Most of the Revolutionary leaders who came to power in New York in 1777 had anti-slavery sentiments, yet, as elsewhere in the North, the urgency of the war with Britain made them delay, and they restricted their activity to a policy statement and an appeal to future legislatures "to take the most effective measures consistent with public safety for abolishing domestic slavery." This resolution passed in the state Constitutional Convention by a vote of 29 to 5.

The war proved particularly destructive in the case of New York, and the state was a battleground from one end to the other. Little was done during the war towards ending slavery, except that in 1781 the legislature voted to manumit slaves serving in the armed forces. But the war itself wrought havoc with the institution. Many slaves ran off to the British during the occupation of the state. Others achieved freedom by taking up the rebels' offer of manumission in exchange for military service. The slave population of New York City was permanently reduced. When the British and the American Loyalists pulled out of New York at the end of the war, some 3,000 blacks left with them.

In 1785, when the fighting was over, New York got around to the slavery question. As before, most of the legislators were anti-slavery, but by now a split had developed between moderates, who favored gradual emancipation, and a minority of hard-liners behind Aaron Burr who sought an immediate end to slavery. The moderates won, and out of the Assembly in 1785 came a plan that children born to slave women after 1785 would be free from birth. But it was passed up to the state Senate with a number of riders attached, which reflected fears of potential power in an ex-slave population and racist concerns about social order. Blacks would be denied the right to vote or hold public office, or to intermarry with whites or give testimony against them in state courts. This combination of gradual emancipation with restrictions on black civil rights was the plan that had succeeded in Connecticut the previous year. "The representatives in effect sought to blunt the political and social impact of emancipation by relegating the Negro freedmen to a civil limbo of second-class citizenship."

The majority in the Senate, however, was more aristocratic and had less to fear from black economic competition. They rejected the restrictive provisions, not only because they were undemocratic, but because they would perpetuate a caste system based on race, which could awaken dangerous civil strife. The Senate sent the bill back to the Assembly for revisions.

The Assembly dutifully stripped off the other provisions, but it would not budge on withholding the right to vote. The Senate, recognizing a line had been drawn, agreed to this.

The emancipation plan faced one more hurdle: the Council of Revisions. Under leadership of Chancellor Livingston (whose family had not long before been slave traders), the bill was indignantly rejected, with the suffrage clause called "shocking" to the "principal of equal liberty." The Council also echoed the Senate's earlier objection to permanent class divisions based on race, which would weaken blacks' commitment to the civil society of the new nation, turning them into a potentially subversive force without a stake in the social order.

The Council sent the bill back to the Senate. But the Senate had made up its mind for emancipation as soon as possible, and the Senators felt this was the price that had to be paid for it. They passed the bill back to the Assembly unchanged. Yet now the Assembly was having second thoughts on the matter. It failed to break the Council's veto, and the bill died. "In the final analysis, emancipation was blocked by a majority that feared Negro power more than it desired Negro freedom." All this concern about the power of a black vote took place in a state where blacks made up less than 8 percent of the population, and even in the county (Kings) where they had the highest population concentration, they were outnumbered 2 to 1 by whites.

In 1788, the slave trade in New York was banned outright (but with important loopholes), and the special courts which had held power of life and death over slaves for 80 years were abolished. The loosening of restrictions filtered down to the municipal level, and Albany abolished the custom of flogging slaves for curfew violations.

The New York Manumission Society, based in the Quaker population of Long Island and headed by the most prominent and wealthy men in the state, had formed in 1785. It kept up a relentless pressure of economic intimidation. It hectored newspaper editors against advertising slave sales, pressured auction houses and ship-owners, and gave free legal help to slaves suing their masters. This effort, along with a booming birth rate and a flood of white workers from other states who did not have to be maintained during periods of unemployment and were willing to work for low wages, made slavery economically obsolete.

In 1799 the Legislature passed "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery" with only token opposition. It provided for gradual manumission on the Pennsylvania model, which allowed masters to keep their younger slaves in bondage for their most productive years, to recoup their investment. The law freed all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799, but not at once. The males became free at 28, the females at 25. Till then, they would be the property of the mother's master. Slaves already in servitude before July 4, 1799, remained slaves for life, though they were reclassified as "indentured servants." The law sidestepped all question of legal and civil rights, thus avoiding the objections that had blocked the earlier bill.

The activity of kidnappers and cheats in selling slaves out of the state in spite of the laws fostered the 1817 statute that gave freedom to New York slaves who had been born before July 4, 1799 -- but not until July 4, 1827. Slavery was still not entirely repealed in the state, because the new law offered an exception, allowing nonresidents to enter New York with slaves for up to nine months, and allowing part-time residents to bring their slaves into the state temporarily. Though few took advantage of it, the "nine-months law" remained on the books until its repeal in 1841, when slavery had become the focus of sectional rivalry and the North was re-defining itself as the "free" region.

The state's slaveholders had seen the writing on the wall after 1785. And part of their response was to sell their slaves south while they still could. As early as the 1780s, after commissions and insurance costs, an able-bodied New York slave could be sold south for a profit of at least 40 Pounds. Owners avoided the ban on the slave trade by disguising purchases as long-term leases or indentures (one importer brought a "free" black over from New Jersey under a 99-year "indenture"). Free blacks were victimized, too, sold into slavery for debt or under terms of fraudulent contracts or apprenticeships. The New York Manumission Society rescued 33 blacks from such schemes in 1796 alone; uncounted others certainly slipped past their vigilance.

In "A History of Negro Slavery in New York", Edgar J. McManus writes that an analysis of census figures shows an extremely sharp drop in the growth rate of New York's black population after 1800. Many blacks must have left the state, he writes, and few left voluntarily. "The conclusion is inescapable," McManus writes, "that the exodus was largely the work of kidnapers and illegal traders who dealt in human misery."

As it did elsewhere in the North, freedom in New York, even with the right to vote, opened up a new set of hardships for blacks. Organized pressure from white workers drove them from the skilled and semi-skilled positions they had filled under slavery. Working class mobs harassed them in riots large and small, the largest of the period being the one in July 1834 in New York City that leveled hundreds of black homes.

Blacks voted in New York, and though they were too few to be a political power on their own, they tended to remember the aristocrats who had been the chief backers of emancipation, and they backed the party of Jay and Hamilton. In certain close races, their block votes were credited with victories for the Federalists. This earned them the enmity of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, which made a political issue of the black vote and attempted to discredit the Federalists by marrying them, in the public mind, to the most vicious racist stereotypes of blacks.

As the Federalists faded in the War of 1812, the Democratic-Republicans moved to shut out the black voters. In 1815, they pushed a bill through the legislature that required blacks to get special passes to vote in state elections. Then in 1821 the Democratic-Republicans successfully sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that, while it entirely abolished the property qualification for white voters, raised it for blacks from $100 to $250 -- the cost of a modest house in those days. The caste system foreseen with fear by the men of 1785 had come into effect, even without legal sanction.

Foster was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century. His songs, such as "Oh! Susanna", "Camptown Races", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Old Black Joe", "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River") remain popular over 150 years after their composition.

Foster was born in Lawrenceville, now part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up as the youngest of ten children in a middle-class family that would eventually become near destitute after his father's fall into alcoholism. Foster's education included one month at college (Washington & Jefferson College) but little formal music training. Despite this, he published several songs before the age of twenty. His first, "Open Thy Lattice Love," appeared when he was 18.

Stephen was greatly influenced by two men during his teenage years: Henry Kleber (1816-1897) and Dan Rice. The former was a classically trained musician who immigrated from the German city of Darmstadt and opened a music store in Pittsburgh, and who was among Stephen Foster’s few formal music instructors. The latter was an entertainer –- a clown and blackface singer, making his living in traveling circuses. These two very different musical worlds created a tension for the teenage Foster. Although respectful of the more civilized parlor songs of the day, he and his friends would often sit at a piano, writing and singing minstrel songs through the night. Eventually, Foster would learn to blend the two genres to write some of his best work.

In 1846 Foster moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and became a bookkeeper with his brother's steamship company. While in Cincinnati Foster penned his first hit songs, among them "Oh! Susanna". It would prove to be the anthem of the California Gold Rush in 1848/1849. In 1849 he published Foster's Ethiopian Melodies, which included the hit song "Nelly Was a Lady", made famous by the Christy Minstrels.

Then he returned to Pennsylvania and signed a contract with the Christy Minstrels. It was during this period that Foster would write most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Old Folks at Home" (also known as "Suwannee River," 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), "Hard Times Come Again No More" (1854) and "Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane McDowall.

Many of Foster's songs were of the blackface minstrel show tradition popular at the time. Foster sought, in his own words, to "build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order." He instructed white performers of his songs not to mock slaves but to get their audiences to feel compassion for them.

Although many of his songs held Southern themes, Foster only visited the South once, on a river-boat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans in 1852 on his honeymoon.

Foster attempted to make a living as a professional songwriter and may be considered a pioneer in this respect, since this field did not yet exist in the modern sense. Consequently, due in part to the poor provisions for music copyright and composer royalties at the time, Foster saw very little of the profits which his works generated for sheet music printers. Multiple publishers often printed their own competing editions of Foster's tunes, paying Foster nothing. For "Oh, Susanna", he received $100.

Foster moved to New York City in 1860. About a year later, his wife and daughter left him and returned to Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1862 his fortunes would decline, and as they did, so did the quality of his new songs. He began working with George Cooper early in 1863 whose lyrics were often humorous and designed to appeal to musical theater audiences. The Civil War helped ruin the commercial market for newly written music.

Stephen Foster died on January 13, 1864, at the age of 37. He had been impoverished while living at the North American Hotel at 30 Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (possessing exactly 38 cents) when he died. His brother Henry described the accident in the New York theater-district hotel that led to his death: confined to bed for days by a persistent fever, Stephen tried to call a chambermaid, but collapsed, falling against the washbasin next to his bed and shattering it, which gouged his head. It took three hours to get him to the hospital, and in that era before transfusions and antibiotics, he succumbed after three days. In his hand when he died there was a scrap of paper that simply said "dear friends and gentle hearts".

John Adams, Jr. (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) served as America's first Vice President (1789–1797) and as its second President (1797–1801). He was defeated for re-election in the "Revolution of 1800" by Thomas Jefferson.

Learned and thoughtful, John Adams was more remarkable as a political philosopher than as a politician. "People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity," he said, doubtless thinking of his own as well as the American experience.

Adams was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1735. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he early became identified with the patriot cause; a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, he led in the movement for independence.

During the Revolutionary War he served in France and Holland in diplomatic roles, and helped negotiate the treaty of peace. From 1785 to 1788 he was minister to the Court of St. James's, returning to be elected Vice President under George Washington.

Adams' two terms as Vice President were frustrating experiences for a man of his vigor, intellect, and vanity. He complained to his wife Abigail, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

When Adams became President, the war between the French and British was causing great difficulties for the United States on the high seas and intense partisanship among contending factions within the Nation.

His administration focused on France, where the Directory, the ruling group, had refused to receive the American envoy and had suspended commercial relations.

Adams sent three commissioners to France, but in the spring of 1798 word arrived that the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand and the Directory had refused to negotiate with them unless they would first pay a substantial bribe. Adams reported the insult to Congress, and the Senate printed the correspondence, in which the Frenchmen were referred to only as "X, Y, and Z."

The Nation broke out into what Jefferson called "the X. Y. Z. fever," increased in intensity by Adams's exhortations. The populace cheered itself hoarse wherever the President appeared. Never had the Federalists been so popular.

Congress appropriated money to complete three new frigates and to build additional ships, and authorized the raising of a provisional army. It also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, intended to frighten foreign agents out of the country and to stifle the attacks of Republican editors.

President Adams did not call for a declaration of war, but hostilities began at sea. At first, American shipping was almost defenseless against French privateers, but by 1800 armed merchantmen and U.S. warships were clearing the sea-lanes.

Despite several brilliant naval victories, war fever subsided. Word came to Adams that France also had no stomach for war and would receive an envoy with respect. Long negotiations ended the quasi war.

Sending a peace mission to France brought the full fury of the Hamiltonians against Adams. In the campaign of 1800 the Republicans were united and effective, the Federalists badly divided. Nevertheless, Adams polled only a few less electoral votes than Jefferson, who became President.

On November 1, 1800, just before the election, Adams arrived in the new Capital City to take up his residence in the White House. On his second evening in its damp, unfinished rooms, he wrote his wife, "Before I end my letter, I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."

Adams retired to his farm in Quincy. Here he penned his elaborate letters to Thomas Jefferson. Here on July 4, 1826, he whispered his last words: "Thomas Jefferson survives." But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier.

In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.

Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786.

Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington's Cabinet. He resigned in 1793.

Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.

As a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Republican electors, attempting to name both a President and a Vice President from their own party, cast a tie vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled the tie. Hamilton, disliking both Jefferson and Burr, nevertheless urged Jefferson's election.

When Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. He slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West, yet reduced the national debt by a third. He also sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary pirates, who were harassing American commerce in the Mediterranean. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803.

During Jefferson's second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson's attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular.

Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind "on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe."

He died on July 4, 1826.

A canal connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie was an early dream for New York settlers. The distance proposed for the canal was 363 miles, longer than had ever been attempted in the United States. Momentum for the project increased during the early teens; surveys continued, engineers were trained in England and Holland, and the federal government was expected to partially finance the canal. By April, 1817, a canal bill was passed, guaranteeing funds for the completion of the project. On July 4, 1817, ground was broken at Utica, New York and construction began simultaneously to the east and west.