Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [149]
Such embellishments conveyed an appreciation of order and harmony, paid lip service to scientific agriculture and horticulture, and provided a setting for such recreations as golf, tennis, cricket, hunting, and horse racing. Some estates boasted deerparks and game preserves—Governor Cosby may have set the local precedent when he designated Governors Island as his private game preserve—and the De Lancey estate even had its own race course just off the Bowery Road, between the present ist and 2nd streets.
POLITICS AMONG GENTLEMEN
One thing the spread of refinement didn’t do was improve the tone of New York politics. During King George’s War, the Morris-Livingston “landed interest” and the De Lancey-led “mercantile interest” waged increasingly rancorous public battles around the problem of Canada. With the help of Governor George Clinton, who replaced George Clarke in 1743, the landed interest clamored for wider military operations against the French. The mercantile interest resisted the idea, fearing a disruption of the Albany trade and new taxes that would jeopardize New York’s reviving commerce. When the two factions turned to voters for support, they hurled pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers at one another with furious abandon—without, however, eliciting much of a response among the freemen of the city, who remained content to leave politics to gentlemen. The merchant interest was thus able to get a firm grip on the provincial assembly, and when Clinton’s successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, committed suicide shortly after his arrival in 1753, it was James De Lancey who took control of the government as lieutenant governor.
By then, too, religion had again become an ingredient in the colony’s factional strife. The gentlemen of the landed interest had always leaned toward Presbyterianism or one of the other dissenting sects, while those of the mercantile interest mostly identified with the Anglican establishment. At mid-century this line was drawn more sharply by a trio of young men connected with the landed interest: William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and William Smith Jr., often referred to as the “Triumvirate.” Each was a recent Yale graduate. Each had read law in the office of Smith’s father, William Smith Sr., who had defended Zenger and helped prosecute the 1741 “conspirators.” And each was (or would be) a member of the Presbyterian Church (the elder Smith had been a leading Presbyterian layman).
In 1752 Livingston and his friends launched the Independent Reflector, a political journal that combined the oppositional intensity of Trenchard and Gordon’s Independent Whig with the didacticism of the Reflector, a contemporary British literary magazine in the style of Addison and Steele. One of their primary concerns was the adverse impact of prosperity on the manners and morals in New York. Dedicated to “correcting the taste and improving the Minds of our fellow Citizens,” the Independent Reflector ridiculed the grasping, pretentious people “who call themselves the Polite and Wellbred.” “Our extraordinary success during the late War has given Rise to a method of living unknown to our frugal Ancestors,” Livingston wrote scoldingly. The journal ceased publication at the end of 1753—done in, Livingston wrote, by “the fears of my enemies and the spite of malignants.” But like Zenger’s Weekly Journal, with which it shared a common intellectual ancestry, the Independent Reflector’s influence would resonate long after it had disappeared. When William Smith Jr. published the first volume of his History of the Province of New York (1757), sharply critical of the De Lanceys, he too mocked the sudden concern for refinement among well-to-do residents of the city. “Our affluence during the late war introduced a degree of luxury in tables, dress, and furniture,