Harmanus Bleecker
Papers, 1715-1872

SC9902

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Biographical Note:

Harmanus Bleecker (October 24, 1779-July 19, 1849), a descendant "both in the male and female line, from ancestors who came [to New York State] originally from Holland" (letter, December 2, 1836), was born in Albany, New York, and was baptized - as Hermanus - on October 31, 1779, in the First Reformed Church of Albany. His great-great-grandfather on his father's side was Jan Jansen Bleecker, a native of Meppel, The Netherlands, who came to New Netherland in 1658. Harmanus was the son of Jacob Bleecker, Jr., an Albany merchant, and Elizabeth Wendell, who, at the time of his birth, lived in a house that stood on the corner of Steuben and Chapel streets in Albany.

Following in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, Hermanus Wendell, who had served as an assistant judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Bleecker entered the study of law in 1797 with John Vernor Henry in Albany. On April 16, 1801, as Bleecker was preparing to travel to New York City to take the bar examination, Henry gave him a letter addressed to the justices of the Supreme Court of Judicature stating Bleecker had served as his clerk and attesting to "his moral character."

Having passed his examination, he returned to Albany and began to practice. Shortly thereafter he entered into a partnership with Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., son of the Massachusetts statesman, jurist, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The office of Bleecker & Sedgwick was first at 82 Market Street (now Broadway), then at 100 State Street and finally at 64 State Street. Bleecker was a frequent guest at the Albany home of Sedgwick and his wife, Susan, as well as at their summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and was a close friend of his partner's sister, Catharine, a novelist. When Sedgwick decided, on account of his health, to go to New York, Bleecker took as his partner Peter Seton Henry.

In 1811 Bleecker was elected, as a Federalist, to represent the Albany (Seventh New York) district in the Twelfth United States Congress (March 4, 1811-March 3, 1813). He was not a candidate for renomination in 1812, resuming the practice of law in Albany. He served as a member of the New York State Assembly in 1814 and 1815.

In 1817 Union College awarded him an honorary LL.D and he was named an honorary member of New York Alpha of the Phi Beta Kappa, Union College.

In 1823 he successfully represented two engineers who, under a contract with the Canal Commission, had gone on land needed for a turnpike and cut down the trees that were growing there (Bradshaw v. Rogers and Magee). Rogers and Magee appealed to the Court for the Correction of Errors where they were represented by Bleecker and Samuel Young. Bradshaw was represented by Abraham Van Vechten.

Over the years he served on the board of trustees of the Boys' Academy and on the board of the Albany Bible Society. In 1822, he was appointed a regent of the University of the State of New York and served on that body until 1834. In 1839 Bleecker was a member of the original board of governors that founded Albany City Hospital, now Albany Medical Center. From 1846 until his death he was a member of the executive committee that organized and oversaw the State Normal College, now the University at Albany.

He was an active member of the St. Nicholas [Benevolent] Society of Albany and there are several letters in the collection related to the celebration of St. Nicholas's feast day, December 6, and suggested toasts to be recited during the annual dinner for the times he could not attend.

In the fall of 1838, at the age of 59, Bleecker decided to retire indefinitely from his law practice and, setting no date for his return, to make his first visit to Europe and wander there as he felt inclined. A farewell banquet was given in his honor and was attended by Ten Eycks, Van Rensselaers, Wendells, Teunis Van Vechten, Gerrit Y. Lansing, Marcus T. Reynolds, and Governor William L. Marcy, to name just a few of the descendants of old Dutch families and prominent Albanians who gathered to honor him.

Bleecker had apparently left his business in the care of a man who proved himself unequal to the trust. When the fear that his affairs were being mismanaged became a certainty, he wrote to John V.L. (Van Schaick Lansing) Pruyn, a 29-year-old lawyer in Albany, asking him to act as his "agent" (legal adviser).

While he was in Europe, Bleecker received word that, on May 15, 1839, President Martin Van Buren had appointed him chargé d'affaires for The Netherlands. He presented his credentials at The Hague on July 13, 1839 and resigned from the post on June 23, 1842, being relieved of his duties on August 22, 1842.

While serving chargé, Bleecker hired, as his secretary, John Romeyn Brodhead, who, once in The Netherlands, indulged in his love of New York State history and eventually resigned his job to gather materials in English, French and Dutch archives that pertained to the history of New York. Included in the Bleecker collection are several letters written to Bleecker by Brodhead.

On September 14, 1842, Bleecker married Sebastiana Cornelia Mentz, a young woman he had met while in The Netherlands. She was 28 at the time of their marriage. In July 1843, he and Cornelia arrived in Albany. Upon his return to Albany, Bleecker retired from public life and business pursuits.

Bleecker died in Albany July 19, 1849, and is interred in the Albany Rural Cemetery.

Cornelia went back to The Hague shortly after Harmanus's death. About two years later she married a distant cousin, Hendrik Coster. The couple lived for a short while in Albany but then returned to The Netherlands. She died at Arnhem in 1885.

Hermanus left all his property for the use of his wife, with the verbal understanding between them that such property, upon her death, should be applied in some judicious way to be permanently beneficial to the City of Albany.

Before returning to The Netherlands to live, Mrs. Coster executed a deed of trust covering the disposition of Mr. Bleecker's property after the death of herself and Coster. J.V.L. Pruyn was appointed executor of the trust. However, when Pruyn died before Mrs. Coster, Harriet Langdon Pruyn Rice's maternal grandfather, Amasa J. Parker, succeeded to the trust.

Judge Parker offered the funds to the Young Men's Association (YMA) of the city of Albany, for the erection of a public hall and library building, and, as a result, Harmanus Bleecker Hall was constructed, ca. 1889, at Washington Avenue and Lark Street. In 1919 the YMA sold the hall and, with the money received from that sale, the Harmanus Bleecker Library at the corner of Washington and Dove Street was built. The association deeded the new building to the city near the end of 1924. It was the first library building in the city, and the beginning of Albany's current public library system.

This biographical note was compiled from information extracted from Harmanus Bleecker: An Albany Dutchman, 1779-1849 by Harriet Langdon Pruyn (Mrs. William Gorham) Rice.

Scope and Content Note:

The collection consists mainly of letters to and from Harmanus Bleecker, and of documents, pamphlets, etc., collected by or relating to him in his career as a leading lawyer and citizen in Albany and in the state of New York, as a member of the House of Representatives (1811-1813), and as the United States chargé d' affaires at The Hague in The Netherlands (1839-1842). Also included are letters to the Bleecker family; to the firm of Bleecker & Sedgwick; and letters relative to the management and disposal of the Bleecker estate.

A great many of the items have little to do with Bleecker directly. There is business correspondence (ca. 90 items), in Dutch, of his great-grandfather, Hendrick Ten Eyck, with agents in Amsterdam, Boston, Curacoa (Curaçao), London, New York and the West Indies (about 1720-1750), giving a vivid impression of the routine of trade of an important Albany merchant of those days. Bleecker's grandfather, Jacob Bleecker, was an interpreter for the New York Commissioners for Indian Affairs, and his correspondence, mainly official, gives a lively if brief glimpse of the colony's dealings with the Six Nations and other Indian nations.

Papers of the law firm of Bleecker & Sedgwick (ca. 1820-1840) deal with land cases and with navigation rights as affected by the newly invented steam power, etc., and include papers related to the Peter Penet case, running back to a pre-Revolutionary Indian land grant. Of particular note to the earliest history of New York State is the long and full correspondence between Bleecker and his ex-secreatary, John Romeyn Brodhead, covering the whole period of Brodhead's gathering of material relating to the State of New York from the archives of The Netherlands, England and France, affording an almost week-by-week account of the progress of one of the state's more important historical undertakings.

Also included are letters written during Bleecker's single term in Congress which covered the outbreak of the War of 1812 and furnish an "atmospheric" record of the outliook of the Federalist "opposition"; papers related to the case of Captain George McIntyre Hatch, of the American ship Atalanta, with its Dutch diplomatic involvements (1841-1842); and letters with George Washington Bethune (1840) on the difficulties of zealous American missionaries with stolid Dutch officials in Java.

Since Bleecker's corresdpondents included most of the important New Yorkers of his time and many of the most important Americans and Hollanders (from John Quincy Adams to Daniel Webster, and Donker Curtius to Wallenstein), the letters provide a lively look at diplomatic life and of the social and political life centering about Albany (1805-1845).

Mr. Bleecker's widow long survived him so that letters, etc., relating to the management of his estate and of the Harmanus Bleecker trust in favor of the city of Albany continue to 1872. To this group, in the main, belong the letters of John Van Schaick Lansing Pruyn and originals or copies of most of the documents related to the Bleecker trust.

The information in this scope-and-content note was extracted from a December 27, 1928, report written by Georgia Benedict, who arranged and described the collection, to Miss Edna L. Jacobsen of the manuscripts and special collections unit of the New York State Library.

Provenance Note:

Most of the documents in the Harmanus Bleecker Papers passed from his hands to his daughters, Harriet Langdon Pruyn (Mrs. William Gorham) Rice and Huybertje (sometimes, Huybertie) Lansing Pruyn (Mrs. Charles S.) Hamlin. Mrs. Rice used the papers in writing Harmanus Bleecker: An Albany Dutchman, 1779-1849 (400 copies published in 1924) before donating them to the New York State Library in 1927. A few of the letters have been printed in the book. Some of the papers originally were held by Amasa J. Parker, Harriet's and Huybertje's maternal grandfather, who served as executor of Harmanus's trust following J.V.L. Pruyn's death.

Related Collections:

The New York State Library also has a one-box collection (0.25 cu.ft.) of Harmanus Bleecker Papers, dating from 1801 to 1885 (SC9578), that consists of three series: letters to Harmanus Bleecker, letters from Harmanus Bleecker, and papers related to his wife, Sebastiana Cornelia Bleecker and his estate. The papers in SC9578, which complement and fill in gaps in SC9902, were donated by Amasa J. Parker in 1926.

Box Arrangement:

The collection is arranged chronologically, but the primary means of description is based on an alphabetical index of correspondents. Certain designated items are stored in the vault, which requires making special arrangements to view the originals; copies of the vault items house with the rest of the collection and digital images of those items are available.

Index to Documents: The above chart should be used to determine the appropriate container in which documents of interest are located.