Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [117]
The Lyne-Bradford Plan of 1730/1731, drawn by surveyor James Lyne and printed by William Bradford. The first map of New York to be printed in the city itself, and probably intended to accompany the Montgomerie Charter, it shows that the built-up area of town now extended almost up to what is now Fulton Street. Wall Street remains the municipal axis, running east from the “English Church” (Trinity), past the new City Hall and the Meal Market, to the Coffee House on the corner of Water Street. The East Ward, lying east of William Street between Hanover Square and John Street, has begun to replace the Dock Ward as the city’s commercial center of gravity. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Like other property owners, too, the corporation was accorded powers of selfdetermination commensurate with the size and nature of its estate. In the words of the charter, it was a “free city of itself.” It could lay streets, regulate markets, license trades, and charge fees. It could make laws and promulgate ordinances not only for “the good rule and government of the body corporate” but for the “common profit, trade, and better government” of all the city’s inhabitants. To enforce such laws and ordinances it could set up courts, erect jails, collect fines, confiscate goods and chattels, and administer punishments “not extending to the loss of life or limb.”
The “free city of itself” was not perfectly autonomous. It had to abide by English and provincial law. It could not tax its inhabitants (that was a power reserved for the provincial legislature and perhaps, depending on one’s point of view, Parliament). What was more, the corporation’s top officials—the mayor, sheriff, coroner, and recorder—continued to be appointed by the colonial governor. When petitioning for a new charter the Common Council had pleaded for an elective mayor; the crown’s refusal was a clear signal that the corporation must answer to interests over and above those of its members.
Likewise the charter’s distinction between “freemen” and “freeholders.” “Freemen” were residents enrolled as voting members of the corporation after swearing an oath of loyalty and paying a modest fee—initially £3 12s. for a “Merchant, Trader or Shopkeeper,” £i 4s. for a “Handy-craft Tradesman,” and mere pennies for native-born residents of the city or those who had completed an apprenticeship there (the exact amounts varied over time). Counting white women and slaves of both sexes over the age of twenty-one, about one-third of the city’s adult population qualified for the freemanship. “Freeholders” (a term not used in either the Nicolls or Dongan grant) were defined by existing provincial statute as persons owning real property worth forty pounds in the ward where they voted. They needn’t be residents of the ward, or even residents of the city, and were permitted to vote in every ward where they met the property qualification. Here too the charter gave outsiders a voice in the corporation’s governance; to wealthy outsiders it offered the prospect of more than one.
Freemanship conferred genuine benefits. As under the old burgher-right, only freemen could practice an “art, trade, mystery, or occupation” or sell “any manner of goods, wares, merchandises, or commodities by retail.. . within the said city.” Every Michaelmas (September 29), they assembled ward by