Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [172]
THE WILKES OF AMERICA
Opposition to the Townshend program was now at the end of its second year. In March 1769 New York merchants assembled at Bolton and Sigel’s tavern near the Exchange (formerly the Queen’s Head) to set up a Committee of Inspection for enforcing their nonimportation agreement. Headed by the indefatigable Sears, and widely believed to be an arm of the Sons of Liberty, the committee patrolled the waterfront, checked papers, and searched warehouses in search of violators. The best measure of its success was that imports from Britain fell to a mere seventy-six thousand pounds by the end of 1769, an 85 percent decline from the £491,000 reported just the year before, steeper than in any other colony.
In September 1769 Governor Henry Moore died, setting in motion an extraordinary train of events. Taking over again as acting governor was none other than Cadwallader Golden, now eighty-one (he “fairly lives himself into office,” grumbled the merchant John Watts). Golden, who saw this (as his last chance to score points with the ministry and snare an appointment as governor in his own right, negotiated an alliance of convenience with the De Lancey forces. Early in December, as part of their deal, the De Lancey-led Assembly—though it had just endorsed the Virginia Resolves of May denying Parliament’s right to tax the colonies—abruptly chose to comply with the Quartering Act by appropriating two thousand pounds to provision His Majesty’s troops stationed in New York. It was a spectacular blunder.
On December 16 an anonymous broadside entitled To the Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New York appeared on the streets. Signed only by “A Son of Liberty,” it attacked Golden and the Assembly as corrupt minions of British tyranny. It also recommended that the friends of liberty in New York, and indeed throughout America, “Imitate the noble example of the friends of Liberty in England; who, rather than be enslaved, contend for their right with k———g, lords, and commons.”
This was an unmistakable reference to the controversy then boiling around John Wilkes, a radical member of Parliament who had been imprisoned in 1763 for his part in the publication of an allegedly libelous political pamphlet, The North Briton, no. 45. In 1768, a hard year for England’s laboring classes, Wilkes won reelection to Parliament from Middlesex County and got himself thrown into jail again on the old charge of seditious libel. Crying, “Wilkes and Liberty!”—“Wilkes and No King!”—his indignant supporters, primarily small property owners and working people, paralyzed London with strikes, rallies, marches, and riots. On May 10, the day Parliament opened, as many as forty thousand demonstrators in St. George’s Fields (a crowd exceeding the population of New York City) was fired on by troops, with considerable loss of life.
Amid spreading disorder, Parliament refused to let Wilkes take his seat. Three times more the Middlesex electors sent him back; three times more Parliament turned Wilkes away. By mid- 1769 the government had more or less lost control of London to an array of spontaneously organized radical clubs and popular associations—among them the famous Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights—for whom Wilkes’s ordeal now symbolized the need for massive reform, even revolution. To suggest, as had the author of To the Betrayed Inhabitants, that New York needed a dose of the same thing was a provocation of the first rank.
While the De Lancey-led Assembly labored to uncover the identity of “A Son of Liberty,” ill will between soldiers and civilians escalated sharply. The liberty pole in the Common was the scene of frequent mass meetings at which John Lamb and other popular orators assailed