Province of New York

The Province of New York is a Crown province of the United Kingdom of America on the Atlantic seaboard, bounded by New Albion to the north and west across the lakes and the St Lawrence, by Vermont and Massachusetts Bay to the east, and by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south. Its capital in law is New York City and its government sits 150 miles upriver at Albany. It holds about twenty million people, returns 26 members to the Commons, and produces more of the Realm’s output than any other polity.

It is also the polity of the Realm with the least control over its own territory, and that is a matter of constitutional design rather than weakness. Article the Fifth of the Albany Settlement of 1783 confirms the City’s charter against the Province’s own legislature, so Albany cannot legislate for its largest city in the fields the charter covers. The forest article puts the Adirondack preserve beyond the reach of the same legislature. And the Haudenosaunee Confederacy holds land inside the Province’s boundary while standing outside its constitutional order, answering to the Crown and not to Albany.

What the Province governs is everything else, and everything else is a great deal: twenty million people, the largest university system in the Realm, sixty-two counties, the courts that most of the Realm’s commerce contracts under, a wilderness the size of a small country, and a frontier with another realm of the same Crown.

Name

The Province takes its name from the English conquest of 1664, when the Dutch colony of New Netherland was transferred to the Duke of York, to whom the territory had been granted, and New Amsterdam became New York. The name therefore commemorates a proprietor who never visited it, which the Province has never thought worth changing.

The Dutch inheritance survives instead in the colours. The Province’s flag is the tricolour of the Dutch republic charged with the provincial arms, and the choice was made deliberately at the Albany Settlement, when the Province adopted its founding colours rather than its conquerors’. The gesture was a small one and it was noticed at the time: the Realm itself went on flying a flag with the Union in the canton until 1850, and New York had stopped doing anything of the kind sixty-seven years earlier.

Within the metropolitan region “New York” means the City and the Province has to be specified. Outside the Province it means the City almost always, which is the Province’s oldest and most tired complaint.

Geography

The Province runs some 500 kilometres from the harbour to the lakes and covers 141,300 square kilometres, most of which is empty. Its geography is organised by water: a drowned river valley at the sea, a navigable river running two hundred kilometres north from it, a gap in the mountains at the top of that river, and a level corridor from the gap to the Great Lakes. Everything the Province has ever been follows from that gap, which is the only break in the Appalachian wall between the Atlantic and the interior.

The regions

New York City and the harbour at the mouth of the river, treated at length in its own article.

Long Island, 190 kilometres of moraine and outwash running east from the city, holding suburbs of enormous scale, two counties, a hundred school districts and no city of its own.

The Hudson Valley, the old manor country: great houses above the river, towns that industrialised and deindustrialised, reservoirs, and the Realm’s military academy on the western bank.

The Capital District around Albany, at the head of navigation, where the river meets the canal corridor.

The North Country and the Adirondacks, a mountain wilderness of six million acres and the thin farming country north of it, running to the St Lawrence and the frontier.

The canal corridor, the level route west through Utica, Syracuse and Rochester, which holds most of the Province’s population outside the metropolitan region.

The Finger Lakes and the Southern Tier, the long glacial lakes and the vineyards on their slopes, and the poor hill counties along the Pennsylvania line.

The west, meaning Buffalo, Niagara and the lake plain, which looks across the river at New Albion and lives more with it than with Albany.

The Adirondacks

The preserve is the largest protected area in the Realm outside Alaska, and it is protected by the provincial constitution in words that have never been softened: the forest lands of the preserve shall be for ever kept as wild forest land, and may not be sold, leased, exchanged or stripped of timber.

The clause was adopted in the 1890s and it was not adopted out of love of trees. It was adopted for the water. The loggers had taken the Adirondack watershed to pieces, the flow in the upper Hudson and the canal feeders was failing, and the canal was the Province’s principal asset. The constitutional protection of six million acres of wilderness was a commercial decision by men worried about barge draught, and the fact has been so thoroughly forgotten that conservation bodies now quote the clause as a statement of principle.

It is entrenched in the same manner as Article the Fifth, which means the Province has protected a wilderness and a city by the same device and can amend neither. That parallel is the favourite observation of the Province’s constitutional lawyers and is made at every anniversary of both.

The park is not empty. About a hundred and thirty thousand people live inside its boundary, on private land interleaved with public in a pattern no planner would design, and what they may build is controlled by an appointed agency. That agency is the most disliked institution in the Province with the single exception of the City’s watershed constabulary, which polices ground a hundred miles from the City it belongs to.

Water

The Province is wet by the standards of the Realm and the water is worth more than the land in three places. The Hudson is navigable to Albany and tidal nearly as far. The canal and its successors connect that head of navigation to the lakes. The St Lawrence Seaway carries ocean ships past the Province’s northern edge. And the Niagara falls 51 metres in a gorge that generates the cheapest power in the Realm, shared with New Albion under a treaty that fixes how much water may go over the falls for the tourists and how much may go through the turbines, with more diverted at night when nobody is watching.

Climate

Cold continental in the north and west, milder on the coast, and snowy out of all proportion in the lee of the lakes, where the snow belt towns measure their winters in metres rather than centimetres and regard the rest of the Province as soft.

History

Before the Province

The country was the homeland of the Haudenosaunee, the Confederacy of Five and later Six Nations, whose council at Onondaga governed a league that dominated the north-east for two centuries and dealt with the Dutch, the French and the English as a power rather than as a client. It was also the homeland of the Lenape on the lower river and the island, the Mahican in the valley, and the Munsee and others between them.

The Confederacy’s structure, a council of nations that made decisions by consensus and left each nation internally sovereign, was well known to the men who later argued about how thirteen colonies might share a state, and the Realm’s own constitutional writers have never been able to agree how much they took from it.

New Netherland

The Dutch West India Company established a trading post at the mouth of the river in the 1620s and a second at the head of navigation, where Albany now stands, and the colony that grew between them was a commercial operation rather than a settlement project. Its tolerance was instrumental: the Company needed people and did not much care what they believed, and by the 1640s eighteen languages were spoken on the island.

Three things survived the Dutch.

The patroonships, great riverside estates granted with manorial jurisdiction, where a proprietor held courts, collected rents in kind and services, and governed tenants who could not buy their farms. They outlasted the Dutch by two centuries.

The law. Dutch practice in property, inheritance, married women’s property and commercial partnership survived the conquest and was absorbed rather than replaced, and provincial lawyers can still point to the seams.

The language and the church, which lasted in the river valley into the nineteenth century, long after they had gone from the city.

The conquest of 1664

The English took the colony without a fight. The terms, negotiated before the surrender, guaranteed the Dutch inhabitants their property, their inheritance customs, their church and their trade, and were substantially honoured. The Province therefore began as a transfer rather than a conquest, which is why so much of the Dutch settlement survived it, and why the change of name was for a long time the most visible consequence.

The colonial province

For a century the Province was a Crown colony with an elected assembly, a port growing faster than any other on the coast, a chronically contested relationship between governors and assemblies, and a frontier held only by the Confederacy’s tolerance.

It was also, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the largest slaveholding colony north of Maryland. Enslaved people worked the docks, the households, the farms of the valley and the estates, the Corporation ran a slave market on the East River waterfront, and the Province put down two suspected risings with executions of a cruelty that its own eighteenth-century courts recorded in detail.

The Four-Year War

The city was held by the Crown’s forces throughout the war. It became the principal refuge for loyalists from every colony, its population swelled and then emptied, and it was the last ground given up.

That occupation shaped everything that followed. A Province whose commercial capital spent the war under the Crown’s protection, and whose interior counties spent it divided, did not emerge with a revolutionary settlement to impose on anybody. The settlement of 1783 was correspondingly easy here. There was no confiscation to speak of, no proscription that lasted, and no purge, because the merchants who had traded with the garrison were the same merchants everyone needed afterwards.

On the frontier it was not easy at all. The Confederacy split, nation against nation, and was invaded and burned out by an expedition sent for that purpose. It never recovered as a power.

The Albany Settlement

The Province had to constitute itself while its principal city was still occupied, so its convention met where it could, which was Albany. The two-capital arrangement began as an accident of the war and hardened into the constitution.

The Settlement produced the instrument the Province still lives under, and its most consequential clause was the one confirming the City’s ancient charter against the new legislature. That clause is treated in full in the Constitution of New York, and its effect on the Province is treated below.

The frontier settlement was unusually good to the Confederacy, for the plainest of reasons: nobody had won the war, the Realm needed the frontier quiet while it worked out what it was, and a negotiated peace with a league that could still raise fighting men was cheaper than another campaign. The terms the Confederacy obtained in 1783 are better than any comparable nation obtained anywhere in the Realm, and are the foundation of its present position.

The land

What followed the good terms was a century of buying. The Province acquired the Confederacy’s land piece by piece, in instruments made by the Crown and negotiated by provincial commissioners, at prices that nobody now defends.

The instruments are valid. The Crown made them, the power was there, and the modern grievance is not that the Province treated without authority but that it treated hard with people who had no alternative buyer and, in several cases, no interpreter of their own. That distinction matters: it means the claim is about compensation rather than title, and it is why the litigation has run for fifty years without ever threatening to unwind anybody’s deeds.

The manors and the tenants’ war

The patroon estates survived into the 1840s, by which time a quarter of a million people were paying perpetual rents in wheat, labour and fowl to landlords whose title ran back to the Company.

The tenants refused. They organised across the valley counties, disguised themselves, turned out to stop distraint sales, and a sheriff’s deputy was killed. The Province put troops into three counties and then conceded most of the argument: perpetual leases were abolished for the future, the courts found against the reservations in the old grants, and the estates were broken up over a generation.

It is the Province’s first mass political movement and the origin of its modern land law, and it is the reason the valley’s politics have an anti-landlord streak that surprises people who see the houses.

Slavery and abolition

The Province abolished slavery gradually, over thirty years, by a statute that freed nobody immediately and freed the children of the enslaved only on reaching adulthood. People were still enslaved in this Province when the canal opened, which is a sentence the Province’s own historians use to stop the self-congratulation.

Its merchants, insurers and shipowners went on financing and insuring the trade elsewhere for decades after abolishing it at home, and the profits built a good deal of what the city admires about itself.

The canal

The canal was built by the Province, alone, against advice, on its own credit, and it repaid itself within a decade.

Its consequences for the Province, as distinct from the city, were three. It made Albany powerful, because the money, the engineering, the contracts and the patronage were provincial, and the Province has never forgotten that it once built the largest public work in the world without asking anybody. It built a string of cities across the north, at the lock sites and the junctions, which grew for a century and then emptied. And it took the rest of the Confederacy’s land, because a canal needs a corridor and the corridor ran through it.

The abolitionists and the road north

The canal counties became the most politically volatile ground in the Realm, and they produced three movements at once.

The revivals came first, so many and so hot that the district was said to have been burned over, leaving nothing left to catch. Out of the same twenty counties came communities of property, spiritualists, perfectionists, millennial preachers with dates, and the new faith that went west and founded the State of Deseret. Deseret maintains its foundational sites here to this day and sends people to them, a thousand miles from home, which is an arrangement both polities acknowledge and neither makes much of.

The women’s movement began in the same counties, at a convention in a lakeside village in the 1840s that drafted a declaration on the model of the Realm’s own founding grievances. It is the origin of the Realm’s women’s movement, and the Province was decades ahead of the Realm in giving women the provincial franchise.

And the road north ran through all of it. Beyond the lakes lay the British colonies that would become New Albion, under the same Crown, where slavery was gone, and the last stage of the road to it crossed this Province. The great figures of that work lived in the canal towns, are buried in them, and those graves are pilgrimage sites now.

That the three movements came out of the same ground in the same decades is not treated as a coincidence by anyone who has studied it.

The city bloc

The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 gave New York its full entitlement of Commons seats without conditions, which created the Realm’s first city bloc and made the Province decisive in the Parliament that fought the secession crisis.

The Province had lobbied for the Act as a single interest and then spent the following century arguing about who had actually benefited from it, which is the pattern of nearly every provincial argument since.

The secession crisis

The Province was loyal and it was divided, and both are true without qualification.

Its merchant houses held southern debts and its cotton trade ran through the port, so the commercial city’s first instinct was accommodation. Its working class, conscripted and undercut, rioted for four days against the draft and against the Black population of the city, and the riot was put down by troops brought back from the field. And its delegation in the Commons, enlarged by the Act of 1859, carried the votes that sustained the war.

The vacancies of 1852 and 1865

Twice in the nineteenth century the Province was left without a Lieutenant-Governor and could not get another quickly, and the two occasions established the machinery that mattered a century and a half later.

In 1852 the holder died in office and the succession stalled on a question nobody had settled: whose advice the Crown acted on in filling a provincial vice-regal post, the Realm’s ministers or the Province’s. The argument took four months.

In 1865, during the crisis, there was simply no ministry in being to tender advice at the moment it was needed.

On both occasions the Province improvised a Provincial Council of State, the senior judges and the presiding officers of the two chambers acting collectively in the Crown’s name until a holder could be appointed. Both times it worked, both times it was regarded as a curiosity afterwards, and both times it was written up carefully by lawyers who expected never to need it.

The machine

The Province produced the most formidable political machines in the Realm: organisations rooted in wards and counties, providing work, coal, funerals, legal help and naturalisation to people the civic structure did not serve, and taking in exchange a discipline at the polls that no reform movement could match.

They ran the city, reached into Albany, and were broken not by reformers winning an election but by a provincial inquiry with the power to compel witnesses, which put the accounts into the newspapers and a number of men into prison. They were broken and they did not go: the county organisations that still choose most of the Province’s candidates are their direct descendants and are organised on the same principles.

Industry, labour and the fire

The Province industrialised heavily, and its garment, printing, food and transport trades produced a large, organised working class and the Realm’s most consequential unions.

In 1911 a fire in a garment loft in the city killed a hundred and forty-six workers, most of them young immigrant women, behind doors that had been locked to stop them stealing. The provincial commission appointed afterwards spent four years inspecting factories across the Province and wrote a report that became the Realm’s factory law substantially unaltered. It is the Province’s largest single contribution to the Realm’s statute book, and it made the careers of a generation of people who went on to run the Realm’s labour ministries.

The premiership as a ladder

Three Prime Ministers of the Realm have come out of the premiership of this Province, and the office has been understood ever since as the best-known route to New Westminster. Every holder is suspected of wanting it, most of them have wanted it, and the suspicion is itself a constraint: a Premier visibly running for the Realm loses the Province quickly.

What they did here first varies. One built the Province’s first regulatory state, against his own party. One reformed its courts and its insurance law and was thought cold for it. One built relief machinery in the first winter of the Depression, faster than the Realm did and on a larger scale, and the Realm later copied it wholesale when he took it with him to New Westminster.

The authorities

From the 1920s the Province built through public authorities: appointed boards with their own revenues, their own bonds and their own lawyers, building bridges, parkways, power stations and ports outside the ordinary machinery of government and largely outside its scrutiny.

One man ran several of them at once for decades and built more of the Province’s physical fabric than any government ever has: crossings, roads, parks, beaches and housing, at enormous speed, through neighbourhoods that could not stop him and were not consulted. He was stopped earlier here than such men usually are, and the reason is peculiar to this Province. His great projects ran into the one city his boards could not simply overrule, because Article the Fifth meant the City’s own Corporation had powers he needed and could withhold, and the resulting collisions were public, humiliating and instructive. The Province watched a man who could not be voted out being told no, and drew conclusions.

The authorities were brought partly under the Assembly’s scrutiny after a scandal in the 1970s. The reform was partial and is still described that way.

The middle of the century

Suburbanisation emptied the cities into Long Island and Westchester at a speed nothing prepared anybody for. The Seaway opened the lakes to ocean shipping and finished the canal towns as ports in a single decade. Steel and manufacturing left the west of the Province, and Buffalo lost half its population. And the Province built, out of almost nothing, the largest university system in the Realm: sixty campuses, deliberately cheap, deliberately spread, and now the principal employer in most of the upstate counties.

Kennedy

The Prime Minister was assassinated in New York City on 22 May 1966, at a civic occasion, and the Province carried the consequences.

The provincial police ran the investigation, because a murder in the Province is a provincial crime whoever the victim is, and the inquiry into how the investigation had been conducted was provincial too. It found failures of co-ordination between three forces with overlapping jurisdiction in the same square mile, and it produced the standing arrangements for command in the Province that were in force forty years later when they were needed again.

1968

The Province’s great university put a building on land its neighbours used, and was found at the same moment to be holding defence research contracts for the Indochina war. The two grievances had no common settlement, because conceding one did nothing about the other, and that is why the occupation lasted as long as it did.

It was negotiated out. The building was abandoned, the contracts were not renewed quietly some years later, and neither cause was ever jointly settled. The Province regards it as the model for how not to let two arguments become one, and the university regards it as the year it learned to ask the neighbourhood first.

The fiscal crisis

When the City nearly went under in the 1970s, the Province could neither help nor be blamed, and both halves of that were humiliating.

Article the Fifth meant the City’s debts were the City’s. Albany could not take control of a corporation whose charter it could not touch, could not impose terms, and could not be held responsible for the collapse of a government it did not run. It watched. The federation rescued the City on terms the City negotiated itself, and the Province’s role was to be an interested spectator with the largest exposure in the room.

Every account of Article the Fifth written since has had to reckon with that fortnight, and the Province’s constitutional lawyers are still divided about whether it showed the entrenchment working or showed what it costs.

Recovery, and the years before May Day

The two decades after the crisis were the city’s recovery and the Province’s slow divergence. Finance grew beyond anything anybody had forecast and paid for the Province’s budget; crime fell steeply and the argument about why has never been settled; immigration resumed at a scale not seen since the last century and made the metropolitan region younger than the Province; and upstate went on emptying regardless of any of it, so that the Province’s figures improved every year in ways that most of its counties never felt.

May Day

On 1 May 2006 the Province lost more people in a morning than in any day of its history, at four sites in and around its largest city. The attack itself and the broadcast of it are treated elsewhere. What belongs here is what it did to the Province as a government.

The Lieutenant-Governor was killed. Margaret Halloran, known as Peg, had been in office four months. She was a public-health nurse who had risen to run public hospitals, and she was at Grand Central at 10:37 boarding an ordinary train to Albany, travelling alone on a public service by long-standing personal choice. She was not a target; nobody knew who she was. She was missing for hours and confirmed dead at 2:19 in the afternoon, and the announcement was made from Albany by the Premier rather than from New Westminster, because she was the Province’s. She is the only officeholder of any rank who died that day. There was a state funeral, the King attended, and she is buried among servicemen at the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery, at the King’s own request, as a citizen killed in an attack on the Realm. Her stone carries her office, Lieutenant-Governor of New York, because her family asked for it and the King did not overrule them.

The Province had a form to reach for. The Council of State improvised in 1852 and 1865 was constituted the same week, the senior judges and the presiding officers acting in the Crown’s name, and it held the office until a successor was appointed. It functioned without a single contested act.

Every polity in the Realm then rewrote its vice-regal continuity provisions, and New York rewrote least. The Province looked at what it had done, found that a nineteenth-century improvisation had worked under the worst conditions imaginable, and codified it almost unchanged. Other polities built elaborate machinery; New York wrote down what it had already done.

And it declined to change the thing that had killed her. Crown officeholders in this Province still travel on ordinary public services. The present Lieutenant-Governor takes the same train to Albany. It is not announced, not photographed and not discussed, because discussing it would spoil it, and it is of a piece with the Realm’s wider doctrine after that day: the four sites were repaired and not replaced, no scar was left anywhere, and no checkpoint was built.

The backlash was worst here. Sustained violence against Russian and Slavic communities across the Province, against people who had no connection whatever to the attackers and who were burying their own dead from the same four sites, ran for the better part of two years. The Crown and the Church intervened at the time, which is remembered as a moment of grace. The King later apologised. No American government has. A memorial to the backlash years stands in the city.

Since

A provincial emergency management service was built out of what failed that morning, chiefly the command arrangements between forces that the Kennedy inquiry had first identified forty years earlier and that had decayed. A generation of provincial politicians is defined by where it was at 10:37. And beyond that, structurally, nothing changed, which the Province regards not as a failure of nerve but as the achievement.

Constitutional system

Article the Fifth

Everything in this section is downstream of one clause settled at Albany in 1783 and never amended, which confirms the City’s charter, courts, market, ferry, dock and corporate privileges against the Province’s legislature.

The Province’s view of it is unanimous in office and divided out of it. It is resented upstate, as a standing grant of special status to the richest place in the Realm. It is defended by every Premier once in office, for the reason every Premier discovers in the first month, which is that the clause is also the Province’s protection: what Albany cannot do for the City, Albany cannot be blamed for failing to do.

Nobody has ever tried to repeal it. It is understood that the attempt would end the ministry that made it, because the City’s delegation would leave, the courts would probably hold the attempt ineffective, and the Province would have spent its authority on a fight it could not finish.

What Albany can actually do

It can fund or starve, and that is the real instrument. The Province’s grants make up a large part of what the City spends, and the annual negotiation over them is the most consequential thing that happens in provincial government.

It governs everything outside the charter: the courts, the prisons, the health service, the universities, the highways, the environment and the professions, all of which operate inside the City as they do everywhere else.

It appoints the boards of the regional authorities, which is how the Province reaches into the City sideways: the commuter railways, the bridges and tunnels of the outer crossings, and the ports and airports authority shared with New Jersey.

And directly, in the fields the charter covers, it can do almost nothing, for which it has built a century of workarounds rather than admit the fact.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Lieutenant-Governor is the Crown’s representative, resident at St. Nicholas House in the City rather than at Albany, which is a deliberate separation of the Crown from the government.

The office does the ordinary vice-regal work and three unusual things. It holds the Crown’s relationship with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under a standing federal commission held since the settlement of 1783, so that in this one capacity the Lieutenant-Governor acts for the American Crown and not for New York’s; it is the one part of the office’s business in which the Premier has no standing at all. It receives foreign heads of state and the diplomatic corps, in a city thick with consulates and international bodies, more often than any vice-regal office in the Realm outside the capital. And it presides over the May Day observances, which is the heaviest ceremonial obligation any holder of such an office carries anywhere in the Realm.

Its permanent difficulty is that it lives in the largest city while the government sits 150 miles upriver, and must never be seen to take the City’s side.

A reserve power has been used once. A Lieutenant-Governor refused a dissolution to a Premier who had just lost a vote in the Assembly and who wanted an election rather than a successor; the refusal was upheld, a successor was found within the week, and the case is taught in every constitutional course in the Realm.

The present holder is Adele Marchetti, formerly the presiding judge of the Province’s commercial division, appointed in 2023.

The Premier and the Ministry

The Premier is the head of government, sits at Albany, and must hold the Assembly. The present Premier is Daniel Okonkwo, Labour and Social Democrat, in office since 2025 at the head of a coalition with the Liberal Federal Democrats.

The Ministry’s departments are the ordinary ones with two additions peculiar to the Province: a Ministry for the City, which exists to conduct a relationship rather than to administer anything, and a Ministry for the North Country and the Preserve, which exists because the forest article makes the wilderness a constitutional subject rather than a departmental one.

The legislature

The Provincial Assembly of New York is bicameral. Its name in the constitution is the General Assembly, which is the form the constitution’s own clauses use; Provincial Assembly is what everybody calls it.

The Assembly has 150 members from single constituencies, is the confidence chamber, and originates supply.

The Senate has 63 members on four-year terms, and it is malapportioned in favour of the upstate counties on purpose and always has been. The weighting is statutory rather than constitutional, so it is fixable in principle; in practice fixing it requires the Senate’s own consent, which every reforming ministry promises to obtain and none has.

The upstate counties therefore have a real bloc in a real chamber, and it is not a symbolic one: the Senate can and does hold up budgets, and the price of its agreement is paid in roads, prisons, campuses and hospital funding.

Albany

The reputation is the reputation. For a century the Province’s business was settled privately between a small number of men, the budget arrived complete and late, and a steady supply of legislative leaders went to prison.

A reform after a particular scandal genuinely changed it: the budget process was opened, the member item fund abolished, outside earnings disclosed and capped, and an independent commission given the power to investigate. Nobody outside Albany believes it, which the Province’s own officials find both unfair and entirely predictable.

Return to the Lords

The Province’s two members of the Lords are returned by the legislature, and it has never seriously considered direct election.

There is an unbroken convention that one of the two is always a member for the City and one is never. It is not written anywhere and has not been departed from since the 1860s, and when a ministry once tried to return two City members the Senate simply declined to sit.

Local government

Below the Province the arrangement is the most complicated in the Realm: sixty-two counties, cities with their own charters, towns that are not towns in the ordinary sense, villages inside towns, and special districts for fire, water, sewer, library and lighting numbering in the thousands, many of them with their own elected boards and their own power to tax.

The result is the highest local tax burden in the Realm, the direct product of paying for so many overlapping governments. Consolidation is proposed every decade, is supported by every study, and is defeated every time by the districts themselves and by the people who serve on them.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy

The Confederacy holds land inside the Province’s boundary and stands outside the Province’s constitutional order, and the Realm has never articulated a principle that explains why.

The arrangement is this. For everything ordinary the nations are inside: roads, schools, health, policing, the utilities and the ordinary commerce of living in the north of the Province are provided and co-ordinated with provincial bodies under compact. For everything constitutional they are outside: land, treaty, status and their own government are matters between the Confederacy and the Crown, and Albany has no standing in them whatever.

The Confederacy is therefore not a polity. It is a treaty party, which is a different kind of thing, and the Realm’s count of forty-nine polities is unaffected by it. It is also a fourth distinct arrangement, beside the treaty nation outside the polity count in the March, the nations holding compact authority inside Connecticut, and the nations that became Oklahoma-Sequoyah. There is no doctrine behind the difference; there is only history.

The frontier

Confederacy territory straddles the line with New Albion, and four things follow.

There is a right of free passage across that frontier for Confederacy citizens, older than either realm and honoured by both. There are Confederacy passports, accepted by the Realm and by New Albion and refused by most other countries, which their holders use anyway and occasionally litigate about. There is a single council that meets on both sides of the line, so that one body advises two governments and neither finds this odd. And there is a customs argument, running for a century, about goods carried across the line by citizens exercising the right of passage, which flares up every few years and has never been resolved.

No seats

The Confederacy has no chamber at Albany and no seats in either house, and it has refused offers of both.

The reasoning has been consistent for a hundred and fifty years and is understood on both sides: to accept seats from the Province would be to concede that the Province had standing to give them. The Confederacy deals with the Crown through the Lieutenant-Governor, acting under that federal commission, and it declines to deal with the Ministry about anything constitutional at all.

The claim

The land claim is about price and not about title. The Province bought, the Crown made the instruments, and the deeds are good. What the nations say is that the prices were set by men with no alternative buyer, that several of the transactions were conducted without an interpreter the nations had chosen, and that the Realm’s own later findings on other nations’ treaties would not have upheld the conduct if the instruments had been challenged at the time.

It has been in litigation for fifty years. It has produced interim rulings, two commissions and a great deal of learning, and it has never once threatened anybody’s deeds.

Law and the courts

The Province’s final court is the most cited provincial court in the Realm, and the reason is commercial. Contracts across the Realm and a great deal of the world specify this Province’s law and this Province’s courts, because its commercial jurisprudence is old, deep, predictable and written down, and because everybody’s counsel already knows it. A judgment of that court on a question of contract or securities is read in Hong Kong and Straßburg within the week.

Beneath it the trial courts are a famously confusing patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions that reform commissions have been failing to tidy since the last century, and which the bar has learned to navigate and has no great incentive to simplify.

Policing

Five kinds of force operate. A provincial force for the counties and the highways. The City’s own force, the largest in the Realm, which Albany cannot direct. The City’s watershed constabulary, policing reservoir land a hundred miles upstate, which is the single strangest jurisdiction in the Realm and is deeply resented locally. County sheriffs and town and village forces in their hundreds. And Confederacy police on Confederacy land.

The command arrangements between them were written after the Kennedy inquiry, decayed, failed on May Day, and were rewritten again afterwards.

Prisons

The Province holds its prisons upstate, in counties that need the work, and the arrangement has shaped both ends of it.

A rising at one of them in the 1970s was put down with great loss of life, including hostages killed by the retaking force, and the inquiry that followed is still the governing document of the Province’s prison administration. The modern problem is the opposite one: the numbers have fallen, prisons are closing, and the upstate towns that were given them as employment are fighting to keep them open, which nobody involved finds comfortable.

Politics

Labour in the city, Conservative upstate, and the Liberal Federal Democrats in the suburbs, which means the suburbs decide everything. Long Island and Westchester swing, and no provincial government has been formed against them in fifty years.

At Realm elections Labour holds the Province overall and the upstate seats are genuinely contested, so the delegation of 26 is always mixed and always includes members of at least three parties.

The Province’s politics is organised less by party than by the three-cornered argument between the City, the suburbs and upstate, which cuts across every party and which no leader has ever been able to resolve, only to manage.

The upstate grievance

It is real, it is old, and it is about five things at once.

Money. Upstate believes it subsidises the city; the city believes the reverse. Both can produce figures and both sets are honest, because they measure different things: the city generates far more revenue than it receives, and upstate receives far more per head than it generates, and neither of those facts answers the other. This article does not adjudicate it, because it is not adjudicable in the terms the two sides use.

Water. The City owns the watershed, controls what may be built on it across four counties, and polices it with its own constabulary.

Decline. The canal towns and the steel towns emptied over seventy years and nothing replaced them at the same scale.

Attention. A Premier who is not seen upstate for a year is finished there and generally does not discover this until an election.

And the institutions. Upstate holds the prisons, the secure hospitals and the waste the metropolitan region does not want, and is paid to hold them, which is a relationship that satisfies nobody and that both ends depend on.

Economy

The Province’s output is the largest in the Realm, and the composition of it is misunderstood everywhere including inside the Province.

Finance is the headline and belongs largely to the City’s article. It pays for a great deal of the Province’s budget and employs a small fraction of its people, and the gap between those two facts is the central difficulty of provincial fiscal policy.

Health and education are the largest employers in the Province by a wide margin, and they are mostly upstate. The hospital systems and the sixty campuses of the provincial university are what the upstate cities run on now that the factories are gone.

Agriculture is substantial and is dairy above everything, with a dairy lobby to match, plus apples from orchards older than the provincial constitution and the vineyards of the Finger Lakes, whose wine took eighty years to be taken seriously and now is.

Advanced manufacturing survives in optics, imaging and semiconductors, in plants the Province paid dearly to attract and continues to pay to keep.

Tourism runs from the falls to the mountains to the lakes to the city, and is one of the few industries distributed across the whole Province.

And prisons and institutions are an upstate industry, which is uncomfortable and true.

Energy

The cheapest power in the Realm, from the falls and the river, sold to industry at a preference that other polities describe as a subsidy. Imported hydro from New Albion under long contracts. Nuclear stations, including one close enough to the city to be permanently controversial. Offshore wind in the Atlantic approaches, recent and contested by the fishing industry. And no gas drilling at all, banned outright by the Province over the objections of the Southern Tier counties that would have had the money.

Tax

This is the most heavily taxed polity in the Realm, provincially and locally both, and it is the standing argument of every election. The Province wins the argument anyway, most of the time, because it can show what the money buys: the university, the hospitals, the transport, the parks and a level of provision that the polities with lower taxes do not attempt.

Transport

A tolled motorway runs the length of the Province on the canal’s line and is how everyone crosses it. Passenger rail up the river and across the north is unusually good by the Realm’s standards and is the one part of the network the Province is unambiguously proud of. The canal itself is still navigable, carrying pleasure boats and the occasional load too large for a road. And the ports and airports belong to a bi-provincial authority shared with New Jersey, which is the only such body in the Realm and the reason two polities argue about landing slots.

Cities and towns

Albany

A river city of about a hundred thousand people whose entire economy is government, and the oldest continuously chartered city in the Realm, with a Dutch core still legible under the offices.

It is a small capital for a large province, which is the whole of its character: everybody in provincial politics knows everybody, the session fills the hotels and empties them, and the city outside the government quarter is a working place with a serious unemployment problem that no ministry two streets away has ever quite noticed.

In the middle of it stands a vast modern government plaza of white marble slabs on a raised platform, built in the 1960s by clearing forty blocks of the old city, and opinion about it has never settled. It is the single most impressive piece of public architecture in the Province and it stands on the site of a neighbourhood that was not asked.

Buffalo and the west

Buffalo was the greatest inland port in the world for half a century: the point where the lakes met the canal, where grain was transhipped and where the elevators were invented to do it. The Seaway ended that in a decade by letting ocean ships go past, and the steel mills closed after them, and the city lost half its people.

What it keeps is cheap power from the falls, which built the industry in the first place and is now the argument about what to put there instead; architecture out of all proportion to its present size, because the money came early and spent itself on the best architects then working; and a cross-border life with New Albion that is closer, more frequent and more affectionate than its life with Albany. People in Buffalo shop, work, follow sport and marry across that river, and describe a trip to the capital of their own Province as going east.

The canal cities

Utica, Syracuse and Rochester are at a third to a half of their peak populations. Each was made by a single great firm or trade and each was unmade when it went, and what carries them now is a university and a hospital system.

They are also where the Realm’s refugee resettlement actually happens. A shrinking city with cheap housing, an empty school and a teaching hospital is where people are placed, and three of these cities have been substantially remade by it within a generation: their school rolls have stopped falling, their commercial streets have reopened under new names, and their politics have had to learn a new vocabulary in a hurry.

Long Island

A hundred and ninety kilometres of moraine holding suburbs of enormous scale, built fast in the two decades after the second war on potato ground, and now the swing ground of provincial politics.

Its industry was aircraft: the plants that built the Realm’s naval aviation employed tens of thousands and are mostly gone, replaced by medical research, distribution and the ordinary commerce of a very large suburb.

Its east end is beaches, money, potato fields turned to vineyards, and a fishing industry hanging on by its fingernails against the cost of the land its harbours stand on.

And it is a place of two counties, a hundred school districts and no city at all, which is why nothing on Long Island can be decided by anybody and why every provincial government since the war has found it easier to give it money than to govern it.

The Hudson Valley

The old manor country, with the great houses still standing above the river and several still in the families that built them, open to the public on set days and taxed on an arrangement nobody will explain in public.

The Realm’s military academy sits on the west bank, on a bend chosen for a chain across the river, and it is the Realm’s institution rather than the Province’s and sits in it all the same.

The computing industry grew up in the middle valley: laboratories and plants that made the Realm’s business machines, the towns they created, and the towns they hollowed when the work moved.

The reservoirs are in the western hills, and the villages are under them.

And the valley produced the school of landscape painting that taught the Realm how to look at its own country, which is why a particular quality of afternoon light over water is instantly recognisable in this Province and nowhere else.

The North Country

Thin farming country, the St Lawrence, the frontier, and the mountains. It is the emptiest part of the Province and the poorest, with the shortest growing season and the longest winters, and it holds two of the Province’s three largest prisons and most of its plain farming settlements.

It also holds the mountain town that has twice held the winter games, which is the smallest place in the world to have done so, and which has spent the decades since working out how to be a resort without being one.

Population and society

About twenty million people. The metropolitan region and its suburbs grow; the upstate cities and counties have been shrinking for seventy years; and the total is held up entirely by immigration, without which the Province would have been falling for decades.

Who lives here: the largest Jewish population of any polity in the Realm, and of any comparable place in the world, in every variety from the wholly secular to communities keeping their own courts and schools. Irish and Italian communities that shaped the Province’s politics for a century and are now simply part of it. Caribbean and Latin American populations at enormous scale, Puerto Rican and Dominican above all. Chinese and South Asian communities across the city and the suburbs. The descendants of the great internal migration out of the southern provinces. And Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite farming settlements in the emptied upstate counties, buying land nobody else wants and farming it profitably.

The canal cities are where the Realm’s refugee resettlement actually happens, which has changed them: a shrinking city with cheap housing and a hospital is where people are placed, and three of them have been remade by it.

Religion

The Church of America is established and is unusually strong here. This is where its wealth is and where its grandest buildings are, and the Province holds the richest dioceses in the Realm. Its establishment is not a live argument here, because it is so thoroughly ceremonial in this Province that nobody bothers, and the Church itself keeps its head down.

A Catholic population larger than any other polity’s, with the schools, hospitals, universities and politics that came with it. Judaism in every variety. Islam, now a settled part of provincial and city life rather than a recent arrival. And the longhouse religion of the Confederacy, which never stopped and never needed reviving.

Education

The Province examines its schoolchildren under a provincial board older than the Realm, whose certificate is recognised everywhere and which no ministry dares touch. The same board charters and governs the universities, so the Province’s entire education system answers to a body that is not quite a ministry and is not quite independent, an arrangement nobody would design and nobody will change.

Beneath it: the provincial university on sixty campuses, a city university of its own, and the private foundations that were the whole of the Province’s higher education until the last century.

Culture

The city’s culture belongs to the city’s article. What the Province has of its own is upstate and is older.

A lakeside summer institution in the western counties invented adult education for the Realm in the 1870s: lectures, correspondence courses, reading circles and a season that still runs, and which put a shelf of books into farmhouses across the continent.

The Shaker villages, their furniture, their architecture and their music, preserved after the communities themselves ended.

The landscape painters of the river valley, who taught the Realm how to look at its own country and whose work hangs in every provincial gallery in it.

Summer festivals of opera, dance and orchestral music that come up from the city for the season and have done for a century.

A regional literature about emptied towns, long winters and the people who stayed, which is the Province’s most distinctive contribution to the Realm’s letters and is not read much outside it.

And a festival in a Catskills field in 1969 for which the Province was completely unprepared and which it coped with: a licensing failure, a traffic emergency, a dairy farmer’s lease and half a million people, remembered everywhere else as a generation’s defining weekend and in Albany as a case study in emergency management.

Sport

Baseball is the Realm’s game and this Province holds its oldest and richest clubs, and the sport’s museum and hall of fame sit in an upstate village of two thousand people. Horse racing at the oldest course in the Realm, whose August meeting empties the city into a spa town for a month. Boxing, and the arena that made it respectable. And a mountain town that has twice held the winter games, which is the smallest place ever to have done so.

Food

Dairy above everything, and a lobby to match. Apples and cider. The wine of the lakes. City food that came upstate and stayed, so that the delicatessen, the bagel and the pizza are now as much Utica’s as Manhattan’s. And the local specialities each upstate city insists upon and nobody outside it has heard of, which is a subject on which no two cities agree and every conversation ends in a list.

The press

An Albany press corps that is small, expert, feared inside the building and read by almost nobody outside the Province, and metropolitan papers that cover Albany as a foreign country and frequently get it wrong.

Identity

There is barely a provincial identity at all, and the Province knows it. People are from the city, or from a county, and the word “New Yorker” means the city outside the Province and starts an argument inside it. What upstate and the city actually share is institutional rather than emotional: the same examinations, the same university, the same motorway, the same parks, and the same conviction that the rest of the Realm misunderstands them.

The rest of the Realm, for its part, mostly does not distinguish the Province from its city, resents it as rich and overbearing and convinced of its own centrality, and concedes that it is usually right about money.

Failings

The Confederacy’s land. Bought at prices nobody defends, from people with no alternative buyer and sometimes no interpreter of their own, in instruments the Province negotiated and the Realm later blessed. Fifty years of litigation have produced learning and no restitution.

Slavery. Abolished so slowly that people were still enslaved in this Province when the canal opened, and financed abroad by its merchants and insurers for decades after it had been abolished at home.

The drowned villages. Communities in the Catskills and the valley were bought out, emptied and flooded so that the City could drink, and the City’s own constabulary still polices the ground they stood on.

The authorities. A generation of building carried out by boards no voter could reach, through neighbourhoods that were not consulted and could not stop them, and the reform that followed was partial and is still described that way.

The prisons. A rising put down with great loss of life, an inquiry whose findings are still the governing document, and upstate towns that now depend on the institutions and fight to keep them.

The backlash. Sustained violence against Russian and Slavic communities across this Province after May Day, worse here than anywhere in the Realm, against people burying their own dead from the same four sites. The King apologised. No American government has.

Upstate. Seventy years of decline that the Province has managed rather than answered, with programmes, incentives and campuses, none of them at the scale of what left.

And Albany. A century of ordinary corruption, a reform that genuinely worked, and a reputation that will outlive everyone now living.

And the clause itself

Article the Fifth has two failings of its own, and they are the same failing seen from two sides.

It protects a corporation and not a people. When the City governed badly, nobody in the Province could reach it, because the clause guarantees the Corporation’s powers and says nothing about how they are used.

And it has given Albany a permanent excuse. For two centuries, whenever the City has needed something the Province did not want to provide, the answer has begun with the clause. It is frequently a true answer. It has also never once been an uncomfortable one.

Symbols

The flag is the Dutch tricolour, orange over white over blue, charged with the provincial arms. The choice of the founding colours over the conquerors’ was made deliberately at the Albany Settlement and was a small act of independence, made at a time when the Realm’s own flag still carried the Union in its canton and went on doing so until 1850.

The arms are a trading province’s arms and read literally. A sunrise over mountains for the money coming in. A river between them carrying a square-rigged ship and a sloop, for ocean trade and river trade. A beaver on a mound beneath a tree, for the fur that founded the colony. Three sheaves of wheat for the interior the canal opened. The whole under the royal crown, added at the Settlement over a shield that both the Dutch and the colonial province had used before it.

The motto is Excelsior, ever upward, on the scroll beneath the shield. It was adopted in a confident century and the Province is now faintly embarrassed by it, which has not been sufficient reason to change it.

Assessment

The Province of New York has spent two centuries governing something it does not control, and has become extremely good at everything except admitting that.

It cannot legislate for its own capital. It cannot touch its own wilderness. It cannot reach the Confederacy that holds land inside its boundary. It could not rescue its greatest city when the city nearly failed, and it could not be blamed for failing to. Its Senate is weighted against its own population, its local government is the most expensive in the Realm, and the argument between its two halves is not adjudicable in the terms either half uses.

And within those limits it has built the largest university system in the Realm, the courts most of the world’s commerce contracts under, the factory law the Realm copied, the relief machinery the Realm copied, six million acres of protected wilderness, and the machinery of vice-regal continuity that every other polity adopted after it had been tested on the worst morning in the Realm’s modern history. The Province is habitually described as the place where the Realm meets the world, which is a description of its city. What the Province itself does is quieter and mostly upstate.

The honest verdict is that the limits produced the competence. A government that cannot command has to persuade, fund, negotiate and wait, and this one has been doing that since 1783 with a city it cannot govern, a wilderness it cannot enter, a confederacy it cannot address and a Senate it cannot outvote.

Which leaves the question the Province’s own lawyers ask and do not answer. A polity whose capital it cannot legislate for, whose wilderness it cannot touch, and whose oldest inhabitants deal with the Crown over its head, is a government of a peculiar kind. Whether it is one government at all, or three arrangements sharing a budget and a flag, is a question the Province has had two hundred and forty years to settle and has never found it convenient to ask.

Chronology

See also

• New York City: the capital in law, and the city the Province cannot legislate for
• Constitution of New York: the Albany Settlement and Article the Fifth in full
• The May Day Bombings
• The ABC May Day Broadcast: the announcement of Halloran’s death, made from Albany
• Robert E. Lee National Cemetery: where she is buried
• New Albion: the frontier, the falls and the seaway
• State of Deseret: founded by a faith that began in this Province’s canal counties
• Parliamentary Reform Act 1859: the Act that made the city bloc
• State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah: the Realm’s third arrangement with its nations

Trivia

Categories

Polities · Provinces · The Atlantic Seaboard · The Crown in the Polities · Indigenous Nations · May Day