Property and Prosperity

ANOTHER PAST POST

Human beings’ natural drive to attain property has driven history since the beginning of time. That said, it is not surprising that the history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century New York was defined by its citizens desire to possess as much property as possible. New York changed a great deal following the American Revolution. Between 1786 and 1820, the population of Manhattan increased by 100,000 climbing from 23,000 to 123,000. The fur trade declined as cotton and flour became New York’s most profitable domestic imports. Clearly, Manhattan had become America’s most important port, and New York was now the financial center of the post-revolutionary Union; the founding of the New York Stock Exchange, the Bank of New York, and the Manhattan Company ensured that the bulk of America’s capital flowed through the banks of the Hudson. However, Manhattan’s prosperity was linked to New York’s new capital, Albany. Although Albany was first and foremost the political center of New York, the upstate city was securing its high rank in the financial world because New York’s wealthiest families lived in the Hudson River Valley upstate of Manhattan and secured their assets in Albany’s three prominent banks—the Bank of New York, the New York State National Bank, and the Mechanics and Farmers Bank. It was the patriarchs of these families—the Van Rensselear’s, Philipse’s, Livingston’s, and Van Derbilt’s—who built New York State through financial risks driven by an aspiration to own as much property as possible. Yet, Tom Lewis reminds readers that property to these men was not confined to land. Intellectual rights (see Gibbons vs. Ogden) were as important as acres, and the trading of human beings as personal property was also considered a thriving enterprise. The yearning to own consumed and inspired New York’s most ambitious men. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that everything from marriage to political power in New York was rooted in the attainment of property.