Abraham Yates, Jr. (1724-1796) [Sec 34 Lot 6]
Albany’s first Postmaster, Delegate to the Continental Congress, NY Senator, 31st Mayor of Albany, President of the Provincial Congress, headed the convention that drafted NY’s first Constitution, Albany County Sheriff, founder and one of the first Trustees of Union College, First chairman of Albany’s Committee of Safety during the Revolutionary War.
Throughout his career, Yates maintained his faith in the worth and virtue of the common man and also his distrust of aristocracy and special interests. Although Yates did not live to see the democratic triumph in the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, he had been one of its grass roots architects since the 1750s.
Abraham Yates, Jr.(August 1724 - 30 June 1796), public servant and political writer, was born in Albany the son of Christoffel Yates, a farmer and blacksmith and Catelyntje Winne. He grew up in a multicultural community where his mother and grandmother represented the Flemish and French ancestry roots of New Netherland.
Following completion of preparatory school, Abraham apprenticed as a cobbler. By the 1750s Yates had transitioned from the working class to clerk in the Albany law office of Peter Silvester. There he read for the bar and discovered doctrines of the "Rights of Man" as espoused by the radical writers of the English Enlightenment. He is said to have found his way into the library of attorney William Corry where he began to read for the law. Yates's legal training) has been difficult to determine. His writings reveal an acquaintance with the works of a number of the leading legal theorists of the time. The extent of Corry's actual mentoring is likewise unknown. Nevertheless, Abraham Yates, Jr. was licensed to practice law in New York in October 1759.
In 1746 he had married Anna De Ridder, the daughter of a property-owning Saratoga farmer, and had four children together, and the marriage provided him with access to several regional networks. The couple settled in Albany, where Yates eventually prospered, supported by what became an extensive legal practice, management of the De Ridder lands, and some importing. Of their five children only one, a daughter Susanna, survived to adulthood.
Beginning in 1754, he was elected and served on the Albany City Council, a position he would occupy for the next 19 years. Yates' election was notable as the Council was generally made up of wealthy merchants and he was the sole lawyer among the group, well known for his attacks against the patrician landowners of the era and support for small farmers. Also in 1754, with the help of Robert Livingston, Jr., Yates was appointed sheriff of Albany County. This royal office brought him into contact with New England titleholders squatting on Livingston and Van Rensselaer manors, as well as with those who faced imprisonment for nonpayment of debts and other civil offenses. His tenure as sheriff during the French and Indian War (1754-59) was marked by firsthand experience with the place of civil rights in the face of British military imperatives, as he became a local advocate in direct opposition to British commanders and provincial leaders. Those experiences caused him to question the inequity of access to wealth in America, and more fundamentally, the place of American colonists in the imperial scheme of things. They also shaped his personal life, as he was captured and imprisoned by angry New Englanders, assailed by British officers and censured by provincial officials. Yates was thirty when he became sheriff. His manuscript journal and copy-book covering those years details the varied nature of his duties, how dangerous his work could become, and his personal experiences that raised issues that would make him a Revolutionary leader in the years to come.
Entering local politics, Yates drew on popular support to be elected annually to the Albany common council from 1753 to 1773. This accession of a blacksmith's son to the council was unprecedented as Albany's aldermen mostly had represented the city's commercial elite. A lawyer among merchants, Yates was called on to provide legal services for the City Corporation. In so doing, he showed himself to be a proponent of liberty and opportunity over property and privilege, and thus he alienated much of the community's traditional political establishment. His bid for the provincial assembly in 1761 was thwarted by both landed and court interests who had identified Yates as a dangerous leveler. Embittered by defeat, Yates turned away from conventional politics and began to articulate his reservations about the provincial establishment. He soon had an opportunity to stand for American rights in opposition to the Stamp Act and then the Intolerable Acts. During that time he began to build a local action network that included several nephews and other ambitious but not well-born young men. During the 1760s and into the 70s, he continued to practice law, and traded in wines and other commodities from his Market Street home.
Ousted from the Albany council following a staged election dispute in 1773, ended Yates's official connection to the provincial (royal) government. Yates resurfaced in 1775 as the first chairman of the Albany Committee of Correspondence, Safety, and Protection. By 1775, the royal government in New York ceased to function. Its province-wide operations were assumed by a succession of Provincial Congresses composed of pro-American representatives from each of the counties. Beginning in that year, he was elected to represent Albany in each of the four New York provincial congresses. Commuting between Albany and New York City, Yates attended the congress as it fled before the British in 1776, served as its temporary president, and chaired the committee that produced the first New York state constitution. Despite disabling illness, Yates participated in the drafting of the constitution and led a mostly unsuccessful floor campaign to have some of the democratic features of earlier drafts restored to the final document that was adopted and proclaimed by the New York State Convention in April 1777.
Firmly established as a revolutionary stalwart in New York State, Yates became closely identified with the insurgent politics of new governor George Clinton and spearheaded Clinton's program in the state legislature. He continued to shape the political revolution as a member of the transitional Council of Safety, state senator and member of the Council of Appointment, Albany city recorder, state loan officer, and then as a delegate to the Continental Congress.
During the 1780s Yates became increasingly troubled by what he suspected was a conscious effort to subvert the fruits of the Revolution to the ambitions of a privileged few in order to establish a more powerful central government. Now in his sixties, Yates began to express in writing his opposition to the emerging forces of nationalism. In 1786 he published a polemical monograph entitled Political Papers Addressed to the Advocates of a Congressional Revenue in the State of New York. He also wrote a series of essays in opposition to a stronger central government under the pseudonyms "Cato," "Sydney," and "A Rough Hewer." These newspaper articles, published over a period from 1783-92, were perhaps the most widely read expositions of the antifederalist point of view. During that time Yates resurrected and revised his earlier histories of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and colonial New York, underscoring and intensifying his claims of a historical conspiracy to deprive ordinary people of their essential human rights. These histories served as background for a major polemical article that Yates wrote in 1789 on the movement for the United States Constitution. With the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Yates ended his writing efforts, and those essays remained unpublished.
In 1790 Yates was appointed the 31st Mayor of Albany and he served in that position until his death. During his term, oil street lamps were installed in Albany. His final years were marked by the emergence of his native city as a major American city and as the capital of New York State.
Yates was a presidential elector in 1792, and cast his votes for George Washington and George Clinton. In 1795, Yates was also a founding trustee of Union College in Schenectady, New York.
He died in Albany on June 30, 1796.