One late spring day in Manhattan in 1784, Robert Robert Livingston Jr. did something he and his peers did nearly every day of their adult lives: he sat down, pulled out a sheaf of paper, and began scribbling.¹

For the past seven years, the 37-year-old aristocrat had been New York State’s chancellor, one of its top judicial officials. The position had been created under a new state constitution New York adopted in 1777 after the separation from Great Britain. Livingston coauthored that document and all but inherited the newly created post; his late father, Robert R. “Judge” Livingston Sr. had...

New York officially became an American city at one o’clock in the afternoon on 25 November 1783. To the sound of pealing bells, Major General Henry Knox and a retinue of horse-mounted dignitaries left Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway in Manhattan, setting off to the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Bowery, accompanied by a crowd that had assembled at the city’s “Tea-Water Pump” and followed on foot. There they met George Washington, New York governor George Clinton, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, and other members of a provisional government, which was about to take possession of the southern parts...

Incorporated banking was just one activity that interested early American political entrepreneurs. The state had as its sovereign power the ability to bestow a charter, monopoly grant, or other exclusive privileges on any individual or coalition. Among politically connected would-be investors and directors with financial and political interests outside Manhattan, transportation ventures were often just as attractive as financial ones. In fact, to the extent that internal-improvement promoters from upstate New York favored the chartering of banks, it was often with an eye toward steering bank capital and credit toward the construction of turnpikes, canals, and other transportation projects that...

On the eve of one of the first and most important state ballot contests that would decide the 1800 presidential election, a scion of New York’s foremost Republican family reached for a quill as he sought to soothe the anxieties of the faraway Virginian who hoped to be the victor.¹ “A very important change has been effected,” Edward Livingston assured Thomas Jefferson, “by theinstrumentalityas Mr. Hamilton would call it of the New Bank.” Called the Bank of the Manhattan Company, the “new bank,” Livingston explained, had “emancipated hundreds who were held in bondage by the old institutions.” “Old...

In 1809 Robert R. Livingston started keeping an account book. As one of the richest men in the United States and one of the largest landowners in New York State—not to mention a judge, diplomat, bank director, and promoter of merino sheep—Livingston kept many account books during his lifetime. But this was the sixty-three-year-old Livingston’s first account book tied to his new transportation business. Two years earlier, in 1807, he and the engineer Robert Fulton had launched a steamboat that mastered the Hudson River’s current and won them a monopoly: the exclusive right to run steamboats in New...

Construction of the Erie Canal was completed at ten o’clock on the morning of 26 October 1825. From Buffalo, New York, Governor DeWitt Clinton boarded a slender and crowded packet boat and began traveling east. Trailed by a flotilla of other vessels, Clinton’s party floated along the canal’s 363-mile-long route to Albany, pausing in towns along the way for local celebrations. As the boat departed, a cannon fired off a celebratory shot in Buffalo, initiating a chain of booms that raced eastward along the canal and then turned south, tracing the Hudson River until ending at Sandy Hook in New...

When the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal brought the water of Lake Erie to New York Harbor, decades of promises made by promoters were soon made manifest. Of all the canal’s benefits, the most immediately measurable one was the fall in shipping costs for goods; that cost dropped so dramatically that by one calculation it was as if New York City and Buffalo had been brought to within forty miles of each another.¹ Of course, the canal was not celebrated by contemporaries and studied by historians because of something as mundane as carriage rates. The Erie Canal affected New...