Abraham Yates, Jr. papers

1688-1920s [bulk 1754-1795] D

Abraham Yates Jr. (1724-1796) of Albany, New York, was an American lawyer, politician, and political essayist of the Founding Era. He was an Anti-Federalist during the Confederation and Constitutional periods, known for his writings as "Rough Hewer" and "Sidney" in the New York press. Yates held many elected and appointed offices, notably Albany alderman (1753-1773), high sheriff of the city and county of Albany (1754-1759), chairman of the Albany Committee of Correspondence (1775-1776), and member of the four New York Provincial Congresses and the State's first legislative convention (1775-1777), chairing the committee to write the State's constitution. He then served as New York State senator (1777-1790), Continental Loan Officer for New York (1779-1786), delegate to the Confederation Congress (1787-1788), and mayor of Albany (1790-1796). Abraham Yates was the son of blacksmith Christoffel Yates (1684-1754) and Catalyntje Winne, and the grandson of Joseph Yates (d. 1730), an English soldier who settled in Albany. For a time, the family spelled its name as Yetts. Yates added the suffix "Jr." to distinguish himself from others bearing his name. Notable relatives in the Albany-Schenectady area included his eldest brother, Joseph C. Yates (1707-1748); nephews Peter W. Yates (1747-1826) and Christopher P. Yates (1750-1815); and his cousin, the legislator and jurist Robert Yates (1738-1801). Robert Yates was the son of Joseph Yates (born 1714) and Maria Dunbar, and the grandson of Christoffel's brother Robert Yates (1688-1748).

Yates worked his way from shoemaker to merchant, lawyer and officeholder. He entered Albany's civic life in his twenties as fire warden and constable, and served annual terms as an assistant alderman and alderman for the Third Ward in Albany's Common Council from 1753 to 1773.

Abraham Yates Jr. married Antje De Ridder (1726-1795) sometime before the baptism of a son in 1747. Of their several children, only their daughter Susanna (1762-1840) survived to adulthood. She married Abraham G. Lansing (1756-1834) in 1779, residing in the Yates household with her husband. Lansing assisted Yates in his Continental Loan Office duties and later held positions in county and state government. He and his brother John Lansing Jr. (1754-1829?), a lawyer and politician, were both early political proteges of Yates. Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr., along with Alexander Hamilton, were the three New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; Anti-Federalists Yates and Lansing left the Convention in protest.

In Yates' lifetime, Albany grew from an Anglo-Dutch provincial fur-trading center and Hudson River market town to become the capital of New York State (1797). It was incorporated as a chartered city in 1686, and held strategic importance during the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and the Revolutionary War (1775-1783).

After attending the Albany Congress in June-July 1754, Yates was a secretary to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for several months. In the Fall of that same year, Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey appointed Yates as high sheriff of the city and county of Albany, a position he held until 1759. Yates benefitted from the support of Robert Livingston (1708-1790), third lord of Livingston Manor. His duties as sheriff included enforcing tenant evictions on manor lands and dealing with New England squatters.

His tenure coincided with the most active years of the French and Indian War in the province. The growth of Albany as a garrison and staging area for troops in northern campaigns placed great stress on the populace. Yates confronted British military authorities in Albany such as the Fourth Earl of Loudoun, commander of British forces in North America, for disregarding civil law; quartering troops in households, including Yates' home; and condoning the disorderly and sometimes brutal behavior of troops.

Yates was admitted to the bar in October 1759. Details of his legal education and clerking are uncertain, but his name has been associated with attorneys Peter Silvester (1734–1808) and William Corry (about 1710-1763). William Livingston (1723-1790) of Albany and New York, an attorney and future Revolutionary leader, advised Yates during Yates' conflict with the British while sheriff.

Yates now supported his family as a lawyer and merchant, in addition to income gained from his public duties and real property interests. At times, he fell afoul of prevailing alliances and class interests. Yates lost the sheriff's appointment in 1759, the race for a provincial General Assembly seat in 1761, and re-election to the Common Council in 1773. His artisan past and reliance on public offices for his livelihood provided campaign fodder for his conservative and well-to-do political rivals, who called him a cobbler. Lacking the social standing and wealth of elite families such as the Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the Livingstons, Yates in fact represented a rising and more radical middle-class, a new force in politics.

The American Revolution marked Yates' rise to prominence in provincial and state affairs. He chaired the Albany Committee of Correspondence, the de facto government of Albany, in 1775 and 1776. Yates was elected to the four New York Provincial Congresses spanning May 1775 to July 10, 1776, when the Fourth Congress, meeting at White Plains after British forces occupied lower New York, became the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York. On August 1, 1776, the Convention created a committee to form a plan of government and bill of rights, and Yates, already a member, was appointed chairman not long after. He joined others in drafting the document, although illness accounted for his absence from the Convention from late December, probably until his attendance was again recorded in mid-April, 1777. The Convention adopted the final draft of the Constitution at Kingston on April 20, 1777. Yates had participated in the final deliberations, and joined a small group charged with implementing the constitution, completing their plan on May 8, 1777.

Yates was also a member of the Committee of Safety (later the Council of Safety), which acted from 1775 to early 1778 as an executive body for the formative state government when not in session. He served as temporary president on several occasions in the Provincial Congress, the Convention, and later in Congress, and as president of the Convention in late August-September, 1776.

The New York State Legislature met for the first time at Kingston on September 9, 1777. It met variously at Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany, and New York City (beginning in 1784), finally settling at Albany in 1797. Yates served in the state senate from 1777 to 1790 during the long administration of Anti-Federalist Governor George Clinton, twice serving on the State's Council of Appointment. In 1790 Clinton appointed him mayor of Albany.

The British defeat at Saratoga in October 1777 led to France's alliance with the United States by treaty in February 1778. On November 15, 1777, Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation (ratified March 1, 1781.) France's entry into the war and resulting European loans gave impetus to the reorganization of the Treasury (1778-1781) and its financial system. Yates saw this as an important marker in the movement for a strong national government, manifested in a new executive department exercising fiscal control under Robert Morris ("the Financier"), the Superintendent of Finance from 1781 to 1784.

Clinton appointed Yates as Continental Loan Officer for the State of New York on October 20, 1779. Yates held that office until May 1, 1786, when he was removed by a Congressional resolution for refusing to take a new oath of office with a secrecy clause. The position brought him into conflict with Robert Morris, who appointed Alexander Hamilton as Continental Receiver of Taxes for New York in 1782, and then with the Board of Trade, re-established in 1785.

In the Spring of 1781, the nation faced financial disaster. State requisitions to Congress, the method of funding under the Articles, were erratic and unreliable in wartime. The need for a stable income to meet expenses and pay debt led to two failed attempts to establish federal taxation, the Impost of 1781 and the Impost of 1783. Each resolution required unanimous ratification, difficult to achieve. After Rhode Island blocked the first impost in 1782, nationalists offered a modified version in 1783.

Like others, Yates supported the first impost to fund the war, but during the post-war period came to see the independent source of revenue, collected by Congressional officers, as a threat to state sovereignty. Yates took to the Albany and New York newspapers to fight the 1783 impost, writing essays under the pen name "Rough Hewer." The first, by "A Rough Hewer," appeared on August 4, 1783. Yates was a prolific writer and sometimes wrote extended pieces in serial form. The names "Sidney," "Grotius," and "A Citizen" are also found in his draft writings.

Yates wrote two political pamphlets in 1786. After his removal as Continental Loan Officer, Yates published relevant papers defending himself in Resolutions and Extracts from the Journals of the Honorable the Congress relative to the Continental Loan-Offices in the Several States; and Certain Letters …. (Albany: printed by Charles R. Webster, 1786; Evans 20080). His Political Papers, Addressed to the Advocates for a Congressional Revenue in the State of New-York (New York: printed by Shepard Kollock, 1786; Evans 20168) reprinted four 1785 newspaper essays against the impost by "Rough Hewer" (Yates) and one by "Rough Hewer Jr." (a different writer, according to Yates).

Anti-impost forces in the New York State Legislature, Yates among them, defeated ratification of the tax measure in February 1787, despite earlier vacillation by the state, and efforts to save it by Senator Philip Schuyler and Assemblyman Alexander Hamilton. Yates abhorred the "funding system" of the nationalists and opposed the maintenance of a national debt for the rest of his life. The failure of the impost was the last in a series of events leading to the call for a constitutional convention, which met in May.

It angered Yates that the nationalists, now Federalists, overstepped Congress's charge to amend the Articles at the Philadelphia Convention, replacing them with a new constitution for a federal form of government. Recalling political writings of the English Radical Whigs and historical examples of conspiracies and cabals from his readings, Yates questioned the motivations and means behind Federalist goals. He feared that corruption and the abuse of power would lead to tyranny and the loss of liberty if left unchecked.

After the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787, Yates warned against ratification without amendment and a bill of rights. The New York Ratifying Convention met in Poughkeepsie on June 17, 1788, ratifying the Constitution and proposing amendments on July 26. During that time, New Hampshire ratified, and the Constitution was officially adopted. Yates and other Anti-Federalists continued pushing for amendments to guarantee the protection of rights, promised by Federalists to ensure ratification. In February 1790, New York approved eleven of the original twelve proposed amendments. The ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights were ratified in 1791 by a majority of the state legislatures.

Abraham Yates served as a delegate to the Confederation Congress in New York City for two terms, in 1787 and 1788. In 1788 Yates helped establish the Albany Register, an Anti-Federalist newspaper printed by Robert Barber. Yates was not a member of the Ratifying Convention of June-July 1788. He was then sitting in Congress in New York City, having attended the State legislative session earlier that year. Yates was not, however, one of the New York delegates voting on September 13, 1788 to set the date and place for the new federal government to go into effect, although he had earlier agreed to vote affirmatively if circumstances required his presence. In the previous term, he was the only delegate to vote against passing the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787.

Yates' lifelong belief in the usefulness of historical knowledge permeated his writings. Like other seekers in the Age of Enlightenment, he explored early and contemporary works on natural law and the nature of government, and studied histories of nations and empires for lessons to be gleaned from them. His life in Albany led him to early sources on the history of New Netherland and relations of the Dutch West India Company and European settlers with Native Americans, the loss of the colony to Great Britain in 1664, and the creation of Albany's charter. At some point in his busy career, most likely in the 1780s and 1790s, he applied himself to writing a history of Albany to 1776, left unfinished at his death.

Abraham Yates Jr. continued holding offices in Albany after the Common Council was re-established in 1778, serving variously as recorder, receiver of goods, and postmaster. His mayoral administration (from 1790 until his death on June 30, 1796) was marked by public improvements. The Legislature appointed Yates to be a presidential elector in 1792 when Anti-Federalist (now Democratic-Republican) George Clinton ran for president. Yates demonstrated his belief in the importance of education as a founding trustee of Union College, established in Schenectady in 1795. He wrote for the press until the end of his life.

Sources include:

Bielinski, Stefan. Abraham Yates, Jr., and the New Political Order in Revolutionary New York. Albany : New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1975.

Shorto, Russell. Revolution Song : a Story of American Freedom. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2018]

Wolf, Stephan. Abraham Yates, Jr. : vergessener Gründervater der amerikanischen Republik. Münster : LIT Verlag, 1997.