Note 1111 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Act of March 27, 1798, Laws of New York, 1798, 382-83.
This act, however, was merely the transfer of similar privileges granted to John Fitch on March 19, 1787, to whom, rather than to Robert Fulton, belongs the honor of having invented the steamboat. It was printed in the Laws of New York edited by Thomas Greenleaf, published in 1792, i, 411; and also appears as Appendix A to "A Letter, addressed to Cadwallader D. Colden, Esquire," by William Alexander Duer, the first biographer of Fulton. (Albany, 1817.) Duer's pamphlet is uncommonly valuable because it contains all the petitions to, and the acts of, the New York Legislature concerning the steamboat monopoly.