Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [166]
Like McDougall, Isaac Sears was an immigrant to New York—from Norwalk, Connecticut, where his family had lived modestly for many years, and from where he also had gone off to sea. Like McDougall, he made his way up through the ranks and by his early twenties was a captain in the West Indian trade regularly employed by prominent New York merchants. Like McDougall, too, Sears turned privateer during the Seven Years War, won a reputation for heroism under fire, and made himself a small fortune, some of it in clandestine trade with the French. After the war, Sears established himself as a West Indian merchant in New York, where by his mid-thirties he was living like a gentleman—though everyone could tell by his quarterdeck manners that he wasn’t one.
John Lamb’s father had been convicted of burglary in his native England and transported to New York, where he found work making optical instruments. His son made mathematical instruments. Marinus Willett, whose early history is almost as vague as Lamb’s, was a successful master cabinetmaker still in his mid-twenties when the Stamp Act crisis erupted. The dominant influence on his life seems to have been the evangelical Protestantism that periodically swept through the city beginning in the early 1740s. He moved restlessly through a succession of sects, unable to find one that quite suited his temperament, and played a leading part in the city’s annual Pope Day celebrations.
What made the likes of McDougall, Sears, Lamb, and Willett so formidable was the fierce loyalty they inspired among New York’s artisans, apprentices, seamen, and laborers. They were easy men to respect and good men to follow. They had come up in the world, but without the advantages of inherited wealth, fancy educations, or powerful connections—and without forgetting where they came from. They were still, unmistakably, workingmen themselves. They talked like workingmen—McDougall’s Scottish burr and Sears’s Yankee twang were nothing like the flat, nasal English of the upper classes—and they could still make the rounds of crowded workingmen’s taverns and coffeehouses, pumping hands and slapping backs, with a straightforward, natural confidence. Willett’s father, in fact, operated the Province Arms, while Sears’s father-in-law owned Drake’s alehouse on Water Street near Beekman’s Slip, very popular among the Sons; at one time McDougall may even have owned a sailor’s “slop shop.” It was precisely this common touch that enabled them to link popular social and political grievances to the formal constitutional issues raised by British policy.
“OUR PORT IS SHUT UP”
Toward the end of November 1765 the Sons of Liberty posted notices around New York headed LIBERTY, PROPERTY, AND NO STAMPS and calling for a meeting at Burns’s Coffee House. Enfranchised freemen or not, all residents were invited to take part. On the agenda were radical proposals that the provincial assembly “repeal” the Stamp Act and that merchants resume trade in defiance of Governor Moore’s prohibition. Alarmed by this bold attempt to take charge of New York’s resistance movement—let alone the extremism of the Sons’ proposed remedies—the Livingston and De Lancey factions first tried to prevent the meeting, then, when that failed, determined to prevent it from getting out of hand. They succeeded, barely. A slate of moderate resolutions was adopted and forwarded to the Assembly, which used them as the basis for yet another petition to Parliament.
From the early winter of 1765 through the spring of 1766, the Livingstons and De Lanceys, jointly or at cross-purposes with one another, continued their efforts to tame the Sons of Liberty. Governor Golden, General Gage, and other officials always took it for granted that the Sons couldn’t be acting