Federal Hall

Part III: The Critical Period

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Unlike Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell or Boston’s Old North Church, there are few iconic symbols of this period in New York. Federal Hall is by far the city’s most-visited Revolutionary site, marking the spot “where America’s democracy was born.” It was here, in the old municipal and colonial legislature, that rebels gathered for the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and the first national government from 1781 to 1789. After Pierre L’Enfant redesigned the building, Washington swore the first presidential oath on its balcony, and Congress adopted the Bill of Rights. But the city mostly disappeared from popular memory of the Founding. Why is the Revolution so memorialized elsewhere, but largely forgotten in New York?

Federal Hall

  • Here we end our tour by considering the many factors that pushed New York from its central place in the story of the Revolution, including displacement of the city as the nation’s capital, unfettered land development, enduring politics, and more. We also discuss the era’s many legacies, for all the groups featured in NYC Revolutionary Trail.

    Click below to learn more about the significance of Washington’s decision not to become a dictator or monarch, new debates about the “Compromise of 1790,” the political wrangling over erecting a monument to “America’s first POWs,” the decline of Evacuation Day, the fall of the Iroquois Confederation, the return of slavery, the birth of the world’s first antislavery movement, and the century-long debate over “producer republicanism” — all stories in which New York played a starring role. Our character profile for this stop, Rev. Peter Williams Sr., is just one of many black founders who also transformed this city and country after the war. 

    Did you enjoy our tour? Please consider supporting our work to create a far more immersive and interactive version of NYC Revolutionary Trail. And thank you for reading. Now go, walk these streets like a revolutionary New Yorker!

Rev. Peter Williams, Sr.

New Yorkers would formally celebrate their Revolutionary history on Evacuation Day, every year until World War I, honoring the city’s veterans, including one of its most important Black founders, Peter Williams, Sr. — who, according to descendants, purchased his freedom then.

“[T]o the last year of his life,” his family wrote, “he always spoke of that day as one which gave double joy to his heart, by freeing him from domestic bondage, and his native city from foreign enemies.” Although enslaved during the war, his son later explained that “neither the British sword nor British gold could make him a traitor to his country.” Williams may have served in rebel units, too, but that remains unclear.

He was one of several Black leaders, however, who in 1784 established the African Society, a covert group that would later reconstitute itself as New York’s first Black mutual aid organization, funding such things as the creation of Seneca Village and the all-Black African Grove theater.

  • In 1795, Williams also led his fellow parishioners in a walk-out protesting the segregation at John Street Church, which led to another hugely influential landmark, the founding of “Mother Zion,” the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

    Black churches soon developed in virtually every faith, later providing the backbone of the Underground Railroad. Williams became a successful tobacconist, too, enrolling his son in the African Free School — established by New York’s Manumission Society, which included a number of elite White founders, like Hamilton. Peter Williams, Jr. likewise went onto fame as the first rector of St. Philip's, the earliest Black Episcopal parish in the city, and one of New York’s great abolitionists, a co-founder of Freedom's Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned periodical.

Federal Hall replaced the Stadts Huys as New York’s legislature during the British period, where local and (far more irregularly) colonial leaders met. During the Imperial Crisis, it was dominated by the major upstate landowners behind the Livingstons and the elite downstate merchants behind the DeLanceys. Both factions protested various acts of Parliament, but neither wanted Independence, although some of the Livingstons became major founders, while most of the DeLanceys went into exile as infamous Loyalists. Inside this federal museum (the building’s third iteration) you can find several artifacts from the Inauguration, but very little on this much larger history, or New York’s role in the period.