In September 1760 His Majesty’s troops captured Montreal, completing the conquest of French Canada. The focus of the war now shifted from the North American mainland to the Caribbean, where British forces were preparing to assault France’s island possessions. When the Spanish government appeared ready to assist France, Britain declared war on Spain as well. For New York, this turn of events proved disastrous.
Once-lucrative war contracts evaporated almost immediately, and in May 1761 the East River shipyards fitted the last fleet for an expedition against French Martinique and Dominica—both of which fell to Britain the next year, followed shortly thereafter by the capitulation of Havana. Privateering, vital to the well-being of every American port since the early 1740s, fell off sharply as the Royal Navy harried French and Spanish forces out of the Caribbean. The navy also shut down the clandestine traffic in molasses and sugar from the French West Indies on which many colonial merchants had depended, while an invigorated British customs service cracked down on American smugglers. The departure of British troops from Manhattan meanwhile constricted the flow of coins into the tills of local retailers and tavern keepers. As the merchant John Watts observed sadly: “The Tipling Soldiery that use to help us out at a dead lift, are gone to drink it in a warmer Region, the place of its production.”
The 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed Britain’s triumph. France ceded the whole of Canada, abandoned its claims to land east of the Mississippi (except New Orleans), and withdrew from India. Spain had suffered losses in the Americas from which it would never recover, British merchants stood poised to take over the lucrative European trade with Africa and Asia, and London was positioned to become the financial axis of the world market. New York, though, sank into a depression worse than that of the 1730s.
British mercantile houses, reacting as well to a recession at home, cut back on credit and pressed merchants in New York and other colonial ports to settle outstanding accounts. Some firms abandoned long-established relationships to deal with newer, smaller importers and exporters in the colonies—aggressive upstarts ready to trade on the narrowest of margins—or with public auctioneers, known as vendue masters, who could dispose quickly of great quantities of goods at sharply reduced prices. Others sent out their own agents to bargain directly with local shopkeepers and suppliers. “The weak must go to the wall,” warned one New York merchant, and for craftsmen engaged in the production of finished goods for the local market—ironware, furniture, shoes, hats, and the like—the influx of cheap imports from Britain’s overstocked mills and factories looked similarly ominous.
Hard-pressed merchants called in debts from shopkeepers and tradesmen—who then bore down on artisans, farmers, and country storekeepers. Hard money, of which there was never enough, virtually disappeared. The exchange rate soared, in effect siphoning the profits of recent years back to the mother country as importers scrambled to stay solvent. Domestic consumption fell off, markets languished, inventories of unsold goods mounted. Overextended merchants went bankrupt. Stores and shops stood empty. Journeymen, apprentices, and laborers found themselves out of work for the first time in years. “Our business of all kinds is stopped,” declared the Post Boy in December 1765. “Great numbers of our poor people and seamen without employment and without support. . . many families which used to live in comfortable plenty daily falling to decay for want of business.” In effect, one merchant declared, “Trade in this part of the world is come to so wretched a pass that you would imagine the plague had been here.” Before 1760 there had never been more than sixteen actions against debtors in any given year; by 1763 there were forty-six; by 1766, eighty. So many debtors were locked up in the recently completed New Gaol (conveniently located in the Common next to the almshouse) that it was already being called the debtors’ prison.
The crisis was exacerbated by relentless increases in the cost of living, which had already doubled during the war and now continued to rise as Britain’s burgeoning demand for colonial grain helped push prices higher still. Small houses renting for ten or fifteen pounds were in such short supply that families of modest means were beginning to double up. Food was more expensive than ever, and during the winter of 1760-61, with unemployment spreading, the cost of firewood rose drastically. Taxes, chiefly regressive imposts and excises, mounted sharply. Even steadily employed craftsmen and established shopkeepers found themselves badly squeezed. As one artisan wrote in 1762 to the New-York Gazette, “the Expence of living in the most frugal Way has increased so exorbitantly, that I find it beyond my ability to support my Family with my utmost Industry—I am growing every Day more and more behind hand, tho’ my Family can scarcely appear with Decency, or have necessaries to subsist.” This, he insisted, “is really the Case with many of the Inhabitants of this City.” Things remained equally grim five years later according to a “tradesman” writing in the New York Journal: “What a dismal Prospect is before us! A long Winter, and no Work; many unprovided with Fire-wood, or Money to buy it; House-rent and taxes high; our Neighbors daily breaking; their Furniture at Vendue at every Corner.”
The times were even harder for widows, transients, former indentured servants, British deserters, ex-privateers, recent immigrants—people with the smallest savings, who spent most of their scarce resources on the hard-to-trim items like food, rent, clothing, and fuel. Worst off were the aged or infirm slaves whose owners set them free to save money, a practice so widespread by 1773 that in order to keep down the cost of relief, the legislature imposed a fine of twenty pounds on the last owner of any freedman found begging in the city.
To make matters worse, working people faced competition for jobs, food, and firewood from the numerous military personnel who remained in the city. By law, off-duty sailors and soldiers could take odd jobs or even practice trades to supplement their normally low wages. It was notorious that they would work for next to nothing. The anger this generated was intensified by the Royal Navy’s ongoing attempts to fill out crews by impressing seamen from town. When four fisherman were taken from their boat and carried to a nearby man-of-war in July 1764, an infuriated crowd dragged the ship’s barge to the front of City Hall, burned it, then forced municipal officials to negotiate for the release of the captives.
Spiraling municipal expenditures for relief bear witness to the spread of poverty. Between 1740 and 1760 the city’s average annual expenditure for poor relief was £667 (some £39 per 1,000 population), but between 1761 and 1770 the annual average soared to £1,667 (£92 per 1,000). In 1765 the churchwardens informed the Common Council that money raised for the relief of the indigent “had been “Long Since Expended,” yet the “distresses of the Poor” had become “so Extremely Great” that many “must unavoidably perish” without additional assistance for food and firewood.
Private charity, churches, and national groups like the St. George’s Society and the St. Andrew’s Society shouldered much of the burden, as always. In 1767 some Irish officers in the British army formed the Ancient and Most Benevolent Order of the Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick in the Sixteenth Regiment of Foot; by 1769 its sixty members included civilians as well, and in 1771 they relieved some of their countrymen languishing in the debtors’ prison. Such efforts weren’t nearly enough, and the Common Council discussed various schemes for simply removing the poor from the city, often to places like Staten Island.
Not everyone suffered. Wealthy merchants, lawyers, crown officials, and naval officers lived no less comfortably than they had at the peak of wartime prosperity. The annual cycle of musical recitals, masquerades, balls, and routs went on as before. Performances continued at the Chapel Street Theater. Better shops continued to stock a full range of imported luxuries, and, as one New Yorker informed a London newspaper, “notwithstanding the great complaints of the distressing times, we have here no less than four coaches which were brought hither from London in the last ship.” By 1770, according to one count, a mere sixty-two people owned all the city’s eighty-five fashionable “equipages”—twenty-six coaches, thirty-three chariots, and twenty-six phaetons.
In 1764 a party of rich young aristocrats organized a “macaroni table” at London’s fashionable Almack Club. Their foppish, devil-may-care manner of dressing—short waistcoats, huge wigs, small cocked hats, tasseled walking sticks—represented the height of Italianate fashion. Hard times or no, the so-called macaroni style was at once picked up in New York, which boasted a Macaroni Club of its own at least by the autumn of 1764. That same year the club proclaimed its indifference to the city’s straitened circumstances by offering purses of £100 and £150 for the fastest horses at the Hempstead races.
These excesses attracted a good deal of unfavorable attention around town, and local newspapers soon began to carry letters from indignant residents that had a distinctly radical edge. “Some Individuals,” one writer told the New-York Gazette in 1765, “by the Smiles of Providence or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four wheel’d Carriages, and can support the expense of good Houses, rich Furniture, and Luxurious Living. But is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?”
Faltering trade, unemployment, inflation, poverty—to this litany of trouble was added another: a sudden rise in the city’s population. In 1760 New York had roughly eighteen thousand inhabitants. Over the next ten years or so, the city’s population jumped by four thousand—a 20 percent increase. By 1775 it stood between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand. Only Philadelphia, with forty thousand inhabitants, was larger; Boston now trailed far behind, having barely reached sixteen thousand.
Behind this demographic expansion lay an unprecedented surge in transatlantic migration. Between 1760 and 1775 better than 137,000 Europeans poured into the thirteen colonies—roughly fifteen thousand people every year, three times the average rate before 1760. The great bulk of them—125,000 or so—came from the British Isles, some fifty-five thousand from Ireland (predominately but not exclusively Protestant), another forty thousand from Scotland, and the remaining thirty thousand from London and Yorkshire. Of those whose occupations are known, most were trained artisans and craftsmen, directly or closely tied to the beleaguered textile industry, which was going through a period of massive unemployment. About two-thirds of the Irish and English emigrants, generally young men and women on their own, came as indentured servants. Fewer than one-fifth of the Scots did so, presumably because they were somewhat older, included a higher proportion of laborers, and traveled as families, sometimes entire communities.
Land was the goal of the overwhelming majority of these immigrants, and they headed as quickly as possible for the rapidly expanding colonial frontier. No one kept count of how many went to the province of New York, but estimates place the figure at roughly twenty-five thousand. Most were recruited by local merchants to settle and develop property they had purchased far to the north and west, so only a small minority of these new arrivals, probably fewer than one out of every six or seven, actually took up residence in town. (That was enough, however, to make a noticeable difference in its racial balance, for while the absolute number of slaves in New York rose from 2,278 in 1756 to 3,137 in 1771—a growth of 38 percent—the proportion of Africans in the population fell from 18 percent to 14 percent because the number of whites grew even more rapidly.)
For the permanent residents of New York as well as for transients, the hubbub on waterfront wharves and piers—the confusion of accents, the clattering, milling congestion of it all—was something to behold. Between 1773 and 1775 alone, forty-odd vessels disgorged as many as thirty-three hundred men, women, and children in the city, equivalent to 15 percent of its population.
The newcomers brought additional competition for scarce jobs and resources. They also brought new voices of protest, for they included some of Britain’s most militantly disaffected urban craftsmen and rural laborers—unemployed journeyman weavers from the Spitalfields district of London who tried to storm Parliament in 1765 and followed George III about with black flags; shipwrights recently discharged from the royal naval yards after striking for higher wages; and some of the bands of Whiteboys, Oakboys, and Steelboys who were now throwing down fences and mobbing landlords in Ireland. Their anger against the British government, and the experience they had gained while fighting it, ensured that the postwar political climate of New York would become increasingly volatile.
Even before the war with France was over, young George III began fiddling with the political system in England. It now appeared that his break with Pitt was only the beginning of a campaign to reassert the power of the monarchy by arranging a permanent majority for it in Parliament. Year after year, more and more impatient with long-established alliances, the king shuffled ministers, shifted policies, and shoveled out patronage on a scale that would have made Walpole himself cringe.
Also on the royal agenda was a new get-tough attitude toward the colonies. Like a good many people, the king no longer believed that America could be controlled, as in the past, by the easygoing, solicitous policy that Edmund Burke famously defined as “salutary neglect.” Uncooperative colonial courts and legislatures had repeatedly obstructed the recent war effort, or so it was said; now, without the threat of French Canada hanging over their heads, there was every reason to expect the colonies would become more rather than less difficult to manage in the future. Besides, customs fraud, smuggling, and illicit manufacturing had flourished so extravagantly during the war that respect for imperial regulations seemed to have sunk to an all-time low, even among the richest and most respectable elements of colonial society.
The crux of the matter was money. Given that customs duties accounted for well over a third of the crown’s income, how was the government to finance the defense of Britain’s vast new conquests, much less pay off the nation’s sky-high war debt, if the colonies continued to flout the law? Increased domestic taxation was next to impossible: the landowning classes refused to accept a higher land tax, while stiffer excises looked very risky in light of widespread industrial and agrarian unrest. Considering how much the mother country had already done for the colonies, let alone the precarious state of her finances, surely the time had come for them to bear their fair share of imperial expenses. What were colonies for, after all?
In that frame of mind the king and his ministers began to tighten the administrative screws of the Empire. As early as 1761 customs officials were authorized to use writs of assistance, a kind of search warrant, to ensure compliance with the Navigation Acts. In 1763, in addition to banning further settlement across the Appalachians, the government announced it would station ten thousand British regulars in America to make certain that His Majesty’s subjects did as they were told.
The following year, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville won parliamentary approval for a sweeping American Revenue Act. Popularly called the Sugar Act, it raised duties on a variety of items imported into the colonies, provided more efficient collection of duties on sugar and molasses imported from the foreign West Indies, required all duties to be paid in silver, and lengthened the list of colonial products that could be shipped only to Britain. A companion bill gave the customs service broad new powers to catch and prosecute merchants who violated trade regulations. Still another measure, the Currency Act, prohibited colonial governments from issuing paper money to meet the need for specie. If necessary, Grenville said, he would also ask Parliament to raise a revenue in the colonies by means of a stamp tax.
In New York, Grenville’s program looked all the more threatening thanks to the dour, petty, self-righteous, and dogmatic Cadwallader Golden. For nearly half a century now, ever since Governor Burnet put him on the council, Golden had complained to anyone who would listen that the crown’s interests were being thwarted by the venality of New York’s great landlords and merchant princes—to say nothing of the lawyers who trailed behind them (Colden’s contempt for lawyers knew no bounds). They in turn cordially despised him. Even the Livingstons, perhaps more sympathetic than any other of the colony’s great families, felt uneasy about the man.
When Lieutenant Governor De Lancey died unexpectedly at the end of July 1760, Golden, senior member of the council at the age of seventy-two, became acting governor. True to form, Golden promptly threw himself into a series of amazingly ill timed and provocative reforms that made him a target for the wrath of both the Livingston and De Lancey factions. He infuriated New York’s powerful legal community by undermining the finality of jury verdicts and insisting that judges in the colony served at the pleasure of the crown (one of his few backers on the bench was Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, recently restored to official favor). He angered merchants and artisans alike by making a special effort to prevent any revival of illegal trade with the French West Indies. He enraged the great landholders by trying to annul some of the largest land patents in the colony. The furor died down when Robert Monckton arrived to take over as imperial governor—then resumed with even greater ferocity when Monckton returned home in the summer of 1763, having spent only eighteen months on the job, and Golden was once again in charge of the colony.
Alarmed by the altered tenor of affairs at home and abroad, New York’s merchants spent much of 1764 drawing up petitions—to the Assembly, to the House of Commons, to the House of Lords, to the king himself. The basic message was always the same: don’t try to squeeze more revenue out of the colonies, don’t saddle the West Indian trade with additional duties, don’t prohibit paper money, don’t meddle with the system of trial by jury, don’t tax the inhabitants of America without their consent. Over the winter of 1764-65 the Common Council took the additional step of declining to provide firewood for regular troops quartered in the New Barracks above the Common. It had always done so in the past. But this year, Mayor John Cruger informed Major General Thomas Gage, the new commander-in-chief of British forces in America, the city simply didn’t have the money.
One group of wealthy New Yorkers applied pressure from a different direction. In the autumn of 1764 they set up the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Agriculture, and Economy to promote the domestic production of manufactured goods hitherto imported from Britain, above all linen cloth. The loss of American markets would send an important message to Parliament, the society’s backers theorized. What was more, domestic manufacturing would slow the drain of specie to the mother country and create work for the city’s growing numbers of jobless poor. By teaching frugality and self-reliance, it would counteract the enervating effects of “the vast Luxury introduced during the late war.” It looked like a good investment too.
Within months, prompted by the society’s offer of cash bounties for the purchase of equipment, a linen factory with fourteen looms opened on Mulberry Street, near the Fresh Water Pond. Several spinning schools for the children of paupers were set up as well, and a new municipal market was designated for the sale of flax and yarn. Before failing a year or so later, the enterprise would employ some three hundred people, mostly poor women. It also accorded a certain legitimacy to an upsurge of popular resentment against the ostentatiousness that had so greatly altered the city over the previous two decades. “All pride in Dress seems to be laid aside,” Robert R. Livingston observed, “and he that does not appear in a Homespun or at least a Turned Coat is looked on with an Evil Eye.” Well-to-do women resolved that they would “let a horrid homespun covering (which can become none but a country wench) take the place of the rich brocade and graceful satin.” Even Governor Golden and members of his council were seen in homespun coats.
Parliament took no notice and in the spring of 1765 made good its threat to pass a Stamp Act. The measure taxed a broad range of paper and paper products sold in the colonies, and the revenues raised were to be paid into the royal treasury for the maintenance of British troops stationed in America—meaning, of course, a proportionate reduction in the flow of military appropriations from Britain that had boosted the colonial standard of living in the 1740s and 1750s.
The drive to reduce American dependence on British imports prompted Peter Curtenius and Company to build this iron foundry on the Hudson River in 1767. It produced kettles, pots, plows, and other items for the local market. In 1776 Curtenius contracted to make bayonets and muskets for local patriots. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
More important, the Stamp Act put at risk the power and authority of every colonial political establishment by violating the old assumption that the inhabitants of America could be taxed only by representatives of their own choosing. Partly in response to Gage’s prompting, Parliament also adopted a Quartering Act that required civil authorities in the colonies to provide shelter and supplies for British troops. Never before had Parliament attempted to tax the colonies directly; never before had it ordered them to help pay imperial bills. To many colonists this was tantamount to slavery. Britain “will make Negroes of us all,” cried Robert R. Livingston.
By the summer of 1765 urban America was in an uproar. In New York, the Assembly agreed to host an emergency Stamp Act Congress in October for the purpose of coordinating colonial opposition. There was talk of refusing compliance with the Quartering Act on the grounds that it, like the Stamp Act, violated the ancient principle of no taxation without representation. What, after all, was the difference between a tax levied directly by Parliament and a parliamentary order that a colonial legislature spend money for one purpose or another?
Mid-August brought word from Boston of a violent disturbance that forced the stamp distributor there to resign in fear of his life. James McEvers, a rich merchant who had accepted appointment as New York’s distributor, announced that he too would resign to avoid “the like treatment.” “My House would have been Pillag’d, my Person Abused and His Majestys Revenue Impair’d,” he advised Governor Golden. McEvers’s announcement was followed by reports of more trouble in Boston and the spread of rioting to Newport, Rhode Island. The stamp distributor from Maryland appeared at the gates of Fort George to tell how he had fled from a mob in that colony with just the clothes on his back.
Colden, now grasping what he and Parliament had wrought, began to prepare for the worst. He informed Gage that Fort George couldn’t be defended “in its present state, from a Mob, or from the Negroes”—an allusion, perhaps, to the events of 1741—and Gage obligingly sent down reinforcements from Crown Point. Major Thomas James, commander of the Fort George artillery, wheeled up new guns and positioned them on the walls to enfilade Broadway. Golden had the cannon on the Battery spiked to prevent their being turned against the fort, strengthened its gates, and had two frigates moved up to provide additional firepower if necessary. The more the truculent old governor prepared for trouble, however, the more it was said around town that he wanted trouble—and would get it if he tried to enforce the Stamp Act.
On October 7, 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies assembled at the City Hall for the long-awaited meeting of the Stamp Act Congress. Over the next eighteen days the Congress adopted declarations and petitions that denied Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies and cautioned that its attempts to do so “have a manifest Tendency to subvert the Rights and Liberties of the Colonists.”
On the evening of October 23, just as the Congress finished its work, the booming of cannon from a man-of-war in the harbor signaled the arrival of the stamps. The following day, as an angry crowd of two thousand gathered on the Battery, the Edward, escorted by two warships, dropped anchor under Fort George’s ninety-two guns and awaited orders concerning the disposition of more than two tons of stamped paper, parchment, and vellum in its hold. Handbills circulated in the streets threatening violence against anyone assisting in their distribution (“the first Man that either distributes or makes use of Stampt Paper let him take Care of his House, Person, and Effects”). Ships in the harbor flew their flags at half-staff “to signify Mourning, Lamentation, and Woe.” Golden had marines bring the stamps into the fort under cover of darkness, temporarily averting a confrontation.
One week later, two hundred of New York’s “principal merchants” gathered at the City Arms Tavern on Broadway to sign a nonimportation agreement. It was the first pact of its kind anywhere in the colonies.
No British goods would be bought or sold in the city, vowed the merchants, until Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and removed the objectionable parts of the Revenue and Currency acts. They assumed that British exporters would pressure Parliament to act quickly, and in the meantime nonimportation would give local importers a chance to dispose of swollen inventories. It would stimulate the local production needed to pay for imports in the future. It would also toughen a people overly fond of foreign luxuries. Although this all went well beyond what the Assembly had been prepared to do, a crowd of artisans, mariners, and laborers had gathered outside the Coffee House in the expectation of still stronger measures. Disappointed, they staged a mock funeral for “liberty,” then roamed the streets “in a mobbish manner,” breaking lamps and windows and threatening to pull down houses.
On November 1, 1765, the day the Stamp Act took effect, business in the city came to a halt. An eerie calm descended over the usually busy waterfront. Little or no traffic moved in the streets. Toward sundown, a crowd began to assemble in the Common, eventually some two thousand strong. Witnesses reported that it consisted of numerous sailors, youths, artisans, laborers, and blacks, along with many “country people” who had flocked to town from nearby farms and villages. With the upcoming Pope Day celebrations clearly in mind as a model, the crowd hoisted a scaffold from which hung an elaborate effigy of Governor Golden. One hand held stamped paper and a boot (symbol for the unpopular earl of Bute, the king’s current minister). The effigy’s other hand held a drum (recalling Colden’s service as a drummer boy in the Jacobite rising of 1715). Beside him sat the devil, whispering instructions in his ear.
A second column of demonstrators appeared, dragging Colden’s private coach and another effigy of the unpopular governor. “With the grossest ribaldry,” according to one witness, the two groups marched with gallows, coach, and effigy down Broadway to the fort, their way lit by candles and torches. They hurled bricks and stones at the walls and challenged the garrison to open fire; according to the chief engineer of His Majesty’s forces, “300 Carpenters belonging to the mob were collected & prepared to cut down the Fort Gate on the first Shot fired from thence.” Although Golden wouldn’t give the order to fire, a letter was nailed on the gate warning him that if he used force to uphold the Stamp Act, “you’ll die a Martyr to your own Villainy, and be Hang’d like Porteis, upon a Signpost, as a Momento to all wicked Governors, and that every Man, that assists you, Shall be, surely, put to Death.” The crowd then dragged his private coach over to Bowling Green and burned it along with the effigies.
From Bowling Green some “Volunteers” proceeded back uptown to Vauxhall, where they sacked the home of Major James, the fort’s artillery commander, who had incautiously sworn to “cram the Stamps down their Throats with the End of my Sword.” “Looking Glasses Mehogany Tables Silk Curtains A Libiry of Books all the China and furniture”—anything, in short, that bore witness to the refinement of its owner—was thrown into the street and smashed. The major’s private papers and personal effects were destroyed; his wine cellar was broken open and its contents consumed or destroyed; his garden was torn up. (The Assembly later awarded the major £1,745 to cover the damage, a generous sum. Golden put his losses at around £195. The Assembly gave him nothing.)
Men of property and reputation in the city, even those who had been outspoken in opposition to the Stamp Act, floundered in disbelief at what was happening. The governor’s council believed New York to be in a state of “perfect anarchy.” Robert R. Livingston, proprietor of Clermont and a Dutchess County assemblyman, found the mayor and his advisers “extremely dejected” and paralyzed with “despondency and irresolution.” Crowds, including armed newcomers from Connecticut and New Jersey, milled about the streets waiting for something to happen. Rumors flew of an impending attack on the Fort on November 5 (Pope or Guy Fawkes Day), of attempts on the lives of officials, and, worse, of “an open Rebellion” by a “secret party, who called themselves Vox Populi.” Golden, who believed that “a great part of the Mob consists of Men who have been Privateers and disbanded Soldiers whose view is to plunder the Town,” fled with his family to the warship Coventry for protection. An apprehensive group of merchants associated with the Livingston faction met at the Merchants’ Coffee House to discuss ways of preventing “all riotous proceedings,” but broke up in confusion.
Tensions eased when Golden, fearing “the Effusion of blood and the Calamities of a Civil Warr,” turned the stamps over to municipal officials, who carried them off for safekeeping in City Hall. A huge throng of five thousand lined the streets to watch. Everyone breathed a little easier, too, when a new royal governor, Sir Henry Moore, arrived on November 13 to relieve Golden. Moore’s appointment was his reward for brutally crushing a Jamaican slave revolt, but he had no intention of using force to make New York accept the stamps. Instead, on the theory that a few months of economic stagnation would bring the colonists to their senses, the governor simply refused to permit any business to be conducted that would require the use of stamped paper. “All their commerce must inevitably be ruined if they persevere in their obstinacy,” he explained smugly.
New York’s obstinacy, as Governor Moore called it, reflected the rising influence in municipal affairs of persons and groups that spoke for the city’s middling and laboring classes. One, as Livingston reported, went by the name of Vox Populi. Another was known as the Sons of Neptune, yet another as the Free Sons of New York. Most famous was the Sons of Liberty, which seems to have been formed in late October or early November 1765, just prior to Governor Moore’s arrival.
The Sons of Liberty was the creation of Alexander McDougall, Isaac Sears, John Lamb, Hugh Hughes, Marinus Willett, and others—plain-spoken, self-taught, self-made men, the kind who had carried little weight in municipal affairs since at least the end of the last century, if ever. McDougall’s family had emigrated from Scotland when he was a boy, and his father operated a profitable dairy farm on the outskirts of town. At the age of fourteen, McDougall left the farm and went to sea. Diligent and reliable, he worked his way up to become a highly successful captain of privateers during the Seven Years War. With the end of the war, still in his early thirties, he came back to New York and set himself up in the West Indian trade. He prospered, bought a lot of land up in Albany County, and scandalized the refined classes with his flamboyant manner and flashy taste in clothes. Through the Presbyterian Church he also became a disciple of the Whig Triumvirate—William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and William Smith Jr.—under whose influence he read everything from Cato’s Letters to nonconformist religious tracts.
Like McDougall, Isaac Sears was an immigrant to New York—from Norwalk, Connecticut, where his family had lived modestly for many years, and from where he also had gone off to sea. Like McDougall, he made his way up through the ranks and by his early twenties was a captain in the West Indian trade regularly employed by prominent New York merchants. Like McDougall, too, Sears turned privateer during the Seven Years War, won a reputation for heroism under fire, and made himself a small fortune, some of it in clandestine trade with the French. After the war, Sears established himself as a West Indian merchant in New York, where by his mid-thirties he was living like a gentleman—though everyone could tell by his quarterdeck manners that he wasn’t one.
John Lamb’s father had been convicted of burglary in his native England and transported to New York, where he found work making optical instruments. His son made mathematical instruments. Marinus Willett, whose early history is almost as vague as Lamb’s, was a successful master cabinetmaker still in his mid-twenties when the Stamp Act crisis erupted. The dominant influence on his life seems to have been the evangelical Protestantism that periodically swept through the city beginning in the early 1740s. He moved restlessly through a succession of sects, unable to find one that quite suited his temperament, and played a leading part in the city’s annual Pope Day celebrations.
What made the likes of McDougall, Sears, Lamb, and Willett so formidable was the fierce loyalty they inspired among New York’s artisans, apprentices, seamen, and laborers. They were easy men to respect and good men to follow. They had come up in the world, but without the advantages of inherited wealth, fancy educations, or powerful connections—and without forgetting where they came from. They were still, unmistakably, workingmen themselves. They talked like workingmen—McDougall’s Scottish burr and Sears’s Yankee twang were nothing like the flat, nasal English of the upper classes—and they could still make the rounds of crowded workingmen’s taverns and coffeehouses, pumping hands and slapping backs, with a straightforward, natural confidence. Willett’s father, in fact, operated the Province Arms, while Sears’s father-in-law owned Drake’s alehouse on Water Street near Beekman’s Slip, very popular among the Sons; at one time McDougall may even have owned a sailor’s “slop shop.” It was precisely this common touch that enabled them to link popular social and political grievances to the formal constitutional issues raised by British policy.
Toward the end of November 1765 the Sons of Liberty posted notices around New York headed LIBERTY, PROPERTY, AND NO STAMPS and calling for a meeting at Burns’s Coffee House. Enfranchised freemen or not, all residents were invited to take part. On the agenda were radical proposals that the provincial assembly “repeal” the Stamp Act and that merchants resume trade in defiance of Governor Moore’s prohibition. Alarmed by this bold attempt to take charge of New York’s resistance movement—let alone the extremism of the Sons’ proposed remedies—the Livingston and De Lancey factions first tried to prevent the meeting, then, when that failed, determined to prevent it from getting out of hand. They succeeded, barely. A slate of moderate resolutions was adopted and forwarded to the Assembly, which used them as the basis for yet another petition to Parliament.
From the early winter of 1765 through the spring of 1766, the Livingstons and De Lanceys, jointly or at cross-purposes with one another, continued their efforts to tame the Sons of Liberty. Governor Golden, General Gage, and other officials always took it for granted that the Sons couldn’t be acting independently of either one or the other faction—mostly on the grounds that common people couldn’t act in concert unless led by gentlemen. “The Plan of the People of Property has been to raise the lower Class to prevent the Execution of the Law,” Gage wrote. “The whole Body of Merchants in general, Assembly Men, Magistrates, &c. have been united in this Plan of Riots, and without the Influence and Instigation of these the inferior People would have been quiet.”
In truth, the New York Sons of Liberty followed no one’s direction but their own. Just a few days before Christmas they formed a Committee of Correspondence and charged it with the task of seeking a military alliance or union with their comrades elsewhere in the colonies; their idea, which owed nothing to either the Livingston or De Lancey faction, was to be ready to go “to the extremity with lives and fortunes” to prevent enforcement of the Stamp Act. The committee’s efforts were successful. By the following spring the New York plan for a “Union of the Colonies” had been greeted with enthusiasm from Massachusetts to South Carolina—except, of course, by crown officials and handfuls of ministerial sympathizers who understandably viewed it as out-and-out treason. Even when word began to get around that Parliament would soon repeal the Stamp Act, the New York Sons continued to emphasize that the liberties of America couldn’t be preserved without vigilance and organization.
On their own authority, too, the Sons took to the streets of New York so often over the winter and spring of 1766 that, as Governor Moore told Lord Dartmouth in January, the magistrates were terrified of displeasing them. They had “Children nightly trampouze the Streets with lanthorns upon Poles & hallowing.” They led noisy crowds around town with effigies of Golden, Grenville, and other unpopular officials; once they depicted Golden “mounted on a Cannon drilling the vent”—a ribald commentary on his orders to spike the fort’s cannon. Tongues in cheek, they warned that all persons caught selling or eating lamb in New York would have their houses pulled down.
Early in May, a party of Sons interrupted the opening performance of the Chapel Street Theater. It was “highly improper that such Entertainments should be exhibited at this Time of public distress, when great numbers of poor people can scarce find subsistence,” they announced. Shouting, “Liberty, Liberty,” they then drove the audience out in a shower of “Brick Bats, sticks and Bottles and Glasses,” stripping many along the way of “their Caps, Hats, Wigs, Cardinals, and Cloak Tails”—all symbols of wealth and disdain for a virtuous frugality. The crowd then reduced the building to kindling and carted it off to a giant bonfire in the Common.
In the meantime Sears and troops of Liberty Boys brought pressure to bear on merchants who broke the nonimportation agreement, routinely inspecting papers, confiscating goods, and forcing offenders to recant in public. So effective were these measures that when spring arrived the Sons virtually controlled business in the city. “The people of this province seem to have such an aversion to taking the stamp papers, that they will sooner die than take them,” declared one resident. “Our port is shut up, no vessel cleared out, no law, and no money circulating.”
The radicalism of New York’s Liberty Boys had its limits, though, as events in the countryside soon demonstrated. Early in 1766 word began to reach the city that tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley had risen against their landlords. First in Dutchess, then in Westchester and Albany counties—on the vast estates of the Philipses, Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Beekmans, Van Cortlandts, and other great proprietary families—disciplined bands of rebels, some said to number in the thousands, were shutting down courts, throwing open jails, and fighting pitched battles with hastily organized posses. Most sought only more secure leases and lower rents; others wanted to buy their land outright and pay no rent at all. A few at least professed to be “levelers” and looked to the day when the land would be divided equally among those who worked it. All were keenly aware that among their landlords were men who had lately been talking a great deal about liberty and freedom.
In April 1766 as many as two thousand insurgents massed at King’s Bridge, which linked northern Manhattan and Westchester. Calling themselves true “Sons of Liberty,” they made ready to march into New York City, join forces with “the poor people there,” and pull down the town houses of big landowners. If anyone got in the way, they warned, they would “kick their Arses as long as we think fit.” Even the king would get such treatment, declared William Prendergast, one of their leaders, “for Kings had been bro’t to by Mobs before now.”
But the city’s poor didn’t respond as hoped. Nor did the Sons of Liberty, who, after some initial stirrings of sympathy, recoiled from the farmers’ more radical egalitarianism. Governor Moore called out the militia and drove them away without bloodshed.
Grenville had meanwhile quarreled with the king, who replaced him with the marquis of Rockingham. Rockingham, eager to disentangle his new government from Grenville’s controversial policies, promptly abandoned the Stamp Act. Parliament passed a repeal bill in March 1766, and George III signed it into law a month later.
When word of the repeal reached New York on May 20, the town went berserk with joy. Crowds of merrymakers surged through the streets, roaring out their approval against a background of clanging church bells, exploding firecrackers, and sporadic musket fire. The Common Council added its voice to the festivities by appropriating funds to erect a statue of George III in Bowling Green.
Grander festivities followed on June 4, the king’s official birthday. A throng of thousands gathered in the Common to devour, at public expense, two barbecued oxen, twenty-five barrels of “strong Beer,” and a hogshead of rum. While a band played “God Save the King,” a flagstaff was erected with the standard of George III and a banner with the word LIBERTY in large letters. Near the flagstaff went up a liberty pole—ancient symbol of popular defiance to tyranny—with a dozen tar and pitch barrels suspended from the top. A “Grand illumination throughout the city” followed in the evening, after which the day “ended in Drunkeness, throwing of Squibbs, Crackers, firing of muskets and pistols, breaking some windows and forcing off the Knockers off the Doors.”
Royal Navy transports arrived in June with two regiments—three or four thousand men in all—to reinforce the British garrison, and General Gage promptly dispatched one of the two to mop up what remained of the tenant insurgency. His redcoats arrested scores of rebels, dispersed them at gunpoint, and caused considerable property damage in the process. A special court—consisting of Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden and seven associate justices, including Oliver De Lancey, assisted by lawyers John Morin Scott and William Smith Jr.—met in July 1766 to hear the cases of some seventy men charged with riotous assault. Most received stiff fines and jail terms. William Prendergast, denied counsel, was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. The king pardoned him six months later, but the court’s harshness wasn’t forgotten. Scott’s role in it remained a sore point with the insurgents for years.
After much discussion about forming a permanent political club, the Sons of Liberty decided to suspend operations until such time as the rights of America were again in danger. That time was nearer than most realized. For even as it repealed the Stamp Act, Parliament had also passed a little-noticed Declaratory Act, reaffirming its right to tax the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
Nothing, in short, had been settled.