Location

Albany, New York

Albany occupied a critical position in the northern colonies because it stood where the Hudson River corridor met the interior routes toward the Mohawk Valley and the Great Lakes. Long before the Revolution, Dutch traders at Fort Orange and Beverwijck had made the site a center of exchange, and after the English takeover it became a place where imperial officials, colonial assemblies, and Iroquois diplomats all had to reckon with one another. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin traveled to Albany for the Albany Congress, where he proposed the Albany Plan of Union as colonial leaders confronted the mounting danger of the French and Indian War and tried to imagine some durable form of intercolonial cooperation. Sir William Johnson, whose diplomacy with the Haudenosaunee mattered enormously to British strategy, also moved through the political world centered there, and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix reflected the way Albany served as a staging ground for frontier settlement and imperial bargaining. During the Revolutionary era the city remained tied to military and political decisions because control of the Hudson and Mohawk corridor helped determine whether British forces could divide New England from the rest of the colonies. Albany mattered to American constitutional history because it revealed, decades before 1776, that the colonies could not easily defend themselves or coordinate policy without some larger union, a problem that would return in sharper form under the Articles of Confederation and then under the Constitution.