Robert G.

Albion's "The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860"

The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 by Robert Greenhalgh Albion
Review by: Clifton Hood
Reviews in American History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 171-179
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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IN RETROSPECT
ROBERT G. ALBION'S
THE RISE OF NEW YORKPORT, 1815-1860
Clifton Hood

Robert Greenhalgh Albion. TheRise of New YorkPort, 1815-1860. New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939; reprint edition, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984. xv + 485 pages. Figures, maps, appendixes, bibliography, and
index. $45 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Sixty years after it was published in 1939, Robert G. Albion's TheRise of New
YorkPort, 1815-1860 remains the standard account of New York City's
emergence as the dominant metropolis in North America. This book, which is
still in print today, is impressive for its prodigious research and for the broad,
transatlanticperspective it takes on urban growth. Yet Albion's study is also
in many ways old and outdated. Having been overtaken by the advent of
social history as the profession's dominant subfield and bypassed by the
newer theoretical and quantitative trends that prevail in economic history, it
now fits one definition of a scholarly classic: much cited, little read, seldom
discussed. A very long time indeed has passed since a survey of historians
taken in the early 1950s ranked The Rise of New YorkPort in the "honorable
mention" category of preferred works in American history.1
For someone who made his greatest mark with a study of New YorkCity,
Robert G. Albion took little interest in cities or their history. He instead
identified himself as a maritime historian. Most of the sixteen books that
Albion wrote, co-wrote, or edited during his long life dealt with some aspect
of the sea, including Square-Riggers
on Schedule:TheNew YorkSailing Packetsto
and
the
Cotton
Ports
(1938), Sea Lanesin Wartime:TheAmerican
England,France,
1775-1942
and
(1942),
Experience,
SeaportsSouthof the Sahara:TheAchievement
an
American
Service
(1959).2 His attachment to the sea began early.
of
Steamship
in
Born 1896, Albion grew up on the shores of Maine's Casco Bay, where he
spent much time on the water. After earning a B.A. in economics from
Bowdoin College and then serving as an infantry officer during World War I,
Albion entered graduate school at Harvard. Therehe developed his interest in
maritime history, writing a dissertation on the timber problem of the Royal
Reviews in American History 27 (1999) 171-179 @ 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 1999

Navy that was published in book form in 1926. As the title of this bookForests and Sea Power: The TimberProblemof the Royal Navy, 1652-1862suggests, Albion's early thinking about the oceans was strongly influenced by
Alfred T. Mahan and Frederick Jackson Turner. Borrowing from Mahan,
Albion saw the oceans as an arena of economic and military competition
whose control shaped the destiny of nations. Reacting to Turner, Albion
viewed the sea as a second frontier that had exerted a powerful, if underrated,
influence on American society. Albion, Samuel Eliot Morrison, and other
maritime historians believed that oceanic commerce had contributed significantly to the growth of the U.S. economy.3 They contended that American
historians had overlooked the importance of "the water frontier to the east."4
Albion wanted to lift scholarly knowledge and public awareness of
maritime history to the level that the Turnerian frontier commanded. As a
faculty member first at Princeton and then at Harvard, Albion offered a
course on oceanic history that was popular with students, who affectionately
called it "Boats."In addition to his writing and teaching, he participated in
many other aspects of maritime history-lecturing at the U.S. Naval Academy
and the Naval WarCollege; advising maritime museums; giving a pioneering
television course on the subject; and serving on the editorial board of the
quarterly journal AmericanNeptune. A festschrift published in his honor is
suitably illustrated with a photograph that shows a jovial Albion standing in
front of a sailing ship at Mystic Seaport. Albion died in 1983 in Groton,
Connecticut, not far from Long Island Sound.5
Albion's conception of maritime history was shaped by his understanding
of classical economics. He was primarily concerned with the organization of
economic activity and with the rationalization of maritime affairs. As he saw
it, the Atlantic world (and for Albion, maritime history largely meant the
Atlantic ocean) generally stopped at the shoreline and consisted of the ocean
itself and of efforts to organize and control it. He focused on the management
of shipping companies and, to a lesser extent, on the administration of the
navy, and he evaluated their effectiveness by how well they inaugurated new
techniques and policies that solved problems and led to greater efficiency.His
writings accordingly centered on company owners, navy brass, middle
managers, and ship captains rather than on sailors or dock workers. The
conflict in Albion's work is not among social groups but most of the time
between nature's unpredictability and the human impulse toward control
and some of the time between nations. There is not much sense in Albion's
work of the ocean as a place of fundamental cultural clashes or sharp social
disputes.
There is a strong triumphalist element in Albion's scholarship. Problems
are eventually solved: square-riggers are put on schedule, American steamships establish a commanding position south of the Sahara, the port of New

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HOOD / In Retrospect

173

York rises. Initially, Albion had planned The Rise of New YorkPort as the
middle volume of a trilogy that would examine New York City's entire
maritime history. It seems characteristic of Albion's optimism that he could
not bring himself to complete this trilogy by writing either the first volume,
on the colonial period when the port of New Yorklagged behind Boston and
Philadelphia, or the second one, on the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century
years when it achieved and then lost world dominance. One result of Albion's
frame of reference is that he sees New Yorkas a unique place rather than as a
type of port city. Largely because his primary interest is in the reasons for
New York's rise, Albion limits the extent of his urban comparisons to a
consideration of how New York differed from rival American seaports and
why it achieved success. By sticking to this question and stopping at the point
when New York became dominant, Albion does not put New York in the
context of major Atlantic port cities such as London, Liverpool, Hamburg,
Rotterdam, and Amsterdam.6
The Rise of New YorkPort was Albion's most highly regarded book and
established his reputation as an eminent maritime historian. If it is remembered chiefly as a work of city history, that is largely because the attempts of
Albion, Morrison, and other scholars to position maritime history as a
permanent historical subfield were ultimately fruitless, and so the professional niche into which TheRiseof New YorkPortbest fits today is that of urban
history. The irony is that TheRise of New YorkPort was actually Albion's most
ambitious effort to demonstrate the importance of the "second frontier" to
American life. It employs maritime history to explain the emergence of New
York as the dominant national metropolis and ties oceanic affairs directly to
national economic growth. Perhaps the best reason why TheRise of New York
Port deserves to be remembered as a work of maritime history rather than of
urban history is that it is a study of a port ratherthan of a city. Albion does not
connect New York's waterfront and maritime functions to the larger city; he
does not relate the port's commercial and technological changes to the city's
spatial and social development.' Nonetheless, the book has a much broader
scope than any of Albion's other monographs, which suffer from his limited
conception of maritime affairs as a realm of economic competition and
managerial efficiency. The book also displays great confidence and authority.
As its most perceptive reviewer noted, The Rise of New YorkPort was a
"masterly volume [that tells its story] clearly, dramatically, and authoritatively."8
The subject of the book is how the merchants of New Yorkestablished their
city as the leading American seaport. In 1800 New Yorkranked as the second
largest city in the United States, after Philadelphia. Although New York
finally surpassed Philadelphia to become the largest city in the country
twenty years later, even then it was scarcely dominant. In 1820 New Yorkhad

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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 1999

a population of 123,000, compared to 112,000 for the City of Brotherly Love.

But New Yorkboomed after 1820. By 1860 New Yorkhad a population of over
one million (including the independent city of Brooklyn) and was twice as big
as Philadelphia. Two-thirds of all U.S. imports, one-third of its exports, and 70
percent of its immigrants passed through New Yorkharbor on the eve of the
Civil War. In the four decades before the Civil War, New York went from
being a regional center to being the nation's trade, manufacturing, financial,
and communications center.
It is significant that Albion chose to address the issue of why New York
City achieved dominance, for it was not a new one. For over a century, New
York City history had been the purview of wealthy amateurs who waxed
enthusiastic over this very matter. As the Reverend Samuel Osgood bubbled
in 1867, New York City was "one of the marvels of the age, if not one of the
wonders of the world."9 For Osgood and other gentlemen amateurs, the
source of New York's splendors was clear: their own social class was
responsible for the city's greatness. Discomfited by rapid urban change and
particularly by immigration, these amateurs positioned themselves as the
caretakersof city history and sought to put New Yorkon a par with the great
European cities. Even though this hagiographical tradition, which remained
very much alive in the 1930s, might have deterred other professional historians from embarking on a study of the ascendancy of New York that would
center on its merchants, Albion was impervious to it. To be sure, Albion was
conservative in his politics and his scholarship, yet TheRiseof New YorkPort is
the product of a consummate outsider who was not inclined to celebrate New
York City. As a New Englander who felt little if any personal connection to
New York City, as a maritime historian who was making his only study of
New YorkCity, Albion could easily view New Yorkin broad perspective. Just
as tackling a new subject unleashed Albion's creative energies and let him
overcome some of maritime history's interpretationalbarriers,so his outsider
status let him avoid the trap of urban parochialism.
It is also noteworthy that Albion saw the rise of New York port as an
analytical problem that had to be explained one way or other. He does not
believe that geography alone determined urban success. Of course, Albion
does not neglect New York's natural advantages. He provides a thorough
analysis of the city's river-and-harborsystem that confirms its geographical
superiority to other North American seaports. New Yorkharbor,Albion tells
us, had five main geographical advantages: 1) a relatively short, seventeenmile long sea approach from the ocean to the berths in Manhattan; 2) the
Upper Bay, a large, interior harbor that protected shipping from storms;
3) deep anchorages directly alongside the East River, the main landing area
for sailing ships; 4) Long Island Sound, a safe "back door" route to New
England that sheltered coastal shipping from storms and enemy attack; and

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HOOD / In Retrospect

175

5) the Hudson River, a wide, deep channel that was navigable far into the
interior. But nature alone, Albion insists, explains little. Geographical determinism cannot account for why New York port lagged behind first Boston
and then Philadelphia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or why it
eventually achieved pre-eminence in the nineteenth century. Instead, Albion
rightly thinks that geography becomes important in a particular economic
context where natural advantages, urban leadership, technology, and markets
interact.
Albion was convinced that the key events that were responsible for the rise
of New YorkCity occurred in the early nineteenth century, that is, during the
same period as the city's takeoff itself. He examines New York's rise in the
context of a comparative framework. He contends that New York was
engaged in a rivalry for commercial supremacy with four other American
seaports-Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Although his adoption of this comparative approach represents a major
advance over earlier narrative histories that had focused exclusively on New
YorkCity, Albion's treatment of the other four ports is cursory. He conceives
of these seaports as being undifferentiated regional centers at the beginning of
his study, in 1815, and he does not examine their social and economic
structures or consider that a city's economic base, leadership, cultural traditions, or ethnic makeup may have shaped its evolution. Here again, Albion
separates the port from the city and does not ask how maritime functions
were interrelatedwith urban spatial and social developments. And, except for
a few remarks that single out Philadelphia for criticism for being "conservative, if not actually 'sleepy"' and for lacking "initiative and foresight,"Albion
regards the seaports as monolithic (pp. 374-75). He assumes that the leaders
of all five seaports shared the same goals and outlook but that only the
merchants of New Yorkshowed much spark in initiating economic improvements. It is not clear from The Rise of New YorkPort why New York's
merchants proved so different from those in the other ports. In a brief
overview of colonial New York,Albion implies that the city's founding as a
Dutch trading post may have produced a permanent orientation toward
commerce. However, he does not elaborate on this insight and the sources of
New York'suniqueness remain in doubt. On the whole, Albion takes the view
that Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston were losers that simply
failed to measure up. The last chapter in the book, "TheDisappointed Rivals,"
concludesthat the competing seaports "had missed their chance" and needed
to be roused "from their lethargy" (pp. 373, 377).
Albion says that the key to New York'ssuccess was this: "It drew to itself
the three major trade routes-from Europe, from the southern ports, and from
the West" (p. 10). He writes that New York gained a competitive edge over
rival seaports because its enterprising businessmen anticipated the growth of

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trade following the Napoleonic Wars and captured the bulk of it for themselves. Between 1815 and 1860, New York merchants made several improvements that exploited their city's geographical advantages and turned it into a
commercial emporium. The Erie Canal was easily the most dramatic of these
improvements. Completed in 1825, the canal extended 363 miles across
upstate New York, providing a water-level route from the Hudson River to
the Great Lakes that redirected much of the Midwestern trade through New
York City. Though Albion recognizes the Erie Canal's contributions, he
corrects earlier writers who exaggerated its significance. As a maritime
historian, he assigns priority to advances in Atlantic shipping that gave New
Yorkcontrol of southern U.S. and European trade routes. Albion's rejectionof
the Erie Canal explanation was a major scholarly advance that compelled
historians to examine New Yorkin context of the Atlantic world, although he
is too quick to assign causality to technical adjustments in shipping patterns
and does not go far enough in looking at the social relationships between
American and British merchants.
Albion says that New Yorkmerchants made two improvements to transatlantic shipping that promoted urban growth. The first and most important
advance involved the packet ships that carried passengers, mail, and freight
across the ocean. In 1818, the Black Ball line began regular packet service
between New York and London. Albion is interested in how the Black Ball's
greatest innovation-the introduction of regularly scheduled sailing timesmade shipping more predictable and resulted in its growth. With the Black
Ball line's success, other packet lines were founded. Because most of them
made New Yorktheir western terminus, the city boomed. Any packet line that
started up later, Albion claims, almost had to operate from New York or face
a competitive disadvantage. Albion notes in passing that the Black Ball line
was founded by members of an extended Quaker family, the Wrights and the
Thompsons, who had some members in New York and some in Britain and
who cooperated closely in creating this transatlantic enterprise. But he pays
little attention to this social dimension; as he saw it, the Atlantic world ended
at the shoreline. As an economic historian influenced by classical economic
theory, as a conservative scholar writing during the Great Depression, Albion
was concerned about making capitalism more orderly and predictable. The
introduction of scheduled departures was the precisely the kind of rationalizing business adjustment to which Albion was attuned.
The second improvement was the triangular cotton trade created by New
York merchants such as Anson G. Phelps. In the 1820s, New York shipping
lines began carrying cotton bales from the southern U.S. to Liverpool, Le
Havre, and other European ports. There, the cotton was exchanged for
manufactured goods, which were transported to New York.From New York,

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HOOD / In Retrospect

coastal packets transported finished products to southern ports. According to

Albion, this triangular cotton trade is remarkable because New York merchants turned what should have been a direct trade between Europe and the
South into a three-way commerce that passed through New York. This
"abnormal arrangement" exploiting southern business passivity was highly
profitable for New Yorkers: "They actually took over a large share of the
South's commercial activity" (pp. 95-96).
This explanation for the rise of New YorkCity occupies only a third of the
text. The rest of the book surveys the port's various other activities. There are
chapters about New York's dominance of the coastal trade, its involvement
with the Latin American and Chinese trades, the practices of the city's
mercantile houses, government regulation of the harbor, the advent of
steamships, the East River shipyards, immigration, and other topics. No
wonder a 1971 reprinting of the book changed its title to The Use of New York
Portin an effort to reflect its contents more accurately.10But even though these
ancillary subjects take up the bulk of the monograph, Albion's discussion of
them is not compelling and need not detain us from considering his analysis
of New York'semergence.
Albion's reliance on technical sailing improvements as an explanatory
device to account for the rise of New York is mechanical. The problem with
this emphasis on the packet service and the cotton trade is that it exaggerates
the possibilities of purposeful decisions aimed at controlling economic environments and misses the importance of merchants' social relationships. The
ascendancy of social history in recent decades has provided a different lens
for seeing the rise of New York than the classical economics lens that Albion
employed. Even though American social historians continue to concentrate
on the lower- and middle-orders and to neglect elites, new British scholarship
on the Atlantic world prior to the nineteenth century offers a different
approach to analyzing the problem of the rise of New York.British historians
such as P.J.Cain and A.G. Hopkins, David Hancock, David Harris Sacks, and
H.V. Bowen have recently revised the older interpretation of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century British Empire as a discrete political and military
unit-an "empire of goods" and an "empire of paper." At a time when
government infrastructure and communications were relatively primitive,
these scholars concentrate on the more informal, intangible sinews that held
the empire together. As they see it, the pre-nineteenth-century Empire was a
commercial, cultural, and social body that was reinforced and legitimated by
a set of cultural values, social relationships, and business connections shared
by elites in Britain and overseas.11 The possibilities of applying this new
approach to New York City can be glimpsed by making use of Albion's
example of the Black Ball packet. What is important from the standpoint of

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the social history of elites is less the innovation of regular sailing times than
the fact that this innovation was made by a web of merchants-an extended
Quaker family, the Wrights and Thompsons-stretching across the Atlantic
between the United States and Great Britain and tying New York and
metropolitan British together. By conceiving of the Atlantic world as a
cultural and social phenomenon rather as a watery second frontier,we may
ask what it was about the social relationships between merchants in New
York and those in Britain that gave New York a competitive advantage over
rival seaports.12
Albion's explanation also disregards the role of the state. As a conservative
economic historian who was convinced of the free market system's paramount importance, Albion discounted the possibility that government actions, particularly involving warfare and nation building, shaped economic
relationships and urban growth. Albion saw war and society as separate
entities rather than as interconnected phenomena. He thought that economic
growth resulted from actions taken by the private sector. This emphasis on
peacetime economic growth is evident in the periodization of TheRise of New
YorkPort: it begins after the War of 1812 and ends before the Civil War, an
unusually peaceful interlude in this country's turbulent history.
Since Albion wrote TheRise of New YorkPort, there has been no reinterpretation of this problem. A revised analysis of the emergence of New Yorkmight
retain Albion's comparative framework of putting New Yorkin the context of
Boston, Philadelphia, and the other seaports, yet extend the inquiry to the late
eighteenth century. It could then explore how the Seven Years War, the
Revolutionary War, and American nation building differentially affected
mercantile relationships between the leading American seaports and metropolitan Britain.
Despite these limitations, there are reasons for scholars to have a continuing interest in TheRise of New YorkPort. First, Albion insists on studying New
York in the context of other U.S. cities and the Atlantic world, as he
understood it. Though American urban historians import ideas from abroad,
our frame of reference is much narrower and even isolationist, and we all too
rarely place our findings in international perspective. Second, Albion demonstrates the importance of examining economic elites, a social group that
American social historians have neglected in their almost exclusive focus on
relatively powerless subcultures. The study of elites is a forgotten area of
scholarship that seems peculiarly American; certainly British and French
social historians do not neglect these groups. This powerful historiographical
bias has distorted our understanding of the inter-relationships of social
classes and identity groups and confounded our ability to comprehend
political decisions.

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HOOD / In Retrospect

Above all Albion shows the merit of asking important questions and of
tackling large subjects. The main reason for The Rise of New YorkPort's
survival is that it explores a problem of abiding significance, how and why
New YorkCity became the country's dominant metropolis. Although Albion's
answer may seem unsatisfactory,and although he does not go on to ask what
the rise of New Yorkmeant for the city or the nation, his book's boldness and
scope is impressive. It is refreshing to encounter a scholar who is neither
narrow nor defensive. For these reasons, TheRise of New YorkPort is likely to
be around for a very long time.
Clifton Hood, Department of History, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, is
writing a study of New York City's political economy from 1666 to 1987.
1. John Walton Caughey, "Historians' Choice: Results of a Poll on Recently Published
American History and Biography," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (September 1952):
300.
2. The nature of authorship is an issue with Albion. Many books that list Albion as sole
author were actually co-written with his wife, Jennie Barnes Pope. It was their practice for
Albion to research a subject and write a first draft and for Pope to produce a final
manuscript. TheRise of New YorkPort, 1815-1860 seems to have been created in this way. The
title page credits Albion as the author and notes that the book was produced "with the
collaboration of Jennie Barnes Pope," although the nature of this collaboration is nowhere
explained. Later books credit Albion and Pope as co-authors. John H. Kemble, "Maritime
History in the Age of Albion," in The Atlantic World of Robert G. Albion, ed. Benjamin W.
Labaree (1975), 6.

3. RobertG. Albion,ForestandSeaPower:TheTimberProblemof theRoyalNavy, 1652-1862

(1926).
4. Benjamin W. Labaree, foreword to The Rise of New YorkPort, 1815-1860 by Robert G.
Albion (1939; 1984), vi.
5. Labaree, ed., Atlantic World, frontispiece, 3-17; New York Times, August 13, 1983;
Directory of American Scholars, 7th ed., vol. 1 (1978): 6.
6. Josef W. Konvitz, "The Crises of Atlantic Port Cities, 1880 to 1920," ComparativeStudies
in Society and History 36 (April 1994): 293-318.
7. Ibid., 295-99.
8. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, review of The Rise of New YorkPort, 1815-1860, by Robert G.
Albion, American Historical Review 45 (January 1940): 415.

9. Reverend Samuel Osgood, New Yorkin the NineteenthCentury:A DiscourseDelivered

November
20, 1866(1867):
Anniversary,
BeforetheNew YorkHistoricalSocietyon Its Sixty-second

5. See also Theodore Roosevelt, New York(1918), xi, 89, 214.

10. ContemporaryAuthors, New Revision Series, vol. 3 (1981): 17.
11. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism:Innovationand Expansion (1993); David

Hancock,LondonMerchantsand the Integrationof theAtlanticCommunity,1735-1785(1995);

David HarrisSacks, TheWideningGate:Bristoland theAtlanticEconomy,1450-1700(1991);
H.V. Bowen, Elites,Enterprise
andtheMakingof theBritishOverseasEmpire,1688-1775(1996).
12. The most recent study of the colonial port is Cathy Matson, Merchants & Empire:

Tradingin ColonialNew York(1998).

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