Supplanted Sovereignties: Gateways, Commerce, and Dispossession in Postrevolutionary New York

Abstract

Supplanted SovereigntiesGateways, Commerce, and Dispossession in Postrevolutionary New York Nolan M. Cool (bio) Traveling slowly along the muddy, loamy road west from German Flats toward Old Fort Schuyler in the heat of early June 1791, an inquisitive Scottish physician, Alexander Coventry, "found the road grow worse the further I went … mostly level." Within three miles of Old Fort Schuyler, he explained, there were "several new improvements" along the road, populated "seeming[ly] by Germans." Coventry drew attention to a "Capt. [Stephen] Potter and family well, living in a neat log house, and himself [busy] planting corn," thus reflecting farming's continued prominence across the postcolonial countryside. The physician highlighted the settlement's landscape, observing, "An old log house stands where Old Fort Schuyler used to be." Coventry thereby reveals that a developing, culturally entangled borderland village was gradually swallowing the colonial post.1 In his 1791 travels, future New York jurist and scholar James Kent mirrored Coventry's conclusion, commenting that "where old Fort Schuyler stood … now there is no vestige."2 Riding westward, Kent writes that nearby "White's Town is the center of the population and is amazingly increasing."3 Stopping at Oriskany, a former Oneida village, Kent explains that about "a dozen log houses" stand at this newly engulfed American settlement, as the "Oriskies [Oneida villagers] went off to the westward this spring, their lands being purchased by us." Traversing the well-worn road through Whitestown, Coventry captures the overarching sentiment of the period's travelers, traders, farmers, and settlers gazing at New York's expanding borders, asserting that "this when cleared will be a most beautiful [End Page 270] country."4 Coventry represents a landed, white, slaveholding elite—a handful of people who came to erode the diplomacy, reciprocity, and security promised to settlers and Indians alike in New York's borderlands.5 The picture Coventry paints and the language that he and others like him employed asserts a cosmopolitan, white settler-colonial empire that would soon dominate New York's countryside. Old Fort Schuyler (present-day Utica), a growing postrevolutionary village in Central New York, constituted a pivotal gateway to early American settler-colonial expansion toward the Great Lakes even before the Erie Canal opened as a crucial corridor funneling people, commerce, and Anglo-American imperialism toward the continental interior in the 1820s. Old Fort Schuyler served to channel the organized development of Central and Western New York, and by extension, an evolving, agrarian-industrial economy toward the North American interior. Here, state officials and encroaching communities perfected the business of Indian removal and explicitly aimed to replace the economy of the Haudenosaunee (or Six Nations) with an American industrial economy fueling continued settler-colonial expansion.6 The echo of the ax reverberated as settlers downed trees and brush along the border of Indian country, and land acquisition and commercial dominance became the preeminent tools of American settler-colonial projects and territorial expansion. American settlers like Coventry and Peter Smith, a storeowner and major regional land magnate, favored a vision of log houses, towns, newly established farmsteads, and communities dotting the landscape alongside an increasing number of brick and limestone mansions in growing city-towns that would replace upstate New York's dense forests and small, isolated trading posts. The history of communities like Old Fort Schuyler, which stood between east and west, constitute a foundational framework of how federal, state, and private interests made postwar towns into commercial outposts from which Americans launched colonization efforts to transform the borders of Indian country. During the 1780s and 1790s, geography, demographic growth, and commercial development converged in New York State to steer settler-colonial expansion westward to the Great Lakes and, by extension, to control the coveted American interior. Old Fort Schuyler's merchants, settlers, and land-hungry speculators like Peter Smith molded the post's economy into a major staging ground for the development of New York's borderlands. Former and newly acquainted neighbors from New England and throughout the Northeast [End Page 271] exchanged rum, cloth, sundries, scarce American currency, and land. Geographically at the eastern end of the Mohawk Valley, the village and its economy directed migration and coordinated expansion into what...