New York was one of the Middle Colonies. It was different in many ways from the New England Colonies. In New England, a half-million families, mostly of English descent, scratched out a living on small plots of rocky land. In contrast, fewer than 200,000 people lived in all of New York in 1776. Because of unusual land-grant policies, huge tracts of New York's fertile land were owned by a handful of men, most of them descended from the New World's early Dutch or English settlers. At the beginning of the American Revolution, then, about twenty wealthy families (including that of American General Philip Schuyler; 1733–1804) owned most of New York's land and wielded most of the region's political and economic power. These families were connected by intermarriage, and most of them—including many of the ordinary citizens of New...