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From Bowling Green some “Volunteers” proceeded back uptown to Vauxhall, where they sacked the home of Major James, the fort’s artillery commander, who had incautiously sworn to “cram the Stamps down their Throats with the End of my Sword.” “Looking Glasses Mehogany Tables Silk Curtains A Libiry of Books all the China and furniture”—anything, in short, that bore witness to the refinement of its owner—was thrown into the street and smashed. The major’s private papers and personal effects were destroyed; his wine cellar was broken open and its contents consumed or destroyed; his garden was torn up. (The Assembly later awarded the major £1,745 to cover the damage, a generous sum. Golden put his losses at around £195. The Assembly gave him nothing.)

Men of property and reputation in the city, even those who had been outspoken in opposition to the Stamp Act, floundered in disbelief at what was happening. The governor’s council believed New York to be in a state of “perfect anarchy.” Robert R. Livingston, proprietor of Clermont and a Dutchess County assemblyman, found the mayor and his advisers “extremely dejected” and paralyzed with “despondency and irresolution.” Crowds, including armed newcomers from Connecticut and New Jersey, milled about the streets waiting for something to happen. Rumors flew of an impending attack on the Fort on November 5 (Pope or Guy Fawkes Day), of attempts on the lives of officials, and, worse, of “an open Rebellion” by a “secret party, who called themselves Vox Populi.” Golden, who believed that “a great part of the Mob consists of Men who have been Privateers and disbanded Soldiers whose view is to plunder the Town,” fled with his family to the warship Coventry for protection. An apprehensive group of merchants associated with the Livingston faction met at the Merchants’ Coffee House to discuss ways of preventing “all riotous proceedings,” but broke up in confusion.

Tensions eased when Golden, fearing “the Effusion of blood and the Calamities of a Civil Warr,” turned the stamps over to municipal officials, who carried them off for safekeeping in City Hall. A huge throng of five thousand lined the streets to watch. Everyone breathed a little easier, too, when a new royal governor, Sir Henry Moore, arrived on November 13 to relieve Golden. Moore’s appointment was his reward for brutally crushing a Jamaican slave revolt, but he had no intention of using force to make New York accept the stamps. Instead, on the theory that a few months of economic stagnation would bring the colonists to their senses, the governor simply refused to permit any business to be conducted that would require the use of stamped paper. “All their commerce must inevitably be ruined if they persevere in their obstinacy,” he explained smugly.

SONS OF LIBERTY

New York’s obstinacy, as Governor Moore called it, reflected the rising influence in municipal affairs of persons and groups that spoke for the city’s middling and laboring classes. One, as Livingston reported, went by the name of Vox Populi. Another was known as the Sons of Neptune, yet another as the Free Sons of New York. Most famous was the Sons of Liberty, which seems to have been formed in late October or early November 1765, just prior to Governor Moore’s arrival.

The Sons of Liberty was the creation of Alexander McDougall, Isaac Sears, John Lamb, Hugh Hughes, Marinus Willett, and others—plain-spoken, self-taught, self-made men, the kind who had carried little weight in municipal affairs since at least the end of the last century, if ever. McDougall’s family had emigrated from Scotland when he was a boy, and his father operated a profitable dairy farm on the outskirts of town. At the age of fourteen, McDougall left the farm and went to sea. Diligent and reliable, he worked his way up to become a highly successful captain of privateers during the Seven Years War. With the end of the war, still in his early thirties, he came back to New York and set himself up in the West Indian trade. He prospered, bought a lot of land up in Albany County, and scandalized