The (Other) Northeast Corridor
On May 7, 1775, the Hudson Valley took center stage (again)
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
Nowadays, when we hear the phrase “Northeast Corridor,” we think of a stretch of territory on the Atlantic seaboard that stretches from greater Boston to metropolitan Washington, DC, a swath of settlement inhabited by about 50 million people, or 17 percent of the U.S. population. But 250 years ago, a different northeast corridor—one running along the Hudson River from Manhattan to Albany, with overland connections to Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Saint Lawrence River—was the seam along which control of North America ran.
It's not hard to see why. Rivers were the first highways in America, and the Hudson, anchored by the Atlantic at one end and a crossroads with the Mohawk River at the other, offered the most accessible avenue to the interior of the northeast for centuries. It was a key asset for indigenous peoples, for whom the river was a key strategic dividing line between Algonquin and Iroquois tribes. And when the Dutch East India Company arrived in the early seventeenth century to open a branch office in the West, it ran its commercial operation in narrow string running from Fort Orange to the north and New Amsterdam to the south—renamed Albany and New York once the English wrested this prize from the Dutch in a series of relatively bloodless maneuvers that was largely complete by the last quarter of the century.
Meanwhile, the French, who had established a claim to Canada dating back to 1535, finally got serious about developing it—and threatening the English. The outbreak of King William’s War in 1688 was the first in a series of conflicts that lasted for 75 years between the French and British empires—and their indigenous rivals—for control of the continent. These wars reached their climax in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), during which the French moved methodically from Montreal down through a string of forts until the British launched a counteroffensive that climaxed on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759, where the British won a decisive victory that cemented their control for good.
Or so it seemed. As we know, the end of the French and Indian War effectively marked the beginning of the American Revolution, in which the Hudson Valley would again become an indispensable geopolitical asset. It was, in effect, the backbone of New England—and an obvious means of cleaving the most rebellious of the British colonies from their less militant counterparts. The valley was also the gateway to the western frontier of upstate New York (evoked in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels were the Star Wars of their time—and the setting of 1992 film version of Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day-Lewis, one my favorite movies of all time), which is why the British had long cultivated good relations with the tribes there, most of whom would fight against the Americans.
It's also why, with the blood barely dry from the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775, some colonists immediately turned their attention toward this northeast corridor. There was a distinctively improvisatory—and nakedly opportunistic—quality to the enterprise. Though it had no jurisdiction over New York territory, the colony of Connecticut authorized a military expedition to be led by an audacious young soldier named Benedict Arnold to seize the key node of Fort Ticonderoga and its batteries of artillery, which could come in handy if moved down to Massachusetts (as it did it was, resulting in victory of the Battle of Dorchester, which drove the Brits out of the colony entirely). At the same time, that place known as Vermont—truly the wild, wild east of North America, tussled over by New York and New Hampshire, and which would flirt with the British as well as toy with becoming an independent republic—sent another traveling party led by a gangleader named Ethan Allen, who led an outfit known as the Green Mountain Boys. On May 7, 1775, Allen and Arnold, both of whose loyalty to the United States would later come into question, put aside their differences long enough to skillfully execute a raid that captured Ticonderoga without a shot. The British commander was caught in his nightclothes.
The American capture of Ticonderoga launched fantasies that Canada was low-hanging fruit. Arnold almost died almost died in an insane—but almost successful—attack on the impregnable Quebec that fall, and Congress sent Benjamin Franklin to Montreal the following spring to try to talk the Canadians into joining the United States. Nothing doing. (Nothing doing in the War of 1812, when the Americans tried again. And nothing doing in 2025, notwithstanding the delicate diplomacy of Donald Trump.)
After the colonists kicked the Brits out of Boston in March of 1776, his Majesty’s government looked at the imperial chessboard and once again focused its gaze on the northeast corridor of the eighteenth century. Capturing New York in the summer of 1776 was a breeze, thanks to the ineptitude of General Washington, setting up a scenario where the Brits could march up the Hudson Valley from Manhattan and down the Hudson Valley from Quebec (with, yes, a stop at Ticonderoga) to sever the Revolution at its most important artery. It really should have worked. But through a series of mishaps that will be a story for another day, the turning point of the Revolution took place at the Battle of Saratoga in the fall of 1777. There might have been a different turning point three years later if Benedict Arnold, now a traitor, succeeded in turning over West Point to the British, which would have transformed the strategic situation of the Hudson Valley once again. The next turning point wouldn’t occur for another half-century, when the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected New York to the Great Lakes via the Hudson Valley and made Manhattan the pivot between the American interior and Europe. Another great empire was born.
These days, the Hudson Valley is no longer seen as the nation’s critical corridor (though it’s a vacationland and a playground for history nerds). Such are the vagaries of history. And so it is I say: All hail that traitor Benedict Arnold!