Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [126]
In New York, the ramifications of the recession were multiplying quickly by the mid-1730s and continued for the remainder of the decade. The city offered “nothing but the melancholy Scene of little Business, and less Money,” it was reported in 1732. Shipyards languished; by 1734 only one or two vessels were under construction, and the governor was seeking ways to “give life to the expiring hopes of ship carpenters.” Indeed everyone whose livelihood depended on overseas trade was in trouble. “The Baker, the Brewer, the Smith, the Carpenter, the Ship-Wright, the Boat-Man, the Farmer, and the Shopkeeper”—all were suffering, “John Scheme” wrote to the New-York Weekly journal in 1734. Many residents had been forced “to seek Other Habitations so that in these three Years there has been above 300 Persons who have left New York.” Sailors were hit hard as the town’s merchant fleet, 124 ships strong in 1700, shrank to fifty in 1734. Residents wondered how the prosperity of the previous decade could have ended so quickly. As one poetically inclined writer asked in the pages of the New-York Gazette in 1733: “Pray tell me the cause of trade so dead,/Why shops are shut up, goods and owners fled, / And industrious families cannot get bread?”
Disease made matters worse. Epidemics of measles and smallpox claimed 549 victims, some 6 percent of the population, before running their course at the end of 1732. “Many Children dye . . . and the Country People are afraid to come to Town which makes Markets thin, Provisions dear, and deadens all Trade, and it goes very hard with the Poor.” Between 1731 and 1735, almost four hundred people required public assistance—twice as many as a decade earlier—while the poor rate soared to £649 (although the churchwardens and vestrymen were unwilling to raise taxes to support able-bodied artisans out of work). Prosecutions for larceny, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution rose swiftly, accompanied by a skittish clamor for a new jail and a better watch. Courts imposed increasingly severe exemplary punishments, and the municipal gallows were moved up to the Common to accommodate larger crowds.
Hard times increased racial animosities. In 1737 Lieutenant Governor Clarke received petitions from skilled craftsmen who “complain with too much reason of the pernicious custom of breeding slaves to trades. The honest and industrious tradesmen are reduced to poverty for want of employ” and must “seek their living in other countries.” For this too Clarke had a solution. New York, he said, needed to be “replenished with white people” and made an all-white city. But white outmigration continued, the flow of white immigrants fell off, and the city—its economy and society now hooked on slavery—continued to import African slaves. By 1741 nearly one in five New Yorkers would be black.
THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE
In the summer of 1731 Governor John Montgomerie died unexpectedly. His replacement was William Cosby, formerly governor of Minorca, who regarded his appointment as an invitation to gorge at the public table. No sooner had he reached New York in 1732 than he forced the Assembly to give him a “present” of a thousand pounds and sued Rip Van Dam, president of the council, for half the salary that Van Dam had collected as acting governor in the months since Montgomerie’s death. Van Dam’s lawyers, William Smith and James Alexander, persuaded Chief Justice Lewis Morris to throw out the governor’s suit, over the objections of Associate Justices James De Lancey and Frederick Philipse. Cosby, in a rage, kicked Morris off the bench and named