There’s an exciting, quirky story from the earliest days of colonial New York that goes
like this: In the 1670s, New York and New Jersey were arguing over control of Staten
Island, which lay in the waters separating the two colonies.
The Duke of York offered to settle the argument with an unusual proposition: Any “small
island” in the Hudson River or New York Harbor would be considered part of New York
— and “small” meant that a boat could circumnavigate it in less than a day.
This would seem to grant the sizable land mass of Staten Island to New Jersey — except
that the crafty duke hired British sea captain Christopher Billopp, who used his nautical
skills to race around the island in 23 hours.
And that’s why even though Staten Island is nestled on three sides along the New Jersey
mainland, and seemingly a “natural” part of the Garden State, is today part of New
York.
The only problem with this story is that the events it describes almost certainly never
happened.
There’s no record of anyone telling it until 1873, more than 200 years after the boat race
supposedly took place.
What’s more, the story describes the boat race as settling the dispute — and yet in
reality, New Jersey was still fighting for the right to control Staten Island all the
way into the 1830s.
So today we will cover the actual story behind staten island but first be sure to subscribe
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The real story of how Staten Island came to be part of New York — a perennial question
for a borough that often seems like it wants to go its own way, and another four boroughs
that might be inclined to let it — is more complicated.
It involves an exiled prince, 100,000 beads of wampum, and a nineteenth-century out-of–Supreme
Court settlement that gave rise to a twist ending in 1998.
The story begins with the Dutch, during a halcyon period before trans-Hudson rivalries.
Most of us know that the Dutch were the first Europeans to colonize Manhattan, but on paper
(parchment?) the Dutch claimed a huge swath of territory, stretching from the Connecticut
River to the Delaware, and thus including all of present-day New Jersey.
Most of the Native Americans living there were likely unaware that the Dutch had claimed
their land, now as for what European settlement existed was for the most part clustered along
the Hudson River and New York Bay.
The whole region, including small settlements on Staten Island (named in honor of the Staten-Generaal,
which is the Dutch parliament) and in present-day Jersey City, was run as a single unit from
New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan.
But in 1664, an English fleet sailed into New York Harbor and seized the colony without
a fight.
King Charles II granted it to his brother James, the Duke of York, who renamed it after
himself.
But the duke, who never visited his new realm, almost immediately turned around and granted
much of it to two friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley of Stratton.
Only a few years previously, England had returned back to a monarchy after a decade under the
control of Oliver Cromwell’s puritan Commonwealth.
During the interregnum, Carteret had sheltered the royal brothers on Jersey, off the coast
of France, and they owed both him and Berkeley a debt of gratitude, as well as a debt of
actual money.
To repay him, James assigned them the land between the Hudson and Delaware as a separate
colony, which was named after Carteret’s home.
This is how the two sides of the Hudson came under separate jurisdictions.
The charter granted to Carteret and Berkeley described the new colony’s shape in a manner
typical for the period: vaguely and full of errors arising from wild misunderstandings
of actual geography.
Disputes arose in every direction, but the section that’s relevant for our purposes
describes the border in the area around New York City:
If you look at a map of New York Harbor, you’ll see why this description is inadequate.
Upper and Lower New York Bay aren’t really part of the “main sea” (the Atlantic),
but they aren’t part of the Hudson either.
And while Staten Island would clearly be to the west of a line extended straight down
from the mouth of the Hudson, you can also see why, if you’re looking at the map through
the eyes of a seventeenth-century colonist, it makes sense to group it in with the rest
of the New York archipelago.
In the days before extensive road and bridge networks, when boats were the main form of
transportation, bodies of water united the land masses around them rather than dividing
them.
That’s why Maryland and Virginia, settled around the same time, have land on both sides
of Chesapeake Bay.
Staten Island formed one half of the natural entryway into New York Harbor and the Hudson.
And so the leaders of New York did the natural thing: They bought it.
In 1670, five years before the boat race that never happened, Francis Lovelace, the governor
of New York Colony, negotiated a treaty with the members of the native Munsee people who
had been uneasily sharing Staten Island with a few Europeans since the days of the Dutch.
Much has been written about the mutual misunderstanding and coercion that often marked these sorts
of transactions, but it seems that the Munsees got a better deal than some, leaving with
400 fathoms of wampum along with guns, lead, powder, hoes, and knives.
In 1683, New York organized its first county governments, and Richmond, covering Staten
Island, was one of them.
New Jersey organized its first counties in the same year, and Staten Island was conspicuously
not included.
County governments were ways for colonies to stake out claims on disputed territory;
one of the other original New York counties was Dukes, which included Martha’s Vineyard
and Nantucket, now in Massachusetts.
So this seemed to settle the Staten Island question, right?
Not so fast.
It would take another 150 years, but New Jersey would finally have its day in court.
By the early nineteenth century, New York and New Jersey had settled the Line War — the
dispute over their land border near the Poconos — but their maritime boundary in the New
York City area was still hotly contested.
The colonial charters were considered the ultimate authority, and New York took the
maximalist interpretation of “bounded on the east part by the main sea, and part by
Hudson’s river”: It claimed that the eastern edge of New Jersey was, at the high-tide point,
where the water met the shore.
By this logic, even the docks or wharves New Jersey built on its own shore were New York’s
— and New York routinely sent tax collectors and other government officials to enforce
its supposed rights.
New Jersey, to fight back, now made a sweeping claim of its own: It said that the line ought
to run down the middle of the Hudson and then follow the channel out to sea, which would
give it control not only of its own shore but of Staten Island as well, which by 1830
had 7,000 inhabitants and had never been controlled by the New Jersey government.
In 1832, New Jersey finally took New York to court over the dispute — specifically,
to the Supreme Court.
But it wasn’t clear that the court had the jurisdiction to hear the case; New York definitely
didn’t think so, and at first refused even to send lawyers to argue its side.
The case also arose during a delicate moment in U.S. politics.
South Carolina was threatening to refuse to enforce a newly passed federal tariff, and
the Jackson administration didn’t want another headache involving states’ rights.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had just ruled against Georgia in its dispute with the Cherokee
Nation, and Georgia was similarly refusing to go along with the decision.
Chief Justice Marshall may have worried that if New York ignored a ruling against it as
well, the court’s prestige would be irreparably harmed, so he postponed the case until the
next year.
That gave Martin Van Buren, newly elected U.S. vice president and one of New York’s
biggest power brokers, time to swoop in and arrange a compromise.
New Jersey would get the line it wanted down the middle of the Hudson, and the right to
build and control piers and docks on its shore.
But the line would jog around Staten Island, leaving Richmond County as part of New York
State and, once consolidation went through in 1898, New York City.
One wonders how serious New Jersey was about its claim in the first place; perhaps it was
just a chip it could bargain away to get the shore rights that were its overriding goal.
But whatever the case, that’s how Staten Island definitely became part of New York:
no boat race involved, just a treaty with Native Americans and a little vice-presidential
arm-twisting.
There’s one odd footnote: Van Buren’s line down the Hudson left two uninhabited
islets that had long been administered by New York — Ellis Island and Bedloe’s Island
— on the New Jersey side of the maritime border.
New Jersey was, again, mostly concerned about its commercial docks, so it agreed to let
those islands remain New York land surrounded by New Jersey water.
Bedloe’s Island became the base of a giant statue gifted to us by France and was renamed
Liberty Island; Ellis Island, meanwhile, became the port of entry for millions of immigrants,
and in order to accommodate them all, was expanded tenfold by landfill.
New Jersey sued, claiming that the newly constructed parts of the island belonged to it, and in
1998 the Supreme Court agreed — which is what makes figuring out sales taxes on Ellis
Island unduly complicated to this day.