Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [170]
Neither had gentlemen ever before faced such insistent popular demands for changes in the political process: open sessions of the Assembly, secret ballots, and strict adherence to the principle that legislators should do what they were instructed to do by their constituents rather than what they thought best for them. In response, the Assembly opened its doors to the public for the first time in early 1769. In municipal elections, too, more and more working people were involving themselves in the political process. Local elections brought steady increases in the numbers of artisans winning seats on the Common Council, and three out of five constables, collectors, and assessors were artisans.
The 1769 election even brought a hint of organized ethnic involvement in politics, when it was alleged that in the previous year’s contest lawyer Thomas Smith, of the Livingston faction, had said “that the Irish were poor beggars, and had come over here upon a bunch of straw.” The whole body of Irishmen, it was observed, “immediately joined and appeared with straws in their hats.” Fearful that Irish voters would desert en masse to the De Lancey side, the Livingstons hastened to publish a broadside utterly denying that Smith had been involved in “abusing or reflecting upon the Irish People” and asserting that indeed he had “expressed his Disapprobation of such Conduct.”
A CITY “ALIVE TO GOD”
Dissatisfaction with established hierarchies was heightened by a new eruption of evangelical Protestantism in the city. George Whitefield, who had an instinct for showing up at key moments in the Anglo-American crisis, swung through town in 1763—65 and again in 1769—70 to remind his vast audiences of the difference between an authentic “religion of the heart” and the sterile “legal Christianity” of an unregenerate clergy. The thousands of working-class immigrants descending on New York from England, Scotland, and Ireland also proved fertile ground for the exertions of Methodists like Philip Embury, a Palatine German carpenter who had been preaching Methodism in Ireland and came to New York in 1760. At the instigation of his cousin Barbara Heck, who had been upset to find her brother playing cards in a hayloft in John Street, Embury began preaching to a small group in his home in 1766. A Methodist organization was formed, led by Embury and Captain Thomas Webb, a British army officer who had been conducting interracial services in Brooklyn. The fledgling Manhattan congregation met in a sail loft on William Street until Wesley Chapel was completed in 1768, fittingly enough on John Street.
New York’s tiny Baptist congregation flourished as well. While its old church on Golden Hill hadn’t survived the 1730s, the denomination had been revitalized in the 1740s by shipbuilder Jeremiah Dodge, who held prayer meetings at his house. Now, in the early 1760s, the First Baptist Church moved into a stone meetinghouse on Gold Street, just south of Fulton, and by 1763 had forty members.
Against this background, the city’s principal dissenting sects set out to incorporate themselves as had Trinity many years earlier (incorporation permitted them to receive bequests, acquire and convey property, and the like). In March 1766, with the Stamp Act controversy raging around them, John Morin Scott, Peter R. Livingston, and other trustees of the First Presbyterian Church had petitioned the crown for a charter of incorporation. They were turned down on the grounds that the king had a duty to uphold the exclusive rights of the Church of England. The bishop of London and other imperial officials had also strongly advised against such a charter, fearing that it would encourage discord and undermine the dignity of His Majesty