Those Bills which failed to become Laws (1685-1732) make three volumes of manuscript, and though the measures proposed never became operative they show the drift of public opinion during the period covered by them. Several of these bills have been bound into the volumes of laws.
The student of colonial commerce and finances will find much to interest him in other manuscript volumes, now in the State library at Albany, to wit: Accounts of the Treasurer of the Province, under various titles, and covering the period from 1702 to 1776, eight volumes, and Manifest Books and Entry Books of the New York Custom House, 1728 to 1774, forty-three volumes. Much information coveted by the genealogist is hidden in the Indentures of Palatine Children, 1710 and 1711, two volumes; in forty volumes of Marriage Bonds, 1752 to 1783, of which an index was published in 1860 under the title New York Marriages; and in the records kept in the office of the clerk of the Court of Appeals,—Files of Wills, from 1694 to 1800, and of Inventories, 1727 to 1798.
Out of the 28 volumes of Council Minutes, 1668 to 1783, everything relating to the legislative business before the council has been published by the State of New York in the Journal of the Provincial Council. The unpublished parts of these records—the seven volumes of “Warrants of Survey, Licenses to Purchase Indian Lands,” 1721 to 1766, the fourteen “Books of Patents,” 1664 to 1770, the nineteen “Books of Deeds,” 1659 to 1774, and the thirty-four volumes of “Land Papers,” from 1643 to 1775—give as complete a history of the way in which the colony of New York gained its population as at this day it is possible to obtain without following the many private histories of real estate. The above-mentioned “Books of Deeds” contain papers of miscellaneous character, widely differing from deeds, such as commissions, letters of denization, licenses of schoolmasters, etc. Of the “Land Papers” a Calendar was published by the State in 1864.[495]
A public-spirited citizen of Albany, General John Tayler Cooper, enriched in 1850 the State library with twenty-two volumes of manuscripts, containing the correspondence of Sir William Johnson, the Indian commissioner. This correspondence covers the period from 1738 to 1774, and is important for the political, Indian, social, and religious history of New York. Extracts from it appeared in Dr. O’Callaghan’s Documentary History of New York (vol. ii.).[496]
Less important for the period treated of in this chapter are the Clinton Papers, especially the later series; but of the first importance in the study of the French wars are the Letters of Colonel John Bradstreet, deputy quartermaster-general, and The Letters of General Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief in America, dated New York, Albany, etc., from 1755 to 1771, a manuscript volume presented to the State library by the Rev. Wm. B. Sprague, D. D.[497]
An Abridgment of the Records of Indian Affairs, transacted in the Colony of New York from 1678 to 1751, with a preface by the compiler, is the work of Peter Wraxall, secretary for Indian affairs. It is a manuscript of 224 pages, dated at New York, May 10, 1754.[498] It is to be regretted that Wraxall’s complete record of these transactions has not been preserved, as the few extracts of them handed down to us in the Council Minutes and in the Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York give us a great deal of curious and interesting information.[499]
The religious life in the colony of New York during the early part of the eighteenth century, as seen from the Episcopal point of view, is well depicted in a manuscript volume (107 pp. folio), Extracts from Correspondence of the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts with the Missionaries T. Payer, S. Seabury, and others, from 1704 to 1709.[500] The history of trade and business is likewise illustrated in the Commercial Letters of the firm P. & R. Livingston, New York and Albany, from 1733 to 1738, and of Boston and Philadelphia merchants during the same period, giving us a picture of mercantile transactions at that time which a number of account-books of N. De Peyster, treasurer of the colony and merchant in the city of New York, and of the firm of Beverley Robinson & Morrison Malcom, in Fredericksburg, now Patterson, Putnam County, N. Y., help to fill out.[501]
[II.] Cartography and Boundaries of the Middle Colonies. (By Mr. Fernow and the Editor.)—The following enumeration of maps includes, among others, those of a general character, as covering the several middle colonies jointly, and they run parallel in good part with the sequence named in an earlier section[502] on the “Cartography of Louisiana and the Mississippi Basin under the French Domination,” so that many of the maps mentioned there may be passed over or merely referred to here.[503]
There was little definite knowledge of American geography manifested by the popular gazetteers of the early part of the last century,[504] to say nothing of the strange misconceptions of some of the map-makers of the same period.[505]
A German geographer, well known in the early years of the eighteenth century, was Johann Baptist Homann, who, having been a monk, turned Protestant and cartographer, and at nearly forty years of age set up, in 1702, as a draftsman and publisher of maps at Nuremberg,[506] giving his name till his death, in 1724, to about two hundred maps.[507] Homann’s career was a successful one; he became, in 1715, a member of the Academy of Science at Berlin, and was made the official geographer of the Emperor Charles of Germany and of Peter the Great of Russia. A son succeeded to the business in 1724, and, on his death in 1730, the imprint of the family was continued by “the heirs of Homann,” at the hands of some university friends of the son. Under this authority we find a map, Die Gross Britannischen Colonial Laender in Nord-America in Special Mappen (Homannsche Erben, Nuremberg), in which nearly the whole of New York is called “Gens Iroquois,” or “Irokensium.”