3

Politics

ROCHESTER proprietors had migrated from villages in which the public peace was secure. In the villages the more troublesome outsiders and dissidents were expelled. The others were governed by household heads, the disciplinary machinery of the church, and the web of community relationships. But in Rochester in the middle 1820s troublemakers numbered into the hundreds, and they lived outside the families, churches, and social networks that proprietors controlled. There remained one institution with the power to stop them: the village government. In 1826 that body was reorganized and empowered to arrest drunkards and gamblers and to close the theater, the circus, and the dramshops. The new powers, however, were never used. The reasons were twofold. First, the Antimasonic hysteria of 1827 and 1828 divided and destroyed the officeholding elite. Party politicians took their places. Second, voters made it clear that they did not want to be reformed by force. As a result, candidates in the late 1820s stayed away from the questions of temperance and social disorder. Those who did not lost elections, and official power became available only to men who promised not to use it.

FACTIONS

It was Antimasonry that played the greatest part in crippling the elite. The popular attack upon the Masonic Lodge was a strange phenomenon, and it has attracted scholars interested not only in politics but in the irrational and bizarre in social movements.¹ In Rochester, however, Antimasonry made sense. It was a skillfully directed assault upon wealthy and powerful men who had been the focus of resentment since the beginnings of settlement. Antimasons discredited these men and drove them out of politics, leaving a divided and embittered elite to face the social crisis of the late 1820s. An understanding of Antimasonry and of the political paralysis that it helped create begins with the politicians and the political system that Antimasons destroyed.

The Rochester elections of 1817 had stamped the pattern of village politics. The first village president was Francis Brown, who with his brother and cousin and their families had come from Rome, New York, in 1810 to occupy landholdings on the west bank. Accompanying Brown on the first board of trustees were his business partner William Cobb and two close associates of his foreman, Hamlet Scrantom: the master carpenter Daniel Mack, and Jehiel Barnard, who was Scrantom’s son-in-law and an old neighbor and friend of the Browns. The fifth trustee was Everard Peck, whose Federalist and Clintonian newspaper reflected the sentiments of the Brown family connection. Conspicuously absent were the family and friends of Nathaniel Rochester. Apparently his friends had plotted to dominate the village government, had been found out, and had been defeated by the Brown slate of candidates. Rochester wrote asking the rival clan to “heal the wound before it becomes an ulcer,” but with little success.² The Browns and their associates dominated town meetings throughout the early and middle 1820s. Francis Brown served three consecutive terms as village president, then turned the job over to his brother Matthew, who served six of the next seven years. The one year in which the Browns did not hold the highest village office was 1824. That year the job went to J. W. Strong, a Clintonian ally who at the time was collaborating with the Browns in one of their bitter disputes with Colonel Nathaniel Rochester.

Although Colonel Rochester and his family never controlled the board of trustees, he stood at the center of village politics. The secret of Rochester’s capacity to arouse jealousy and opposition in other rich men lay not in the size and influence of his family or even in his money. It lay in his connections with Martin Van Buren’s Bucktail Republican faction at Albany, connections that made the colonel’s son William the Bucktail candidate for governor of New York in 1826.³ Twice during the 1820s, Rochester used those ties to gain spectacular favors for himself and what were considered unfair advantages over other wealthy villagers. Rochester lobbied with the help of his neighbors for the creation of a new county at the mouth of the Genesee in 1821. He received not only the county but had his town named county seat and donated ground on his Hundred-Acre Tract for the county buildings—thus ensuring that land he owned would become the center of a busy town. Francis and Matthew Brown had helped lobby for the county, but they had hoped that their land would become its center. As it turned out, the Browns watched as the fine houses they had built near their proposed civic center were surrounded by the modest homes of journeymen, laborers, and shopkeepers in what became the out-of-the-way second ward.⁴

Rival speculators were angered again when the colonel and his friends began pressuring the legislature to charter a bank in their village. His Clintonian rivals lobbied for a different bank in 1822, and both were refused. The factions joined temporarily and sent Thurlow Weed, the young editor of the Clintonian newspaper, to Albany. Weed successfully negotiated the charter, and the village had a bank in 1824—with Nathaniel Rochester as temporary president. When the directors under his control finished selling stock, it became clear that the Bank of Rochester would be controlled by the Rochester clan and their Bucktail friends in the eastern part of the state. Colonel Rochester had used his connections to gain control of the bank, and thus of the financing of major business operations in his town. This time, Clintonians did not stand still. Pointing to anti-democratic tendencies of the statewide Bucktails as well as to the shifty means by which local Bucktails had taken over the bank, Clintonians reorganized as the People’s Party and swept the next elections. Within a year, they had ousted the Bucktail directors and established the Bank of Rochester as a Clintonian institution.⁵

Rochester politics in the early 1820s were dominated by feuding between the Rochesters and their Bucktail friends and a Clintonian faction that revolved around the families of Matthew Brown, J. W. Strong, and Levi Ward. Bucktails, who called themselves “merchants” at the first town meeting, were overwhelmingly businessmen and lawyers. Clintonians were merchants and manufacturers. Both, however, were rich. The political dividing line was not social class but family jealousies compounded by religion and geographic origins.⁶ Nathaniel Rochester and his sons were Marylanders, although many of his associates and distant kin were New Yorkers and New Englanders. They spent Sunday mornings at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The colonel had donated the land on which St. Luke’s was built, and he and his family rented the most expensive pews. While his sons and friends served the congregation as vestrymen, Rochester personally recruited Francis H. Cuming to fill the pulpit. In 1822 the colonel’s son Thomas married Reverand Cuming’s sister, making the minister’s attachment to the Rochester clan official.⁷

Clintonians were New Englanders, and the wealthier of them affiliated with First Presbyterian Church, which stood across the courthouse square from St. Luke’s. The Browns were at First Church, and their cousin Warren had been elected elder at the first meeting in 1813. Jacob Gould, who helped organize the People’s campaign, occupied one of the front pews, as did Levi Ward and his son-in-law Moses Chapin. In the choir, the Clintonian Frederick Backus was baritone soloist.⁸ These were leading members of First Church: all of them natives of New England, and all of them Clintonians. Even before the fighting started, one of Nathaniel Rochester’s partners warned him that “I have learned enough of Yankees to dread & fear their wiles & offers. You are too honest and unsuspicious—take heed my friend or they will be your ruin.”⁹ Rochester soon had reason to remember the warning.

Factions split the elite along religious and cultural lines, but only because politics was grounded in kinship. At the conclusion of the bank fight Colonel Rochester explained what from his standpoint was the central issue in village politics: “ … some hotheaded politicians such as Brown, Strong, and others have frequently said that my family had too much influence and must be put down. They have always considered me in their way.”¹⁰ This was faction politics, centering on jealousy and competition for honor between a few wealthy gentlemen and their families and friends. Underneath that competition lay an additional and temporarily inoffensive fact: the Rochesters belonged to the Masonic Lodge; their opponents did not.

Late in 1826 there began a series of events that altered the old factions, politicized village government, and made the nastiest of earlier faction fights seem peaceful. At the center of these events stood one William Morgan, a stonemason who had come to Rochester in 1822 to work on the aqueduct. During his brief stay Morgan joined the Masonic Lodge in Rochester. He moved southwest to Batavia, where he expected to use his Masonic connections to find work. He did not find a job, and the Batavia lodge refused him admittance. Rebuffed, Morgan wrote a long exposé of the secrets of Masonry and went looking for a publisher. The Rochester editor Thurlow Weed and others read his attack and would have nothing to do with it. But finally a Batavia printer took the job. Word spread that the book would be published, and Morgan came under mysterious official harassment. After a few groundless run-ins with local sheriffs, Morgan was abducted and taken to Canandaigua to face spurious charges. He was quickly released from jail—and just as quickly kidnapped. With the help of some Rochester Masons, he was spirited through the village and imprisoned in one of the old buildings at Fort Niagara. From there he disappeared forever.¹¹

Immediately, town meetings in Batavia and Canandaigua demanded an investigation, and they were joined by outraged citizens in towns throughout the region.¹² The Rochester committee, headed by Thurlow Weed and his Clintonian friends, soon gained control of an organized campaign that demanded full investigation of the kidnapping and indictments of suspected conspirators. Judges, grand jurors, and sheriffs—most of them Masons—moved slowly, and the Morgan committees began suspecting that the Masons were covering up a murder. Beginning as a citizens’ investigation of one crime, the campaign widened into an attack on Masonry and its secret handshakes, secret obligations, secret ritual, and, ultimately, its secret control over society and politics.

It seems strange that men could believe Masons were plotting to take over the government of the United States. But in Rochester that was an intelligible interpretation of events. Antimasons knew the leading Masons personally. They knew the lodge included rich and powerful men, and they knew that Masons favored each other in business dealings. They knew also that Masons enjoyed the most visible signs of deference that the new community had to offer. When Rochesterians gathered to celebrate the opening of the Erie Canal in 1823, the band opened with the Masonic hymn “The Temple Is Completed.” ¹³ Two years later, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Rochester on his triumphant return to the United States, each of his official greeters was a Mason.¹⁴ Suspicious and jealous non-Masons had noted all of this: “In the foundation of every public building we have beheld the interference of these mystic artisans with their symbolic insignia—in every public procession we have seen their flaunting banners, their muslin robes, and mimic crowns.”¹⁵

But most frightening was Masonic political power. While Rochesterians petitioned the legislature for a quick investigation of Morgan’s disappearance, their own representative in that body was the Mason Abelard Reynolds. James Seymour, the sheriff empowered to arrest local men implicated in the conspiracy, was another member of the lodge. There were no arrests. Probably just as well, for the judge who would have heard the cases was the Mason John Bowman. Men who were Masons held formidable political power. And under attack they used that power in secret and spiteful ways. In 1827 the Clintonian Frederick Backus was standing for his eleventh consecutive term as village treasurer. No one else had ever held the job. But in 1826 he had added his name to the Rochester Morgan committee and made powerful enemies. People assumed that Backus would again run unopposed. But when the votes were opened and counted (it was only the second time that elections were conducted by secret ballot), a write-in candidate had won. The new treasurer was John B. Elwood, a Bucktail Mason.¹⁶

Antimasons transformed themselves from a protest movement into a political party in 1828. With the help of his Clintonian friends, Thurlow Weed began publishing the Anti-Masonic Enquirer in February.¹⁷ In March delegates from all over western New York met at Leroy and, under the direction of Weed and the Rochester committee, formed the Antimasonic Party, dedicated to preventing Masons from holding office. Of course Weed and his henchmen knew that their troubles were caused by more than Masons, and they worked to establish a connection between Masonry and the Van Buren Republicans in New York politics. It was easy. In Rochester that faction centered on Nathaniel Rochester, and the most prominent Masons were his family and friends. Grand Master of the Lodge—and the man accused of providing a carriage for Morgan’s abductors—was Francis Cuming, pastor at St. Luke’s Church and himself a member of the family. The colonel’s son William, recently Bucktail nominee for governor, was another Mason. So were Rochester’s son John and his son-in-law Jonothan Child. The Bucktail assemblyman and the slow-moving Judge Bowman, both of them old friends of the family, were also members of the lodge. John Elwood, who had become the most bitterly hated Mason in town when he sneaked into the village treasurer’s post, shared a medical office with the colonel’s son-in-law Anson Colman. In all, 39 percent of Bucktail leaders and only 14 percent of Clintonians were Masons.¹⁸

In the Antimasonic press and increasingly in the public mind, the Masonic conspiracy was linked to the Rochesters and to their Bucktail friends at Albany—friends they had used in typically “Masonic” fashion to establish the county and gain control of the bank. Clintonians had always wondered at their enemies’ ability to win favors from government, and now they had a vote-winning answer:

In the Executive of the State we have beheld a man holding the highest office in the Order, bound to his brethren by secret ties of whose nature, strength, and character we knew nothing. We have seen our legislature controlled by [Bucktail] majorities bound to the Fraternity by the same ties.¹⁹

Weed quickly completed the connection. Late in 1828 he accused thirteen men of using both Masonic and government funds to bribe the voters of Monroe County. Named in the handbill were nine Rochester Masons. Three of the others were Weed’s rival editor, Luther Tucker, and the wealthy Democratic activists Addison Gardiner and Thomas Sheldon. The thirteenth was Martin Van Buren himself. The Masonic and Bucktail conspiracies were one and the same.²⁰

Antimasonry originated in popular outrage over an unpunished murder. Thurlow Weed turned that outrage against the Van Buren Republicans in state politics and against the gentlemen in Rochester who supported that faction and enjoyed its favors. The argument between Bucktails and Clintonians gave way to an uglier fight between Democrats and Antimasons. Much of the leadership came from the old factions, and the controversy was in some ways continuous with the past: Bucktails became Democrats, Clintonians became Antimasons. ²¹ But power within the Antimasonic and Democratic Parties passed on to new kinds of men. Democrats included many old Bucktails, but they were led by the combative Masons Jacob Gould and James Seymour, and by the Irish Catholic editor Henry O’Reilley. At the same time, the anti-Van Buren forces came under the firm personal control of Thurlow Weed.

The rise of new leaders brought on a near-total collapse of the old political families. Matthew Brown sided with the Antimasons, but he remained far from the center of power within that movement. The Rochesters, the Strongs, and the Wards disappeared from lists of party functionaries. To put it simply, politics was no longer a gentleman’s game. Nathaniel Rochester, for one, had been in politics all his life: as member of the revolutionary assembly in Maryland and of the state constitutional convention after the war, and as state legislator in Maryland and New York. But while he helped govern every community in which he lived, Rochester hated conflict. He remembered that as a member of the Maryland legislature he “was so disgusted with the intrigue and management among the members, that I afterwards uniformly refused to go again …”²² In Rochester, things grew worse. The colonel acknowledged resentment against him and agreed to sit as president of the Bank of Rochester in 1824 only until it was fully organized. But Thurlow Weed saw a chance to turn jealousy of Nathaniel Rochester into votes for himself, and he organized the People’s Party largely as a public attack upon Rochester’s honesty. Under the Antimasons decorum broke down altogether, and leaders of the old factions stepped out of politics. Bucktails had been accused of anti-republican tendencies and of extracting undue favors from government, and Clintonians had been labeled (in private) as a band of “scurrilous banditti.”²³ But never before had leading citizens come under a blanket accusation of—to name only two—treason and murder. There was no more honor in politics.

DEMOCRACY

Antimasonry disrupted the established political elite in the late 1820s, and it was against that backdrop that pious Rochesterians tried to discipline drifters and workingmen through political means. In 1817 Rochester had been incorporated as a village modeled after New England towns. Power rested with five trustees elected annually in open town meeting. Every man who owned property, or who worked on the roads or served in the militia or fire department, and who had lived in the state one year and in the county six months, could vote. In 1823 the property requirement was dropped by state law.²⁴ Even these liberal requirements denied the vote to much of Rochester’s volatile population. Only 44 percent of householding journeymen and laborers, for instance, stayed in Rochester over an eight-month period in 1827.²⁵ No doubt frequent moves inhibited interest in local politics among many of the others. With voice-vote elections, and with participation limited to the more stable elements of the population, rich men won elections. Rochester’s fifty wealthiest taxpayers, along with their relatives and business associates, accounted for 61 percent of the trustees elected between 1817 and 1825. These men held 80 percent of the offices. Most of them, we have seen, were the Browns and their Clintonian friends.

As trustees, they held some of the power to bring workmen and transients under control. The charter enabled them to collect taxes up to $1,000 and to hire a night watch and regulate public amusements. In 1822 they levied an annual license fee of twenty-five dollars on ninepin alleys, shuffleboards, billiard tables, wheels of fortune, card tables, and all other gambling devices.²⁶ Licensing did not stop the gamblers, nor did it prevent a visitor from being robbed of $1,800 at a gambling shop in 1824.²⁷ The next year trustees outlawed gaming devices outright, but rather than arrest violators they collected a three-dollar monthly fine.²⁸ In matters of Sabbath breaking and drinking, trustees had almost no power at all. Grocers paid an annual fee of five dollars for the right to sell strong drink. Many avoided paying even that. These feeble attempts at regulation corresponded with increased offensive behavior and public disorder in the middle 1820s. The first charter had created a village government that could not control a fast-growing city. And trustees demonstrated a puzzling unwillingness to use the powers that they had. While rich men squabbled and competed for powerless and honorific positions, society was coming apart.

Inadequacies in the first charter were clear almost from the beginning, and by the middle 1820s Rochester urgently needed a new government. The village had numbered only 700 persons in 1817. It rose to 7,000 over the next nine years. There were simply too many voters for open elections. But most troublesome was the trustees’ ineffectiveness in dealing with vice and disorder. Rochester petitioned the legislature for a city charter, but had to settle for a revised village charter in 1826. The second charter eliminated the most glaring inadequacies of the first. It abolished the town meeting and divided the town into five wards, each of which elected a trustee by secret ballot. More important, these trustees were empowered to “secure and enforce neatness, regularity, good order, and safety … and efficiently to restrain whatever may be offensive, or detrimental, to decency, good morals, or religion.” Boat masters would be fined if they blew horns or bugles in the village on Sunday. Grocers could not sell liquor, serve customers, or permit gatherings of people on that day. County officials, most of them Rochesterians, promised to scour the woods for men who spent the Lord’s Day hunting and fishing. Ninepin alleys, circus riders, and theatrical representations of every kind without special license were banned.²⁹ “Heretofore,” stated a hopeful editor, “disorder has bid defiance to wholesome law, but the presumption now is that a new state of affairs will take place.”³⁰

His hopes died quickly. For the new charter and the concurrent rise of Antimasonry contributed to the collapse of the old political families and to the election of new kinds of public officials. Under the first charter, trustees were elected at large and by voice vote, and one or the other of the family factions controlled the village government. To a large degree those factions were based in rivalries between land speculators. The Browns lived on their Frankfort Tract in the second ward. Nathaniel Rochester and most of his family lived in the third ward and owned much of their neighborhood. The Wards and Strongs lived on North St. Paul in the fifth ward and speculated in east-side land. With trustees elected to represent wards rather than the village at large, no faction could dominate the reorganized boards. The Brown, Ward, Strong, and Rochester family connections held nearly two-thirds of village offices between 1817 and 1825. Beginning in 1826 that figure dropped to less than one in five.³¹

More troublesome, however, was the awakening of the electorate. In 1827 the state legislature rescinded the requirement that propertyless voters work on the roads or serve in the militia or fire companies, thus adding voters who had no ties to the town’s institutions.³² And the second charter substituted general elections for the town meeting, transforming voting from a public to a private and individual act. That act was influenced not by community pressure or the stares of notables but by noise and propaganda, sometimes by violence, always by the voter’s own mind. It was at this point that contests between Antimasons and Democrats penetrated elections for even the smallest offices, introducing organized party warfare into village government and contributing to the collapse of political propriety. The canvass of 1828 in particular witnessed scores of street fights. The Antimasonic editor Thurlow Weed was menaced in the streets, and the Christopher brothers rescued another Antimason from a bad beating when they pulled him into their hotel.³³ Frederick Whittlesey, the Antimasonic candidate for village clerk, was not so lucky. Confronted by an enraged Democratic blacksmith named Patrick Cavanaugh, Whittlesey stood his ground. He won the election, but went into office with a broken nose.³⁴ (Whittlesey, a Yale-educated lawyer and scion of one of Rochester’s wealthiest families, became the Antimasons’ leading streetfighter. In 1829 he was attacked and beaten again by “unknown persons,” but made a comeback later that year by knocking out a prominent Democrat—in the bar at the Eagle Tavern.³⁵)

Election-day fighting was only the most visible sign of what had happened: village government had degenerated into politics. Members of the old officeholding elite either lost elections or quietly stepped out of politics. Under the first charter the fifty richest taxpayers and their kinsmen and associates held 80 percent of the offices; under the second they held 38 percent. At the same time the stability and continuity that town meetings and family factions had provided were lost. Between 1817 and 1825 over half the trustees were re-elected at least once. Beginning in 1826, the proportion fell to one in three.³⁶

Most ominous, the new unseen electorate chose men who were unlikely to attack workingmen’s controversial amusements. The following chapter will describe a campaign to enforce Sabbath observance through the use of boycotts and other kinds of force. Forty-one percent of trustees who served under the first charter affiliated with the radical Sabbatarians in 1828, while only 8 percent stood against them. Under the second charter, only 11 percent of trustees publicly favored coercive measures of enforcing Sabbath observance. A full 30 percent actively opposed them. Voters, it seems, were determined to stop pious assaults upon their freedom.

The result was that politicians dissociated themselves from Sabbatarianism and the more radical forms of temperance agitation. Antimasons in particular have been noted for their moralistic tone and for their supposed connection with Protestant churches and church-related reforms. The Democratic editor noted the same thing, and spent column after column trying to document a “holy alliance” between the Antimasons and the unpopular temperance men and Sabbatarians.³⁷ We shall see that he was partially correct. But leading Antimasons made it public that they had little use for religion, and even less for coercive moral reform.

Thurlow Weed, for instance, was the Antimasonic mastermind. Weed was a notorious cigar smoker and denizen of billiard rooms, and he never joined a church. In fact he mocked the most pious elements of Rochester society. In 1829 Weed ran for the assembly against Elder Jacob Gould of First Presbyterian Church. His advisors decided that he should attend services there on the Sunday before the election. He did, wearing an ill-fitting borrowed suit, “a wretched cravat, and a shocking bad hat.”³⁸ Among the Presbyterians who witnessed this clownish performance were Elder Gould and Ashley Samson, who was president of the Monroe Sunday School Union and vice president of the New York State Temperance Society. Both Gould and Samson had taken public stands for the enforcement of the Sabbath, and both were Democrats and adamant Masons.³⁹ If there were members of First Church who believed that a vote for Thurlow Weed was a vote for Christ, they left services that morning with ample food for thought.

Weed’s newspaper fished for votes with periodic temperance editorials (so, for that matter, did its opponent), but Antimasonic boards of trustees issued more grocery licenses at lower prices than did Democrats. And while the godly worried about the rise of vice, the Enquirer advertised a sure cure for gonorrhea.⁴⁰ Strangest of all, however, were Antimasonic attitudes toward the theater. That institution was a key target of militant evangelicals, but they could expect no help from Rochester’s leading Antimasons. The Enquirer was one of the few newspapers that accepted theater advertising. Antimasonic congressman Frederick Whittlesey read his own bad poetry at the opening performance (followed by the plays “The Honeymoon” and “The Poor Soldier”), and Edwin Scrantom, publisher of the Anti-Masonic Almanack, enjoyed the theater as much as any man in Rochester.⁴¹ When the theater manager was in financial trouble in 1828, Thurlow Weed and his young co-worker Henry B. Stanton organized a special performance and asked all their friends to come. The performance was a success. The manager paid his debts and stayed in business. No doubt that distressed Rochester’s more pious citizens, but it gratified Thurlow Weed. He owned stock in the theater.⁴²

The dissociation from churches and church-related reforms held from top to bottom within both Antimasonic and Democratic organizations. Economic and religious differences between the two parties were minimal.⁴³ Antimasons recruited relatively large numbers of wage earners, but Democrats were not far behind, and both parties staffed their organizations with men from every walk of life. In the churches, Democrats and Antimasons were present in almost equal numbers, although Democrats were making inroads among the humble Methodists and Catholics.⁴⁴ But the most striking aspect of the relationship between religion and politics was its weakness: only one in five activists of both parties was a full church member, and fewer than half attended services regularly. In their personal comportment, in the social makeup of their organizations, and in their campaign rhetoric, Antimasonic and Democratic politicians advertised themselves as men who had nothing to do with the gathering assault upon drinking, disorder, and irreligion.

In office, they kept their promises. After 1826 trustees could outlaw billiard rooms, the theater, neighborhood dramshops, and other workingmen’s amusements. That they would refuse to use those powers became clear within the first months of the charter’s operation. The trustees received an application for a theater license and quickly laid it on the table. An attempt to deny the license outright was voted down; meanwhile, the theater operated without a license. The trustees ordered the theater manager to close his doors or face prosecution. But they could not agree to enforce the order. Instead, they subjected the unruly manager to periodic fines, even when he operated on Saturday night. Apparently the theater owners found that fines could easily be deducted from their profits, and they continued to operate on that basis.⁴⁵ Even when touring companies procured the necessary license, concerned citizens protested. The Rochester Observer lamented that

It is really .astonishing to think that the trustees of so respectable a village as Rochester should permit such a disorderly place as the Theatre on State Street; and it is seriously to be doubted whether there is another place this side of Boanerge’s regions where such a group could obtain a license from any civil authority. We express ourselves thus plainly from the knowledge that the respectable part of this community has long since decidedly disapprobated the theatre, and we do sincerely hope that our village trustees will hereafter, when an application for license is presented by any playing company, act more in accordance with the wishes of the sober, moral, and reflecting part of our citizens.⁴⁶

It was an unhappy and increasingly clear fact, however, that the “sober and moral” part of the community no longer determined what happened in Rochester.

The same permissiveness and indecision typified actions toward the groceries. After long argument the trustees decided to raise the price of licenses rather than shut the dramshops down. In 1827 and again in 1828 they issued nearly 100 licenses to sell whiskey.⁴⁷ Even then, scores of grocers operated without them. When the touchy subject of unlicensed groceries reached the trustees, Frederick Whittlesey explained that the village lacked jurisdiction, and the board deftly and gratefully sidestepped the question.⁴⁸ Even when grocers violated the terms of their licenses or blatantly encouraged others to make trouble, trustees allowed them to keep on selling drinks. Aaron Hitchcock, for instance, operated the kind of establishment that temperance men hated most. Hitchcock owned a small shoe shop and a house on Water Street; he took in boarders and was licensed to sell whiskey. One Sunday in 1829 he opened his doors and allowed his neighbors to drink and make noise. Constables descended on the house and arrested him. He was fined five dollars and set free. His license was not revoked.⁴⁹ Andrew Sellig, who operated a combined candy store and dramshop on Exchange Street, was arrested in 1826 for “throwing rockets on the island.” He too was fined and permitted to keep his license.⁵⁰ Temperance men petitioned and editorialized against the issuance of any licenses at all, but to no avail. Rather than outlaw sin in their city, the trustees had decided to tax it.

The reorganization of the village government, then, had mixed effects. It gave trustees the power to outlaw sin in their village. But at the same time secret ballot elections freed voters from the observation of others and coincided in time with the introduction of organized party warfare into village politics. Regardless of their personal feelings, the candidates of both parties were politicians first and last, and they stood before popular majorities that invariably voted against their own repression. Whatever the replacement for lost social controls, it would not come from the village government.