Albany

Located 135 miles north of New York City and 165 miles west of Boston, Albany was founded by the Dutch in 1624 as a fur trading post and was chartered as a city by the British in 1686. The settlement first came to international attention in 1754 as the site of the Albany Congress, a gathering of colonial representatives and Native American Iroquois leaders. The colonials,rift gold delegations of which came from seven of the thirteen British colonies, needed this Indian alliance as a defense against the armed power of New France in the looming imperial conflict that would be known as the French and Indian War (1754–1760).

Despite difficulties, the Iroquois’ assistance was secured and the colonial delegates turned their attention to a plan of union to enable greater cooperation and coordination between their colonial governments. The plan that was adopted, conceived by Benjamin Franklin, advocated a single American government with far-reaching powers, uniting the thirteen colonies under one president general appointed by the crown. While it was rejected by both the British government and the colonial legislatures as encroaching on their authority, the Albany Plan paved the way for subsequent national assemblies such as the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and the Continental
Congress of 1774.

During the French and Indian War, Albany was a major base for English regulars and colonial soldiers. Twenty years later, Albany was a Patriot stronghold in the American Revolution, and in 1775 it was again the site of important negotiation as General Philip Schuyler tried to persuade the Six Nations to remain neutral in the escalating conflict. Throughout the war, Albany’s three thousand residents doggedly resisted British attempts to invade the city. Albany’s riverfront location held strategic value for both sides, and the city thus served as a major supply depot for the Continental Army.

Albany developed rapidly after the war, becoming the capital of New York State in 1797, chosen because its inland location promised safety from naval attack and also gave access to new farmlands to the west. The transportation revolution of the early nineteenth century made the city the center of a new web of commercial links. The introduction of steamboats put New York City within twenty hours’ reach, while the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected the city to the Great Lakes. While the colonial settlement had once been an entrepôt between frontier colonists and Indian traders, now Albany grew wealthy on the trade between the coastal cities and the resource-rich interior. As Albany expanded, the grid system was adopted and the city acquired banks, hotels, newspapers,rift gold a hospital, and a jail. While many of the city’s residents were still of Dutch origin, the population, which reached twenty-four thousand in 1830, was now swelled by Irish construction workers as well as large numbers of northern European Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The city would enjoy continued antebellum prosperity with the arrival of the country’s first commercial railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson, in 1831. Further industrial growth was spurred by the city’s iron foundries and leather industries, creating a period of general growth that would last for much of the century.