Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/271

Nominations in Colonial New York 261 territory on both sides of the Hudson, and Long Island and Staten Island. The number of counties increased with the population, but they were mostly cut out of the old ones, so that by the time of the Revolution New York, territorially, was practically what it had been at the opening of the century.

But New York was not only territorially small; more important still, what there was of it was largely in the hands of a few men who had benefited by the surviving medieval custom of making large land-grants for personal services. In nearly every county some representative of the coterie of great families held considerable tracts of land and helped to carry out a more or less concerted plan of action. On Staten and Long Island few extensive grants were made during the English period; but even here the most favored ones were men influential in political life — frequently men, such as Smith and Nicolls, whose chief interests were elsewhere.1 The wealth of the influential families of New York City and County was based upon industry and commerce rather than upon land, though here too some valuable though comparatively small grants were made. New York was nevertheless pre-eminently a commercial city2 and the families which were eminent socially and politically make up the roll of her most famous merchant houses. George and Caleb Heathcote, William Smith and William Smith, Jr., the Crugers, one branch of the Livingston family, the Waltons, Alsops, Van Dams, — these were some of the principal merchant families of New York City, and these are names constantly met with in the political history of the province.

But it was northward along the Hudson that the great landed families lived and exercised an influence which was not limited by their own broad estates, but extended throughout the province and was especially powerful in the metropolis, with whose prominent families they were united by ties of interest or of blood-relationship. The largest part of Westchester County was comprised within the six manors located there; and in 1769 it is estimated that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants of the county lived within their bounds.3 In Dutchess County large grants were made to Philipse, Heathcote, Beekman, and Schuyler.4 In Albany County the Livingston manor spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer

1 Bayle's Suffolk, 197, 226.

2 "New York probably carries a more extensive commerce than any [other] town in the English American provinces." Kalm, Description of the City of New York in the year 1748, in Manual of the Corporation (1869), 845.

3 De Lancey, Origin and History of Manors in New York, in Scharf's History of Westchester County, I. 91.

4 Smith, Dutchess County, 43, 44.

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