Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [177]
Outraged by the Boston Tea Party, the government in London had meanwhile resolved to make an example of Massachusetts. From its point of view, it could do no less. Ten years of American defiance had upset a trading empire worth thirty million pounds a year in combined imports and exports. Besides, when perhaps only one in thirty Englishmen could vote, and at a time of ballooning internal disorder, American theories of representation struck at the very heart of Britain’s political and social order. As George III himself declared: “The colonists must be reduced to absolute obedience, if need be, by the ruthless use of force.” (Otherwise, he would later say, India, Ireland, and the rest of England’s possessions would go their own way as well, and “this Island, reduced to itself, would be a poor Island indeed.”) The upshot, in April 1774, was a series of so-called Coercive Acts—soon referred to throughout America as the “Intolerable Acts”—by which Parliament shut the port of Boston, reorganized the colony’s courts to facilitate the prosecution of political troublemakers, and sharply restricted the power of the colony’s legislature and town meetings. Commander-in-Chief Thomas Gage was named governor and sent up from New York with additional troops to help him enforce the law.
THE “NEW ARCADIA” OF LIBERTY
Initial reports of the Intolerable Acts began to arrive in New York in mid-May. “This intelligence was received with Great abhorence & indignation,” McDougall noted in his diary. The Sons of Liberty and the Livingston faction immediately moved to organize “an impartial spirited Committee of Correspondence” for the purpose of drawing up new nonexportation as well as nonimportation agreements and reviving the idea of a continental congress. They were only partially successful. At a turbulent mass meeting at the Exchange on May 16, moderate merchants rallied by the De Lancey faction voted to postpone a decision on nonimportation and nominated a fifty-member committee with only a dozen-odd seats reserved for the Sons.
The very next day, however, Paul Revere returned to town with the Boston Circular Letter, which advocated an immediate embargo on trade with Britain until Parliament repealed the Intolerable Acts. Heartened by this evidence of patriotic zeal elsewhere, and ready now to act independently of the merchants, a group of the city’s mechanics nominated a Committee of Correspondence having only twenty-five members, mostly Sons of Liberty and Livingston adherents. Revere was sent off with letters for the patriots in Philadelphia and Boston, explaining the confusion in New York and stressing the need for a general congress.
The showdown occurred at a tumultuous public meeting in the Coffee House on May 19. At issue was the size and composition of the Committee of Correspondence: fifty, as the moderates wanted, or twenty-five, as the new Mechanics Committee had proposed. Equally difficult was the question of who in the city had a right to vote on the matter: “none but the Freeholders & Freemen,” as one of the moderates argued, or “every man whose Liberties were concerned,” as Sears maintained. On both points the moderates again carried the day. All fifty moderate nominees won election, with the addition, as a conciliatory gesture, of one radical. A compromise plan for a house-to-house canvass of the city broke down when the details couldn’t be worked out. The following day Sears and McDougall reluctantly persuaded the Mechanics Committee to accept what was now the Committee of Fifty-one on the understanding they would be removed “if they misbehaved.”
Although the moderates gained the upper hand, the appearance of the Mechanics Committee was a milestone in the political history of New York City. A plebeian counterpart to the merchants’ Chamber of Commerce, it confirmed the growing political sophistication of the city’s working people and their ability and willingness to act without the prompting even of men like Sears, Lamb, and McDougall. Its