Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [118]
Some freemen were affluent merchants, lawyers, landowners, and “gentlemen.” The majority consisted of carpenters, bakers, bricklayers, butchers, cordwainers, cartmen, mariners, tavern keepers, weavers, tanners, laborers, and other working people of moderate means, or less. (Between 1700 and 1745 better than two thousand individuals representing ninety-one trades would be admitted to freemanship; after mid-century half the new admissions were laborers.) Rich or poor, all freemen were created equal under the charter, and the charter held them all equally responsible for the management of the corporation’s business. “Ye Shall be Contributing to all Manner of Charges within this City,” ran the oath to which they were required to swear, “as summons, Watches, Contributions, Taxes, Tallages, Lot and Scot, and all other Charges, bearing your Part as a Freeman Ought to do.”
Freemen did not, however, enjoy access to the corporation’s real estate. In many villages of England and New England, the “commons” were available to all members of the community for hunting, cutting hay and firewood, pasturing livestock, and the like. Not so in New York, where the Montgomerie Charter gave the corporation absolute ownership of its estate, unencumbered by old-fashioned “use-rights.” The Common Council would in fact spend considerable time prosecuting trespassers, encroachers, poachers, and others who allegedly threatened the value of its holdings.
Suffusing the charter was the idea of a collective civic good that transcended the private interests of individual freemen. The most direct and tangible expression of this belief was a welter of regulations (some dating back to the Dutch era) that protected all freemen from the destructive effects of economic competition, dishonest practices, and shoddy workmanship. Periodic “assizes” fixed the weight, quality, composition, and price of every essential commodity offered for public sale in the city. Other regulations prevented “forestalling,” the practice by which sellers bought up and withheld goods from the market in the hope of boosting prices. Wages too were typically set by statute, and there was close supervision of trades deemed vital to the public interest—carters, butchers, bakers, tavern keepers, gravediggers, porters, chimney sweeps, river pilots, midwives, and assorted municipal functionaries (gaugers, packers, watchmen, weighmasters, and so on).
Yet the welfare of the corporation as a whole was an ideal that could mean different things to different people. Building and repairing docks, for instance, were improvements to the municipal infrastructure that arguably benefited everybody. But how should the work be done? Municipal authorities favored a policy of selling the “water lots” that lay between high- and low-water marks along the East River. Purchasers were required to fill in the lots and construct buildings, wharves, bulkheads, and streets—which looked like a reasonable way to raise revenue while developing the port. It was also, however, a device for moving some prime urban real estate into the hands of wealthy speculators and developers. So, too, when municipal authorities refused to let the cartmen raise their rates, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the livelihoods of working people were secondary to the interests of merchants.
DEFERENCE OR INDIFFERENCE?
Merchants and the propertied classes usually got their way, moreover, for freemen of modest means—the “middling” classes who comprised perhaps 60 percent of the city’s white population—generally failed to sustain an organized presence in either municipal or provincial politics.