Coenties Slip

An Extraordinarily Diverse Port

New York’s role as the political, military, economic hub of North America made it extraordinarily diverse, even for a port in the modern Atlantic. The original Dutch colony (1626-64) boasted at least eighteen European languages, well less than half its population Dutch if the Frisians, Walloons, and Flemish are separated. But the English made up the least part of the British era, too. New York became home to many of the 55,000 “Anglo” Irish who emigrated after the 1720s, Protestants from the northern part of the island. A small minority of Catholics from the west, still literate in the old Gaelic, could also be found. It was home to a good number of the 35,000 Scotsmen who arrived during the Imperial Crisis, too, speaking their own brand of Celtic. There were a good number of “German Irish” as well, emigrants from Baden-Württemberg who came through Limerick. And many other nationalities: Protestant and Jewish refugees from Belgium and Brazil speaking French, Yiddish, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Poles, Lithuanians, Transylvanians, even the occasional “Italian” or “Turk.” This does not include the indeterminable number of ethnic groups from Africa or North America. As the capital of New York, the city was frequently home to diplomats and traders from Indigenous nations, mainly speaking the Algic or “eastern Algonquian” tongues of local Natives. And many of the enslaved still used Kikongo, Ga, Mandinga, Soninke, Temne, Fulbe, Sere, the lingua franca Akan, or mixed (“creole”) dialects. A person strolling along New York’s waterfront in this era might hear any of these languages, its denizens probably highly multi-lingual.

Reflecting its diversity, New York was home to many different faiths. Anglicans made up no more than 10 percent of its population, just two of the city’s twenty-two churches and twenty-six of the colony’s 239. Scottish Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed dominated politically among the “dissenting” Protestant faiths, which included Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, and others. There were also Jews congregating at the nation’s first synagogue, Shearith Israel, and probably Catholics worshipping in secret, the city forbidding "papists" to vote and jailing or executing "priests and Jesuits" until 1784. While most slaves worshiped in Protestant churches, a few likely continued to express Islam or animism clandestinely.

New York’s streets teemed with people from all over the Atlantic, and points further east or west. Because of its geography and deep-water harbor, the port conveyed traders and labor as well as goods between regional and international markets. And because the Hudson was often frozen in these last decades of the Little Ice Age, the western shore had just one dock, the King’s Wharf.

The eastern shore was therefore the city’s busiest district, containing six open-air markets among the dozen inlets (“slips”) colonists made on the East River’s marshy coast. By day, it belonged to artisans, dozens of trade signs hanging outside their doors. By night, it returned to the men who labored in this entrepôt, outfitting merchant fleets and working as carpenters, sailmakers, retailers, auctioneers, stevedores, or general hands (“roustabouts”). As many as 4,000 dockworkers, mechanics, and sailors lived here in the East Ward, finding employment in the workshops of the Montgomerie Ward to the north, the stores of the Dock Ward to the south, and of course the waterfront. It was the city’s worst slum — usually 3-4 families living in a single room, in wooden tenements, hammocked lean-tos, and flophouses.

Coenties Slip is not labelled in Ratzer’s famous map. But the large triangular inlet lies at the border of the Dock and East Wards, between Albany Pier and Cruger’s Wharf, the start of the waterfront district.

In the evening, the neighborhood came to life with dance and fiddle halls, gambling and blood-sport dens, cheap brothels, gin-shops, and taverns. But robberies and gang violence were common. Shards of barrels and other debris lay everywhere. And manure, garbage, and other filth washed down from the higher ground in the middle-class North Ward. To drink, one had to draw from a well, some of the foulest in all New York — generally reputed for its unpalatable water (so bad that even horses refused to sip it, the rich purchasing bottles from the “Tea Water Pump” at Chatham & Pearl St.). For these reasons, the neighborhood was also home to many of the enslaved. Elites referred to all these people as the “lower sort.” By the 1760s, however, the maritime workforce increasingly disparaged these “gentlemen” (and others who had earned the title of “mister”) as “big wigs” in “silk stockings,” the “corrupt Oligarchy.”

William Hogarth’s Gin Lane was published in 1751, amid the push to curb uncontrolled production and sale of the liquor, blamed for the violence and poverty of neighborhoods like the East Ward in New York. During the Imperial Crisis, as the number of taverns and unemployed “drunken sailors” grew, elites pushed to construct another, far larger debtor prison, the New Bridewell, to replace the New Gaol, erected in 1759 to “solve” this problem of crime. In part for this reason, pious New Englanders called the city “one of the wickedest Places this side of Hell.”

While exports remained a small part of New York’s economy (like all thirteen colonies), the bedrock of this market lay in the West Indies. More than half the city’s ships traded with those ports from the early to late 1700s. And slaves from Africa became the primary cheap labor-force in these years, too. Gold and other highly valuable items like ivory, animal hides, pepper, beeswax, or gum, had been the main draw for the European merchants who established trading ports along the west African coast in the late 1500s. But in the 1600s the Portuguese and Dutch surpassed the demand for slaves from the Islamic empires, succeeded by the French and especially the British in the 1700s. Religious, political, and economic rivalries in west Africa also dramatically increased “supply,” as wealthy kingdoms like the Dahomey, Asante, Senegambia, Benin, and Oyo sold captives taken in endemic warfare for guns, powder, fabrics, salt, and other goods. Independent “creole” merchants also expanded kidnapping raids far inside the continent, eventually touching half the sub-Saharan population.

The main driver was “the sugar revolution.” Sugar had become the most profitable cash-crop in the Americas. Unknown to people of European stock, it became a “necessity” for the middle and upper classes, used in tea, coffee, and chocolate. Most of the 12 million sold between the late 1500s and early 1800s were shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean to grow the sweetener. The hard labor, brutal oversight, and poor diet on these plantations caused the death of millions. But life was cheap. In 1675, a slave in west Africa cost roughly $350, adjusted for inflation. The merchants and kings of the Euro-Atlantic purchased as many slaves in this 250-year period as the merchants and kings of west Africa had sold in 1,000.

Trade... in Human Life

“Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

“Band of Capitves Driven Into Slavery.” Lithograph from The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, LL.D. [London, 1870?]

Slavery was — like empire, its veritable twin — a universal practice dating to the “dawn of civilization,” the first agricultural states. In a few west African nations, slaves comprised 20-50 percent of the population. In parts of Asia, they made up a quarter to a third. And millions of Indigenous were already enslaved in the Americas. The institution could still be found in parts of Europe, where it had been a staple for a millennium. And by the end of the Age of Democratic Revolution (1760-1800), the historian Adam Hochschild estimates, three-quarters of the global population would remain unfree — typically as slaves or serfs, often with little difference between the two. Slavery had often taken different forms in the past; among many smaller societies it was often a military strategy to replenish populations, captives eventually becoming full members of the group. But in the 1700s it became a dominant mode of labor for imperially protected commerce. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the radical French philosopher, scandalized the elite by arguing in 1762 that: “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.” The Scottish liberal philosopher Adam Smith expressed an unusually disapproving but less controversial view: “The freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves... the most numerous part of mankind.”

Most of the early labor-force in North America had been indentured labor: 320,000 of the 457,000 colonial settlers. These were Britons sold as servants without pay for 5-10 years, with children under five obliged to work until age twenty-one. Such numbers were possible because of three almost unprecedented developments that occurred alongside liberalization: a near-doubling of Britain’s population from 1600-1800, significant declines in farm labor, and dramatic rises in urban pauperism. The goal was to populate the colonies to ward off rivals, and to rid the British isles of the unwanted poor, most frequently described as “waste” and various other like terms (e.g., “white trash”).

Indentures ranged from adults to poor boys and teens (the majority), “spirited” off city streets. Women constituted a full quarter. Many were also criminals, opting for servitude instead of the notorious workhouses and debtor prisons proliferating in Britain. Hence, the English writer Samuel Johnson’s quip that Americans were “a race of convicts.” A large number had been sentenced to death, with capital punishment exploded from 50 to 250 categories after the late 1600s, mostly for crimes of property. The liberal Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville observed, casually: “Hundreds, if not Thousands, of Necessitous Wretches… are daily hanged for Trifles.”

The indentured faced horrid conditions, with sometimes not even half surviving the voyage from Britain. Spouses and children were often separated for long periods, sometimes permanently. They could be flogged and mutilated. And they were often branded physically if they ran away, as many did. But their service was not hereditary. And until the 1700s they had a chance to own a small plot of land.

Thus, as ownership concentrated, British emigration shifted to other imperial destinations like Australia, and the cost of North American labor rose. African slaves presented the solution. Many of the elite were “at best ambivalent.” But as New York’s acting governor explained, “the want of hands and the Dearness of Wages of hired Servants makes Slaves at this Time, necessary.” The dominant liberal thinkers of the age, such as John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu, echoed the sentiment. Merchants thus purchased 275,000 from west Africa and the upper Guinea coast between 1700 and 1775 — roughly two-thirds of all the slaves brought to North America during the colonial period. It was the largest “immigrant” group of the period, most hailing from Angola, the Congo, and Gabon. As their number grew, Whites began to to associate blackness with slavery, an increasing source of anxiety in New York for both ordinary White laborers and the minority of free Blacks (10 percent).

“Auction of an enslaved man during the Dutch Period,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1895)

By the early 1700s, the city had already become the largest slave-owning port in the North. By mid-century, a fifth of its population was enslaved, the same proportion as in the rest of British North America. The numbers were similar in the farming counties around Manhattan, like Staten Island and Queens. Roughly a third of Brooklyn was enslaved. By 1776, Manhattan had nearly 3,000 slaves, with another 20,000 living within 50 miles of the city. Most came initially from the British sugar islands, especially Jamaica, where they had been “seasoned.” After the panic over the (dubious) Negro Plot of 1741, they came directly from the Akan-speaking regions of today’s Ghana. They were sold mainly on the waterfront, at the shore or at the nearby auction-stands, in the Meal Market at the end of Wall St., and the Fly Market at the end of Maiden Lane.

Slaves worked in every trade and were found on every street and in every village. They helped build New York’s roads, docks, bridges, mills, and the colony’s most vital buildings, from City Hall to the Battery and Fort, Dutch and English churches like Trinity, large taverns such as the Queen’s Head (Fraunces), the debtor prisons, the hospital, and the military rampart that became Wall Street. They were everywhere, one visitor commenting in 1774: “It rather hurts the Europian eye to see so many negro slaves upon the streets.”

“A Bird’s-Eye View of Wall Street about 1735,” Frederick Trevor Hill, The Story of a Street (1908). You can find a small marker for the public slave auction-block that ran here until 1761 in Mannahatta “Park” on Water St., looking north to Federal Hall, the old municipal and colonial legislature, and Trinity Church. There is no historic plaque for the Fly Market, several blocks north at the intersection with Maiden Lane.

Roughly 40 percent of households in the metropolitan area (12 miles in any direction) contained one or two slaves, from royal officials and merchants to shopkeepers and artisans. In the wider colony, most lived on small farms, often close to relatives. But in the city, the greatest proportion was here in the East Ward. Larger absolute numbers resided in the Out Ward, at the northeast beyond the city, where freemen owned property (by the 1760s, a neighborhood of shacks, rampant with disease, home to the public slaughterhouse, five or six distilleries, several ropewalks, tanning yards, kilns, and the potter’s field). Smaller absolute numbers could be found in the Bowery and Harlem, where the elite had large farms and mansions.

Slavery was a business, financed by the city’s merchants — at least seventy of them working next door in the Dock Ward, the highest concentration of slaveowners. Philip Livingston, a rebel delegate and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was perhaps the largest trader in the colony. The Schuylers, Van Cortlandts, Waltons, and Beekmans were also prominent. And slavery was no milder in New York than in the southern colonies. It grew harsher under the British — the government banning marriage, for example, and permitting families to be split up. Killing was illegal. But, as in the Caribbean and Brazil, many died young, overworked and underfed. Most slept in attics, garrets, cellars, or kitchens. Women performed domestic services, helping free or indentured White women cook, clean, and raise children. And they often could not leave their masters’ homes except to fetch goods at market, owners prizing Black women unable to give birth.

By the early 1700s, New York had more slaves than any port but New Orleans and Charleston. It also saw the North’s first slave revolt in 1712, said to inspire the Plot of 1741 (pictured above). In both cases, White men and women joined, demanding greater economic and political freedom for themselves. As with Bacon’s Rebellion and the Stono Rebellion in the South, extremely harsh racial codes followed, mandating segregation. The city also staged long public “trials” followed by horrific executions, with thirteen “conspirators” burned alive, eighteen hanged, one crushed by a wheel, and more than seventy deported. The news generated enormous publicity throughout the British Empire.

Blacks gathered and often provided music and dance for Pinkster (Dutch Pentecost), St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s, and celebrations of the monarch’s coronation and birthday. But nowhere was there more free regular association than in the East Ward, where slaves made up a quarter of the population. It was the one public space where Black women could socialize with Black men. Peck Slip, the Brooklyn ferry landing near the Out Ward and the African Burial Ground, was a particular hub of Black life, too. There enslaved men and women frequently engaged in the song and dance of their homelands. Despite laws against interracial gathering (passed after the deadly slave revolt of 1712), Blacks also frequented the waterfront’s social venues at night.

In large part, that was because enslaved men comprised 10-20 percent of the maritime workforce, most laboring as dockers, wagoners, and cartmen. While newspapers frequently published notices warning captains not to hire runaways, those laws were essentially ignored because of the need for sailors on royal and private vessels. And the number of runaway slaves increased steadily over the 1700s — alongside the number of runaway indentures, apprentices, soldiers, and criminals (nearly a full quarter of all print in the century). Many escaped to New York by foot or hid on ships, looking for employment on the waterfront, or with one of the hundreds of vessels in port.

Rebellion on the Waterfront

Maritime workers led a spartan existence, only finding employment in good weather two-thirds of the year, with disease or accident forever looming as crippling disaster. Sailors especially were “so ill-paid, ill-fed, and ill-handled that it was impossible to obtain crews by free enlistment,” historian Linda Colley notes. This included the men kidnapped by the hated military “press gangs,” which roved the streets of England and swarmed New York’s waterfront, pulling men off the streets and from their homes to fight in Britain’s endless wars. Separated from relatives, they worked under threat of death for years and even decades.

Illustration of a press gang in 1760, Wiki-Commons. During the Seven Years War, the British swarmed New York’s waterfront to seize men, making it a place “of armed attack and armed resistance,” as historian Jesse Lemisch writes. During the Imperial Crisis, despite a sharp fall in waterfront commerce, this continued. Street actions in port cities were thus often led by sea captains who had been privateers, rallying mariners that could no longer find work, but were still impressed with increasingly brutal tactics — and stiffer resistance. Nominally forbidden in North America since 1708, Parliament outlawed impressment again in 1775.

Sailors nonetheless enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom and power on the high seas, leading crews, negotiating exchanges, navigating vessels, and developing literacy and other valuable skills as the backbone of labor in the most profitable corner of the imperial economy. They developed an exclusive community, shaped by harrowing experiences — storms, piracy, disease, and oceangoing violence — which bred a strong trust and camaraderie. These “Jack Tars” had their own dialects, customs, and fashion, which often leveled differences of faith, ethnicity, and race (Blacks making up perhaps a tenth of all private and royal vessels). Sailors also routinely challenged political and economic autarky, staging mutinies and calls for justice that lead many historians to regard them as a vital proto-democratic culture.

Those politics spilled into waterfront taverns, some of the most radical sites during the Imperial Crisis. While merchants lost profit, the regulations and taxes of 1763-65 fell hardest on maritime workers. A highly circulated essay from 1764 claimed that 20,000 had already lost employment in North American ports. Consequently, seamen were among the first to rebel — particularly in New York, where the Sons of Neptune preceded the more famous Sons of Liberty. By late 1765, the colony’s shipping income had halved, and the cost of food and wood and rent in the city had soared. With few exceptions, the waterfront remained a place of scarce employment during the rest of the Imperial Crisis. One New Yorker prophesied: “In the Year 1776, the English will be the richest people in the Universe, for before that time all the poor will be starved to death.”

Among the concerns many elites shared about the radicals on the street was their seeming inter-racialism. A pamphlet in 1775 blasted the mob for promoting “fraternization,” complaining that the so-called “Sons of Freedom” consisted of “People of all sizes and all hues! red-skins, yellow-skins, green-skins, grey-skins, bay-skins, black-skins, blue-skins!” New York was the most ethnically and racially diverse city in North America — intermarriage and childbearing further muddying the casual distinctions often made between all these groups.

The Great Riot and the Sons of Liberty

Merchants saw their incomes plummet after the last of the mid-century wars, however, and none welcomed the legislation of the Imperial Crisis. In New York, some of the wealthiest had made enormous fortunes outfitting the British military, often using connections in England — for example, the popular assembly leader Oliver DeLancey and the mayor John Cruger. But middling tavern-owners, innkeepers, and other suppliers had watched their customer base disappear, t00. As did 224 privateers, employing 5,670 men. While the city dealt with the resulting spike in unemployment and cost-of-living, nearby farmers also saw their crops die from two early frosts in 1763-64, after the northeastern draughts of 1761-62. Altogether, one New Yorker complained in 1765: “Trade in this part of the world is come to so wretched a pass you should imagine the plague had been here.”

But after the restrictions on settlement, trade, and currency, and the import taxes of 1764, news came in April 1765 that Parliament had enacted the Stamp Act. The law required every sheet of paper to bear the emblem of the King — newspapers, wills, deeds, subpoenas, affidavits, invoices, licenses, almanacs, calendars, notarizations, even dice and playing cards. In England, where the crown long held a monopoly on paper, few saw a problem. Even in the House of Commons, where a small number of legislators were not patrons of the aristocracy or clergy, the bill caused no debate. Only a small number in Parliament knew much about the colonies. But most New Yorkers found the legislation shocking, even though it had been promised for a year.

Nearly everyone would be impacted. By summer, months before the law took effect, vigilantes and mobs raided every stamp collector’s house or frightened them into resignation. Maryland’s Zacharias Hood had to take refuge in the King’s Arms coffeehouse, and then with Lt. Gov. Colden in the Fort, before fleeing to Colden’s summer estate in Flushing. In June, the Massachusetts legislature sent an invitation to every colonial speaker of the House, calling on popularly elected leaders to meet in October to draw up a collective petition, since London had ignored their individual protests. They selected New York as the location for the “Stamp Act Congress” (the first continental meeting of such leaders) because it was a middle ground, easily accessible for New England and the southern colonies, and quickest to England by ship. Colden refused. But the delegates came anyhow to City Hall, the municipal and colonial legislature at Wall & Broad St. They had firm support among young merchants and tradesmen — as well as prominent lawyers and judges, who, Colden and Gage believed, had been orchestrating a non-stop stream of propaganda for a year, newspapers, handbills, and Council petitions attacking the idea-turned-law.

The Irish-born Scot Cadwallader Colden was a dominant figure in New York during the Imperial Crisis. The surveyor general was a distinguished botanist and man of the Enlightenment, with a vast correspondence on both sides of the Atlantic. But he rose to lieutenant governor soon after the death of his rival (and in-law) James DeLancey Sr. And in politics he was “utterly rigid and unbending, intolerant, tactless, a hopeless stickler for the letter of the law… All but ignored in London, scorned and disliked in New York… [and] the man in charge,” Richard Ketchum writes, when “Britain decided to remake its suddenly expanded empire.”

In late October, however, before London could respond to a petition sent by the famous Congress, New York exploded over Colden’s insistence on enforcing the Act. More than 2,000 residents gathered at the Battery when the HMS Edward arrived, to see if the vessel would unload the first cargo of stamps, the man-of-war protected by several naval craft in the harbor and the Fort’s guns. Posters went up the following night in taverns and street corners around the city, vowing that anyone buying or selling these insignia would see their home destroyed. Colden persisted. Five days later, a group of 200 merchants gathered at the Burns coffeehouse and voted to boycott imports from England, and to recruit other colonies in the effort — the very first such pact on the continent.

As these Sons of Liberty stepped out the door, they saw hundreds of New Yorkers marching on Fort George: sailors and craftsmen, Blacks and women, and farmers from nearby villages, seemingly led by young men and boys carrying torches and effigies of royal officials. The most prominent was of Colden, holding stamped paper in a moveable gallows, with the Devil whispering into his ear. After meeting at the commons near the main Barracks, they had marched first on City Hall, before heading for the Governor’s House inside the Fort. Smashing thousands of windows as they proceeded along Broad Way in the elite West Ward, occasionally firing pistols at the effigies, they stopped at Bowling Green. Then, an even larger procession arrived: mariners, ship captains, blacksmiths, tavernkeepers, masons, carpenters, barbers, and other laborers who had protested first outside the Merchants coffeehouse at the end of Wall St., social headquarters of the economic and political elite.

Numbering in the thousands now, Gen. Gage thought, the mob began hurling bricks and stones at the Fort, daring guards to shoot. They then set fire to Colden’s beloved coach in a massive bonfire on Bowling Green. A smaller contingent proceeded north to raid the home of a British major who had strengthened the garrison in preparation, destroying all the contents of “Vaux Hall” within 10 minutes. Afterward, they attacked several “bawdyhouses” in the “Holy Ground,'“ a red-light district nearby frequented by the elite. The fracas, which lasted until 4 o’clock in the morning, prompted Robert Livingston Sr., the dominant Assembly leader, to go into the streets pleading for order. But the 10-hour riot ended with all of New York’s churches ringing their bells in support — except the Anglican parishes of Trinity and St. Paul’s.

More than any other city, New York was also a drinking town. With a liquor license for every sixty people, the average person consumed more than seven ounces of rum a day. This is where the Sons of Neptune found its home, and where the Sons of Liberty went to mobilize their base, the number of bars growing from 282 to 396 during the Imperial Crisis. Taverns on New York’s waterfront gathered the port’s diverse maritime workforce — often impressed, enslaved, and politically radical for the age. The proprietors were often women, and in some cases free Blacks. (C.S. Hamden, The Attack Upon Odds Bobbs & Syllabubs: An American Scene During the War, 1780. Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT.)

The city was no stranger to rebellion. But the government had always been able to smash popular uprisings in the past. By the 1760s, however, at least two-thirds of White men had the vote — unlike Boston or Philadelphia, where less than half enjoyed the “privilege.” And most of these legislators were neighbors, living in close proximity to “freeholders” and “freemen” (craftsmen who held at least 50 acres of land — e.g., bricklayers, masons, blacksmiths, weavers, and rope-makers — and ordinary laborers who bought the right for a few shillings — e.g., cartmen, porters, boatmen, and mariners). Although the wealthiest merchants and landholders still dominated both legislatures and the governors’ council, officials needed popular support to exert authority, short of a military crackdown.

During the year-long crisis over the Stamp Act, Colden was thus forced to take extreme actions, proroguing the Assembly and moving his royal entourage onto warships in the harbor. Days after the Great Riot, fearing that Pope’s Night (a local holiday that evolved from Guy Fawkes Day) would bring an even larger demonstration, Colden relented and dispensed the King’s stamps to local councilmen. These decisions reflected the power of a growing citizenry — and the power of the mob. Explaining why he did not just shoot the rioters the morning after the Riot, Colden explained that he had received a letter, promising “you’ll die a Martyr to your own Villainy & be Hang’d… and every Man that assists you Shall be surely put to Death.” Hours later, Livingston reported the Sons of Neptune plan to storm the Fort, and the Sons of Liberty plan to boycott imports.

In the days that followed, the city grew unnervingly still. Where middle and upper class women and men had once flocked to the Dock Ward for British goods, now Livingston complained: “Shopkeepers will buy none, Gentlemen will wear none.” Fear had also grown of more rioting, or a military crackdown. Explaining the situation to an outside general, Livingston warned that enforcing the Stamp Act would mean the “destruction of all Law, Order & government in the colonies, and ruin all men of property.” His archrival, James DeLancey Jr., expressed the same dread. By Jan. 1766, Gen. Gage reported that even if there were 5,000 troops in the city, “no part of the Civil Authority, the Governor excepted, [] would have asked their Assistance, to quell any of the Riots.”

The years of the Imperial Crisis were thus revolutionary. Never before had politics in the colony been so influenced by men not of the clerical and mercantile elite. Rebels created an independent power base, fueled by class resentments and backstopped in mob violence. The long-bubbling hatred in slums like the East and Out wards combined with outrage at Parliament’s abrupt shift in 1763-65, and the sharp depression and inflation that resulted. As one measure of this change, just over half the persons elected to New York’s municipal legislature over the next decade would be “mechanics,” or craftsmen — something that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.

By contrast, elites gathered in coffeehouses, where they conducted business and engaged in political debate within a far more homogenous space. By the 1760s, the King’s Arms near Trinity and the Burns near the Fort had given way to the Merchants at the east-end of Wall St. The Sons of Liberty formed at the Burns, and met regularly at the Merchants. But so did many of those who became Loyalists, who also met regularly at elite pubs near the Fort like the Queen’s Head, today’s Fraunces Tavern. (Artist unknown, Interior of a London coffee-house, c. 1690-1700, British Library).

A coalition of interests had formed, which rebel merchants skillfully exploited. For these waterfront financiers, owners, and employers, the replacement of salutary neglect and military spending with regulation and taxes meant not just depressed profits but ideological shock. They had imagined themselves as partners in the Empire, only to discover that Parliament understood them as subjects.

New York’s Sons of Liberty formed that October amid the Great Riot, just three months after merchants in Boston established the first chapter in August 1765. They soon inspired counterparts in Oyster Bay, New Brunswick, White Plains, Albany, Norwich, Philadelphia, Newport, and similar groups in South Carolina and Georgia. And during the Imperial Crisis, they often led other resistance-minded organizations in the city. By April 1766, they were even pushing for a “congress of the Sons of Liberty” to coordinate action up and down the seaboard, an idea which even the rebels in Boston found too radical.

The Sons were divided. “Moderates” in the group like Alexander McDougall, a Scottish milk-boy who came into a small fortune (£7,000) as a British privateer, wanted to focus on traditional channels of protest, like the wealthier, "more conservative” merchants in the Sons — and those who became Loyalists. Radicals like the sea captain Isaac Sears had a similar if less successful background (£2,000), but consistently pressed for more radical action, like boycotts, street violence, and illegal trade.

The group was secretive. No one knew just who belonged, or how many, and what they did exactly. But their few public leaders were plain-spoken and self-made, men who commanded fierce respect among ordinary laborers and middling craftsmen. They would responsible for some of the most spectacular acts in New York’s road to Independence, none more than Sears. The group’s slogan during the Stamp Act crisis was “Liberty and Property.” And it focused, then as later, on spreading boycotts and organizing legislative petitions. But Sears always went further.

Even in the more “peaceful” work of boycotting imports, the Sons often used violence and coercion to get support — the kinds of methods standard in wars for independence and revolutions, but more often associated with the sans-culottes of the French Revolution than with America’s Patriots. For that reason, and for their willingness to use the mob, both moderate and conservative Whigs viewed them as radicals, sons of “anarchy,” not liberty.

Protest and threats of violence continued long after the Great Riot. Mobs chased distributors into exile and sent anonymous threats to governors and military captains. Demonstrators hoisted effigies of lords and generals, dangling by the noose. And merchants pressured anyone who might stand in the way of the boycott. Montresor reported in February 1766 that it had become a nightly event to hear youth “trampouze the Streets with lanthorns upon Poles and hallowing.” When the city’s only theater reopened that spring, believing enough time had passed, a crowd showed up the very first night. To shouts of “Liberty!,” they chased out the wealthy patrons, stripping them of “Caps, Hats, Wigs, Cardinals, and Cloaks,” before they dismantled the Chapel St. house and burned it on the commons. The group explained later that its English actors expressed pro-British sentiments, and that such a rich entertainment was an outrage given the depression.

After the Great Riot, elite landowners, merchants, lawyers, and judges in the colony petitioned Parliament again, calling the Stamp Act unconstitutional. But they made no call for action, while drowning the complaint in pledges of loyalty. Sears had argued for sending all the stamps back to England on the very next ship. When they refused, he summoned the power of the mob to effectively nullify the Act. He led stamp-raids on the Custom House and Navy ships, and even put royal officials into a stockade on the commons, where the city had long gathered to watch the execution of criminals and rebels. Gen. Gage placed 1,000 barrels of gunpowder and 12,000 stands-of-arms on warships in the harbor. But officials started appealing to Parliament for help already by January. By spring, no warship hassled any unstamped merchant vessel in the harbor.

While arguably the birthplace of New York’s influential Sons of Liberty, there is no historic marker for the Burns on Thames St. & Broadway. It is now a Starbucks.

There is no marker for the Merchants either, the coffeehouse at the end of Wall St. where both rebels and Loyalists gathered during the Imperial Crisis. The Sons plotted New York’s tea party at the building, and drafted their call for the first Continental Congress. Run by Mary Ferrari, it was a place of auctions (especially property) until 1776, and remained the premier site of sales during the Occupation. After the war, James Strachan, the owner of the Queen’s Head (Fraunces) Tavern purchased it, and elites reorganized the Chamber of Commerce and established the Bank of New York while sipping its brew.

Protest erupted across the colonies over the Stamp Act, making 1765 the debut of popular rebellion. The revolt shocked Parliament. Grenville wanted a military crackdown. But the economic consequences of the legislation had also mobilized London’s merchants, who persuaded much of the public, and the king, to repeal the law. William Pitt, the "Great Commoner,” pled their case. Parliament thus relented in March 1766, six months after the Stamp Act went into effect. When the news arrived, New York exploded in joy. A large group of the Sons went to the Fort, to congratulate Lt. Gov. Colden, and then raised the first “liberty pole” on the commons, near the main Barracks. Merchants in the Assembly commissioned the enormous golden statue of King George, after voting for a marble statue of Pitt. For a short time, prosperity returned and the Sons retired. But the other regulations and import duties remained. And Parliament expressed its right to legislate for the colonies in the Declaratory Act, two days after the repeal. Gen. Gage, who had been increasing the number of soldiers in North American ports since February, brought two full regiments to New York in June.

  • On the increasingly interconnected issues of consumption, political mobilization, colonial resistance, and imperial crisis, see Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in 18th Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011); T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004)

    On the trade in enslaved and bound laborers, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Anna Suranyi, Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America (University of North Carolina Press, 1947).

    On slavery in colonial New York, see Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Thelma Willis Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford University Press, 2004); Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse University Press, 1966); Graham Hodges, Root and Branch: African-Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jill Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” in Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (The New Press, 2005).

    On the significance of Black maritime life and culture, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail (1997); Philip D. Morgan, “Maritime Slavery” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 3 (2010): 311-26 and "Black Experiences in Britain's Maritime World," in Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain's Maritime World, c. 1763-1840 (2007); Charles R. Foy, "Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-83," Early American Studies 4, no. 1 (2006): 46-77, and “The Royal Navy’s Employment of Black Mariners and Maritime Workers, 1754-83,” International Maritime History Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 6-35.

    On colonists who chose to remain loyal to the British Empire, see Christopher F. Minty, Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City (Cornell University Press, 2023); Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011); Robert Ketchum, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York (Henry Holt, 2002); Joseph Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763–1776 (Cornell University Press, 2008); Joseph Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut, eds, The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787 (State University of New York Press, 2005); Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Sung Bok Kim, “Impact of Class Relations and Warfare in the American Revolution: The New York Experience,” Journal of American History 69 (1982); Michael D. Hattem, “‘As Serves Our Interest Best’: Political Economy and the Logic of Popular Resistance in New York City, 1765–1776,” New York History 98, no. 1 (2017): 40–70; ; Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Beacon Press, 2000).

    On popular violence, see Patrick Griffin, et al, eds. Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era (University of Virginia Press, 2015); Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987).

    On seaport life, sailors, and their integral role to the era’s economy and politics, see Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Beacon Press, 2014); Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1968): 371–407.

    On the various elements of the population of New York at this time, and where in the city they lived, see Carl J. Abbott, “The Neighborhoods of New York, 1760-1775, New York History 55, No. 1 (1974): 35-54.

    On the legacies of Dutch-style modifications of Manhattan’s shoreline for the development of New York’s shipping trade, see Paul R. Huey, “Old Slip and Cruger's Wharf at New York: An Archaeological Perspective of the Colonial American Waterfront,” Historical Archaeology 18, No. 1 (1984): 15-37.

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