Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

The collection contains documents about land holdings in and around Yonkers and Westchester and Dutchess Counties, New York owned by the wealthy Philipse, Gouverneur, Verplanck, Livingston, and other allied families. Included are grants, patents, deeds, indentures, transfers, wills, leases, accounts, maps, and records of civil and chancery court actions. These records not only chronicle legal actions, riots and uprisings of the European colonial settlers related to land disputes against these wealthy colonial settler families, but also record their interactions with the true landowners the Wappinger Confederacy.

Letters, manuscripts, and documents collected by Crary primarily for use in the writing of her book on American Tories, THE PRICE OF LOYALTY (1973). Many of the items relate to the Continental Army, and especially to the Company of Captain Nathan Peirce in the Green Mountain Boys Regiment of Seth Warner (1743-1784). Also included are letters from John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Indian agent Israel Chapin, William Harris Crawford (1772-1834), Charleston merchant and loyalist John Cruden, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), Woodbury Langdon (1738/9-1805); and others. Also, documents relating to the commands of Benedict Arnold, John Burgoyne, Lord Cornwallis, David Wooster, and many others; deeds to land in Montgomery County, N.Y. signed by Jeremiah Van Rensselaer (1738-1810), and others; an orderly book belonging to Ichabod Norton; and a journal kept on Gibralter, apparently by the governor, George Augustus Eliott (1717-1790). A volume of muster rolls and troop encampment data of the Army of Great Britain contains copies of letters intercepted from Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris.

Correspondence, mansucripts, transcripts, documents, photographs, and printed materials assembled by Vance for his dissertation, a biography of Myles Cooper (1737-1785), clergyman, Loyalist, and second president of King's College (now, Columbia University) from 1763 until 1775. There are transcripts of very many letters and manuscripts by and about Myles Cooper and King's College along with pertinent photographs and printed materials which Vance collected from American, English, and Scottish sources. There are also materials about Samuel Seabury (1729-1796) and Isaac Sears (1730-1786) whose biographical entries Vance wrote for the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRPAHY. Among the correspondents are Gertrude Atherton, Nicholas Murray Butler, Marcus Benjamin, Dixon Ryan Fox, and Dumas Malone.

Correspondence and legal and business papers of Peter Van Schaack and his family. The collection includes letters to and from Egbert Benson, Henry Cruger, James Duane, William Laight, Theodore Sedgwick, Peter Silvester, John Vardill, and many others. The letters deal with such subjects as taxation, the siege of Boston, George Washington, Tories, the Jay Treaty, Shays' Rebellion, and the many prominent people with whom Van Schaack was acquainted, including the Jay family and Gouverneur Morris. There is a large number of letters to and from his brother, Henry Van Schaack (1733-1823). The correspondence contains many political and social opinions regarding America and England before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. Many of the legal documents concern the disputed claims to the Van Rensselaer properties in Claverack and Westenhook, N.Y., as well as land claims around Kinderhoek, N.Y. Henry Cruger Van Schaack added to the collection more letters from well-known people as well as legal and family papers. These are mostly dated in the mid-19th century, and deal in part with the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, the Berkshire Iron Works, and similar business ventures. Many documents are Colonial-era deeds or concern early land disputes such as the New York-Massachusetts boundary dispute.