Golden Hill

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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During the mid-1700s, New Yorkers welcomed the large number of soldiers in their city, the only British garrison in North America. But this sentiment changed radically with the Imperial Crisis, as colonists began to view Parliament, and eventually King George, as sources of “tyranny,” not the peerless icons of liberal government they had celebrated since the Glorious Revolution. By 1776, as much as a third of the population in “big towns” like New York had fallen into poverty. And in the face of this depression, British soldiers no longer represented profit and protection but competition for work and the everyday physical symbol of hated foreign rule. Nowhere was the opposition to “quartering” greater than in New York, because it had the largest number of “Redcoats.”

  • New Yorkers responded to the Quartering Act with another string of demonstrations, but this time Parliament responded by stripping the colony of its legislative powers, until it found a way to house the city’s soldiers. The suspension of New York’s legislature was unprecedented, stirring fear and outrage across the colonies.

    After more than two years, the assembly relented, levying yet another tax in Dec. 1769. But the city revolted again. Soldiers complaining of daily insults. Rebels pressured tavern-keepers and merchants to deny any service. Alexander McDougall, a prosperous trader and erstwhile moderate in the Sons of Liberty published a broadside calling for public action on the law and the soldiers — which, he said (anonymously), were clearly not here “to protect but to enslave us.”

    The leaflet and poster, widely circulated by its printer, reignited a dangerous back-and-forth which had lasted seven months during the Townshend Act crisis, over the “liberty pole” on the Common. Now, after the tense peace of the Suspending Act, soldiers at the nearby Barracks again tried to pull down — and ultimately blew up — the iron-girded white pine. The pole stood on their parade grounds, adorned with political messages and highly visible at 80 feet.

    It also escalated the rhetoric. In February, another letter blasted the DeLancey faction, which now dominated the legislature (and had backed the rebels since 1765), for agreeing to provide food and shelter to not just the soldiers but their “whores and bastards.” The reference was to the “Holy Ground,” a popular red-light district which soldiers frequented on Trinity Church land, near the Common and the Barracks. The author (almost surely McDougall) was thus complaining of a double-tax: quartering the soldiers and paying for the orphans that might end up in the public Almshouse.

    The charge was dubious. But officers and regulars saw it as a libel on their wives and children, a good number of whom came to New York as “camp followers.” Days later, following a nervous standoff at the mayor’s home, a crowd of rebels heckling and assaulting a small band of Redcoats found itself gored with bayonets in a skirmish known as the Battle of Golden Hill, the “first blood shed in the American Revolution.” The event, now mostly forgotten, was a “fundamental catalyst” of the Boston Massacre, a major turning point which accelerated the Crisis from protest to armed rebellion.

Eden’s Alley, on Gold St. between Fulton St. and John St., is where “the first blood” in the Revolution was shed. It is now used for garbage. There is no historical signage.

“King” Isaac Sears

Isaac Sears was the “Sam Adams of New York,” the public face of its Sons of Liberty, the second and perhaps most active chapter in the colonies. He was a prosperous merchant, like so many leaders of the underground rebel group.

And during the mid-1700s, he made fine income as a privateer, too, hunting the ships of imperial rivals for the British, like Alexander McDougall. Only when the Sugar Act brought an end to his trade in the West Indies, did the sea captain turn against the Empire. And like many of the “radical Whigs” in New York, he sided with the conservative DeLancey faction in the legislature until the events preceding the Battle of Golden Hill. In short, he was no outsider in elite society or democratic zealot. It was Sears who alerted rebels that James Rivington intended to publish a rebuttal of Common Sense written by the minister at Trinity Church — which he knew being a member of the parish, the city’s wealthiest and most pro-British institution.

  • Still, the merchants who dominated New York’s legislature and trade viewed Isaac as a demagogue for stirring up the maritime workforce with populist rhetoric, like the Sons’ famous “No taxation without representation.” Opponents dubbed him “King Sears” in recognition of his influence with the “mob,” supporters once rescuing him from arrest by literally mobbing the jailhouse door. Sears co-founded New York’s chapter of the Sons after the first appeared in Boston, and led nearly every mass demonstration in the city. He insisted on raising the liberty poles over the Common between 1765 and 1767, to provoke soldiers at the Barracks; led the import boycott; was a major catalyst in the Battle of Golden Hill in 1770; organized New York’s tea party in 1774; and posted notes at every printshop after destroying Rivington’s operation in 1775, warning that for anyone who published Charles Inglis’s attack on Thomas Paine — or let it be published — “destruction, ruin and death, will be your portion.” This seeming ideological radicalism makes his lack of wartime participation all the more surprising. Isaac fled New York before the British invasion and spent most of the war privateering, making a small fortune. He returned during the Critical Period, twice-elected to New York’s early and more radical legislatures, but died in China, hoping to establish the first American trade route.