Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [130]
Clarke now discovered, however, that if the Morrisites couldn’t be beaten, their leaders could be bought off. He won over Smith and Alexander by having them reinstated to the bar, he endorsed a few Morrisite reforms (including a one-year revenue bill and a triennial election act), and he appointed key Morrisites to public offices in Westchester and other counties. Morris himself accepted an offer from Newcastle to become the royal governor of New Jersey and promptly turned into an advocate of executive authority—which only proved, as Walpole liked to say, that every man has his price. Abandoned by its founders, the “popular party” fell into disarray, and when prosperity returned, it disappeared altogether.
The Morrisites had nonetheless opened the door to a new and potentially more turbulent political environment in the city. The freemen had returned to politics, books and newspapers were full of talk about threats to “liberty,” and gentlemen—as one assemblyman put it—increasingly had to think of public office as “a fine laced Livery coat of which the vain Lacquey may be stript at the pleasure of his proud Master [i.e., the electorate] & may be kikt out of Doors naked.”
What was more, the Morrisites had actually delivered on some campaign promises, establishing yet another precedent. To alleviate the shortage of specie and attendant high interest rates, they issued twelve thousand pounds of paper money in 1734 and added another £48,350 three years later, to repair “the Decay of Trade & other Difficulties which this Colony has the Misfortune to have Laboured Under.” In 1737 the first Assembly elected in the colony in a decade remodeled the militia, agreed to hold triennial elections, and reduced the legal interest rate.
The Morrisites also made good on their promise to construct New York’s first permanent almshouse. Completed in 1736, the two-story stone and brick building stood on the Common at the very outskirts of town (the northern end of what is now City Hall Park). Although a boon to its contractors, it was greeted with considerably less joy by those for whom it was intended. Really three institutions under one roof—a Poorhouse, a Workhouse, and a House of Correction—its inmates were a cross-section of the city’s lower classes, ranging from “Poor Needy Persons and Idle Wandering Vagabonds” to “Sturdy Beggars,” petty criminals, rogues, and “parents of Bastard Children.” All inhabitants of the city had “free Liberty and Lycence to send to the said House all unruly and ungovernable Servants and Slaves there to be kept at hard labour.” Despite rudimentary attempts to separate them—one basement room was reserved for the inmates at forced labor, another for those considered “unruly”—the vestrymen were soon expressing concern at mixing the elderly sick with incorrigible rogues.
Whatever the reasons for their confinement, all inmates were held, insofar as possible, to a strict daily regimen calculated to teach them self-discipline, industry, and deference. Inmates were supplied clothing “marked with the first letters of their names,” deprived of meals if they refused to attend prayer sessions, and set to work carding wool, shredding old rope for reuse, or raising garden crops. The idea, according to the Common Council, was that “such Poor as are able