Chapter One
LAND AND REBELLION IN THE HUDSON VALLEY
The banks of Hudson's river are for the most part rocky cliffs.... The passage through the highlands affords a wild romantic scene for sixteen miles through steep and lofty mountains: the tide flows a few miles above Albany, the navigation is safe, and performed in sloops of about forty or fifty tons burden, extremely well accommodated to the river: about sixty miles above New-York the water is fresh.... -William Smith Jr., The History of the Late Province of New-York from Its Discovery to the Appointment of Governor Colden in 1762
The advantages of this river for penetrating into Canada and protecting the Southern colonies ... must be very apparent to every judicious observer of the maps of the inland parts of North America. -The History of the Province of New-York from the First Discovery to the Year 1732
Children of the Revolution
On 8 October 1797 in central New York Sarah Clark and Samuel Haring were married in a forest clearing near Owasco Outlet, a stream that runs from the lake by that name. She was seventeen, he a day short of his twenty-first birthday. Their lives in the world they inherited would take them to Albany and New York City, but at the time of their marriage they were settlers in the recently opened up Indian lands of central New York. Sarah and Samuel were children of men who had participated in the military and civil struggles in New York during the Revolution. They were born in the war, children of the Revolution, and thus of the first generation to live their entire lives in the independent country.
The marriage of a Haring son and a Clark daughter in a hamlet on the Genesee trail connected two distinct traditions of early American settlement and manners. The Harings came from the Netherlands and New York, the Clarks originally from England and New England. The Haring-Clark union also brought together two strains of Calvinism: the Dutch Reformed (from the Confession of Dort) and the Presbyterianism of the Westminster Catechism, which the Clarks adopted after leaving Congregational Connecticut Colony. The marriage, with its ethnic and religious mixing reveals the increasing openness of American society in the post-Revolutionary years.
The Hudson Valley was home to both the Haring and Clark families in the eighteenth century, and despite their differences, the two families did share the yeoman political culture of the settlements on the west bank of the river. The Harings had been settled by the Tappan Zee and in New York City since the seventeenth century. The Clarks settled Bedford in Westchester County from Connecticut, and three generations later in the mid-eighteenth century Sarah Clark's grandfather ventured into trade and farming near the Hudson, above the highlands. Men and women of both families were deeply involved in the Revolution, in the actions in and around New York City and in Orange and Ulster Counties.
The social and economic conditions in which these young people were to live their lives were shaped in large part by the successful resolution of the struggle against British domination. The settlement on Owasco Outlet, where they were married, to cite one particular, had only come into existence after the Revolution, a consequence of which was the opening up of Indian lands to European settlement. New York was the scene of more military and civil conflicts than any of the thirteen original states. The fathers of Samuel and Sarah were deeply engaged-John Haring in Manhattan and southern Orange County in the lower Hudson Valley and James Clark in Ulster north of the highlands and in the actions of 1776 in and around Manhattan. The actions of their generation created the new conditions of American life. The stories of their involvement with the Patriot cause illuminate the Revolution in New York from different perspectives of family background, social position, and geography. Before returning to the young couple making their way in the new republic, it will prove instructive to consider the experiences of their families during the Revolution.
The Harings
John Haring, Samuel's father, was the great-great grandson of Jan Pietersen Haring, who arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam as a child in the 1630s. Fifty years later Jan Pietersen's family was one of a number of farming families who settled away from English-dominated Manhattan on a tract they purchased from the Tappan Indians near the west bank of the Hudson, where it widens to form the Tappan Zee. The Tappan Patent granted by the royal governor gave the Dutch farmers land enough for themselves and for their children. Under their cultivation the land provided for the families' needs and yielded surplus crops to be sold in the city.
The Harings multiplied, and family members in the next two generations continued to be prominent in what came to be designated under British rule as the southern part of Orange County (now Rockland). Peter Haring, John's grandfather, and Abraham, his father, each in their time served for years in the Provincial Assembly. Because that body met in Manhattan, the Haring men became familiar with the commercial world of New York. As Firth Haring Fabend observed in her study of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Harings,
The historical significance of the political experiences of farmer-politicians like the Haring[s] ... were twofold. On the local level by participating in governments in their own communities they were exposed to the demands of, public office, formed attachments to local prerogatives, and experienced the pluralism toward which the society was gradually moving. On the provincial level, their close involvement meant in the daily affairs of the colony provided [them] ... with a valuable education in negotiations, conflict management, and cooperation with men of diverse interests. Most important, exposure to politics reinforced such men in a tradition of resistance to royal authority that their sons and grandsons would jealously guard when their constitutional rights and prerogatives were threatened by authority.
John, born in 1739, was conversant with the Dutch society of Tappan and, to a greater degree than his forebears, with commercial and political circles in New York. "Like most ambitious men of the clay, John Haring had several sources of income, for he had received enough education to qualify both as a surveyor and as a lawyer," and, to judge by his letters, he was fluent in English. Like his forebears, John Haring was a devoted member of the Dutch Reformed Church, becoming one of the original trustees of Queen's (later Rutgers) College, established in 1766 to train ministers for the church and, according to the second charter, for the "education of youth in the learned languages, liberal and useful arts and sciences." He was supported by the Coetus party of the Dutch Church, one of whose aims was the education and ordination of ministers in America.
In 1769 John Haring stood for his ailing father's seat in the Provincial Assembly. When he lost the election to the Anglican faction that supported the royal governor, he petitioned to have the vote reversed on the grounds of fraud. The petition was denied, and Haring was fined costs by the Governor's Council. This brush with the powers-that-be may well have contributed to his resentment of the royal administration.
John's marriage to his first cousin, Mary Herring, in 1773, at the advanced age of thirty-four, broadened the circle of influential families in the city to whom he-and Samuel after him-was connected. Mary was the daughter of John's uncle, Elbert Herring (1703-73), who as a youth came to New York as a bolter (sifter) of flour and anglicized the family name to Herring as he rose in prominence in the English city. He expanded the family holdings to create a farm of over a hundred acres in the Bowery, at his death the second largest farm on the island. Elbert Herring had sixteen children by two wives. Six of his daughters married men from well-known families in the city: George Brinkerhoff, a member of the Mayor's Council before the Revolution; Cornelius Roosevelt, of the merchant family; Samuel Jones, an eminent member of the bar before and after the Revolution; John De Peyster, of the prominent merchant family; Samuel Kip, of the family who owned Kip's Bay on the East River and who later succeeded to the mansion; and Gardner Jones, a prominent physician in New York City after independence. In their time Sarah and Samuel were part of this large extended family, it was Mary Herring's young brother Abraham, a merchant with interests in the city, upriver, and to the west, who became an influential example for Samuel. All of these families supported the Patriot cause and fled when the British forces occupied Manhattan in late summer 1776. They returned with children born during the war and re-established themselves in the city after the British evacuation.
John Haring had some preferment under the Crown when, in 1774, he was appointed judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Orange County. This did not make him a supporter of the royal government, however, for at the Yoast Mabie house in Tappan on 4 July 1774 he was one of the signatories of the Orangetown Resolutions, which warned that "however well disposed we are towards his majesty, we cannot see the late acts of Parliament imposing duties upon us, and the act for shutting up the port of Boston, without declaring our abhorance of measures so unconstitutional and big with destruction." This was a position that presaged the Revolution, uncannily on the date of the later Declaration: "It is our unanimous opinion that the stopping of all exportation and importation to and from Great Britain and the West Indies would be the most effectual method to obtain a speedy repeal."
John Haring was one of the five (including his brother-in-law, Gardner Jones) appointed to "correspond" with like-minded colonists in New York City. A further step towards rebellion came when proponents of a vigorous position against British governance convened a congress in New York to supersede the authority of the New York Provincial Assembly. Haring subscribed to this overtly subversive action and was elected as a delegate from Orange County. The battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775 increased the tempo of political protest in New York, where, in August, the Provincial Congress elected Haring chairman of the committee formed to appoint officers in the militia. The Orange County electors then sent him to the First Continental Congress, sitting at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia.
In September Haring became a member of the Committee of Safety of the New York Congress-in a sense the executive committee of the group which still included those uncertain as to whether to embrace a complete break with Britain. On 16 December he was unanimously elected president pro tem of the provincial Convention-briefly successor to the Congress-in which capacity, as Fabend notes, he was "in effect the head of the revolutionary government in New York." Throughout May 1776, as Washington and the troops prepared defenses against British invasion, John Haring was continually in New York at meetings of the Provincial Congress. In late May he joined with John Jay and John Morin Scott, two of the leading attorneys in the city who sided with the rebel cause, to consider the Continental Congress's Resolutions of 15 May supporting independence. Their recommendation to the New York Congress was "to adopt such Government as shall, in the opinion of the Representatives of the People best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general." The die was cast for the Revolution in New York.
In August 1776 Haring was appointed brigade major by the New York Congress and continued as chairman of its Committee of Safety, which operated as the executive arm when the Congress was not in session. Shortly afterwards the British attacked the rebels on Long Island and invaded Manhattan-among the opposing forces was Ulster militiaman James Clark, father of Haring's future daughter-in law.
With Manhattan closed off, Haring returned to Tappan, which also became a refuge for the Kip, de Peyster, and Jones in-laws, among others. John Morin Scott left a glimpse of the crowded conditions there in his request for leave to visit his wife, who was in "Tappan with her whole family, in one room ... overwhelmed with distress, and continually in tears, not knowing how to dispose of all that are dear to her except myself." Manhattan, the lower Hudson Valley, the lands to the east and west including the once prosperous farming communities of south Orange County and adjacent Bergen County, New Jersey, were subjected to more destruction than any other area of the colonies during, the war. It was within this so-called "neutral ground"-meaning no one side dominated-that John Haring spent the war years, with his life and his family's livelihood on the line.
The signs of war were evident in the little stone Dutch Reformed Church in Tappan when Samuel Haring, John and Mary's second child, was baptized on 3 November 1776. The church was then occupied by men wounded in the battles of Long Island and Harlem Heights. John Haring, an elder of the church, had helped arrange this improvised hospital care. The celebration of the birth of this first son was tempered by the evidence of the devastating defeats the Patriot cause had suffered in the previous weeks.
Clarks: From Connecticut to the Hudson Valley
James Clark, Sarah's father, was in the fourth generation from William Clark (whose parents are not known) who was one of twenty from Stamford on Long Island Sound who established a new settlement in the "Hopp ground," about twelve miles northwest of the town. In May 1682 the General Court of Connecticut did "grant [the settlers] the priveledg of a plantation, and doe order that the name of the town be henceforth Bedford." The proprietors possessed an area of six square miles, divided into house and meadow lots and awarded by lottery.
Like other Connecticut towns, Bedford was governed with a high degree of local autonomy, and town officers were elected. In 1700, however, a long-standing challenge by the Province of New York was resolved by a royal edict transferring Bedford to Westchester, where much of the county was governed by owners of large tracts of land who permitted only leaseholds and who exercised virtually feudal authority over their tenants.
Continues...
Excerpted from More Lasting than Brass by Peter Haring Judd Copyright © 2004 by Peter Haring Judd. Excerpted by permission.
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