Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [167]
In truth, the New York Sons of Liberty followed no one’s direction but their own. Just a few days before Christmas they formed a Committee of Correspondence and charged it with the task of seeking a military alliance or union with their comrades elsewhere in the colonies; their idea, which owed nothing to either the Livingston or De Lancey faction, was to be ready to go “to the extremity with lives and fortunes” to prevent enforcement of the Stamp Act. The committee’s efforts were successful. By the following spring the New York plan for a “Union of the Colonies” had been greeted with enthusiasm from Massachusetts to South Carolina—except, of course, by crown officials and handfuls of ministerial sympathizers who understandably viewed it as out-and-out treason. Even when word began to get around that Parliament would soon repeal the Stamp Act, the New York Sons continued to emphasize that the liberties of America couldn’t be preserved without vigilance and organization.
On their own authority, too, the Sons took to the streets of New York so often over the winter and spring of 1766 that, as Governor Moore told Lord Dartmouth in January, the magistrates were terrified of displeasing them. They had “Children nightly trampouze the Streets with lanthorns upon Poles & hallowing.” They led noisy crowds around town with effigies of Golden, Grenville, and other unpopular officials; once they depicted Golden “mounted on a Cannon drilling the vent”—a ribald commentary on his orders to spike the fort’s cannon. Tongues in cheek, they warned that all persons caught selling or eating lamb in New York would have their houses pulled down.
Early in May, a party of Sons interrupted the opening performance of the Chapel Street Theater. It was “highly improper that such Entertainments should be exhibited at this Time of public distress, when great numbers of poor people can scarce find subsistence,” they announced. Shouting, “Liberty, Liberty,” they then drove the audience out in a shower of “Brick Bats, sticks and Bottles and Glasses,” stripping many along the way of “their Caps, Hats, Wigs, Cardinals, and Cloak Tails”—all symbols of wealth and disdain for a virtuous frugality. The crowd then reduced the building to kindling and carted it off to a giant bonfire in the Common.
In the meantime Sears and troops of Liberty Boys brought pressure to bear on merchants who broke the nonimportation agreement, routinely inspecting papers, confiscating goods, and forcing offenders to recant in public. So effective were these measures that when spring arrived the Sons virtually controlled business in the city. “The people of this province seem to have such an aversion to taking the stamp papers, that they will sooner die than take them,” declared one resident. “Our port is shut up, no vessel cleared out, no law, and no money circulating.”
The radicalism of New York’s Liberty Boys had its limits, though, as events in the countryside soon demonstrated. Early in 1766 word began to reach the city that tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley had risen against their landlords. First in Dutchess, then in Westchester and Albany counties—on the vast estates of the Philipses, Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Beekmans, Van Cortlandts, and other great proprietary families—disciplined bands of rebels, some said to number in the thousands, were shutting down courts, throwing open jails, and fighting pitched battles with hastily organized posses. Most sought only more secure leases and lower rents; others wanted to buy their land outright and pay no rent at all. A few at least professed to be “levelers” and looked