A History of New York Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  BOOK III

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  BOOK IV

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  BOOK V

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  BOOK VI

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  BOOK VII

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  The Author’s Apology

  Notes

  A HISTORY OF NEW YORK

  WASHINGTON IRVING was born in New York City in 1783, the year the Revolutionary War ended. As a young man he began to write theater criticism and satire, and his first book-length work, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, was published in 1809 to great popular and critical acclaim. While Irving is best known today for his tales of the Hudson River region, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” he was equally famous during his lifetime for his picturesque “sketches” of European country life and his biographies of historical figures. These included the story collections The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), and a series of books written during a posting to Spain as an attaché for the American legation: Life and Voyages of Columbus (1828), The Conquest of Granada (1829), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), and The Alhambra (1832). Upon his return to the United States in 1832, Irving purchased “Sunnyside,” the Dutch cottage in Tarrytown, New York, that would become a symbol of the author and a place of pilgrimage for his readers, and wrote a series of books on the American West: A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). Although he would return to Spain from 1842 to 1845 as the appointed minister of President John Tyler, Irving spent the better portion of his remaining years at Sunnyside, where he produced revised editions of his collected works as well as biographies of Oliver Goldsmith and George Washington (which comprised five volumes), the liberator of New York in whose honor he was reportedly named. When Irving died in 1859, the Tarrytown church where his funeral was held was filled to capacity, and it was reported that more than a thousand mourners waited outside for their chance to pay their respects to the “father of the American short story,” and the first American writer to achieve an international renown.

  ELIZABETH L. BRADLEY is Deputy Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is the author of the forthcoming Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York, and her work on New York City history and culture has been published in Bookforum and The New-York Journal of American History.

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  First published in the United States of America by Inskeep & Bradford 1809

  This edition with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth L. Bradley published in Penguin Books 2008

  Introduction and notes copyright © Elizabeth L. Bradley, 2008

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  Introduction

  Missing: One Knickerbocker

  “DISTRESSING,” the notice in the October 26, 1809, New York Evening Post began. “Left his lodgings sometime since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of KNICKERBOCKER. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, ... great anxiety is entertained about him[.]” The notice begged readers to submit any information they might have about his whereabouts and well-being to the “Columbian Hotel, Mulberry-street.” A later advertisement reported the discovery of a “very curious kind of a written book” that the vanished Knickerbocker had left behind, and warned that the landlord of the Columbian Hotel “shall have to dispose of the book” to “pay off his bill for board and lodging” should the missing debtor fail to reappear. The ads were a hoax, the landlord imaginary: the book, however, was quite real. Its full title wasA History of New-York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty; Containing, among Many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the Disastrous Projects of William the Testy, and the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong—The Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam: Being the Only Authentic History of the Times that Ever Hath Been or Ever Will Be Published.

  and when it was finally published on December 6, 1809, it proved to be even more “surprising and curious” than had been promised. In fact, A History of New York was unlike anything that American readers had ever seen: it was simultaneously a rollicking account of the discovery, colonization, and ultimate conquest of the New Amsterdam settlement, and a scholarly, grave, and mournful memorial to the lost leaders and traditions of the same. This recipe for “very tragical mirth” is narrated by the much-advertised Diedrich Knickerbocker, a self-proclaimed descendant of the “Dutch Dynasty” of the title. To him, Knickerboc
ker explains in a mixture of pride and pessimism, has fallen the task of righting the wrongs done to his ancestors by those who vanquished and then forgot them: it is his solemn mission to “rescue from oblivion” the “great and wonderful transactions of our Dutch progenitors,” and to save the “early history of this venerable and ancient city” from “dropping piecemeal into the tomb.” It is a dramatic statement, one meant to convince his anticipated audience that the impulse behind his History is as soteriological as it is curatorial: with this work of “faithful veracity,” he assures his readers, he will “rear ... a triumphal monument, to transmit [New Amsterdam’s] renown to all succeeding time.” The only check on the boundless ambition of Knickerbocker is the fact that the historian himself is far from veracious: he was a fictition, the brainchild of a young New York lawyer named Washington Irving.

  Washington Irving was twenty-six years old when he wrote A History, intending it only as a “temporary jeu d’esprit,” as he would later maintain: a spoof of the archival efforts of the fledgling New-York Historical Society and a critique of contemporary Jeffersonian politics and society. Irving had not yet become America’s best-loved author, the creator of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane; he had not yet been compared to Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Oliver Goldsmith, or hailed as the “Father of the American Short Story.” In fact, his literary oeuvre at that time consisted primarily of a year spent as a founding editor of and contributor to Salmagundi, a satirical literary weekly modeled after the English Tatler and Spectator magazines, and a total of nine theater reviews, written while still a teenager under the pseudonym “Jonathan Oldstyle,” which he had contributed to his brother’s newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. Little about Irving’s family or upbringing suggests that literary celebrity was in his future: while another brother, William, collaborated with him on Salmagundi, by and large the Irvings were a family of genteel merchants who earned a prosperous living trading in hardware, wine, and sugar. Irving’s parents, who had emigrated from Scotland, settled on William Street before the Revolutionary War, and raised their seven surviving children there. Washington, their youngest son, was born on April 3, 1783, in British-occupied New York, seven months before the official evacuation of enemy troops from the city. By the time the History was published, Irving’s native city had been substantially rebuilt from the devastations of war and occupation, but it was by no means the dense, hectic metropolis that the words “New York City” currently evoke. In Irving’s youth and young adulthood, fashionable New York was bounded by the Battery and the Common, now City Hall Park: City Hall itself, which began construction when Irving was a teenager, was considered to be at the edge of civilization, beyond which lay the Collect Pond (on which Robert Fulton had taken a prototype steamship for a test run in 1796), now drained, paved, and christened Canal Street, and, farther north, the bucolic pastures of Greenwich Village. Indeed, the Chambers Street side of the new City Hall was faced in brownstone rather than in Massachusetts marble, on the premise that few visitors would be likely to see the grand facade from that northernmost perspective. Perhaps in an effort to widen his horizons in this miniature Manhattan, the young Irving chose legal studies over following his brothers to Columbia College, and entered the law offices of Josiah O. Hoffman, the former attorney general of New York State—where, by all accounts, Irving quickly discovered his career mistake.

  Irving’s discovery and the subsequent development of Knickerbocker may be partly laid at the feet of the third and final editor of Salmagundi, his friend and future brother-in-law, James Kirke Paulding. It was through Paulding, who had been raised in the Hudson River Valley, that Irving would first learn about the Dutch history of the region, and discover the particular traditions maintained by their nineteenth-century descendants. These traditions, which would form the basis of Irving’s New York writings, included Dutch food, architecture, and language; oral histories, such as the ghost story of the headless Hessian, whose insomniac riding kept whole hamlets awake in fear; and glimpses of improbably charming tableaux vivants: from Dutch American farmers puffing in stolid silence on their long pipes and apple-cheeked vrouws presiding over groaning tea tables to firelit hearths framed by a frieze of Delft tiles of scripture scenes. The romance of this heritage, not his own, inspired Irving to create Diedrich Knickerbocker, the Dutch “insider” who could legitimately present an “authentic” (one of Knickerbocker’s favorite compliments) portrait of these overlooked “progenitors,” both in his History of New York and in the stories of the Hudson River Valley that he would later write. These include the most famous pair: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which would become part of the fabric of American literature, spun into children’s books, poems, paintings, plays, and movies. But the History was Knickerbocker’s debut, and the beginning of Irving’s meteoric rise.

  Irving’s tongue-in-cheek retelling of the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam and the fortunes of the citizens and governors of that first New York colony—from its settlement to its ultimate surrender to the British in 1674—was a popular success on both sides of the Atlantic. American and European readers likened the History to the work of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift, praising Irving’s combination of anarchic humor, winning nostalgia, and mock erudition. Like Tristram Shandy, the History is sprawling, and more than a little strange; in the course of mapping colonial New Amsterdam, Knickerbocker takes numerous detours to enlighten his reader on a variety of related topics, from the introduction of the doughnut to the birth of Wall Street. Irving lards the historian’s narrative with confusing citations and footnotes in multiple voices, all of which seem intended to add nuance and scholarly depth to his humble account of small-scale colonial wars, but have instead (like Sterne’s black or blank pages) the surprisingly postmodern effect of knocking his story (and his reader) off course. But the real argument of the History is not to be found in its long-winded accounts of New Amsterdam’s military history (which, in Knickerbocker’s telling, seems to consist of Dutch generals practicing their swashbuckling moves on garden vegetables, and praying for divine intervention in battle) but through the winningly offhanded way in which Irving fills the lacunae of New York history, satisfying the reader’s curiosity with minute and charming details of domestic life in the little colony. Knickerbocker’s story is one of origins: he explains the city’s familiar-yet-mysterious names (Maiden Lane, Coenties Slip), gives a gloss of romance to its topography (Buttermilk Channel, the Battery), and boldly claims New York’s tribal customs (Santa Claus, stoop sitting, an inexplicable fondness for sauerkraut) as inventions of the Dutch who settled the city.

  The nostalgic, sometimes bawdy stories of Dutch home life and heroism in Irving’s History not only identified the formative influence of the Dutch burghers on the physical, economic, and cultural development of New York, but presented these newly rediscovered “founding fathers” as a set of acceptable ancestors for a city looking to divorce itself and its past from the monarchical associations of England. In the wake of the Revolutionary War and seven years of British occupation, Knickerbocker’s portrait of New Amsterdam seemed appealingly homely, even middle class. What busy urbanite could deny the charm of the “golden age of Wouter Van Twiller,” when “a sweet and holy calm reigned over the whole province” and the “Burgomaster smoked his pipe in peace”? Like Irving’s nineteenth-century city, the Dutch colony, thus portrayed, was equal parts bourgeois ritual, democratic tolerance, and hospitable (if clannish) sophistication. Here, finally, were forebears in which a newly republican New York could take a fond, nostalgic pride. Knickerbocker’s epic saga of New Amsterdam, however satirical, was one of the first articulations of American identity, and an early entry into the communal history of a city not yet accustomed to commemorating and celebrating its difference from the rest of the country, as well as from the rest of the world.

  Irving’s History connected readers to New Amsterdam by taking the colony out of the realm of mystery and conjecture. But the book
was also a finger in the eye of the New-York Historical Society, which had been founded in 1804 with a mandate to collect and make available to the public “whatever may relate to the natural, civic, or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general, and of this State in particular.” But information about the New Amsterdam settlement was not forthcoming. In an 1807 “Address to the Public” that is equal parts persuasion and polemic, the Society admits the “paucity of materials” pertaining to New York’s Dutch past, and reiterates the “extreme difficulty of procuring such as relate to the first settlement and colonial transactions of this State.” In an appeal to their fellow New Yorkers’ sense of history and responsibility, the Society solicited documents of just about any kind or quality, including “Manuscripts, Records, Pamphlets and Books relative to the History of this Country ... narratives of Indian Wars, Battles and Exploits; of the Adventures and Sufferings of Captives, Voyagers and Travellers... Statistical Tables, Tables of Diseases, Births and Deaths, and of Population,” and just about anything else that might shed light on New Amsterdam. In an effort to remedy this archivist’s nightmare, one of the Society’s most revered members, the physician and naturalist Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, compiled and published The Picture of New-York: Or, The Traveller’s Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States in 1807. The Picture was designed to enrich the meager holdings of the Historical Society while offering readers “ample and genuine information” about the historical, geographical, civic, and social circumstances of the contemporary city. Despite its panoramic title, Mitchill’s book is little more than an encyclopedia of dry geographical and municipal facts, curtly expressed. An incomplete encyclopedia, unfortunately: while The Picture touches on everything from the city’s tidal patterns to its prison system, Mitchill disposes of fifty years of Dutch rule in a few swift sentences, without apology. It was this oversight that inspired Irving (and his brother William, with whom he had originally conceived of the History)—he later confessed that their original “serio-comic” intent was just to “burlesque the pedantic lore” of The Picture and other books of its kind. In a reversal that its author would not have appreciated, today The Picture is an essential artifact of New York only because it gave rise to the creation of its opposite: the voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Mitchill’s attempt to build an “ample” ontological framework for the nascent city instead created the vacuum into which Irving and his revisionist historian could merrily rush.