Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [178]
Joining them there were the many women who played an increasingly visible role in mobilizing resistance to British policy, above all by vesting ordinary domestic decisions with political significance. As shoppers, retailers, and housewives, they refused to buy or sell British goods, made clothes of homespun, and served coffee instead of tea. Some called themselves Daughters of Liberty, and their patriotic fervor suffused the letters that a New York teenager named Charity Clark sent to a cousin in England. She and other young women of the city had begun to knit “stockens,” she wrote, dreaming of the day when “a fighting army of amazones . . . armed with spinning wheels” would free America from its dependence on British imports and thus put it beyond the reach of “arbitrary power.” Do not underestimate us, she warned her distant correspondent: “Though this body is not clad with silken garments, these limbs are armed with strength, the Soul is fortified by Virtue, and the Love of Liberty is cherished within this bosom.”
THE CONTINENTAL ASSOCIATION
For the next six weeks, according to one observer, New York was “as full of uproar as if it was beseiged by a Foreign force.” City papers reported a succession of raucous meetings, rallies, demonstrations, and fistfights. Isaac Sears received a “drubbing” on one occasion from a British officer stationed in the city.
Despite pressure from its more radical members, the Committee of Fifty-one managed to sidestep a commitment to nonimportation by insisting that it should be proposed first by a “Congress of Deputies from all the Colonies in general”—although the committee’s moderate majority didn’t much like the idea of such a meeting, either, given its radical origins.
By early July it had become certain that a congress would convene in Philadelphia in September. The Fifty-one grudgingly nominated five delegates to attend for New York City: Isaac Low, John Jay, Philip Livingston, John Alsop, and James Duane. Dismayed that no one to their liking had been included, and conscious that events had begun to turn in their favor, the Mechanics Committee met at Bardin’s Tavern (the former Hampden Hall) to draw up its own slate of candidates: Low, Livingston, Jay, Leonard Lispenard, and Alexander McDougall. Called by the Sons of Liberty, a public meeting in the Fields on July 6 approved the mechanics’ slate, along with resolutions instructing the five, if elected, to support a nonimportation agreement. It took three weeks of tense, byzantine maneuvering to work out a compromise: the Mechanics Committee agreed to support the original nominees of the Fifty-one, while the Fifty-one in turn assured the mechanics it would wholeheartedly support a nonimportation agreement if one were adopted by the upcoming congress.
Several weeks later John Adams and other New England delegates passed through New York en route to Philadelphia. With McDougall as their semiofficial host, they toured the city and spent hours in deep conversation with patriots. The starchy Adams was less than impressed. “At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable,” he noted in his diary. “They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether.” (They did know how to eat, however: invited to John Morin Scott’s “elegant Seat” overlooking the Hudson, Adams was taken aback by the profusion of silverware and abundant food.)
Adams tore himself away, and New York’s delegates embarked for Philadelphia on September 1, “with Colours flying, Music playing, and loud Huzzas at the End of each Street.” Four days later the Continental Congress, attended by fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies, got down to business. To the delight of radical patriots everywhere, it advised the people of Massachusetts to form a new government and take up arms. It rejected a conciliatory Plan of Union