FRANCE now became more menacing than Spain. The French sent a fleet to the New World with orders to burn Boston, and although the attack failed, French soldiers raided upper New York State. As always, the French and the British vied for help from the Six Nations. New York’s new governor, George Clinton, offered a bounty to every Indian bringing in an enemy scalp.
In 1746 hundreds of Oneida and Mohawk warriors, squaws, and papooses glided down the Hudson in canoes so that the sachems could confer with the governor. Beaching their craft on the western shore of Manhattan, they disembarked and set up camp at what is now the eastern end of the Holland Tunnel. Then the braves filed down Broadway, carrying poles hung with the scalps of dead Frenchmen. Upon reaching the fort, they powwowed with the white men, declared an end to their friendship with the British, and vowed that they would slay no more Frenchmen. New Yorkers watched silently and anxiously as the Indians left.
Philadelphia feared an invasion from Canada as much as New York did, and four Pennsylvanians came here to borrow cannon. One of the men was Benjamin Franklin, then clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly. After returning home, he wrote about the conference with Governor Clinton:
He at first refused us peremptorily; but at dinner with his council, where there was great drinking of Madeira wine, as the custom of the place was, he softened by degrees and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers, he advanced to ten; and at length he very good-naturedly conceded eighteen. They were fine cannon, eighteen-pounders with their carriages, which we soon transported.
This wine-guzzling governor ruled the colony and city of New York from 1743 to 1753, or longer than anybody since Peter Stuy-vesant. Then, wracked with rheumatism and richer by 80,000 pounds, Clinton wanted to go back to England. The people were equally eager to see him depart. On October 7, 1753, Clinton welcomed his successor, thirty-eight-year-old Sir Danvers Osborn, still mourning his wife’s death a decade earlier. His brother-in-law, the Earl of Halifax, got him this job in the New World, hoping that a change of scenery would brighten his spirits.
Three days after Osborn arrived, he was sworn into office by Clinton. As the new and the retiring governors paraded from the fort to City Hall and back, spectators shouted oaths and shook their fists at the detested Clinton. At first he shrugged off their hostility but finally took refuge within the fort. The more sensitive Osborn, shaken by the demonstration, murmured to Clinton, “I expect like treatment to that which you have received before I leave this government.”
The next evening, while dining with Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey, the new governor complained that he felt ill and told his host, “I believe I shall soon leave you the government, for I find myself unable to support the burden of it.” A doctor was summoned, but Osborn ignored his advice, merely taking a bowl of broth. Dismissing his servant at twelve o’clock, he spent the rest of the night burning private papers and laying out a small sum of money owed to a friend.
Osborn was a guest in the home of Joseph Murray, the colony’s leading lawyer, because the governor’s mansion was being redecorated. Just as dawn pearled the horizon on October 12, the young governor slipped out of the Murray household and walked into the garden. It was bounded by a high wooden fence, topped with spikes. Osborn climbed onto a board a few feet off the ground, took a silk handkerchief from his pocket, fashioned it into a noose, cast the loop over a couple of spikes, thrust his head through the handkerchief, and stepped off the board.
About eight o’clock that morning people began shouting in the streets, “The governor has hanged himself!” In excitement and bewilderment officials gathered in the Murray home. Osborn’s secretary revealed that he had made an attempt on his life once before in anguish over the death of his wife. Now it was ruled that Sir Danvers Osborn had committed suicide while insane. After a dispute about giving a suicide a religous burial, he was laid to rest with full religious rites.
The Reverend Henry Barclay, rector of Trinity Church, who officiated at the funeral, took part in a more pleasant activity the following year. This was the establishment of present-day Columbia University. In those days lotteries were the usual means of raising money for colleges. Back in 1746 New Yorkers had persuaded the assembly to hold a lottery for a local college, and 2,250 pounds had been realized. Five years later a second lottery had brought in 3,443 more pounds. The total sum was vested in a board of ten trustees appointed by the assembly. One trustee was a Presbyterian, two belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, and the other seven were members of the Church of England and served as Trinity vestrymen. When the assembly gave them the right to consider offers from citizens or counties wanting the college, Trinity’s vestrymen offered some Trinity land as a campus.
The lone Presbyterian trustee, William Livingston, protested. He wanted a state college supported by the legislature, not an institution dominated by the Church of England. The local Anglican party, headed by De Lancey, fought back. After a furious controversy the Anglicans won. The college charter declared that the college president “forever and for the time being” must belong to the Church of England. Moreover, the college’s morning and evening services had to be conducted in the liturgy of this Church.
The sixth college in the British colonies received its charter on October 31, 1754. It was named King’s College in honor of King George II. Its first president was a Church of England minister, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Connecticut, tutor of the De Lancey grandchildren. His 250-pound salary was so inadequate that the vestrymen also named him assistant pastor of Trinity. Before construction began on the college buildings, the first class met in the vestry room of Trinity Church’s schoolhouse.
For ten shillings the parish gave the college some land on the west side of Broadway. Bounded by Church, Barclay, and Murray streets, the campus sloped down to the Hudson River. An English writer vowed that it “will be the most beautifully situated of any college, I believe, in the world.” The cornerstone was laid on August 23, 1756, and during the celebration that followed, the first toast was drunk to George II. No one mentioned that the mere sight of a book threw him into a rage. Two years later eight students were graduated with bachelor of arts degrees.
Across the sea the heavy-jowled bug-eyed king died of a stroke in 1760. He was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old grandson, George III, a mama’s boy who couldn’t read until he was ten and who suffered neurotic disturbances. Eventually he went insane. The new monarch’s first ambition was to stunt the growing power of the English Cabinet and become a real king. As he left Westminster Abbey the day of his coronation, a large jewel fell from his crown—an omen remembered when Great Britain lost the American colonies.
George casually referred to these colonies as his farms and let them go to weed. Until then the thirteen colonies lacked a central issue to unite them. Profit-conscious New York merchants, proud Virginia planters, and sea-battling Massachusetts mariners had little in common. But George III, his ministers, and Parliament acted so stupidly and repressively that the colonists began drawing together and finally rebelled.
In the seventy-year duel for empire, England had fought successive wars with France, partly in America and partly in Europe. A treaty signed in 1763 gave England control of North America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Spanish Florida to the Arctic Sea. The wars had saddled the English with an enormous public debt. British officials felt that the colonies ought to shoulder part of this load because now that Canada had been wrested from the French, the American provinces were no longer threatened by an invasion from the north.
Still, a few thousand French Canadians smoldered on the far side of the St. Lawrence River, and several hundred thousand hostile Indians bore watching. To guard this new empire, 10,000 British troops were to be sent to America, and the king’s men thought the colonists should share this military expense. First, however, the English decided to break up the smuggling that put American customhouses in debt year after year.
The Navigation Acts would be enforced strictly, the colonies would be taxed, more power would be given to the admiralty courts, and royal governors would be told to demand compliance with the new acts pouring out of England. All these measures provoked the colonists, but they did not act in unison until the Stamp Act was passed in 1765. News of this outrageous law reached New York on April 11, 1765, and touched a spark to a long train of powder.