Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [181]
The most energetic and compelling loyalist propaganda in the middle colonies emanated from a circle of learned, profoundly conservative Anglican clerics: the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler of New Jersey; the Rev. Charles Inglis, assistant rector of Trinity Church; the Rev. Myles Cooper, president of King’s College; the Rev. John Vardill, a sometime professor at King’s College moonlighting as a British spy; and the Rev. Samuel Seabury of Westchester County. To their way of thinking, constitutional liberty could be maintained only by the better sort of people—people of rank and distinction in society—because they alone possessed the capacity for reason and disinterested virtue. Common folk, ruled by base passions, always looked first to their own selfinterest and could not therefore be trusted with power. No wonder, then, that law and order had broken down: all those congresses, committees, and conventions now oppressing the colonies were the handiwork of vulgar upstarts, men ill equipped to govern themselves, much less others. A sad spectacle indeed, declared Cooper: “I feel indignation and shame mingling in my Bosom, when I reflect that a few men (whom only the political storm could cast up from the bottom into notice) have presumed to act in the character of representatives and substitutes of the Province.” That one Tory pamphlet after another would be consigned to the flames on the day of their publication by cheering crowds merely underscored the oppressive nature of mob rule. And it made perfect sense to Anglican loyalists that men who resorted to such desperate, illiberal measures frequently proved to be religious dissenters.
“THE MOB BEGIN TO THINK AND REASON”
Often only the finest of lines divided Tories from moderate or conservative patriots. For young Gouverneur Morris, a Whig like his grandfather Lewis but no admirer of the lower classes, these were gloomy and troubling days. “The mob begin to think and reason,” he declared after watching the mass meeting of May 19, 1774, in the Coffee House. “Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it. The gentry begin to fear this.” If this quarrel with Britain continues, Morris added dramatically, “we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions; we shall be under the domination of a riotous mob.” Yet Morris’s fears didn’t, in the end, fix his course. For whatever reason—the stirrings of national pride, a revival of confidence that the upper classes could maintain control, a sense of obligation to the Whiggism of his ancestors—he cast his lot with the patriots and supported independence.
So did James Duane, the city-born son of a well-to-do Irish immigrant merchant and landowner. After studying law in the offices of James Alexander, Duane built a practice of his own that by the early 1770s, just as he turned forty, was earning a handsome fourteen hundred pounds a year. Marriages to Maria Livingston and, after her death, to Gertrude Schuyler cemented Duane’s position in society. He became a vestryman of Trinity and a trustee of King’s College. He maintained a fashionable town house, a country seat, and a thirty-six-thousand-acre estate west of Schenectady where he managed 235 tenants and engaged in potash-making and milling.
It would hardly have been surprising if Duane, like so many other men of his class and connections, had drifted into loyalism by 1774 or 1775. He didn’t think highly of the .intelligence or intentions of ordinary people and helped prosecute Alexander McDougall. He worried about the advent of mob rule and warned Robert Livingston, his father-in-law, about the dangers of “a great and respectible Family