Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [174]
At the end of April, after nearly three months of this, the grand jury finally met to hear the case against McDougall. His lawyer, John Morin Scott, argued that the acquittal of John Peter Zenger in 1735 had established truth as a sufficient defense against the charge of seditious libel. But Horsmanden would have none of it, besides which the sheriff had carefully packed the jury with friends, relatives, and business associates of both De Lancey and Golden. McDougall was indicted for publishing a “wicked, false, seditious, scandalous, malicious, and infamous libel.” After posting a reduced bail, he was released to await trial. Unlike Zenger, though, he never got his day in court. The case against him collapsed after the death of the government’s key witness, the printer.
NONIMPORTATION DEFEATED
In April 1770 Parliament at long last succumbed to the pressure of nonimportation. All the Townshend Duties were withdrawn except the one on tea—a reminder, said the new prime minister, Lord Frederick North, that Parliament still claimed the right to tax the colonies at its pleasure. The Sons of Liberty, more than two hundred of them, drafted a petition urging that nonimportation continue until the tea tax as well had been removed (many could sign only with a mark).
But after two years of little or no business, finishing off a decade-long economic slump, the pressures for a resumption of trade were formidable. Although a few “rich merchants” were holding their own, observed General Thomas Gage, “traders in general are greatly hurt. Many testify to their dissatisfaction, and the country people begin to complain of the dearness of the commodities they stand in need of.” Also complaining were a sizable number of the craftsmen and seamen and laborers who depended on the merchants for work. In 1768 and 1769 journeyman tailors, waterfront stevedores, and workers in the building trades struck for higher wages. A newly organized Friendly Society of Tradesmen House Carpenters had begun dispensing sick benefits and funeral expenses for its members, obligations previously assumed by the municipal government or religious bodies.
Through the spring and early summer of 1770, the Sons of Liberty tried to keep nonimportation alive, but house-to-house polls in New York suggested that a three-to-one majority of the inhabitants also favored the resumption of trade. By mid-July New York’s nonimportation movement had collapsed. The following month, entertained by brass bands, roaring cannon, and a military parade, a festive crowd converged on Bowling Green for the unveiling of the new equestrian statue of George III, commissioned four years earlier after repeal of the Stamp Act. A statue of William Pitt was subsequently erected in Wall Street, also at public expense.
Yet all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t repair the damage done to the traditional order of things in New York. The Assembly had capitulated to the ministry and betrayed the cause of American liberty. Merchants, slow to endorse nonimportation and quick to abandon it, had punctured any illusion that men of wealth could be trusted to subordinate their private interests to the good of the whole community. Working people, drawing on the antiauthoritarianism of evangelical Protestantism as well as on a long tradition of robust plebeian communalism, had rallied behind leaders of their own making and in pursuit of their own interests, outside existing institutions. The De Lancey and Livingston factions, latest (and last) representatives of the old political order, responded accordingly, the former heading off in the direction of Golden and the ministry, the latter moving