Fort George, New York City in 1731.
New York City is the capital of the Northern Confederation and the largest city in New York Province and the Confederation of North America. A center of Loyalist sentiment before and during the Rebellion, the city was taken by William Howe in the summer of 1776 and remained in loyal hands thereafter. After his victory at Saratoga, John Burgoyne took up residence in New York and made it the social and political center of the North American colonies. When the Britannic Design combined the original Central and Northern Confederations into a single Northern Confederation, New York was chosen as its capital, partly in the the hope that its loyalist leanings would outweigh more rebellious New England.
New York reached a population of 40,000 by 1790, making it the largest city in the colonies, and by 1840 it was the largest city in the British Empire, dwarfing even London, and the largest financial center in the world. By that time it also had more theaters than any other city in North America. By 1878 it had the top five banks in the C.N.A., seventeen of the top twenty banks, and was the headquarters of 79 of the nations 100 largest corporations.
As the site of the centralized Northern Confederation government before the Second Design, New York City was the site of the assassination of N.C. Governor Daniel Webster in 1840, and a major center of the violence that engulfed the confederation thereafter. The city was again a focus of violence in 1899, this time directed against immigrants during the Starkist Terror.
As Negroes moved from Southern Vandalia to the rest of the C.N.A. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York was one of their principal destinations. By 1930, a quarter of the city's population was Negro.
In For All Nails, Brooklyn remains a separate city from New York, but there is no evidence for this in Sobel's text.