• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8008 0

fitted the last fleet for an expedition against French Martinique and Dominica—both of which fell to Britain the next year, followed shortly thereafter by the capitulation of Havana. Privateering, vital to the well-being of every American port since the early 1740s, fell off sharply as the Royal Navy harried French and Spanish forces out of the Caribbean. The navy also shut down the clandestine traffic in molasses and sugar from the French West Indies on which many colonial merchants had depended, while an invigorated British customs service cracked down on American smugglers. The departure of British troops from Manhattan meanwhile constricted the flow of coins into the tills of local retailers and tavern keepers. As the merchant John Watts observed sadly: “The Tipling Soldiery that use to help us out at a dead lift, are gone to drink it in a warmer Region, the place of its production.”

The 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed Britain’s triumph. France ceded the whole of Canada, abandoned its claims to land east of the Mississippi (except New Orleans), and withdrew from India. Spain had suffered losses in the Americas from which it would never recover, British merchants stood poised to take over the lucrative European trade with Africa and Asia, and London was positioned to become the financial axis of the world market. New York, though, sank into a depression worse than that of the 1730s.

British mercantile houses, reacting as well to a recession at home, cut back on credit and pressed merchants in New York and other colonial ports to settle outstanding accounts. Some firms abandoned long-established relationships to deal with newer, smaller importers and exporters in the colonies—aggressive upstarts ready to trade on the narrowest of margins—or with public auctioneers, known as vendue masters, who could dispose quickly of great quantities of goods at sharply reduced prices. Others sent out their own agents to bargain directly with local shopkeepers and suppliers. “The weak must go to the wall,” warned one New York merchant, and for craftsmen engaged in the production of finished goods for the local market—ironware, furniture, shoes, hats, and the like—the influx of cheap imports from Britain’s overstocked mills and factories looked similarly ominous.

Hard-pressed merchants called in debts from shopkeepers and tradesmen—who then bore down on artisans, farmers, and country storekeepers. Hard money, of which there was never enough, virtually disappeared. The exchange rate soared, in effect siphoning the profits of recent years back to the mother country as importers scrambled to stay solvent. Domestic consumption fell off, markets languished, inventories of unsold goods mounted. Overextended merchants went bankrupt. Stores and shops stood empty. Journeymen, apprentices, and laborers found themselves out of work for the first time in years. “Our business of all kinds is stopped,” declared the Post Boy in December 1765. “Great numbers of our poor people and seamen without employment and without support. . . many families which used to live in comfortable plenty daily falling to decay for want of business.” In effect, one merchant declared, “Trade in this part of the world is come to so wretched a pass that you would imagine the plague had been here.” Before 1760 there had never been more than sixteen actions against debtors in any given year; by 1763 there were forty-six; by 1766, eighty. So many debtors were locked up in the recently completed New Gaol (conveniently located in the Common next to the almshouse) that it was already being called the debtors’ prison.

The crisis was exacerbated by relentless increases in the cost of living, which had already doubled during the war and now continued to rise as Britain’s burgeoning demand for colonial grain helped push prices higher still. Small houses renting for ten or fifteen pounds were in such short supply that families of modest means were beginning to double up. Food was more expensive than ever, and during the winter of 1760-61, with unemployment spreading, the cost of firewood