‘85, but the Council of Revision (inspiration for a similar body James Madison proposed for the US Constitution) vetoed a bill that had passed the lower house and even the senate, where elites dominated. The legislature made it easier to manumit slaves, but also re-inscribed New York’s slave code in 1788.

By 1790, however, the number of freemen had tripled in size, becoming a third of the Black population, and the number of slaves in the city had fallen to 10 percent, half its pre-war level. Slaves who had served in place of their masters during the Revolution were granted freedom, and rebel governments often liberated slaves held by Loyalists, both during and follow the war. And in 1784, when slave-traders attempted to seize a group of free Blacks and sell them south illegally, a group of Whites created an institution devoted to gradual emancipation: the first non-Quaker organization in New York history pledged to ultimate abolition. The Manumission Society (NYMS) included a number wealthy lawyers and politicians like Jay and Hamilton, who did less of the day-to-day work but lent prestige and broadened the effort.

Still, politics worked against the cause until 1799, when the state joined the rest of the North in committing to gradual abolition. Many Whites smeared free Blacks as potential traitors, citing their support for the British and the Loyalists. Others argued that they were reliant on elites, like unpropertied Whites, and so therefore unable to exercise the crucial virtue of “independence,” needed for the privilege of citizenship in a republic. Others leaned on racist notions of Black inferiority. The Haitian Revolution, in which slaves liberated Saint Domingue from French rule, also dramatically reawakened fears of retributive violence, which only grew as the institution spread onto Native land. During this period, NYMS focused on preventing masters from selling slaves to bourgeoning markets in the South, and the Caribbean. They also concentrated on “preparing” Blacks for citizenship, especially former slaves, building institutions like the African Free School in 1787, the very first school for Blacks in America (later funding six more). This meant envisioning an educated Black citizenry, although it retained the general paternalism of elite republicanism, NYMS hoping the “rising generation” would not “inherit the vices their parents acquired in slavery” or acquire “similar [vices] through want of proper education.”

John Jay was a founding member of the NYMS, and under his governorship the state passed gradual emancipation in 1799. His oldest son and his nephew succeeded him as NYMS’s president, and his grandson, John Jay II, became a radical abolitionist during the late antebellum period. The family well combined the elitism, nativism, and religious prejudice that was often found among high-ranking but nonetheless valiant opponents of slavery.

While New York’s free Black population grew dramatically in the early years of the republic, there was almost no change in the agricultural ring surrounding lower Manhattan either. The free population included many compelled to sell themselves into indentured servitude, and its size remained constant into the 1810s, when the gradual emancipation law matured — a remarkable fact, given the doubling of the state’s overall population. During the 1790s, New York’s slave population increased by nearly a quarter and the slaveowner class by roughly a third.

Most slave-owners were still middle-class (e.g., artisans, shopkeepers, and widows), although increasingly lawyers and other professionals owned a person or two. The wealthy families (the Livingstons, the Beekmans, the Clintons) owned five or more. A fifth of the NYMS owned slaves, and several members became slaveowners while in the group. Jay, its president, owned five. Hamilton owned several, and married into an elite slaveholding family. NYMS had very little role in pushing gradual emancipation. But its first major act was to petition against the export of slaves, signed by a veritable Who’s Who in the city, most slaveowners. Their ranks were inflated by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wealthy planters and mulatto supporters who came to New York after enslaved Blacks liberated themselves and Saint-Domingue (Haiti) from the French in 1793.

By the 1810s and ‘20s, however, slavery was “shifting from the center of New York City's economic life to its periphery.” The number of slaves dwindled from 2,369 in 1790 to 0 by 1827, the average slaveowner no longer a middling artisan, small retailer, or ship's captain, but a wealthy merchant, lawyer, or professional (e.g., the most active delegates of NYMS). By then, coal-powered industry was already beginning to supplant human and animal labor and to provide far larger profits than traditional agriculture. But the decline of slavery in the northern US was also the legacy of the Revolution — including Black antislavery.

The same year that NYMS formed, Black elites formed a clandestine group of religious and business leaders who hoped similarly to “uplift” the race through moral improvement and personal example — among its earliest work, promoting the work of Long Island’s poet and preacher Jupiter Hammon, the first published Black American. The group established itself formally as the African Society for Mutual Relief in 1808, six months after the US officially ceased participation in the slave trade. The organization became one of the city’s most historic institutions, giving rise to generations of black leaders and numerous institutions, such as the largely free Black community of Seneca Village, the all-Black African Grove theater, some of the nation’s first Black churches, and the first Black newspaper in the US. During the late 1820s, it also gave rise to new, more radical “abolitionist” voices like Thomas L. Jennings, Philip A. Bell, Charles B. Ray, James McCune Smith, Albro Lyons, and William Powell, who assisted in the Underground Railroad and helped force antislavery to embrace more democratic ideals, grounded in the Revolution.

David Ruggles came to New York in 1827, when the state finally put an end to slavery. With the growth of industrialized cotton production, more and more runaways were arriving in the city every day, followed by slave-catchers. Ruggles and other young activists founded a group in 1835 to protect the fugitives and confront their pursuers, forcing the government to hold jury trials and obtaining lawyers for the accused. He personally assisted upwards of 600, including Frederick Douglass — sheltered at 36 Lispenard St., one of dozens of safehouses in New York City’s “underground railroad." Ruggles owned an antislavery bookstore, wrote hundreds of articles, and published his own pamphlets and magazine (Mirror of Liberty), the first periodical issued by a Black American.

The Black Loyalist colony in Africa saw morally conflicting political developments as well. Although the northwestern European powers began moving toward abolition during the early 1800s, slavery remained the core of the west African economy well into the century, with 3-5 million enslaved on the continent by the 1830s, nearly 10% of its population. Chiefs of the Tenme in today’s Sierra Leone negotiated with British abolitionists to provide the land for Granville Town, which became the settlement for 15,000 ex-slaves living in London. But disputes emerged quickly, as local groups were entrenched in the trade, selling captives to Europeans in exchange for goods, weapons, and money. Many of the colonists were caught and sold again into slavery, while others became enslavers themselves. Like Novia Scotia, the colony never really took hold, lasting just two and a half years, before disease, hunger, and the forces of war, slavery, and empire destroyed it. Granville Town was burned down in 1789 by King Jimmy, who succeeded the suzerain who first sold the land. The 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia established a second colony, however, known as Freetown, which managed to survive because of the addition of ex-slaves from Jamaica in 1800 (“Maroons”), and over 85,000 Africans rescued by British patrols after the empire abolished slavery in 1808. By the late 19th century, this group assimilated into the Krio / Creole people, becoming an elite minority until the formation of Sierra Leone in 1961.

Freetown, mid-1800s (Drawings of Western Africa, University of Virginia Library, Special Collections, MSS 14357, no. 8)

Captives transported by slave-traders in eastern Africa. Horace Waller, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in central Africa (1874)

From Patrician to Democratic Republicanism

The American war for independence was part of a larger wave of revolutions, from western Europe to Central and South America, which unleashed ancient democratic ideals onto the modern liberal world. For New Yorkers, the impact was perhaps even more dramatic, because the US followed Britain’s economic model, with the city becoming the headquarters of a global market in the span of a few generations. The enormous changes wrought by coal-powered industrialization made questions of citizenship and representative government all the more pressing.

The Imperial Crisis had brought New York’s workers into the street, displacing the patrician control of government in the British colonial era for a powerful moment. During the war, most of those workers joined the militias or became privateers. Afterward, they were determined to maintain their newfound influence. Whereas landlords, merchants, and other elites insisted that they were the best representatives of society, as its most “virtuous and wise” members, skilled tradesmen argued that bankers, lawyers, and the other professions dominating government were untrustworthy guardians of the public interest. Instead, they espoused a competing vision of republicanism, arguing that the pre-industrial workshop was a miniature of the the nation, and that producers ought to be in charge. This ideology, which historians trace to New York’s mechanics and first unionization efforts, helped give birth to America’s labor movement and shaped it for generations. Jefferson famously expressed a twin version in his romanticization of the independent farmer, or “yeoman,” which reverberated across the century, too, culminating in the Populist movement. Both ideologies shared the liberal (“individualist, Lockean”) precepts of the gentry. But they would define political conflict across the industrial era, and by the early 1900s seeded the development of more expansive visions of democracy.

New York has a special place in this history because it served as the leading edge of capitalist development. The city saw a six-fold population increase between 1790 and 1830, spurred by government-financed transportation (roads and canals) designed to expand national and international markets. Artisans welcomed these developments, but often found themselves seeing little gain.

The Revolution had a leveling effect that made the US more egalitarian per capita than any other documented nation, the result of wartime capital losses, a 50 percent drop in trade, decades of hyperinflation, and zero immigration. But alongside rapid economic growth in the North, inequality steadily grew during the antebellum period, until the Civil War. It became increasingly different for apprentices or journeymen to become master carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, cabinet-makers, masons or printers, with a “prodigious influx” of refugees and poor migrants from the British empire and rapid population increase cheapening labor again.

Farm and pasture land upstate became remained ever-more concentrated, and larger markets also brought increased competition. Taxable property and realty costs grew at dizzying rates, creating the nation’s first millionaires and slums like the “Five Points” that rivaled England’s own. New York thus saw labor strife on a scale it had never known: at least thirty strikes from 1800-30, where there had been just three or four before. By the end of this period, the vote was extended to all White males, establishing the US as the first mass democracy in world history. But the matter of who should rule, and how the economy should be designed — the questions which led the colonies to rebel against the British empire — remained at the center of politics from the Gilded Age into the New Deal era and beyond. In all these struggles, the most radical ideals of the Revolution served as the genealogical lodestar.

  • On displacement of New York from popular memory, see Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2007), 214-16; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 265-306; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Cornell University Press, 1989), 14-44; Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Books, 2005), 374-88; Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 31-113; Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Whitney Martinko, Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale University Press, 2008), 132-34, and “Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New York,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (Yale University Press, 2000); Michael D. Hattem, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020), 119, 156-58, 177-80; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard University Press, 2017), 60, 218.

    On the difficulty of establishing a P.O.W. memorial, see Robert E. Cray, “Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in the Early Republic, 1776-1808,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1999): 565–90.

    On the regulation and fading of Evacuation Day, see Clifton Hood, “An Unusable Past: Urban Elites, New York City’s Evacuation Day, and the Transformations of Memory Culture,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (2004): 883–913.

    On postwar de-Anglicization, see Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford University Press, 2011).

    On the consequences for Natives in the region, see Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (Routledge, 2014); Jennifer Anderson, “‘A Laudable Spirit of Enterprise’: Renegotiating Land, Natural Resources, and Power on Post-Revolutionary Long Island,” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (2015): 413–42.

    On the return of slavery and the rise of antislavery in New York, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016); Leslie M. Alexander, African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (University of Illinois Press, 2008); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2007); David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (University of Georgia Press, 1991); and Paul J. Polgar, Standard Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2019).

    On the Black Loyalists of Canada and Sierra Leone, see Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons Between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press, 2018); Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists After the American Revolution (McFarland & Co., 2006); and James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 (University of Toronto Press, 1992).

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