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By Root 7877 0

rose drastically. Taxes, chiefly regressive imposts and excises, mounted sharply. Even steadily employed craftsmen and established shopkeepers found themselves badly squeezed. As one artisan wrote in 1762 to the New-York Gazette, “the Expence of living in the most frugal Way has increased so exorbitantly, that I find it beyond my ability to support my Family with my utmost Industry—I am growing every Day more and more behind hand, tho’ my Family can scarcely appear with Decency, or have necessaries to subsist.” This, he insisted, “is really the Case with many of the Inhabitants of this City.” Things remained equally grim five years later according to a “tradesman” writing in the New York Journal: “What a dismal Prospect is before us! A long Whiter, and no Work; many unprovided with Fire-wood, or Money to buy it; House-rent and taxes high; our Neighbors daily breaking; their Furniture at Vendue at every Corner.”

The times were even harder for widows, transients, former indentured servants, British deserters, ex-privateers, recent immigrants—people with the smallest savings, who spent most of their scarce resources on the hard-to-trim items like food, rent, clothing, and fuel. Worst off were the aged or infirm slaves whose owners set them free to save money, a practice so widespread by 1773 that in order to keep down the cost of relief, the legislature imposed a fine of twenty pounds on the last owner of any freedman found begging in the city.

To make matters worse, working people faced competition for jobs, food, and firewood from the numerous military personnel who remained in the city. By law, off-duty sailors and soldiers could take odd jobs or even practice trades to supplement their normally low wages. It was notorious that they would work for next to nothing. The anger this generated was intensified by the Royal Navy’s ongoing attempts to fill out crews by impressing seamen from town. When four fisherman were taken from their boat and carried to a nearby man-of-war in July 1764, an infuriated crowd dragged the ship’s barge to the front of City Hall, burned it, then forced municipal officials to negotiate for the release of the captives.

Spiraling municipal expenditures for relief bear witness to the spread of poverty. Between 1740 and 1760 the city’s average annual expenditure for poor relief was £667 (some £39 per 1,000 population), but between 1761 and 1770 the annual average soared to £1,667 (£92 per 1,000). In 1765 the churchwardens informed the Common Council that money raised for the relief of the indigent “had been “Long Since Expended,” yet the “distresses of the Poor” had become “so Extremely Great” that many “must unavoidably perish” without additional assistance for food and firewood.

Private charity, churches, and national groups like the St. George’s Society and the St. Andrew’s Society shouldered much of the burden, as always. In 1767 some Irish officers in the British army formed the Ancient and Most Benevolent Order of the Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick in the Sixteenth Regiment of Foot; by 1769 its sixty members included civilians as well, and in 1771 they relieved some of their countrymen languishing in the debtors’ prison. Such efforts weren’t nearly enough, and the Common Council discussed various schemes for simply removing the poor from the city, often to places like Staten Island.

Not everyone suffered. Wealthy merchants, lawyers, crown officials, and naval officers lived no less comfortably than they had at the peak of wartime prosperity. The annual cycle of musical recitals, masquerades, balls, and routs went on as before. Performances continued at the Chapel Street Theater. Better shops continued to stock a full range of imported luxuries, and, as one New Yorker informed a London newspaper, “notwithstanding the great complaints of the distressing times, we have here no less than four coaches which were brought hither from London in the last ship.” By 1770, according to one count, a mere sixty-two people owned all the city’s eighty-five fashionable “equipages”—twenty-six coaches, thirty-three