Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson

6: Boundaries, Sympathies, and the Settlement 1785–1800

6 Boundaries, sympathies,andthe settlement 1785–1800
 The Negro’s Complaint: A SONG To the tune of Homer’s Ghost. By W. Cowper, Esq.: . . . Deem our nation brutes no longer, Till some reasons ye shall find Worthier of regard, and stronger, Than the colour of our kind. Slaves of gold! whose forbid dealing Tarnish all your boasted powers, Prove that you have human feelings Ere you proudly question ours. —Hudson Gazette, Nov. 25, 1788 Albany 24th March 1798 Dear Sir I have nothing very material to write you at Present, I must however inform you that a Bill has passed the House of Assembly yesterday for the Gradual abolition of Slavery. . . .The Greatest objection I have to the bill, is that the expences arising on such as are to [be] Liberated by this bill, is to be Defrayed By a partial tax. —Samuel Ten Broeck, Albany, to William Wilson, Clermont, Mar. 24, 1798 23d Aug. 1799 Sir I have received yours of the 21st Inst. Pulver must abide the fate he has provoked. I have had an application from Mr. Birdsall Junr. in his favor but I have referred the business to you. who knew my Disposition to Senity. . . . I am glad to hear of Mr. and Mrs. Crawford’s intended Visit to the County. . . . . A general viewof the affairs of the Manor [is] much more favorable than perhaps they had Boundaries, Sympathies, and the Settlement ( 229 reason to expect, is all that occurs to me at present. . . . Bye the bye, our academy will soon be on a respectable Footing under the auspices of a Gentleman of Character and Abilities bred at the University of Glasgow. Would not this be an eligible situation for one at least of Mrs. Crawford’s Sons . . . ? Your Obed. Servt P V Schaack —Peter Van Schaack, Kinderhook, to William Wilson, Clermont, Aug. 23, 1799 MARTIN VAN BUREN, THE CULTURE OF SENSIBILITY, AND THE SHAPING OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN POLITICS In the 1780s and 1790s education, the primary vehicle of a culture of sensibility in the early Republic, stood on somewhat shaky ground in the town of Kinderhook. Traditionally the schools were conducted in Dutch on the authority of the Reformed Church, and a final transition toward instruction in English came only haltingly. In the fall of 1777 Andrew Carshore, recently deserted from General John Burgoyne’s defeated and interned army, started an English school in Kinderhook village, but in 1780 he was lured away to Claverack to teach in the new Washington Seminary, where many of the county gentry sent their sons, and some of their daughters, for an academy education. In 1792 the Kinderhook Reformed consistoryacted to improve the level of education in the town, selling a parcel of land to build a new school for students advancing beyond the primary level. Three years later, when the state began to provide modest funding to local common schools, the Kinderhook Academy announced that it was ready to accept students, to be guided through the “classics” and the “sciences” by the Reverend John Egan, “late of Trinity College Dublin.” How long Egan stayed on is unclear. In 1797 the consistory’s new institution was incorporated by the state as the Columbia Academy, and by July 1798 the academy was housed in a building with a cupola. But that March the trustees could only report to the legislature that they were having trouble “obtaining a good and able instructor” and that their fifty-eight “scholars” underan “English teacher” were studying geographyand the basics of the common school curriculum.1 Thus Peter Van Schaack, presumably one of the new academy’s trustees, was greatly relieved eighteen months later when he could write to William Wilson, discussing the waning troubles on Livingston Manor, “Our academy will soon be on a respectable Footing under the auspices of a Gentleman of Character and Abilities bred at the University of Glasgow.” This “Gentleman of Character” was the Reverend David B.Warden, who in 1798 had left revolutionary Ireland under threat of British arrest. By 1800 Warden was well enough established at the academy to put on quarterly exhibitions of his stu- 230 ) Extending the Settlement dents’ work, but apparently his political inclinations crossed those of archFederalist Kinderhook village, and he soon left for Kingston.2 The improved standards that state incorporation and a series of shorttenured Irish scholar-instructors might have brought to the academy in Kinderhook probably had a most...