Monthly Archives: October 2013

Washington Irving’s Iconic New York Stories

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Washington Irving’s Iconic New York Stories:  Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

By Susan Ingalls Lewis

John_Quidor: Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (Smithsonian)

John Quidor: Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (Smithsonian)

Despite the fact that he spent many of his productive years abroad, Washington Irving (1783-1859) was a quintessential New Yorker.  The man who coined the nicknames Gotham for New York City, and Knickerbocker for New Yorker also enshrined the Hudson River village of  Sleepy Hollow (formerly North Tarrytown) and the Catskill Mountains in the collective American memory.  His fictional characters Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane are recognizable to most of us today through various adaptations of their stories (some having very little relationship to the originals, as with the current Fox series Sleepy Hollow, a surprise hit just renewed for a second season).  What witches are to Massachusetts, the Headless Horseman is to New York State; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is New York’s ultimate Halloween story.  In fact, after the village of North Tarrytown lost its General Motors assembly plant in 1996, it actually changed its name to Sleepy Hollow to increase tourism, and the new TV series has furthered that goal.

Sunnyside_Tarrytown_Currier_and_Ives_crop_closeupIrving’s most famous stories are not just part of New York State history because he was from New York – born in New York City, died in his cottage Sunnyside (now a National Historic Landmark) in Tarrytown—but because they also reflect the history of the period in which he lived and wrote.  Rip Van Winkle highlights the difference between New York as a pre-Revolutionary provincial backwater and a growing state; after his twenty-year sleep, Rip awakes to find that the “very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility . . .”   Though Irving is exaggerating colonial New York’s lethargy for literary effect, the period following the Revolution—the Early Republican period—was precisely the time when New York began to surpass other states in population, commerce, and industrial development.  The changes Rip notices are the very changes that had happened in Irving’s own lifetime (he was in his mid-thirties when these stories were written).  Similarly, Irving’s nostalgia for the “old” New York is evident in this paragraph from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

. . . it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New-York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.

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Benedict Arnold’s Boot (Part 2)

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BENEDICT ARNOLD’S BOOT:  The rise and fall of a New York hero (continued, part 2)

By Susan Ingalls Lewis

Last week, we took Arnold through the fall of 1776, and the Battle at Valcour Island.  In the winter of 1776/77, despite support from George Washington and General Horatio Gates, Arnold was passed over for promotion to major general and threatened to resign.  Enemies—he seems to have made many—had turned Congress against him.  However, on his way to Philadelphia to discuss the matter that April, Arnold learned that the British were about to attack Ridgefield, Connecticut, and he joined the defense, led the militia, and was wounded again in the left leg—the very leg represented in the boot monument on  the field at Saratoga.

An artist's view of Arnold in the thick of the battle at Saratoga

An artist’s view of Arnold in the thick of the battle at Saratoga

In 1777, Arnold’s military career reached its zenith. He was finally promoted after his action and wounding in Connecticut, although he continued to resent that his seniority was less than others who had been promoted in the interim between when he felt the promotion was deserved and when it actually took place.  In addition, he had to defend himself against charges of corruption brought by an enemy officer.  Although Arnold threatened to retire, Washington insisted that he was needed for the defense against the British invasion of New York from the north and west.  Coming down from Canada, General Burgoyne’s army recaptured Ticonderoga in July, and Barry St. Leger’s smaller band of British soldiers, Hessians, Canadians, loyalists, and Native Americans (including New York’s Mohawk leader Joseph Brant) had set out from Niagara in the west.  If these forces could meet with an expected expedition up the Hudson from New York City, it was hoped by the British, and feared by the Americans, that New England would be cut off from the rest of the states.

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Benedict Arnold’s Boot (Part 1)

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BENEDICT ARNOLD’S BOOT:  The rise and fall of a New York hero (part 1)

By Susan Ingalls Lewis

The Boot Monument at the Saratoga Battlefield

The Boot Monument at the Saratoga Battlefield

Why would I call Benedict Arnold both a New Yorker and a hero?  Arguably the most famous traitor in American history—a man whose name is still synonymous with betrayal—Arnold was born and grew up in Connecticut, and died in England.  Yet the momentous events of his career took place in New York, and Arnold was one of the most important Revolutionary War heroes before he transformed himself into a villain.  In fact, it was his fall from grace that makes his treason so notorious.  As one of the most demonized figures in our history, it is not surprising that the memorial to his service is simply a mysterious sculpture of a boot on which his name never appears.  This unique tribute, located on the battlefield at Saratoga and erected in 1887, offers a visual reference to the wounds that Arnold sustained there, and is dedicated simply to “‘the most brilliant soldier’ of the Continental Army.”

Arnold was not only the hero of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777—the pivotal battle of the war—but also contributed to the U.S. victory over Great Britain through (1) the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, (2) the building of the first navy and the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, and (3) lifting the siege on Fort Stanwix and thus driving one prong of the British invasion back to Niagara in 1777.  In addition, Arnold’s military career was noteworthy for numerous acts of ingenuity and courage.

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New York: Aviation Pioneer

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New York:  Aviation Pioneer

By Susan Ingalls Lewis

The story of aviation in the United States usually begins with the Wright Brothers and their famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.  Yet the Wrights, though they were the first to successfully test a flying machine, are only a small part of the story of the development of powered aircraft.    New York State was actually at the center of aviation pioneering in the years between 1908 and 1929, with developments concentrated first near Keuka Lake, then on Hempstead Plains.  This period of aviation history highlights New York as a center of innovation, leadership, competition, and capitalism.

Curtiss Junebug

Curtiss Junebug

The first name in New York aviation was Glenn H. Curtiss of Hammondsport New York (Steuben County) in the Finger Lakes region of the state.  Curtiss became known as “The Fastest Man of Earth” in 1907, when the “Hercules” motorcycle he designed, built, and raced set a speed record of more than 136 miles per hour.  By 1908, Curtiss had moved from motorcycles to flying, and began testing his planes by taking off on the frozen surface of Keuka Lake.  When Scientific American organized a three-part contest that year, Curtiss set out to win all three competitions.  “On July 4, 1908, the publication’s editors, along with members of the Aero Club of America traveled to the tiny hamlet of Hammondsport, N.Y., to witness the first pre-announced, public flight of an aircraft in America, the ‘June Bug,’ which won the first leg of the three-part competition” by flying in a straight line for 1 kilometer (.62 miles).[1]  Although the Wright brothers had preceded Curtiss’s flight by several years, his was the first scheduled, publicized test of an airplane.  The following year Curtiss flew 25 kilometers (15 miles) in his “Golden Flyer” biplane to win the second stage of the contest.  Finally, in 1910 he won both the third leg of the Scientific American competition in “The Albany Flyer,” which he piloted from Albany to New York City.   Curtiss not only designed and flew his planes, but built the special high-powered, water-cooled V-8 engines that ran them.

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Matilda Joslyn Gage

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Matilda Joslyn Gage:  New York’s Neglected Suffragist

By Susan Ingalls Lewis

Most New Yorkers probably recognize the names of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, though we may not realize that these advocates for women’s rights spent most of their lives in New York State.  But few have ever heard of a third leader from New York:  Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898).  Like Anthony and Stanton, Gage began her activism in the abolition movement, but devoted most of her life to fighting gender inequality.  With them, she was a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and a co-author and co-editor of the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage, published 1881-1886.  Gage also became an advocate for Native American rights.  Yet even historians of women, like myself, know little about Gage’s beliefs and accomplishments.

Matilda Joslyn GageMatilda Joslyn was born in the town of Cicero, in Onondaga County, north of Syracuse and south of Oneida Lake, where her family was active in the Underground Railroad.  As a married woman and mother, Gage lived in Fayetteville, a village east of Syracuse, where her home also became a refuge for enslaved people attempting to escape their bondage.  New York’s strategic position on the way to Canada made the state a prime location for “stops” on the route from slavery to freedom beyond U.S. borders.  Gage’s antislavery sentiments were shared by her husband, a merchant, her Baptist Church, and many in her Fayetteville community, who became strong supporters of the new Republican Party and the Union cause in the Civil War.

Although Gage did not attend the famous 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls (neither did Anthony), she was a speaker at the 1852 National Convention for Women’s Rights held in Syracuse, New York.  Her speech included these words:

Although our country makes great professions in regard to general liberty, yet the right to particular liberty, natural equality, and personal independence, of two great portions of this country, is treated, from custom, with the greatest contempt; and color in the one instance, and sex in the other, are brought as reasons why they should be so derided; and the mere mention of such, natural rights is frowned upon, as tending to promote sedition and anarchy.[1]

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