Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [179]
Paul Revere was an important conduit of information between radical artisans in New York and Boston. This broadside announces one of his several appearances in the city. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
In New York, one immediate casualty of the Association was David Douglass’s theatrical troupe. Douglass had returned to the city in 1767 and enjoyed a string of profitable seasons in a spacious new playhouse on John Street. But he had also drawn heavy abuse—from radical Whigs, who saw theatergoing as a manifestation of genteel self-indulgence (it was said that the price of a season’s subscription had risen to an amazing fifty pounds), as well as from evangelicals, who believed that theaters promoted idleness, debauchery, and blasphemy. Douglass now learned that the Association agreement had committed all patriotic Americans to “discountentance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Fearing the worst—he could hardly have forgotten the violent destruction of his old playhouse on Chapel Street a decade earlier—Douglass promptly closed his doors and took his actors to Jamaica, expecting no trouble from “the Ladies and Gentlemen of that polite and opulent island.”
The moderate Committee of Fifty-one tried to preserve its control over the course of events by proposing that it supervise enforcement of the Association through teams of inspectors chosen by the electors in each ward. But the Mechanics Committee demanded instead dissolution of the Fifty-one and enforcement of the Association by a new sixty-member Committee of Observation on which popular leaders would have half the seats. Bolstered by the success of radical patriots in other colonies, the mechanics had little trouble getting the Fifty-one to cooperate. Nominations for the new committee were published in the papers and confirmed without incident at a public rally on November 22.
Interior of the John Street Theatre, from The New York Argus, March 13, 1797. (© Museum of the City of New York)
WHIGS OF THE OLD STAMP
From the very beginning of the struggle with Great Britain, New York had been regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as a nursery of loyalty to the mother country. Nowhere else in the colonies, after all, did the ground lie quite so thick with royal functionaries, generals, admirals, Anglican churchmen, big landowners, and merchant princes. They were rich men, on the whole, well born, well educated, well married, and well connected—precisely the kind of men on whom the Empire had relied, for more than a century, to govern its American provinces. Few approved the idea of taxing the colonies, but they were obstinate in their devotion to British institutions and knew what they stood to lose if the Empire failed to keep a firm grip on America. By 1773 or 1774 many had already cast their lot with king and Parliament, and the potential scope of their influence troubled patriots everywhere.
Not until Congress set up the Association, though, would a concerted, broadly based loyalism begin to emerge in New York (or indeed anywhere else). For as the Committee of Sixty and other such extralegal bodies plunged into their work over the winter and spring of 1774-75—chasing down rumors of violations, examining backsliders and the contrary-minded, confiscating property, prescribing what good patriots should buy and sell and wear, often indeed administering oaths of support for the Association—substantial numbers of New Yorkers finally decided that matters had got out of hand.