Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [127]
This was no routine dispute over political spoils. Nor was it the usual dispute over who should pay the bulk of the tax burden—the gentlemen of New York’s mercantile interest (who advocated a tax on land and were now in favor) or those of the landed interest (who championed a tax on imports and were now out). Cosby was a protege of the duke of Newcastle, a great Whig nobleman, secretary of state, and staunch ally of Robert Walpole—the canniest and most controversial politician of the era.
During the 1720s, as lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, Walpole had acquired such influence over both cabinet and Parliament that he became known as the “prime” minister, Britain’s first. He also earned the implacable hatred of “country party” Tories and old-fashioned True Whig “commonwealthmen.” Despite their differences, they were unanimous in the belief that Walpole’s lavish use of patronage had corrupted Parliament, the last bastion of English liberty, and infected the nation with avarice, speculation, luxury, and sloth.
By 1730 attacks on Walpole permeated British literature and public discourse. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, two radical libertarians, won renown for their savaging of Walpole in The Independent Whig (1720) and Cato’s Letters, a series of essays that first appeared in the London Journal (1720-22) and were widely reprinted in the colonies. At the other extreme of the political spectrum stood the Craftsman (1726-76), in which Bolingbroke, William Pulteney, and other Tories flayed Walpole as the “man of craft” who had driven the country to the brink of moral and political ruin. When Walpole proposed a new excise on wine and tobacco in 1733, angry crowds thronged the streets of London chanting “No slavery, no excise!” and— The Craftsman’s motto—“King George, Liberty, and Law!”
The gentlemen of the landed interest in New York, who knew all about the ties between Walpole, Newcastle, and Cosby, decided that Cosby’s venality possessed a deeper, more sinister meaning than first met the eye—that its real purpose was to accelerate the subversion of English liberty by exporting ministerial corruption to America. Their response was to reach out for public support, drawing upon the full range of anti Walpole “opposition” rhetoric. By the spring of 1733, against a background of epidemic disease and the most serious economic depression in the town’s history, the stage was set for New York’s first broad-based political confrontation in decades.
The struggle began in Westchester County, where Morris mounted a campaign against the Philipses for possession of a vacant Assembly seat. When the polls opened in the village of Eastchester on the appointed day in October, hundreds of Morris’s supporters, many on horseback, converged on the village green behind “two Trumpeters and 3 Violines” and a banner emblazoned with the motto of the Craftsman: KING GEORGE on one side, LIBERTY & LAW on the other. After circling the green three times, they retired for refreshments supplied by Morris and his friends. Morris’s rival, a schoolmaster appointed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, then made his appearance, escorted by Frederick Philipse, James De Lancey, and nearly two hundred horsemen. They paraded twice around the green and likewise trooped off for refreshment. The high sheriff, “finely mounted” in the scarlet and silver regalia of his office, then summoned the electors back to the green and began to record their votes.
Morris won handily and returned to New York City, where his supporters had just arranged for William Bradford’s former apprentice, John Peter Zenger, to launch a new newspaper in opposition to Bradford’s semiofficial Gazette. The Morrisites hoped to crack the government’s virtual monopoly on the dissemination of information and to create a means for mobilizing the city’s artisans, shopkeepers, and laborers.
Zenger’s Weekly Journal proceeded to belabor Governor Cosby and his circle for “tyrannically flouting the laws of England and New York and ..