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

2: Conflict and Civil Establishments1783–1793


2 ConflictandCivilestablishments 1783–1793
 TO BE SOLD, By Ashbel Stoddard, At his Printing Office in Hudson . . . The TEN POUND ACT. With the Supplementary Act, passed by the Legislature in April last. Price one Pistareen. An Act for Regulating the FEES of the several OFFICERS and MINISTERS of the COURTS of JUSTICE within this STATE. Price one Pistareen. The Hermit. A Poem. By Dr. Parnelle. The Way to Wealth.Written Dr. B. Franklin. A CHARTER, incorporating the Inhabitants with the City and Liberties of HUDSON . Price 2s. . . . N.B.Two coppers per pound given forany quantityof clean linen orcotton RAGS; orone copper per pound for old sail cloth, etc. —Hudson Weekly Gazette, May 18, 1786 New-Canaan, Dec. 29, 1786 Last Wednesday being the anniversaryof St. John the Evangelist, a numberof Brethren of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, met at the house of Elihu Phinney, innholder, to celebrate the feast. A learned and well adapted discourse was delivered, in the Meeting-House, on the occasion, by Rev. Mr. John Camp, to a respectable audience.The day was spent in innocent mirth and festivity, and much to the satisfaction of the Brethren and Spectators. —Hudson Weekly Gazette, Jan. 4, 1787 As Martin Van Buren and Hannah Goes entered early childhood in the mid1780s , the public face of their upper Hudson world was changing in fundamental ways, literally leading the state into Alexis de Tocqueville’s America. A new civil landscape was taking shape, layered onto and competing with previous civil landscapes, and in that uneasy competition forging a synthesis 48 ) The Revolutionary Settlement of privileged centers that would command consent in the newage.Where the Revolution had raised up a militant popular politics against the old oligarchic order, both of these would have to establish a relationship with a new culture of bourgeois improvement. From the end of thewar into the 1790s these three civil paradigms would sparand chaff with one another before a clear new synthesis of civil authority, a revolutionary settlement, emerged. A NEW PUBLIC LANDSCAPE First came commerce, followed by print and new civil institutions. In the spring of 1783, six months before the British evacuated New York City, a proprietary association of Quakers from Nantucket and Providence purchased land at Claverack Landing to establish a center for trade and whaling on these northern reaches of navigable water on the Hudson. Within two years they had successfully moved a charter for their new city of Hudson, the first in the state’s post-Revolutionary history, through the legislature to enactment. In that same spring of 1785 Ashbel Stoddard and CharlesWebster, until recently apprentices at the office of the Hartford Connecticut Courant and Weekly Advertiser , established their Hudson Weekly Gazette, the first of a series of newspapers that began publishing in the river towns between Albany and New York in the latter half of the 1780s.The new city begat a new county. In April 1786 this southeastern region of Albany County was set off as the county of Columbia, the first new county to be formed in New York after the Revolution .The granting of the county’s chartercoincided almost to the day with the opening of post offices, under private contract with the Confederation government , in Kinderhook, Claverack, and Livingston, along the north-south stage route established in June 1785 connecting Albany with New York City.1 Commerce, print, polity, and communication were matched by private institutions of sociability and politeness. At the close of the war the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons was reorganized in the cityof NewYork, and by the fall of 1788 three new lodges had been formed in Hudson and outlyingdistricts .December1786sawthefirstMasoniccelebrationofSaintJohn’s Day in the limits of the new Columbia County, at the meetinghouse in New Canaan in the old King’s District.When these Masons received their warrant for the Unity Lodge in September 1788, they followed the Hudson Lodge, warranted in March 1787 as the fifth new lodge in the state. The Hudson Lodge in turn had followed the establishment of the Temple Lodge, located just south of Livingston Manor in Dutchess County, warranted in September 1785, the first warrant issued by the new Grand Lodge. The Masons of the Hudson Lodge contributed to an enduring associational sociability in the Conflict and Civil Establishments ( 49 new city on the river, but they were second to the young men of the city who...