Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [140]
Provisioning His Majesty’s forces required gargantuan quantities of food, clothing, shoes, alcohol, horses, wagons, and other materiel, and in 1755 New York was made the “general Magazine of Arms and Military Stores” as well as a station for military and naval forces. (That same year, the British government inaugurated monthly fast-sailing packets from Falmouth to Manhattan, underscoring its selection of New York as its link with the colonies.) Contracts to deliver any of those items to royal or provincial commissaries made fortunes for well-connected New York merchants like Hayman Levy, Peter Van Brugh Livingston, James Alexander, William Bayard, Gerard G. Beekman, Oliver De Lancey, and John Watts. None did better than the firm of De Lancey and Watts, which by virtue of Oliver De Lancey’s marriage to Phila Franks enjoyed close ties to her brother Moses, chief purveyor to His Majesty’s troops in America after 1760. Yet there was plenty of room for newcomers as well. Young Uriah Hendricks, representing one of London’s best-known Jewish firms, settled in the city in 1755 and was soon doing a substantial business supplying the sutlers, mostly Jews, who set up store wherever the military made camp. By 1756 an envious Benjamin Franklin observed “that New York is growing immensely rich, by Money brought into it from all Quarters for the Pay and Subsistence of the Troops.”
Provisioning His Majesty’s enemies was another lucrative wartime preoccupation. “Scarce a Week passes without an illicit Trader’s going out or coming into this Port,” one New Yorker remarked in 1748, “who are continually supplying and supporting our most avowed Enemies [the French].” In the French and Indian War, Manhattan merchants who traded with the French islands offloaded their cargoes beyond Sandy Hook and proceeded to port while their illicit goods were smuggled in by wagon. When increased fighting in the Caribbean made such expeditions too risky, one annoyed merchant crankily informed a correspondent that “I am now about trying a Voyage to our own Islands, since Trading with the Enemy has turn’d out so very ill.”
Still another way to get rich in wartime, especially for merchants without friends in high places, was that old standby, privateering. During King George’s War, about three dozen New York privateers prowled the Caribbean, taking several hundred French and Spanish prizes, worth some £618,000 to their investors. One ship, the Royal Hester, seized forty prizes, generating £63,800 for a dozen backers, among them men with such names as Aspinwall, Beekman, Cuyler, and Livingston. Seven other privateers cleared over forty thousand pounds for their investors, and Captain Peter Warren sailed into port in the summer of 1744 with a single French merchantman carrying nine thousand pounds’ worth of sugar and indigo. Such exploits won “the general acclamation of the Public,” and when Captain John Burgess’s Royal Catherine took Le Mars, after only three broadsides off Sandy Hook, the corporation presented him with a gold box and freedom of the city.
In the next war, seventy-odd privateers operated out of New York—now the greatest such fleet by far in the colonies, and fabulously successful to boot, capturing more than six hundred prizes worth at least 1.4 million pounds to 150-odd investors. Between September 1756 and May 1757 alone, according to an official report, prizes worth two hundred thousand pounds arrived in the city. Their cargoes included coffee, cotton, sugar, wine, dry goods, pottery, indigo, ironware, lumber, bricks, and “live wares” (slaves), not to mention strongboxes of specie—gold