- Title: Philip Schuyler
- Author: Johnson, Fry & Co.
- Date: c.1861
- Condition: A crisp steel engraving on a very clean sheet. Superb.
- Inches: 8 1/4 x 10 3/4 [Paper]
- Centimeters: 20.95 x 27.30 [Paper]
- Product ID: 308731
An Underrated Revolutionary Power Broker
From the National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans, after a painting by Alonzo Chappel. A fine steel engraving printed on wove paper, issued as part of Johnson, Fry & Co.’s ambitious patriotic series celebrating notable figures in the nation’s political and cultural history.
Philip John Schuyler (1733–1804) was a major general in the Continental Army and a key political figure of the early republic, rooted in the Dutch patrician world of colonial Albany. Born into a wealthy landowning family with deep ties to New Netherland’s old aristocracy, he first saw service as a captain and later major in the provincial forces during the French and Indian War, fighting at Lake George, Oswego, Ticonderoga, and Fort Frontenac. In 1768 he entered the New York Assembly and emerged as a strong advocate for colonial rights, then took his seat in the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he was quickly appointed one of the first four major generals in the new Continental Army and placed in command of the Northern Department. From his Albany headquarters he organized the invasion of Canada, oversaw supply and shipbuilding on Lake Champlain, and helped delay and disrupt British advances into New York—preparatory work that proved crucial to the eventual American victory at Saratoga, even though Horatio Gates received most of the public credit.
After ill health, political rivalry, and a court‑martial (in which he was acquitted with honor) led him to resign his army commission, Schuyler returned to politics, serving in the Continental Congress, the New York State Senate, and ultimately the first U.S. Senate, where he backed a strong federal union and supported Alexander Hamilton’s financial program—unsurprising given that Hamilton had married his daughter Elizabeth. At the same time, his legacy is inseparable from his status as a large‑scale enslaver and land magnate: throughout his life he and his family enslaved dozens of people on their Albany and Saratoga properties, building wealth from their labor while styling themselves patriotic republicans. Modern interpretations, including the reassessment that followed Hamilton’s popularity and the removal of his Albany statue, tend to present Schuyler as an under‑recognized but central organizer of the northern war effort—and as a figure whose contributions and complicity must be read together rather than in isolation.