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In 1764 a party of rich young aristocrats organized a “macaroni table” at London’s fashionable Almack Club. Their foppish, devil-may-care manner of dressing—short waistcoats, huge wigs, small cocked hats, tasseled walking sticks—represented the height of Italianate fashion. Hard times or no, the so-called macaroni style was at once picked up in New York, which boasted a Macaroni Club of its own at least by the autumn of 1764. That same year the club proclaimed its indifference to the city’s straitened circumstances by offering purses of £100 and £150 for the fastest horses at the Hempstead races.

These excesses attracted a good deal of unfavorable attention around town, and local newspapers soon began to carry letters from indignant residents that had a distinctly radical edge. “Some Individuals,” one writer told the New-York Gazette in 1765, “by the Smiles of Providence or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four wheel’d Carriages, and can support the expense of good Houses, rich Furniture, and Luxurious Living. But is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suifer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?”

NEWCOMERS

Faltering trade, unemployment, inflation, poverty—to this litany of trouble was added another: a sudden rise in the city’s population. In 1760 New York had roughly eighteen thousand inhabitants. Over the next ten years or so, the city’s population jumped by four thousand—a 20 percent increase. By 1775 it stood between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand. Only Philadelphia, with forty thousand inhabitants, was larger; Boston now trailed far behind, having barely reached sixteen thousand.

Behind this demographic expansion lay an unprecedented surge in transatlantic migration. Between 1760 and 1775 better than 137,000 Europeans poured into the thirteen colonies—roughly fifteen thousand people every year, three times the average rate before 1760. The great bulk of them—125,000 or so—came from the British Isles, some fifty-five thousand from Ireland (predominately but not exclusively Protestant), another forty thousand from Scotland, and the remaining thirty thousand from London and Yorkshire. Of those whose occupations are known, most were trained artisans and craftsmen, directly or closely tied to the beleaguered textile industry, which was going through a period of massive unemployment. About two-thirds of the Irish and English emigrants, generally young men and women on their own, came as indentured servants. Fewer than one-fifth of the Scots did so, presumably because they were somewhat older, included a higher proportion of laborers, and traveled as families, sometimes entire communities.

Land was the goal of the overwhelming majority of these immigrants, and they headed as quickly as possible for the rapidly expanding colonial frontier. No one kept count of how many went to the province of New York, but estimates place the figure at roughly twenty-five thousand. Most were recruited by local merchants to settle and develop property they had purchased far to the north and west, so only a small minority of these new arrivals, probably fewer than one out of every six or seven, actually took up residence in town. (That was enough, however, to make a noticeable difference in its racial balance, for while the absolute number of slaves in New York rose from 2,278 in 1756 to 3,137 in 1771—a growth of 38 percent—the proportion of Africans in the population fell from 18 percent to 14 percent because the number of whites grew even more rapidly.)

For the permanent residents of New York as well as for transients, the hubbub on waterfront wharves and piers—the confusion of accents, the clattering, milling congestion of it all—was something to behold. Between 1773 and 1775 alone, forty-odd vessels disgorged as many as thirty-three hundred men, women, and children in the city, equivalent to 15 percent of its population.

The newcomers brought additional competition