Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [182]
Yet Duane remained a patriot. In the First Continental Congress, he fought for a cautious statement of American rights, conceding almost everything but the right of the colonies to tax themselves. He returned home and plunged into the work of enforcing the Association and preparing the colony for armed conflict. While men no more conservative than he were turning their backs on colonial resistance, he attended the provincial convention and was named a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In 1775 he moved that each inhabitant of the city take up arms and prepare for war.
John Jay was another unlikely rebel. Grandson of the Huguenot refugee Augustus Jay, he was reputed one of the most promising young attorneys in New York by the early 1770s. Besides a quick mind and natural eloquence, he possessed impeccable social credentials and was related to the Bayards, Stuyvesants, Van Cortlandts, and De Lanceys. Robert Livingston Jr. was for a time his law partner, and in 1774, not yet thirty years old, Jay married William Livingston’s daughter Sally. There was talk that year of getting him a royal judgeship.
As conservative as Gouverneur Morris and James Duane—“those who own the country ought to govern it,” he liked to say—Jay too found himself drawn step by step into revolution. His election to the Committee of Fifty-one marked his entrance into the struggle. Sent down to the Congress in Philadelphia, he signed the Association and drafted an Address to the People of Great Britain that was widely applauded for its ringing defense of American rights (“we will never submit to be hewers of wood or drawers of water for any ministry or nation in the world”). By the time he returned to New York, even radicals like Sears and McDougall were hailing Jay’s accomplishments.
Some of his friends worried that “to please the Populace he must have thrown aside his old Principles” but events proved them wrong. The more prominent Jay became, the more certain he was that men of property ought never yield to force from above or pressure from below. He became a revolutionary, in the end, because he couldn’t see an honorable way out of a predicament created by obstinate, venal politicians in London. “It has always been and still is my opinion and belief,” he said many years later, “that our country was prompted and impelled to independence by necessity and not by choice.”
15
Revolution
In February 1775, when the Assembly refused to choose delegates for a Second Continental Congress, the authority of New York’s legal government collapsed. The Committee of Sixty, assuming quasi-governmental power, called for a public meeting at the Exchange in early March to devise a plan for choosing a congressional delegation. To ensure a strong patriot turnout, the Sons of Liberty rallied at the liberty pole on the appointed day, then marched downtown in force, “round all the docks and wharves, with trumpets blowing, fifes playing, drums beating, and colours flying.” The excited crowd that followed them to the Exchange endorsed the Sixty’s proposal that the selection of delegates be entrusted to a special provincial convention of representatives from every county in the colony, to convene at the Exchange six weeks later. Governor Colden talked about preventing the meeting by proclamation, but neither he nor the Assembly had the nerve to do so—which made the royal government look even more ineffectual. New York’s Provincial Convention met on April 20 and put together a congressional delegation. The old Assembly adjourned, never to meet again.
Three days later the city learned that Gage’s redcoats had been bested by mere militia at Lexington and Concord. Isaac Sears, John Lamb, and Marinus Willett quickly