Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [180]
Hardcore loyalists were a distinct minority in the province, never amounting to more than 15 percent of the colony’s 168,000-odd inhabitants. (Some 60 percent of the population, by contrast, supported the patriots; the rest were fence-straddlers and switch-hitters.) Queens, Kings, and Richmond counties—the agrarian periphery of New York City—proved notably cool to the patriot cause. Staunch patriots comprised only 12 percent of the nearly eleven thousand residents of Queens County (which then included what is now Nassau County). With loyalists often outnumbering patriots by better than two to one, a succession of Queens communities—Jamaica, Newtown, Oyster Bay, Flushing, Hempstead—openly defied Congress and issued protests condemning the Association. Indecisiveness seemed epidemic among the thirty-six hundred inhabitants of Kings County. A mere 6 percent have been counted as hardcore patriots, but they outnumbered hardcore loyalists, and the half-dozen towns of Kings County silently ignored the Association. The Flatbush Reformed Church hedged its bets by having services conducted by two ministers, one patriot, the other loyalist.
The strength of loyalism in these counties reflected a long-standing dependence on the export markets of New York City and, through them, on the entire system of international exchange protected by British imperial power. In parts of Kings and Queens counties, if not Richmond, loyalism drew as well on local traditions of hostility to New England-style radicalism dating back to the mid-seventeenth century (neighboring Suffolk County, still closely tied to New England, was overwhelmingly patriot). Also to be reckoned with was the role of religious, cultural, and ethnic heterodoxy: the least “English” areas of Long Island were most heavily loyalist, presumably because they had flourished under British rule and would have the most to lose in a new, majoritarian social and political order.
Nowhere, however, was loyalism rooted in formal ideological differences with the patriots. A shower of Tory placards, handbills, broadsides, pamphlets, and newspaper essays fell on New York in 1774 and 1775—many appearing courtesy of James Rivington’s printshop, source of the New-York Gazetteer, the single most important loyalist journal in the colonies. The bulk of this literature appealed to essentially the same Whiggish fears about tyranny, corruption, and conspiracy that shaped patriot thought. Many Tories, in fact, waited until the very last moment to decide which side they were on, for they saw Congress, not Parliament, as the immediate danger. Parliament may well have acted unwisely or unjustly, loyalist writers conceded. But Congress was an illegal and unconstitutional body, controlled by unscrupulous men whose secret objective was to gain wealth and power for themselves. They would stop at nothing until they had destroyed every remnant of British authority—and with it the prosperity, stability, and security the colonies had enjoyed for generations.
Still, there was something fundamentally elitist, even aristocratic, about loyalism. New York’s leading Tories—John Watts, Isaac Low, Cruger, Thomas Jones, William Smith, Peter Van Schaack, William Johnson, James and Oliver De Lancey, Frederick Philipse, William Bayard—were all men of wealth and power, long identified with British high culture. A large majority of the hundred members of the Chamber of Commerce sided with the crown, as did, overall, half of the city’s merchants, who as a group tended to be wealthier than their patriot counterparts. Religion too set New York Tories apart. Anglican clergy and their congregations by and large opposed independence, while dissenters favored it. Only one of