Tour Stop No. 2
COENTIES SLIP
“…the mob begin to think and reason… if the disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions; we shall be under the domination of a rioutous mob.”
-Gouverneur Morris, May 1774
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 teemed with people from all over the Atlantic, its port conveying hundreds of imports and exports between regional and imperial markets. 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 East River was thus the main waterfront and the city’s busiest district. By day, it was a bustling port, squeezed into just a dozen inlets (or docking “slips”) fashioned on the marshy coast. Goods were loaded and unloaded from and to manufacturers in the Out Ward, shopkeepers in the Dock Ward, and six open-air markets along the border of Montgomerie Ward, the residential neighborhood of the “middling sort.” By night, it returned to the men who did the labor outfitting ships as carpenters, sailmakers, dockworkers, mechanics, sailors, or “roustabouts” (general hands). As many as 4,000 people lived here in the East Ward, a long thin stretch along the river, finding employment in the surrounding areas. It was the city’s worst slum — usually 3-4 families living in a single room, in wooden tenements, hammocked lean-tos, and flophouses.
In the evening, the neighborhood came alive with dance and fiddle halls, gambling and blood-sport dens, brothels, gin-shops, and taverns. But robberies and gang violence were common. Shards of barrels and other debris lay everywhere. Manure, garbage, and other filth washed down from the higher ground. And 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 obtaining bottled water from the “Tea Water Pump” at Chatham & Pearl St.). It was also home to many slaves, contracted to dock labor.
These were the “lower sort,” as elites commonly described them. During the 1760s, it was increasingly common to hear these maritime laborers — a quarter of the city’s workforce — likewise disparage the “gentlemen” who employed and ruled them, as “big wigs” in “silk stockings,” the “corrupt Oligarchy.”
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.
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.”
TRADE… in HUMAN LIFE
“Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)
While exports remained a small part of New York’s economy (like all the 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 became the primary labor-force in these years, too. In the late 1500s, European merchants had gone to Africa for gold and other highly valuable items like ivory, animal hides, pepper, beeswax, or gum. They established trading ports along the western coast. During the 1600s, however, the Portuguese and Dutch began purchasing more and more slaves, surpassing the old Mideastern empires. In the 1700s, the French and especially the British provided most of the “demand.” Religious, political, and economic conflict in west Africa also dramatically increased “supply,” as wealthy kingdoms like the Dahomey, Asante, Senegambia, Benin, and Oyo sold captives taken in war for guns, powder, fabrics, salt, and other goods. Independent “creole” merchants 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 Africans sold between the late 1500s and early 1800s were shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean to grow the sweetener. Hard labor, brutal oversight, and poor diet caused the death of millions. But life was cheap. In 1675, a slave cost roughly $350, adjusted for inflation. The merchants and kings of western Europe purchased as many slaves in this 250-year period as the merchants and kings of west Africa had sold in 1,000.
“Band of Capitves Driven Into Slavery.” Lithograph from The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, LL.D. [London, 1870?]
Slavery was a universal practice dating to the “dawn of civilization,” the first agricultural states or kingdoms. 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. Millions of Indigenous were enslaved in the Americas. And the institution could still be found in parts of Europe, where it had been a staple for a millennium. While it later became standard to differentiate between free and unfree labor, there was no hard line between these states. Most lived in varying degrees of servitude. By the end of the “Age of Democratic Revolution” (1760-1800), three-quarters of the world remained unfree, the historian Adam Hochschild estimates — typically as slaves or serfs. Slavery had often taken different forms in the past. In 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 commodified mode of labor for western Europe’s empires. 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 Adam Smith expressed a less controversial, if unusually disapproving 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 was indentured British labor, 320,000 of the 457,000 settlers. These were men and women sold as servants without pay for 5-10 years, children under five obliged to work until twenty-one. Such numbers were possible because of three almost unprecedented developments that occurred in Britain as the economy gradually liberalized: a near-doubling of the population between 1600 and 1800, alongside significant declines in farm labor and dramatic rises in urban pauperism. The indentured were sold to rid Britain of these unwanted poor, and to fill the “plantations” (colonies). As the historian Nancy Isenberg finds, they most often described as “waste,”or a dozen similar terms, previewing the later “white trash.”
Indentures ranged from adults to poor boys. Teens were the majority. Women constituted a full quarter. They were often “spirited” off British city streets. But many were also criminals, opting for servitude instead of the notorious workhouses and debtor prisons that also proliferated in Britain during this period. Hence, the English writer Samuel Johnson’s quip that Americans were “a race of convicts.” A large number had been sentenced to death, capital punishment exploded from 50 to 250 categories after the late 1600s (mostly for crimes of property). The Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville observed, casually: “Hundreds, if not Thousands, of Necessitous Wretches… are daily hanged for Trifles.”
The indentured faced horrid conditions. Sometimes not even half survived the voyage. 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, crucially, their service was not hereditary. And in the colonies they had a chance to obtain land.
Thus, as land ownership concentrated in the 1700s, British emigration to newer colonies like Australia, and the cost of labor rose. Slaves presented the “solution.” Many elites were ambivalent. But as one New York governor explained, “the want of hands and the Dearness of Wages of hired Servants makes Slaves at this Time, necessary.” The dominant thinkers of the age, such as John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu, echoed the sentiment. Merchants thus purchased 275,000 men and women from Africa between 1700 and 1775, roughly two-thirds of all the slaves brought to North America in the colonial era. It was the largest “immigrant” group of the period. Most hailed from Angola, the Congo, and Gabon. As their number grew, Whites began to associate blackness with slavery, an increasing source of anxiety for both poor white New Yorkers and the minority of free Blacks (10 percent).
By the early 1700s, New York became the largest slave-owning port in the North. By mid-century, a fifth of its population was enslaved. The numbers were similar in the farming counties around Manhattan. Roughly a third of Brooklyn was enslaved. By 1776, the city had nearly 3,000 slaves, but another 20,000 lived within 50 miles. Most came from the sugar islands at first, especially Jamaica, where they had been “seasoned.” After the supposed 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 municipal auction-stand, or “Meal Market,” at the end of Wall Street until 1760, and then at the Fly Market, at the end of Maiden Lane.
“Auction of an enslaved man during the Dutch Period,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1895).
“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.
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.”
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 in the East Ward. Larger absolute numbers lived in the Out Ward, 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 merchants. The highest concentration of slaveowners was thus in the Dock Ward, where at least seventy worked and lived. Philip Livingston, who signed the Declaration of Independence, was perhaps the largest trader in New York. The Schuylers, Van Cortlandts, Waltons, and Beekmans were also prominent. 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 women cook, clean, and raise children. They often could not leave home except to fetch goods at market.
Blacks often provided music and dance for Pinkster (Dutch Pentecost), St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s, and celebrations of the British king’s coronation and birthday. And Peck Slip, the Brooklyn ferry landing near the free Black stronghold in the Out Ward and the African Burial Ground, was a particular hub of Black life. There enslaved men and women frequently engaged in the song and dance of their homelands. But nowhere was there more 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. Despite laws against racial mixing (passed after the slave revolt of 1712), Blacks also frequented the ward’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. The number of slaves who escaped also increased steadily over the 1700s, alongside indentures, apprentices, soldiers, and criminals who fled. Ads for these “runways” made up nearly a full quarter of all print in the century. Many escaped to New York by foot or hid on ships, looking for employment at the waterfront or with the hundreds of vessels in port.
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.
REBELLION on the WATERFRONT
Illustration of a press gang in 1760, Wiki-Commons. During the French and Indian War, the British swarmed New York’s waterfront to kidnap sailors, making it a place “of armed attack and armed resistance,” as historian Jesse Lemisch writes. During the Imperial Crisis, although impressed with increasingly brutal tactics, they met stiffer resistance. Protest in New York was often led by sea captains, like the ubiquitous Isaac Sears (“king of the mob”), who rallied the poor. Nominally forbidden in North America since 1708, Parliament outlawed impressment again in 1775.
Maritime workers led a spartan existence, finding work only in good weather just 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, making up 40 percent of the Royal Navy.
Sailors nonetheless enjoyed an unusual degree of power on the high seas, leading crews, negotiating exchanges, navigating vessels, and developing valuable skills as the backbone of labor in the most profitable corner of the economy. They developed an exclusive community, shaped by harrowing experiences — storms, piracy, disease, oceangoing violence — which bred a strong camaraderie. The “Jack Tars” had their own dialects, customs, and fashion, which often leveled differences of faith, ethnicity, and race. They also routinely challenged political and economic autarky, staging mutinies and other calls for justice. A number of historians regard them as progenitors of modern democracy.
Those attitudes infused the East Ward, New York’s most radical site during the Imperial Crisis. Britain had pulled 40,000 soldiers and marines from the city at the end of the French and Indian War, some believing the cost of living doubled. Parliament’s regulations and taxes only intensified the situation, and the weight fell heaviest on maritime workers. A highly circulated essay claimed that 20,000 had lost their jobs by 1764 already. Consequently, they were among the first to rebel. In New York, it was these “Sons of Neptune” who preceded the more famous Sons of Liberty. By late 1765, the city had lost half its shipping income, and the cost of food and wood and rent 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 rebel and loyal elites shared about the radicals 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!” Blacks made up perhaps a tenth of all private and royal vessels. And New York was the most diverse city in North America.
The GREAT RIOT and
the SONS of LIBERTY
No one welcomed Parliament’s regulations and taxes. In New York, 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 they saw their incomes plummet after the French and Indian War. As did 224 privateering sea captains, employing 5,670 men. Tavern-owners, innkeepers, and other suppliers watched their customer base disappear, too. And nearby farmers saw their crops die from 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.”
Reeling from these blows, news came in April 1765 that Parliament had enacted the Stamp Act. The law required that every sheet of paper 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 merchants had joined the nobility and clergy, the bill caused no debate. Only a few in Parliament knew much about the colonies. But most New Yorkers found the news shocking, even though it had been promised for a year. Nearly everyone would be impacted.
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. He rose to lieutenant governor soon after the death of his rival (and in-law) James DeLancey Sr. But in politics he was “utterly rigid and unbending… All but ignored in London, scorned and disliked in New York… [he was] the man in charge,” as the historian Richard Ketchum writes, when “Britain decided to remake its suddenly expanded empire.”
By summer, months before the law took effect, vigilantes and mobs raided every stamp collector’s house or frightened them into resignation. Zacharias Hood had to take refuge in the King’s Arms, and then with Lt. Gov. Colden in Fort George, before fleeing to Lt. Gov. Colden’s summer estate in Flushing. That June, the Massachusetts legislature sent an invitation to every colonial House speaker, calling on the popularly elected leaders to meet (for the first time) to draw up a collective petition, since London had ignored their individual protests. They selected New York as the location for this gathering because it was a middle ground, easily accessible for New England and the southern colonies, and quickest to England by ship. Colden refused to admit them. But they came anyway, meeting in today’s Federal Hall, then known as City Hall, New York’s municipal/colonial legislature, at Wall & Broad St. The “Stamp Act Congress” had firm support among young merchants and tradesmen in New York, as well as prominent lawyers and judges, who, Colden and Gage believed, had been orchestrating a non-stop stream of propaganda, newspapers, handbills, and petitions attacking Parliament’s bill.
In late October, however, before London could respond to the colonial leaders’ polite petition, New York exploded over Colden’s insistence on enforcing the Stamp Act. More than 2,000 people gathered at the battery, to see if the HMS Edward would unload the first cargo of stamps. Gage provided the man-of-war came with several naval craft in the harbor, and Fort George’s soldiers. Handbills went up the following night at street corners around the city, vowing that anyone buying or selling the stamps would see their home destroyed. Colden persisted. But 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. It was the very first such pact on the continent, and the second chapter of the famous Sons of Liberty.
As they stepped out the door, however, they saw hundreds of New Yorkers marching on Fort George: sailors and craftsmen, Blacks and women, and farmers from nearby villages, led by teens and boys carrying torches and effigies of royal officials. The most prominent was of Colden, holding stamps in a gallows, the Devil whispering into his ear. After meeting at the commons near the main barracks, the crowd marched first on City Hall, then headed for the Governor’s House inside the fort. Smashing thousands of windows in the mansions along Broad Way and occasionally firing pistols at the effigies, they stopped at Bowling Green. Then, an even larger procession arrived: ship captains, blacksmiths, tavernkeepers, masons, carpenters, barbers, and others who had protested first outside the Merchants’ coffeehouse at the end of Wall St., the 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 expensive coach in a massive bonfire on the green. A smaller contingent proceeded north to raid the home of a British major who had strengthened Fort George in preparation, destroying all the contents of “Vaux Hall” within 10 minutes. Afterward, they attacked several “bawdyhouses” in the “Holy Ground,'“ a nearby red-light district 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 “Great Riot” lasted ten hours, ending with all of New York’s churches ringing their bells in support — except the Anglican parishes of Trinity and St. Paul’s.
C.S. Hamden, The Attack Upon Odds Bobbs & Syllabubs: An American Scene During the War, 1780. Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. More than any other city, New York was a drinking town. With a liquor license for every sixty people, the average person consumed more than seven ounces of rum a day. The number of taverns grew from 282 to 396 during the Imperial Crisis. This is where the Sons of Neptune, or disorganized maritime radicals, went to booze, and where radical sea captains in the Sons of Liberty went to mobilize. Taverns gathered the port’s diverse maritime workforce — often impressed, enslaved, and politically radical for the age. The proprietors were often enough widows, even, in some cases, free Blacks.
Artist unknown, Interior of a London coffee-house, c. 1690-1700, British Library. In London, there were many coffee houses, where men of different social rank mixed. But in the colonies, there were just a few, almost exclusively gathering-places for the elite. The ground floor served as places for debate and conversation, while the second floor typically had long tables for auctions or business association meetings. By the 1760s, the King’s Arms near Trinity Church and the Burns near Fort George had given way to the Merchants Coffee House at the east end of Wall St. While the Sons of Liberty formed at the Burns, they met far more regularly at the Merchants; often described as “the” coffee house. So did many of the future Loyalists. Both factions also met regularly at elite pubs in “crown town,” near Fort George, like the Queen’s Head (today’s Fraunces Tavern).
The city was no stranger to rebellion. But the government had always been able to smash popular uprisings. By the 1760s, however, at least two-thirds of White men in New York had the vote, unlike Boston or Philadelphia, where less than half enjoyed the “privilege.” And while elite, most legislators were neighbors, living in close proximity to “freeholders” and “freemen” (men who had 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 the municipal and colonial legislature, as well as the governors’ council, officials needed some measure of 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 an even larger demonstration on Pope’s Night (a local holiday that evolved from Guy Fawkes Day), the Lt. Governor relented and dispensed the stamps to local councilmen. Those decisions reflected the power of a growing electorate — and the power of the mob. Explaining why he did not just shoot the protestors the morning after the Great 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 that various groups (one going by the name Sons of Neptune) planned to storm Fort George. And that merchants in the Sons of Liberty intended 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 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 Imperial Crisis was thus revolutionary. Never before had politics in the colony been so influenced by men not of the elite. Rebels created an independent power base, fueled by economic resentment and backstopped in mob violence. The long-bubbling hatred in slums like the East Ward 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.
No less important, a coalition of interests had formed. For rebel merchants, the Imperial Crisis was an ideological shock. They had imagined themselves as partners in the Empire, only to discover that Parliament understood them as subjects. In response, they organized the Sons of Liberty. New York’s chapter formed in October 1765, the night of the Great Riot, three months after Boston’s merchants established the first. 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” members, including 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 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.” It focused on spreading boycotts and organizing legislative petitions. Sears always went further. But 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 conservatives viewed them as radicals; sons of “anarchy,” not liberty.
Protest and threats of violence continued long after the Great Riot, one elite figure calling it “the general Terror.” 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, a crowd showed up the 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, elites petitioned Parliament again, over the Stamp Act. But they made no call for action, drowning the complaint in pledges of loyalty. Sears wanted to send all the stamps back to England on the very next ship. When they refused, he summoned the mob to effectively nullify the Act. He led 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. Gage placed 1,000 barrels of gunpowder and 12,000 stands-of-arms on warships in the harbor. Officials started appealing to Parliament for help by January. By spring, no warship hassled any unstamped vessel in port.
Protest erupted across the colonies over the Stamp Act, making 1765 the debut of the Revolution. 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 law 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. Merchants in the Assembly commissioned the enormous statue of King George outside the fort. For a short time, prosperity returned and the Sons retired. But the other regulations and import taxes remained. And Gage, who had been increasing the number of soldiers in the colonies since February, brought another two regiments to New York.
Although it was the birthplace of New York’s highly influential Sons of Liberty, there is no historic marker for the Burns Coffee House on Thames St. & Broadway. It is now a Starbucks.
There is no marker for the Merchants’ Coffee House either, the most important gathering-place for the elite during this entire period, from 1763 to 1789. The Sons of Liberty plotted New York’s tea party at the building, and drafted their call for the first Continental Congress. Run by Mary Ferrari, the widow of a Genovan merchant, until 1776, it remained the premier site of auctions during the British occupation. After the war, elites reorganized the Chamber of Commerce and established the Bank of New York while sipping its brew.
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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.