Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [151]
WAGES OF WAR
Throughout the King’s College controversy, the Livingstons, unlike their predecessors in the “popular party” of the 1730s, made no real attempt to mobilize a broad following. Freemen continued to pay little attention to local elections, and the numbers of small shopkeepers and artisans on the Common Council fell to levels not seen in forty years. Nor was there much popular interest in official ceremonies, as the traveler Peter Kalm discovered. “The King of England’s Birthday was celebrated in town to-day,” Kalm wrote in November 1749, “but the people didn’t make a great fuss over it. A cannon was fired at noon and the warships were decorated with many flags. In the evening there were candles in some windows and a ball at the governor’s. Some drank until they became intoxicated, and that was all.”
When the occasion seemed to warrant it, however, the common people didn’t hesitate to defend their interests—in the streets rather than at the polls. Over the winter of 1753-54, for example, a self-appointed committee of merchants agreed that by devaluing copper pennies in relation to the shilling they could improve the colony’s balance of payments with the mother country. Outraged that devaluation would also raise the price of bread and depress wages, laboring people “armed with Clubs and Staves” took to the streets to protest, though without success.
Trouble could erupt, too, over the tendency of soldiers stationed in town to supplement their meager pay by moonlighting as tradesmen or laborers. As their numbers increased, their competition with native working people became the subject of more than a few dockside rows and tavern brawls. What really riled townspeople, however, was raids by naval press gangs. One spring morning in 1756 marines armed with clubs and pistols came ashore at Murray’s Wharf, hurried through the Fly Market, and, ignoring orders to seize “only such as had the appearance of seafaring or labouring men,” entered houses and grabbed people indiscriminately. One man was chased down Wall Street, beaten unconscious, and dragged off. The following spring, when Lord Loudoun’s expeditionary fleet was delayed from sailing against Louisbourg by a scarcity of hands, he had three thousand men cordon off the city at two o’clock in the morning, then sent press gangs to search “the Taverns and other houses, where sailors usually resorted.” By dawn, they had hauled in eight hundred people, including “All kinds of Tradesmen and Negroes”—a number equal to more than a quarter of New York’s adult male population. Even after half had been released, the four hundred or so “retained in the service” were more than enough to meet Loudon’s needs. In 1760, when the fiftygun HMS Winchester fired a shot over the bow of the privateer Sampson and dispatched a party to board it, the Sampson’s crew locked the captain in the cabin, then blasted the press gang with a volley of musketry, killing or wounding several. The mariners then took refuge in the town, where sympathetic citizens helped them escape the clutches of the sheriff.
Despite such incidents, seamen were doing well in the war years; indeed the navy’s resort to impressment was a consequence of the mariners’ prosperity. New York seamen had been swept by “almost a kind of madness to go a-privateering,” Lieutenant Governor De Lancey noted in 1758. They had been quickly joined by farmers, laborers—and deserters from the Royal Navy. In