Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [100]
The “mercantile interest,” headed by the De Lancey, Philipse, and Schuyler families, spoke for those residents who regarded the Anglo-French conflict as bad for business. The deep-water merchants among them were fearful of the toll an all-out war would take on international commerce; others traded regularly with French Canada. The De Lanceys, in particular, had relations with both sides. Stephen, who had helped establish New York’s French Church, had prospered as a merchant (in 1719 he built the handsome mansion on Broad and Queen that would later become Fraunces Tavern). His success was due in part to adroit anglicizing, notably by marriage into the wealthy Van Cortlandt family. His son James had studied in England, where the archbishop of Canterbury had been his college tutor, and the family had impressive connections with influential men in Parliament, the cabinet, and the Anglican Church.
The rival “landed interest,” dominated by the Livingstons, Beekmans, Van Rensselaers, and Morrises, was an alliance between Hudson Valley manor lords and the assorted speculators, lawyers, and city retailers whose fortunes were tied to theirs (and leaned, as they did, toward Presbyterianism or other dissenting sects). They wanted no expense spared for the defense of the frontier, they welcomed war as a source of profit, and they dreamed of conquering Canada, not trading with it.
The landed interest was dominant in the early 1720s owing to the support of Governor William Burnet, Hunter’s hand-picked successor. Bookish and courtly, Burnet liked nothing more than to sit on the porch of White Hall, Stuyvesant’s old residence, gazing out over the harbor while taking his afternoon tea. On three occasions after 1720, at the instigation of Livingston, Morris, and their friends, the Assembly halted sales of “Indian goods” to the French, hoping thereby to keep the Iroquois tied to Britain while ruining Montreal. With the arrival of Governor John Montgomerie, who replaced Burnet in 1728, the mercantile interest got its turn to luxuriate in the warm embrace of official preferment, while the landed interest became increasingly identified with opposition to the colony’s royal governors.
The full meaning of these factional twists and turns was not yet apparent, however, for by 1720 New York was on the upward slope of an economic boom that would completely change the contours of public life in the city.
9
In the Kingdom of Sugar
Sometime over the spring or early summer of 1717, an obscure artist-engraver named William Burgis finished a six-foot-wide panoramic drawing entitled A South Prospect of the Flourishing City of New York in the Province of New York in America. Better known as the “Burgis View,” it depicts the East River waterfront of Manhattan from the Battery to the foot of Catherine Street (slightly north of where the Brooklyn Bridge now stands). That Burgis meant to emphasize the Britishness of the city is readily apparent. At the very center of his panorama he placed Trinity Church, topped by a steeple disproportionately taller than nearby buildings. Besides drawing attention to the privileged status of Anglicanism, this device defines a visual axis of power that runs down Wall Street, passes through the Royal Navy’s Station Ship, and terminates in the coat of arms of the royal governor, Colonel Robert Hunter. A bevy of oversized Union Jacks and Red Ensigns reiterates that the city is a British possession, while the absence of other national flags serves as a reminder that the Navigation Acts excluded vessels of foreign nations from every British port.
Equally apparent in the Burgis View is New York’s prosperity. The economy of the town had