New York by 1820 was becoming a “colony from New England” to use the phrase of President Timothy Dwight of Yale. The “Puritan Pope,” as he was some times called, estimated that 60 to 67 percent of the people of New York had originated in the “land of steady habits.”
The few thousand Puritans who had established a new Zion around Boston in the 1630s were a remarkably energetic, prolific, and self-assertive people. The thin soils on the hilly lands, the harsh winters, and the stern theology of John Calvin created a distinct community spirit and shaped a unique character.
The township was the unit of economic, social, political, and religious life. An economy of small self sustaining farms with cooperative features such as common pastures, mowing lots, and forests made emigration almost imperative as each generation grew to manhood.
Not toleration but conformity was the basic tenet of religion. Some times formal action by town or church (often indistinguishable) but more usually critical comments by neighbors with over-size consciences kept individualists from straying too far from the Mosiac code. Not democracy but an oligarchy of God’s elect at the beginning ruled each town. New England remained in 1800 a remarkably homogeneous community proud of its civilization so appropriately described as a “state of mind.”
The isolation of the frontier, the ideas of the enlightenment, and the secular and cosmopolitan spirit of the seaports had gradually loosened the iron grip of the clergy, especially in the eighteenth century. But the Puritan virtues and vices still marked the citizens of New England and their transplanted compatriots in New York. Their thrift at times verged on stinginess; their self-esteem seemed arrogance to many; their soul-searching sometimes led to morbidity; their “conscience” tended to outrageous meddling in the lives of their neighbors.
Their stamp on the character and institutions of New Yorkers has been unmistakable. Farm and factory, school and church all show the Yankee imprint. Who else but a Yankee such as John Brown of Providence would have designated several townships in the Adirondacks with such titles as Frugality, Industry, Enterprise, and Sobriety [in northern Herkimer County]?
Prior to 1775 the great majority of restless Yankees were filling up the back country of southern New England, spreading up along the Maine coast, and following the Connecticut River northward into Vermont. Daughter towns, however, were springing up in New Jersey (New Ark), in Pennsylvania (Wyoming Valley), and especially in New York.
As early as 1640 Yankees were beginning to invade Long Island and the eastern two-thirds soon became completely Yankee in population. Only a trickle during the seventeenth century, this population movement became an important stream during the first three quarters of the eighteenth century.
By 1775 many Connecticut men had filtered into the eastern townships of Westchester and Dutchess Counties and across the Hudson River into Orange County. After 1783 the influx became a torrent pouring into the Hudson Valley towns, sweeping up the Mohawk Valley, and spreading out across the rich lands of central and western New York. Within a generation the sons of New England could be found in every town and city of New York State.
The New England migration to New York is a thrilling chapter in one of the great folk migrations of all time. The Yankee came by land and by sea, in winter and in summer, in groups and as individuals. Sloops sailed up the Hudson laden with the household gear of families while sleighs and ox carts came overland through the steep hills fringing the border.
The citizens of Albany watched a continual parade of restless people. During one three day period in February 1795 about 1,200 sleighs freighted with men, women, children, and furniture passed through that city on the way to the Genesee country. During the summer settlers going up the Mohawk Valley got aboard the bateaux and Durham boats which profane rivermen poled upstream to the portage near Rome whence they could reach Oneida Lake and its connections with Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes.
Others preferred to take the turnpike westward. Rude wagons carried only the absolute necessities – pots, pans, beds, farm tools. The young, the old, and the sick rode; the able bodied walked with the men leading the oxen; the young men drove the two or three milch cows and scraggly sheep.
The mania for “turnpiking” which reached its peak between 1800 and 1807 opened up new highways to the west. New Englanders could drive their wagons westward over the New England network until they met roads leading eastward from Greenbush (opposite Albany), Hudson, and Poughkeepsie.
At almost every river landing small boats were ready to carry them across the river. From Albany settlers could strike out for the west over the Cherry Valley turnpike or to Schenectady and thence up the Mohawk Valley. Other settlers used the turnpikes leading westward from Newburgh and Catskill.
Most Yankees were looking for farms although thousands headed for the counting houses of New York and the shops of artisans. The migration to the countryside was not an orderly procession which filled up eastern counties one by one. Rather the wave of newcomers seems to have swept into almost every valley except the recesses of the Adirondacks in the first decade following the close of the Revolution.
Of course, the Hudson Valley counties were the first to feel the onrush, but Yankees were planting corn on the fertile intervales along the Genesee Valley long before the hill towns in the Catskill region had filled up. Almost every county save Dutchess and Westchester contained thousands of acres of unimproved lands after 1800. In fact, New York farmers were still clearing forest lands after 1850.
Land-hunger was the compelling drive behind the migration, although other factors swelled the bands of the discontented. In Massachusetts high taxes coming at a time of falling prices ruined thousands of farmers, whose attempt in 1786 to prevent mortgage foreclosures by following the rebellious Daniel Shays failed miserably.
Settlers, braving the wild country near Lake George, declared to a traveler that the capitation tax [poll tax] in Rhode Island had driven them to New York. Others wished to escape the keepers of the New England conscience who enforced conformity with little charity and less humor.
Glowing reports of rich lands in New York piqued the curiosity of Yankees picking stones from their steep hillsides. Missionaries to the Iroquois sent back accounts of a new Eden. Many Yankee soldiers had carefully noted the fertile intervales as they followed General Sullivan in 1779 into the Finger Lakes region. They realized that the destruction of the Senecas and their allies would enable the white man to take over the corn fields of the [Iroquois] within a decade.
The first pioneers wrote stirring letters urging their relatives to join them. Hugh White, who claimed to be the first white inhabitant west of the German settlers [Palatines] on the upper Mohawk, sent back to his friends in Middletown, Connecticut, his tallest stalks of Indian corn, his largest potatoes and onions.
Agents distributed handbills offering new farms at tempting prices and on long term credit. Small wonder then that Yankees hurried westward to the promised land. One authority estimates that between 1790 and 1820 the three states of southern New England lost approximately 800,000 people through emigration. Most of these settled in or passed through New York.
A quick survey of various regions will bring out the extent and magnitude of the Yankee invasion.
The valley of the Hudson and especially the counties on the west side of the river attracted thousands, who almost submerged the small Dutch communities. For example, Stephen Van Rensselaer along with other landholders sent out broadsides advertising his vacant lands.
As a result hundreds of Yankees leased farms in the hill towns back of the Helderberg escarpment [in Albany County]. Other immigrants filled up the lands stretching northward from Albany to Lake Champlain.
The Mohawk and Schoharie valleys had only a handful of inhabitants in 1783. To the Yankees the rich alluvial soils looked as attractive as Canaan had appeared to the children of Israel. They bought unoccupied lands along the river bottoms and struck out into the hill country north and south of the Mohawk.
The rugged Adirondacks formed a natural barrier some thirty miles north of the Mohawk. Some sanguine and unwary Yankees such as John Brown, the Providence merchant, tried to establish settlements in the mountains but with little success. Except for the inroads of lumber man and a few miners supplying the forges on the shore of Lake Champlain, the Adirondacks remained a wilderness until well after the Civil War.
Thousands of Yankees found homes in the hill towns south of the Mohawk. Otsego County where William Cooper [father of James Fenimore Cooper] was land agent was the mecca for thousands. Throughout the Mohawk Country the sound of the ax was heard on every side.
The experience of Herkimer County is typical. Within fifteen years some 10,000 immigrants from New England and the eastern counties had taken residence in that county.
The North Country, that is the region lying between Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario and southward from the St. Lawrence River to the Adirondack vastnesses, became another colony of New England. Perhaps the title New Vermont (found on early maps) would be more precise because so many Green Mountain residents crossed Lake Champlain to this region in search of land, timber, and mill sites.
About 1795 a stream of Vermonters began to leave that state and after the Embargo Act of 1807 it became a flood. By 1850 about 52,000 Vermonters (one fifth the population of Vermont itself) were living in the Empire State. Town names in western New York such as Lyndon [in Cattaraugus County] and Royalton [Niagara County] betray the Vermont influence.
The region drained by the Delaware and the Susquehanna rivers likewise was overrun by New Englanders. To be sure, speculators from Pennsylvania and New Jersey often owned the land along the upper reaches of these rivers. A trickle of Pennsylvanians, Jersey men, and even Marylanders worked their way up these river systems.
Legend has it, for example, that the town of Penn Yan on Keuka Lake was so named as a compromise between settlers from the two areas. The bulk of the settlers, however, were New Englanders who found the steep hillsides of the Southern Tier of counties reminiscent of their old home.
Central New York by 1800 had become almost as Yankee in population as Connecticut itself. Whitestown in Oneida County, which at first included all the state west of Utica, was typical. Elkanah Watson, himself a son of Berkshire, marveled at the influx in 1788 only four years after Hugh White of Middletown, Connecticut had cut a clearing and erected a log house. Watson wrote:
“Settlers are continually pouring in from the Connecticut hive, which throws off its annual swarms of intelligent, industrious and enterprising settlers, the best qualified of any men in the world, to subdue and civilize the wilderness… They already estimate three hundred brother Yankees on their muster list.”
Timothy Dwight, who traveled over New York during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, was delighted to find towns such as New Hartford and Clinton [in the town of Kirkland] in Oneida County which reproduced in the wilderness the church, the school, and the “sprightliness, thrift, and beauty” of New England.
The story of western New York is much the same. There was scarcely a town which did not have settlers from New England. The census figures tell a story of rapid settlement. The districts west of the Line of Property of 1768 [the Fort Stanwix Treaty line], exclusive of Oneida and Oswego counties, received about 60,000 inhabitants between 1790 and 1800.
A decade later the population of this region neared 200,000. By 1820 it had passed 500,000. Ten years later it was over 700,000 and by mid-century over 1,000,000. The great bulk of these people were of New England stock.
The Yankee impact on New York’s economy, politics, professional and social life was tremendous. Yankee axes cleared most of the forests. Ledgers kept by Yankee clerks for Yankee business men recorded most of the expanding trade nourishing New York and the upstate cities.
Even industry, which had hardly begun prior to 1825, felt their stimulus. Some of the leaders of the textile factories in Oneida County, for example, were former residents of Rhode Island.
A high proportion of the men who preached the Gospel, pleaded before the bar, bled the patient, and used the birch rod to chastise the unruly student were also trained in the academies and colleges of New England. Moreover, many ingenious craftsmen migrated westward where their talents were in great demand to construct grist mills, forges, homes, and mercantile buildings.
Yankee brains stirred the old river ports to feverish activity. The port of New York won top place among the nation’s ports largely under their direction. Since the days of Peter Stuyvesant a few sons of New England had drifted to the wharves of Manhattan despite ministerial fulminations that the city was a re-creation of Sodom and Gomorrah.
After 1800 their numbers swelled greatly until by 1820 Yankees had become the largest but certainly not the most digestible ingredient in the metropolitan melting pot. Before long the quarter decks, ship yards, and counting houses, were virtual colonies of New England.
Farm boys from the towns along the [Long Island] Sound paced the procession. These lads were indeed the prototypes for the heroes of Horatio Alger’s stories. By working hard, by seizing every opportunity, by cutting corners and driving sharp bargains, and by avoiding the pitfalls of wine, women, and song, a goodly number of Yankee farm boys climbed to the pinnacles of New York life.
Other immigrants had an easier time of it. Several New England families of substance moved their businesses to the city. Boston firms often sent younger sons to set up branch offices on Manhattan. A new mercantile group gradually emerged overshadowing the older aristocracy of New York.
The Griswolds, hailing from Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the Lows from Salem enticed most of the China trade from Boston. The Grinnells formerly of New Bedford owned scores of trim ships. Edward K. Collins originally of Cape Cod won fame with his Black Ball packets.
Edwin Morgan from Berkshire grew fat on the import trade, directed the Hudson River Railroad in the early 1850s and ended his career as Governor and Senator. The Fish family of Rhode Island and the Macy family from Nantucket also carved niches in the political and commercial life of New York.
Yankees manned the helm on most of the ships operating out of New York. They owned most of the shipyards and directed most of the shipping lines. Indeed they invaded every cranny of economic activity. Later in the century Jim Fisk from Vermont titillated the country with his prodigal amours and his unscrupulous deals.
J. P. Morgan from Hartford is another son of Connecticut who towered over Wall Street around the turn of the century. The old mercantile and landed families naturally resented this invasion by the “locusts of the east.” To the De Lanceys, the Griswolds were upstarts who had no manners, sang psalms, and chased dollars avidly-and too successfully.
The old families tardily organized the St. Nickolas and the Knickerbocker Societies as a counterpart to the New England Society established as early as 1805. The newcomers were outspoken men quick to ridicule the proverbial lethargy of the native New Yorkers and tireless in extolling the virtues of the “land of steady habits.”
Their successful business careers seemed to confirm their claims to superior virtue. How the descendants of the old mercantile families must have writhed when they saw Yankees occupying the presidential chair of the New York Chamber of Commerce continually, except for one short period of eight months, between 1845 and 1875.
The landed aristocracy smarting from the beating which the Green Mountain boys had already given them in regard to their land claims in the region of Vermont had additional cause to dislike the land speculators and settlers from New England.
Yankees such as Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham got control of the choicest lands of western New York when Massachusetts sold off its claims in 1786. Millions of acres were dumped on the market during the 1790s cutting down the value of the older tracts in eastern New York.
Furthermore, Yankee settlers brought with them a desire to hold land in fee simple, an idea which threatened the large estates developed under the leasehold. James Fenimore Cooper held the Yankee farmer as largely responsible for the anti-rent troubles of the 1840s. He wrote three novels attempting to justify the role of the landed aristocracy and to expose the nefarious designs of the anti-renters, who were invariably depicted as knaves and scoundrels from New England.
Albany likewise felt the invigorating effect of Yankee enterprise. The inrush of thousands of immigrants into the upland regions both south and north of the Mohawk River was roughly matched by the increase in the population of Albany which tripled its numbers between 1790 and 1810. By 1803 the Yankees outnumbered the original inhabitants.
Indeed they had become so powerful that they succeeded in pushing through an ordinance requiring the enraged Dutch burghers to cut off the long rain-spouts which the Dutch had erected on their houses.
Six miles to the north of Albany, New England adventurers laid out the new town of Troy in 1787. Its citizens soon acquired a reputation for bold enterprise and civic pride which became the taunt and the despair of Albany merchants for the next century. The centennial bard of Troy no doubt exaggerated Albany’s distress at the news of Troy’s founding.
At Albany it awakened
The Dutchmen from their sleep
And with prophetic terror
Their flesh began to creep
Nantucket whalers in 1783 banded together in an association to found the city of Hudson. The city became a port of entry and her schooners sailed directly to foreign countries. Across the river, Catskill showed a similar growth. In fact there grew up a cluster of houses and stores at the foot of “every considerable road” leading to the Hudson River. Canny Yankees thus invigorated the business life of the Hudson Valley.
Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo likewise owe much of their early growth to the New England migration. To be sure, some of the founders such as Colonel Rochester [Nathaniel Rochester, 1752–1831] came from Maryland and other states, but most of the early settlers came in from the east.
The city of Rochester was soon noted not only as America’s first boom town but also for its stern Puritan piety. Ambitious farm lads from New England dominated the commercial life of these upstate urban areas in the same way that their compatriots swept to the top in New York City.
Those Puritans and their children who settled in New York displayed more skill and leadership in national politics than those who stayed at home. Hardly had they cleared the forests before they were organizing town governments. Soon they were unraveling the twisted skein of state politics which had been the private preserve of the influential colonial families for so many decades.
The first generation of New Englanders tended to join the fight for democracy. The sturdy Yankee yeomen could not help but look askance at the semi-feudal land system of the aristocracy. Contrariwise the landed gentry looked with mingled distrust and disdain at the hustling Yankee merchant and with some alarm at rising industrial towns with a property-less working class.
A majority of the members of the [New York] Constitutional Convention of 1821, which established manhood suffrage, were of New England stock. Of course, the career of Martin Van Buren and still earlier that of George Clinton indicate that democratic impulses were stirring in the older pre-Revolutionary population.
Nevertheless, by the 1830s practically all the most prominent political leaders stemmed from New England forbears. The Albany Regency boasted such Democratic worthies as Silas Wright, William L. Marcy, Azariah C. Flagg, John A. Dix, and Martin Van Buren. Only Van Buren could trace his roots deeply into New York back ground. Moreover, the outstanding leaders in the Whig and later the Republican party – William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, Hamilton Fish, and Horace Greeley – were of New England origin.
The transit of Yankee culture showed some interesting sea changes. The new environment modified such typical institutions as the town, the church, and the school. The New York frontier was settled by individuals and almost never by organized groups.
The salient characteristics of the New England town with its proprietors and its jointly-owned and used pasture, mowing, and forest lands seldom appeared except on Long Island. To be sure, the pioneers often laid out a village green on which the church and homes fronted. But most farmers lived in isolated homesteads not in nucleated villages. Furthermore, the town was much less important as a unit of local government in New York where the county performed many important functions.
White church steeples soon dotted the New York country side. Oddly enough, many of them belonged to the Presbyterian rather than the traditional Congregational faith. This is one of the accidents of history, which some will insist illustrates how the canny Scots outsmarted their fellow Calvinists.
During the 1790s the Presbyterian Church of the United States with its center in Pennsylvania and the Congregational Associations of the various New England states were cooperating closely especially in sending missions to frontier areas. It seemed foolish for denominations so similar in theology to compete for members in the sparsely settled communities of the Susquehanna region.
Jonathan Edwards, Jr., President of Union College, suggested a Plan of Union which was adopted in 1802 by representatives of both denominations. It permitted communicants of either faith in a new community to form a single congregation which might call a minister of either denomination. A majority of the congregation could elect to conduct their church polity and discipline according to the rules of either the Presbyterian or Congregational church.
Most congregations, despite the Congregational background of their members, selected the Presbyterian discipline. The presbyterial organization seemed better suited to the needs of a frontier church. But Presbyterians of Yankee background did not submit readily to the rigid rules and orthodox Calvinism imposed by their Scotch-Irish brethren. Each congregation followed its own wishes as before.
The former Congregationalists tended to read the sermons of New England preachers who were beginning to question such doctrines as original sin. Unitarian ideas rising to the forefront even in such citadels of Puritanism as Harvard during the first decade of the nineteenth century were part of the intellectual baggage which Yankee divines carried with them to upstate New York.
Denominational ties were so lightly regarded by these “Presbygationals” that they eagerly joined such interdenominational agencies as the American Bible Society. Their leaders shocked old-Guard Calvinists by damning slavery more vigorously than warning the people of eternal damnation.
The Old School Presbyterians denounced these tendencies as heretical. In 1837 they got control of the General Assembly and ousted four synods, including those of Utica, Geneva, and Geneseo. The New School Presbyterians promptly organized a separate church.
Gradually other synods and presbyteries joined their ranks as the slavery issue grew hotter. Eventually the New School group included nearly all the Presbyterians of the north. In 1869 the Old School rejoined their brethren.
The New England tradition continued to influence New York churches. Most of the preachers serving the Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, and Unitarian churches were reared in that region and educated in Harvard, Yale, Amherst, and similar colleges. For example, Charles Finney, who sparked the great revival of 1825 and following years, was a native of Connecticut brought up in Utica.
New England even provided the leaders of several strange cults which grew up in the fertile soil of the “burnt-over district” of central-western New York. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, and John Humphrey Noyes, founder of Oneida Community, hailed from Vermont. William Miller, who convinced thousands that Christ would return in 1843, was also a Yankee. Boston was to remain for decades the religious and intellectual capital of Yankees in diaspora.
The little red school house, the elm-shaded academy, and the hill-top college were usually founded and directed by New Englanders. Ichabod Crane is only one of several fictional and many flesh-and-blood school masters who parsed sentences in a nasal tone.
The New York system, or perhaps more accurately, lack of system of state-supported schools displeased Yankees accustomed to tax-supported schools open to all children. Significant it is that a New Englander, Gideon Hawley, was called upon to direct the first successful system of state-aided neighborhood schools. Private academies flourished throughout the state whenever New England influence was strong.
Columbia College was the only institution of college level in the state that was not stamped with the Yankee imprint. Even Union College, which attracted the support of the Dutch Reformed and Episcopalians, soon had such one hundred per cent Yankees at the helm as Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and Eliphalet Nott.
No institution was more New England in character than Hamilton College. Samuel Kirkland of Connecticut had established in 1793 the Hamilton-Oneida Academy. Prior to the Civil War all save one of the presidents of the College founded in 1812 were Puritan divines and usually sons of old Eli.
As Dixon Ryan Fox has ably shown in his admirable book of essays, Yankees and Yorkers [1940], Colgate, Rochester, Hobart, and St. Lawrence displayed the Yankee stamp. These colleges drew most of their faculty from the east and modeled their curricula after Harvard and Yale.
Science and fine arts owed much less to immigrants from the eastern states. The singing society, however, was an import from New England. More literate-certainly more articulate-than the average New Yorker, the Yankee wrote most of the editorials and set most of the type. One need only mention Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley to understand our state’s indebtedness to New England for the development of the press before 1850.
These cocksure invaders naturally antagonized the early inhabitants of New York. They did not conceal the contempt which they felt toward the “churlish, ignorant, and unenterprising” Germans and Dutch. The natives struck back as best they could by circulating stories about “dirty Yankee tricks.”
The upper classes read with approval James Fenimore Cooper’s novels which invariably described the Yankees as a particularly disagreeable race. Cooper pilloried their avarice, their arrogance, their cant. The whole catalogue of sins was theirs, from poor cooking to a “strong and unpleasant” dialect. In Miles Wallingford [1863] he writes: “near neighbors they did not love each other. The Yankees said the Dutch were fools, and the Dutch said the Yankees were knaves.”
Gradually the passage of time softened these asperities into a feeling of mutual good will. The transplanted Yankee became more mellow and less angular. Many another besides Ichabod Crane found the Dutch lasses captivating.
Moreover, the Dutch and Germans gradually lost their dialects, especially after the public school system was extended. The new aristocracy based on trade and manufacturing began to copy some of the manners and customs of the landed aristocracy. Marriage alliances and a common distrust of LocoFocos [early radical labor-oriented Democrats] and radicals drew them together.
Perhaps the most decisive factor was the Irish invasion of the 1840s and 1850s. The older population forgot their minor differences in their common distrust of these newer immigrants who were fervently Catholic and disturbingly clannish.
By the 1840s the transplanted Yankees, themselves the despised newcomers only one short generation earlier, were beginning to scorn this new wave of invaders. This inevitable but short-lived xenophobia was to greet each immigrant group in the future: the Poles, Italians, and the Jews after 1900; the [African Americans] in the 1920s; the Puerto Ricans in the l940s.
Fortunately the desire for “Americanization” has always been strong among immigrants. Even more fortunately the spirit of good will among New Yorkers has usually overcome bigotry and prejudice.
No group of newcomers however, left a more permanent imprint upon the racial, cultural, economic, and political life of New York than the resolute and enterprising sons of New England.
Born in Utica in 1914, Dr. David Maldwyn Ellis was appointed Dixon Ryan Fox Fellow of the now defunct New York State Historical Association in 1948 and commissioned to help write a one volume history of the State. This article was adapted from a proposed chapter in that study. At the time, Ellis was Assistant Professor of history at Hamilton College, where he had attended school as an undergraduate. His first book, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region (1946), won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. Subsequently, he produced nine more books about New York State as well as numerous articles, encyclopedia entries, edited volumes, forwards and book reviews. Dr. Ellis died in 1999 at the age of 85.
This essay first appeared in the journal New York History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (January 1951).
Illustrations: Anthony Finley’s (1784 – 1836) 1827 Map of New York (see a larger version here); detail of an 1807 drawing of a Durham boat with sails traveling the Mohawk River; Land Office, Alloway, town of Lyons, Wayne County, NY, ca. 1835 (courtesy Genesee Country Village and Museum);
“Map of the Head Waters of the Rivers Susquehanna and Deleware, Embracing the Early Patents on the South Side of the Mohawk River” (from the original drawn about the year 1790 by Simeon Dewitt, see close up here); “Map of the tracts, patents and land grants of northern New York,” 1894 (New York Public Library); an Erie Canal packet boat, possibly, as was often the case, overcrowded with immigrants; and a New England townscape transplanted to New York (Farmers Museum).
