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

1: The Revolutionary Crisis of Consent 1775–1783

1 Therevolutionarycrisisof consent 1775–1783
 The Declaration of Independency proceeded upon a Supposition that the Constitution under which we before lived was actually dissolved and the British Governmt here as such totally annihilated. Upon this Principle we must have been reduced to a State of Nature, in which the Power of Government reverted to as they Originated from the Peoplewho had undoubtedlya Right to establish any new Form they thought proper. . . . The Question whethera Govt. is dissolved and the People released from their Allegiance is in my Opinion a question of Morality as well as of Religion in which every man must judge. . . . In Such a Case no Majority however respectable can decide for him. . . . I hold it that every Individual has still a Right to choose the State of which he will become a Member, for before he surrenders any part of his natural Liberty . . . the Subjection of any one to the political Power of a State can arise only from his own Express consent! I speak of the Formation of Society and of a Man’s initiating himself into it, so as to make himself a Member of it, for I admit that once the Society is formed the Majority undoubtedly conclude the Rest. —Peter Van Schaack, Kinderhook, New York, Jan. 25, 1777, to the New York Convention On December 23, 1780, after a long day of “nothing but snow, hail, and frost,” the marquis de Chastellux stopped for the night in the “first hamlet” in Kinderhook. Among several nondescript taverns, he chose “the best,” “a very small house, kept by two young people of a Dutch family; they are very civil and attentive, and you are not badly off with them, provided you are not difficult to please.” These two young people were Abraham Van Buren, a captain in the local militia, and his wife, Maria Van Alen. Their third child, born two years later, would one day become the president of the United States. Martin’s future wife, Hannah Goes, was born into a local family the next March. A 14 ) The Revolutionary Crisis of Consent quarter century later, in the winter of 1807, Martin and Hannah would elope across the Hudson River to Catskill, to be married by Hannah’s sister’s husband , Judge Moses Cantine. The Van Buren and Goes families had lived and farmed in Kinderhook since the 1680s, and a deep web of kinship entangled them and their neighbors; Martin’s mother, Maria, was Hannah’s great-aunt, and his sister had recently married her brother.These families all shared a long history in the struggle to establish freeholds along Kinderhook and Kline Kill creeks, stretches of fertile land lying in the midst of the great holdings of the Van Rensselaer family on the east side of the Hudson.1 Martin and Hannah were born as the war of the Revolution was ending and peace and Independence stood on the horizon for the American people. But their families had been sharply divided for some years by the Revolutionary struggle. Hannah’s father, John Dirck Goes, had sided with a group of leading men in Kinderhook who resisted the Revolution; Martin’s father Abraham had risen to local prominence as a patriot whig. Both had close kin in the opposite camp: John’s cousin Isaac Goes was one of Kinderhook’s leading whigs, and Abraham’s younger brother, Martin, namesake of the future president of the United States, had been banished for loyalism in 1778.When Hannah was born in early March 1783, John Goes was at home but still listed as a fugitive, marked by his loyalist affiliation; when Martin was six years old, PLATE 1. Abraham Van Buren and Maria Van Alen’s Tavern. South of Kinderhook Center, Late 1830s. Courtesy of the National Park Service The Revolutionary Crisis of Consent ( 15 hewould havewitnessed the sale of toryestates at his father’s tavern, including land that he himself would buy for his Lindenwald estate a half century later. Even then, in the winter of 1839–1840, Martin Van Buren could not think of party politics outside the framework of the struggles of his father’s time, between thewhigs and tories of the Revolution.The passions of the Revolutionary struggle thus left a powerful mark and must have simmered as an undercurrent in their marriage, and in the wider Kinderhook community.2 The American Revolution sliced through colonial societies, imposing...