Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [162]
In New York, Grenville’s program looked all the more threatening thanks to the dour, petty, self-righteous, and dogmatic Cadwallader Golden. For nearly half a century now, ever since Governor Burnet put him on the council, Golden had complained to anyone who would listen that the crown’s interests were being thwarted by the venality of New York’s great landlords and merchant princes—to say nothing of the lawyers who trailed behind them (Colden’s contempt for lawyers knew no bounds). They in turn cordially despised him. Even the Livingstons, perhaps more sympathetic than any other of the colony’s great families, felt uneasy about the man.
When Lieutenant Governor De Lancey died unexpectedly at the end of July 1760, Golden, senior member of the council at the age of seventy-two, became acting governor. True to form, Golden promptly threw himself into a series of amazingly ill timed and provocative reforms that made him a target for the wrath of both the Livingston and De Lancey factions. He infuriated New York’s powerful legal community by undermining the finality of jury verdicts and insisting that judges in the colony served at the pleasure of the crown (one of his few backers on the bench was Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, recently restored to official favor). He angered merchants and artisans alike by making a special effort to prevent any revival of illegal trade with the French West Indies. He enraged the great landholders by trying to annul some of the largest land patents in the colony. The furor died down when Robert Monckton arrived to take over as imperial governor—then resumed with even greater ferocity when Monckton returned home in the summer of 1763, having spent only eighteen months on the job, and Golden was once again in charge of the colony.
RESISTANCE
Alarmed by the altered tenor of affairs at home and abroad, New York’s merchants spent much of 1764 drawing up petitions—to the Assembly, to the House of Commons, to the House of Lords, to the king himself. The basic message was always the same: don’t try to squeeze more revenue out of the colonies, don’t saddle the West Indian trade with additional duties, don’t prohibit paper money, don’t meddle with the system of trial by jury, don’t tax the inhabitants of America without their consent. Over the winter of 1764-65 the Common Council took the additional step of declining to provide firewood for regular troops quartered in the New Barracks above the Common. It had always done so in the past. But this year, Mayor John Cruger informed Major General Thomas Gage, the new commander-in-chief of British forces in America, the city simply didn’t have the money.
One group of wealthy New Yorkers applied pressure from a different direction. In the autumn of 1764 they set up the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Agriculture, and Economy to promote the domestic production of manufactured goods hitherto imported from Britain, above all linen cloth. The loss of American markets would send an important message to Parliament, the society’s backers theorized. What was more, domestic manufacturing would slow the drain of specie to the mother country and create work for the city’s growing numbers of jobless poor. By teaching frugality and self-reliance, it would counteract the enervating effects of “the vast Luxury introduced during the late war.” It looked like a good investment too.
Within months, prompted by the society’s offer of cash bounties for the purchase of equipment, a linen factory with fourteen looms opened on Mulberry Street, near the Fresh Water Pond. Several spinning schools for the children of paupers were set up as well, and a new municipal market was designated for the sale of flax and yarn. Before failing a year or so later, the enterprise would employ some three hundred people, mostly poor women. It also accorded a certain legitimacy to an upsurge of popular resentment against the ostentatiousness that had so greatly altered the city over the previous two decades. “All pride in Dress seems to be laid aside,” Robert R. Livingston