At independence New York was a second-tier colony, more important for its strategic location than for its population or its economy. New York City was just a colonial port. New York's boundaries with both New England and Indian country were uncertain. The Six Iroquois Nations loomed large in New York affairs. By 1830, however, New York had become the Empire State, first in population and dominant economically over the Northeast, the emerging "Great West," and in some ways even the South. New York City had become the American metropolis and was on its way to world standing. Many Iroquois had departed and the remnants were struggling to hold on to scraps of land. In 1775 New York had the largest slave population outside the South; by 1830 only seventy-five slaves remained in the state, the last sufferers of a quirk in its gradual abolition law. Nearly 45,000 black New Yorkers were free. Yet both in 1776 and in 1830 New York was a raucous place where people of all sorts mingled and jostled.
New York's Revolutionary leaders did not accept independence until 9 July 1776, making it the very last of the founding thirteen to break with Britain. Part of what they called New York, the counties of Cumberland and Gloucester, was about to declare its own independence as Vermont. Until 1791 New York's leaders called Vermont a "pretended state," and its people "revolted subjects." But the state had lost the Green Mountains, as it had lost its weak claim to western Massachusetts and western Connecticut.
But New York did not yet have its familiar shape. Reporting to London in 1774, the last royal governor invoked an Indian treaty of 1702 to claim the Niagara Peninsula, in modern Ontario, and the country beyond Detroit. An official British map, drawn about 1775 and published in 1779, showed western New York ending much farther east, at the "line of property" where the country of the Six Iroquois Nations began. To the Six Nations, that line remained in effect even after the Revolutionary War. Massachusetts claimed part of the Iroquois country under its royal charter. The matter was not resolved until a treaty between it and New York at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1786. The borders with New Jersey and with Pennsylvania were clear on official documents but had not been completely surveyed. Like much of the rest of Revolutionary America, New York's boundaries and extent were anything but certain.
Its early political life as a state was equally uncertain. The Revolutionary leaders did not proclaim a new constitution until April 1777. They never offered the document for ratification, simply announcing that it was taking effect. By then Manhattan, Long Island, Staten Island, and southern Westchester were in British hands. Loyalism was rife in the Hudson Valley. Civil war raged where white settlement met Iroquois country. Four of the Six Nations (the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) chose the British side, whereas the Oneidas and most of the Tuscaroras were with the Americans. In 1779 the Iroquois put out their Council Fire, the symbol of a League of Peace and Power that had endured for centuries. Their white neighbors were equally divided.
Even among white Patriots dispute raged. A small group of young men who stemmed from the old colonial elite, including Philip Schuyler, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert R. Livingston, expected to take control. But the votes of soldiers gave outsider George Clinton the first of five three-year terms as governor, and in the late 1770s and the 1780s a populist political party came together around him. This party's rule was so successful that New York held off on ratifying the federal Constitution till 1788 (becoming the eleventh state to do so), joining only after it was clear that the Constitution would take effect and that New York City might secede and ratify on its own.
Despite the war's disruptions, New York grew rapidly. Governor William Tryon estimated New York's population in 1774 at 182,000. By the 1790 federal census, that figure had nearly doubled, to 340,241. In 1800 it was 586,182, and in 1810, 959,049. New York City had outstripped Philadelphia by then—96,000 to 91,000—but Pennsylvania remained the most populous state, in 1820 outnumbering New York, 1,549,458 to 1,372,812. Not until 1830 did New York have the largest population, with 1,918,608 people. Of these, 202,589 lived in New York City. By then Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Kingston had passed the urban threshold to small city status. Albany had become the permanent capital, and Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo marked waypoints and industrial centers along the Erie Canal.
These numbers do not include Indians, despite New York's claim that the Six Nations, the Shinne-cocks, the Montauks, and others within its now-firm boundaries "belonged" to it. The censuses did count African Americans. Governor Tryon reckoned that, in 1774, 21,549 New Yorkers were black, almost all of them part of the largest slave population north of Chesapeake Bay. Slavery weakened by 1790, when 4,782 black New Yorkers were free. More than 21,000 remained enslaved, however. The state finally began gradual abolition in 1799. The census in 1800 showed 10,374 free black New Yorkers and 20,613 slaves. By 1810 the numbers were tilting, with 25,333 free people and 15,017 slaves. In 1820 there were 29,279 free of slavery, but 10,088 remained in chains. New York's leaders adopted 4 July 1827 as the day for slavery to end. In 1830 the free black population was 44,870.
Creating the Empire State required destroying what historians now call Iroquoia. At the end of the Revolutionary War the state maintained that the four Iroquois nations that had sided with the British had forfeited their land. It could not make that claim stick; nor could it claim the land of the pro-American Onei-das and Tuscaroras. Both the state government and the Confederation Congress maintained their claim to sovereignty in relation to the Indians and their right to purchase the land. To complicate matters, so did Massachusetts. Congress aside, the Treaty of Hartford gave legal sovereignty to New York but allowed Massachusetts the right as a private purchaser to preempt Indian land west of Seneca Lake. By the time the federal Constitution took effect in 1789, Massachusetts and New York believed they had negotiated treaties to purchase most Iroquois land. The federal Non-Intercourse Act of 1790 supposedly ended separate state purchases of Indian land, and in 1794 federal negotiators worked out a major treaty with the Six Nations at Canandaigua, in the central Finger Lakes region. Between then and 1846, New York State negotiated a long series of treaties for virtually all the remaining Indian land. Because those treaties did not conform to federal requirements, their legal status has remained open to litigation and is not fully resolved at this writing.
Nonetheless, settlers poured into western New York, which the state was dividing into counties and townships without regard to Indian title. Even colonials had seen that New York possessed a unique opportunity at the Oneida Carrying Place, where the Mohawk River, flowing toward the Hudson, comes within a mile of Wood Creek, flowing toward Lake Ontario. Build a canal across that low ridge, and a few others around the Mohawk's rapids and falls, and the two water systems would join. Nowhere else between the St. Lawrence and the southern tip of the Appalachian Mountains was such a link possible. By the early nineteenth century some were thinking in bigger terms, proposing a canal from Albany to Lake Erie. Rochester flour dealer Jesse Hawley apparently had the idea first, but credit for the Erie Canal goes to DeWitt Clinton, who pushed the idea ceaselessly as mayor of New York City, governor, and federal politician, including a run for the presidency in 1812. (Not until Martin Van Buren's election in 1836, however, would a New Yorker win the White House.)
Clinton sought federal support, but when President James Madison vetoed a bill in 1816 New York embarked on the project alone. Construction began in 1817, and the canal opened in 1825. It was so successful that it needed enlargement by 1836. It gave New York City access to the whole northern interior, ensuring its primacy over rivals Philadelphia and Montreal. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago all became part of New York's system. Land values along the canal soared.
The canal's completion was part of the high tide of white male democracy in New York, as property requirements for voting and officeholding came to an end. But democratic opportunity led straight to machine politics, of which Van Buren was a pioneer, and was joined directly to the exclusion of most black male voters, to whom property requirements for voting still applied. Moreover, the canal's very success brought unrest along its route. Central and western New York were so overrun by religious revivals and reform movements that the region became known after 1830 as the "Burned Over District." Militant abolitionism, prison reform, temperance, women's rights, and the emergence of the Latter-Day Saints as a uniquely American religion all were among the results.