LITMIR.BIZ

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and independent.”⁸⁸

      Providing the leaven of polite society in Albany were the Schuylers and several other interrelated “inhabitants of the upper settlement,” who once a year went to New York City. There, “at a very early period a better style of manners and polish prevailed . . . than in any of the neighboring provinces.” This “pleasing and intelligent society” was most in evidence around the British governor, where “a kind of a little court kept.” Grant favorably describes Sir Henry Moore as a “show governor” whose “gay, good natured, and well bred, affable and courteous” demeanor seemed primarily intended “to keep the governed in good humor.” The government house was the scene of frequent “festivities and weekly concerts.” Within this circle, Grant describes the Schuylers and other leading Albany families as “conscientious exiles,” allied through intermarriage and upbringing to the “primitive” Albany settlers yet committed to the “liberality of mind and manners which so distinguished them from the less enlightened inhabitants of their native city.” Grant praises Catalina Schuyler, the matron of the Albany Schuyler home, for the “singular merit” of being able to move between “this comparatively refined society” and “the homely good sense and primitive manners of her fellow citizens at Albany, free from fastidiousness and disgust.”⁸⁹

      The locus for polite society in Albany and the site of an emerging public sphere was the Schuyler home, called the Flatts, which was a few miles outside town. The house was “an academy for the best morals and manners.” In 1709, Philip Schuyler, Catalina’s husband, had returned from London with a small library of newspapers and books that were apparently read throughout the extended family. Catalina was said to begin and end each day with Scripture and spend no less than several hours in “light reading, essays, biography, poetry, etc.” Under the supervision of Catalina and Philip, the family hosted meetings with provincial leaders, strategy sessions with British army officers, and assemblies where peace treaties or alliances were worked out with various nations. In these endeavors, Grant recalled, the Schuylers pointedly mixed “serious and important counsels with convivial cheerfulness, and domestic ease and familiarity.” Dinner parties regularly included the family, close friends, visitors “of worth or talent,” military guests, and “friendless travelers.” The talk around the table was “always rational, generally instructive, and often cheerful.” Frequently a “new set of guests” arrived in the afternoon for tea. Catalina and Philip also presided over a “Lyceum” at their home, where “questions in religion and morality, too weighty for table talk, were leisurely and coolly discussed; and plans of policy and various utility arranged.” The larger purpose of social life at the Flatts, Grant acutely observed, was to employ “the rays of intellect . . . to unite the jarring elements of which the community was composed, and to suggest to those who had power without experience, the means of mingling in due proportions its various materials for the public utility.”⁹⁰

      Despite the incubation of polite society in the Schuyler home, as late as the 1740s, Albany remained a place where, according to the visitor and Master Mason Alexander Hamilton, “there was no variety of choise, either of company or conversation.”⁹¹ Large-scale change began in 1754 with the arrival of refugees from the French and Indian Wars, who almost doubled the town’s population, from eighteen hundred to three thousand. The arrival of as many as fourteen hundred officers and soldiers, all of whom were quartered in Albany homes, followed in 1757.⁹² Among these troops were officers who were “younger, and more gay,” and, Grant tells us, encouraged the formation of “a sect . . . among the younger people, who seemed resolved to assume a lighter style of dress and manners, and to borrow their taste in those respects from their friends.” This rustling of polite society among his younger church members “alarmed and aggrieved” Theodorus Frelinghuysen Jr., the town’s Dutch minister. The eldest son of the Dutch minister who had helped begin the Great Awakening in New Jersey, Frelinghuysen focused his wrath on the manners and entertainments of the young British officers, who “were themselves a lie” and therefore deeply threatened the “truth” of Dutch life. In keeping with his Reformed Calvinist convictions, Frelinghuysen declared that those who, in the name of politeness, gave themselves over to the vainglory of fashionable display, the levity of wit, the consumption of luxurious goods, and the idleness of dancing and gaming faced the terrors of divine judgment.⁹³ The Common Council efforts to get rid of these invasive people, through unequal taxation and selective enforcement of laws, aided the minister’s crusade.⁹⁴

      Nevertheless, a 1760s wave of Scots-Irish and English immigrants and subsequent economic growth transformed the community from an isolated trading post into a bustling commercial center. These developments provoked new economic tensions between wealthy “gentlemen” and landless poor; social and religious divisions among the town’s three ethnic churches (Presbyterian, Anglican, and Dutch Reformed); and political divisions between the newcomers and the largely Dutch Common Council. Albany’s two colonial lodges were the first cultural institutions outside the churches to appear in the community. What became Union Lodge in 1765 was originally a British military lodge, which had arrived with the troops quartered in the city over the winter of 1757–58. Masters Lodge was founded in 1768. The new fraternity attracted leaders from throughout the community, though it drew heavily from British newcomers.

      Though more than two-thirds of Albany’s prewar Masons were of British descent— including the most prominent Scots-Irish and English merchants, some of the non-Dutch members of the Common Council, and the ministers of the Presbyterian and the Anglican churches—a number of Dutch merchants, aldermen, and church members joined them. For the members of the two Reformed churches, joining the lodge, with its freedom of thought and religious toleration, meant setting aside denominational convictions. At the same time, the inclusion of Presbyterian, Anglican, and Dutch Church members in the fraternity, where only a generation earlier the Dutch had steadfastly resisted the imposition of an Anglican church on their town, was a watershed of interethnic cooperation and a harbinger of postwar interreligious fellowship. Although the more affluent and older Dutch were less willing to join the lodge than their English, Scots-Irish, and Yankee peers, Albany’s Masonic fraternity was the first local society to bridge the community’s ethnic and religious divisions.⁹⁵

      The membership of Albany’s first Masonic lodge suggests Freemasonry’s emergence as part of the town’s expanding public sphere. Richard Cartwright was the master of the first lodge, which met in his tavern, the King’s Arms, one of only two in town. He had been a British soldier stationed in Albany, and after completing his service, he joined its Saint Peter’s Anglican Church and established his tavern. The King’s Arms was a focal point for the postal service, land and lottery sales, the boarding and stabling of visitors, political meetings (including the first meeting of the Sons of Liberty), and monthly gatherings of the Masonic lodge. Entering into this largely British social setting were younger-generation Dutchmen, such as Leonard Gansevoort. Descended from one of the original Dutch families and having married up into the affluent and polite Cuyler family, Gansevoort was a Dutch Church officer and later a member of the local Committee of Correspondence. The brotherhood also welcomed men like the Scots-Irish immigrant Matthew Watson, who came to Albany in the 1760s, worked as a tailor, and became an elder of the Presbyterian church, and the Boston-born merchant John W. Wendell, who became a member of the Common Council and served as a trustee of the Presbyterian church. Despite the Calvinist convictions of their respective Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches, men such as Gansevoort, Watson, and Wendell entered Freemasonry in Albany. The democratizing social practices and benevolent social philosophy of the “polite” society nurtured in the Schuyler home had foreshadowed this mixing together of established British soldiers, Scots-Irish and Yankee immigrants, and the rising generation of Dutch town leaders. In 1768, the members of this newly formed brotherhood, some of whom would play key roles in the Revolutionary War, paraded their importance to the community in a Saint John’s Day march from the King’s Arms to Saint Peter’s Church.⁹⁶

      Though Albany Masons could be found on either side of the emerging revolutionary fervor, together they displayed a heightened civic consciousness. Beginning in 1766 with the violent local reaction to the British imposition of a new tax on newsprint and continuing with the formation of the local Sons of Liberty and the later election of a Committee of Correspondence to the Continental Congress,

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