During the financial crash of 1772, the British government investigated the East India Company and found that, with the combination of a recent war in India and famine in Bengal, the economic giant was on the edge of bankruptcy. It was promptly nationalized, but fifteen banks in Amsterdam failed. And needing to dump excess supply to regain its health, the royal company was now also permitted to export to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York without tax — although colonies still had to pay the import duty of 1767. New York’s rebels were aghast, fearing it might be the first of several new monopolies.

Meanwhile, the city’s mercantile elite found themselves in a now familiar bind: not wanting to legitimate Parliament’s decision and fearing its consequences for themselves, but also not wanting to cede leadership to the rebels by encouraging another boycott. New York’s governor, likewise, feared the street would erupt in protest and riot, as in the past two waves of legislation.

But the rebels sprang into action immediately, with a stream of public meetings and broadsides, now often signed “The Mohawks,” the moniker rebels in Boston later made famous. By October 1773, just five months after the Tea Act, Sears and McDougall stood before an enormous crowd at the waterfront, thanking New York’s maritime workforce for again helping to prevent royal agents from distributing taxed British goods — the very first protest in the colonies. Officials informed Gov. William Tryon that they would not distribute the import. Thousands gathered outside the Merchants Coffee House to burn the effigy of a sea captain who did. One month earlier, the commanding officer reported to Gen. Gage, now the appointed governor of Massachusetts, that New York’s rebels had managed to prevent all support from reaching the military in Boston’s harbor. Most of the twenty-eight riots that rocked New York during the Imperial Crisis would occur in these final years.

Thomas Malton, East India House, c. 1805

During the summer and fall of 1773, Sam Adams and others in Boston failed to advance the rebellion, John Adams writing finally: “Our credit is at stake… unless we [act], we shall be discarded by the sons of liberty in the other colonies.” But most of the colonies established Committees of Correspondence during this period, to organize protest if Britain suspended their legislatures — as they had with New York, during the last major wave of protest. And in December, after months of pressure from New York’s Sons, rebels in Boston staged their famous tea party, climbing aboard three ships dressed as Mohawks (carrying hatchets, their faces painted), and dumping £9,000 worth of the British good into the harbor.

Boston under military blockade during the crisis. The port had around 12,000 residents, just a little less than half of New York.

After hearing the news, Sears immediately circulated a letter calling on the Sons of Neptune to be ready when the next British ship came to New York. Tryon promised not to let any dock, but then left for England, with Colden sworn in as the acting governor again. On April 18, 1774, the Nancy arrived in Sandy Hook, carrying 698 chests of tea, double the amount rebels spoiled in Boston. It was refused, and the captain took refuge at the Merchants Coffee House. Three days later, the London anchored at Murray’s Wharf with eighteen boxes. That night hundreds gathered — “the greatest number… ever known in the city,” Rivington’s Gazette misreported — and threw it overboard. The next morning, another crowed marched on the Queen’s Head (Fraunces) Tavern, demanding the ferryman’s apology, and escorting both captains to the waterfront and back to London. As with the events of Golden Hill, the DeLancey faction now faced open rebellion from both rebel merchants and the waterfront laborers that radicals like Sears mobilized.

Illustration of John Lamb, the wine-dealer and Sons of Liberty radical, rousing New Yorkers over the Tea Act

London responded with the so-called Coercive or Intolerable Acts. Rebels mistakenly viewed the Quebec Act as one (the law enormously expanded the ex-French colony southward, granting its small population a Catholic bishop, and seeming to both nullify speculative land claims and to recreate the conditions of Pontiac’s Rebellion). But the most infamous of the four closed Boston’s harbor and dissolved “the democratic part” of the Massachusetts colonial government. The other two enabled governors to move trials to England and insisted that soldiers be quartered in “uninhabited houses, out-houses, barns, or other buildings” at colonial expense.

At the Queen’s Head, McDougall and Sears urged merchants to implement a third boycott, and resumed their proposal for a continental Congress (the idea Sam Adams would later famously advance). But while Oliver DeLancey spoke for the dominant political faction in the assembly — saying that he would “rather spend every shilling of [my] Fortune” than accept the Boston harbor shutdown — New York’s mercantile elite also fervently opposed the idea of another non-important agreement. McDougall, by now a famous radical, began referring to their erstwhile allies as “the old enemies of liberty,” and told Paul Revere to push the rebels in Boston on the continental congress idea at once. In July 1774, the “Committee of Fifty-One” (New York’s correspondence group) censured both McDougall and Sears. William Smith Jr., the future Loyalist, commented: “Strange that the Colony who had the first Intelligence of the Parliamentary Measures is behind all the rest.” But his pupil, the future rebel Gouverneur Morris, expressed the view of most elite merchants and landowners in New York, that reconciliation with Britain was the only sensible course.

By August, however, Boston had taken up the New York rebels’ call for a congress, and the DeLanceys consented to sending five (pro-boycott) delegates to Philadelphia for the meeting. McDougall unofficially hosted John and Sam Adams later that month, taking the Boston rebels to meet the “Liberty Printer” at Hanover Square and other leaders, before sending the congressional delegation off to meet the Fifty-One. The merchants’ opposition to boycott, or any larger action, disturbed them. But days later, New York’s delegates went to Philadelphia, John Jay leaving without fanfare, while large crowds escorted Isaac Low to New Jersey ferry at Paulus Hook and bid farewell to the rest with a procession from the Merchants Coffee House to a wharf near the Exchange, officiated by James Duane.

Rebels used handbills and broadsides, such as this one, to rally mobs

In New York, tensions reached a fever pitch over Boston. In September 1774, a few merchants began refusing to ship troops or military supplies, while carpenters refused to help build barracks for the British military that now occupied Boston. By January 1775, others shipped 1,000 lbs. of food and provisions to the blockaded port. Leaders in the DeLancey faction ejected radicals like McDougall and Sears from their deliberations at the Merchants, and Colden demanded business go on as usual. But there was now a rebel Congress, which imposed stiff penalties on those who failed to comply with an embargo on imports and exports, levied in October. Colonists who remained loyal to the British government were labelled enemies of the new rogue state. Thanks to James DeLancey, Jr., New York’s assembly narrowly refused to recognize Congress’ authority. In February, 1775, the legislature refused to appoint deputies for the second Continental Congress. But the rebels continued.

The DeLanceys still officially dominated the government. But the city moved overwhelmingly against them. From November 1774 to January 1775, James Rivington, the “Tory printer” at Hanover Square, published another famous series of essays in the Revolution, “A.W[estchester]. Farmer.” Writing under a pseudonym (itself significant), the Rev. Seabury argued that the rebels’ embargo on imports and exports to Britain would ruin New York’s small farmers, an eminently reasonable position. But the letters prompted a famous, hefty denunciation from an 18-year-old at King’s College (likewise unprecedented), a law student named Alexander Hamilton. In March, when Trinity’s Charles Inglis attempted to refute Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with a pamphlet warning against the dangers of war and independence, Sears led a mob and destroyed both the printed copies and everything in Rivington’s printshop. On the street, events moved as they did in print. When rebels on the waterfront attacked the merchants selling nails, pickaxes, shovels, billhooks, and spades to Gage’s army in Boston, the Council issued arrest-warrants for Sears and other radicals in the Sons of Liberty. But supporters came running to his aid from all over the city, rescuing the “King” at the Fly Market and parading him up Wall St. and Broad Way to the Liberty Pole. Robert Livingston Sr., head of the “rebel” faction in the assembly, expressed the common view among New York’s elite: “Every good man wishes that American may remain free… at the same time, I do not desire, we should be wholly independent of the mother country.” But the weight of public opinion fell hardest against the DeLancey faction in power. As before, this group of nascent Loyalists sent petitions to the King, the Lords, and the Commons, echoing the rebels’ complaints. But they still hoped for a middle-ground that would give the colonies greater independence without breaking from the Empire. In May 1775, James DeLancey Jr., the fantastically wealthy and influential head of the faction, sailed for England, hoping to negotiate such an order. But the events at Lexington and Concord forestalled that possibility. He never returned.

Isaac Low was elected chairman of the Committee of Fifty-One at Fraunces Tavern, and served previously in the colony’s Committee of Correspondence. He was a de facto governor in New York’s rebel congress, but turned Loyalist after the Declaration of Independence, like a number of rebels (and Sons of Liberty). He was released from jail by Washington but fled to England.