In June Fulton launches a new vessel, the Car of Neptune. The same month rival John Stevens takes his new vessel, the Phoenix, out of New York City and heads for Philadelphia, the world's first oceangoing steamboat. On December 1st the two men divvy up the market. Fulton gets the steamboat monopoly on all New York State waters, the run to New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Stevens gets Chesapeake Bay, the Connecticut, Delaware, Santee and Savannah Rivers, and the run from Long Island Sound to Providence, Rhode Island.
Life goes on across the state.
In Manhattan Knickerbocker's History of New York, a spoof by young Washington Irving, is published, and John Randall, Jr. is commissioned to map out new streets for the growing city. Lake Champlain even acquires one of the new steamboats, the Vermont. And death comes this year to two once influential New York residents. In Canandaigua, land speculator Oliver Phelps, promoter in 1788 of the million-dollar purchase of western New York lands, dies in debtor's prison. Down in New York City's Greenwich Village, one of the great enablers of the previous war, Thomas Paine, dies in an alcoholic haze.