Location

New York

New York's role in the founding era was broader and more perilous than many summaries suggest. Before it became a British colony in 1664, the city at its center had been New Amsterdam, a Dutch commercial settlement whose legacy of trade, pluralism, and strategic location continued to shape the province long after English rule began. During the Revolution the state became the hinge of British strategy, because commanders in London believed that control of New York and the Hudson corridor might cut New England off from the rest of the colonies and end the rebellion in its first year. The 1776 campaign around New York City nearly succeeded in doing exactly that: Washington's defeats on Long Island and Manhattan exposed the weakness of the Continental Army, and only a disciplined retreat preserved the force that later crossed the Delaware and survived to fight on. Even after Saratoga altered the war, New York remained central, both as a military theater and as a political battleground where loyalism, commercial interest, and patriot ambition constantly collided. In the ratification struggle of 1787 and 1788, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison used New York newspapers to publish many of the Federalist essays, while Melancton Smith and other Anti-Federalists pressed hard against adoption; had New York refused the Constitution after Virginia had ratified, the Union would have begun with a dangerous geographic and political fracture. When the Constitution did take effect, New York City became the first capital of the United States, George Washington was inaugurated at Federal Hall on April 30, 1789, and Hamilton began building the financial system that would define federal power in the early republic. The early sessions of Congress in the city made clear what the ratification struggle had been about, because the Constitution there ceased to be theory and became a working national government. Federal Hall thus became the place where a fiercely disputed document first took institutional shape before the eyes of the country. New York mattered because it combined the Revolution's greatest near-disaster, the ratification battle that nearly wrecked the Constitution, and the first working seat of the new national government.