Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [184]
“GOOD AND WELL-ORDERED GOVERNMENTS”
The New York Provincial Congress took over the vacant Assembly chamber in City Hall on May 23 and moved quickly to consolidate its authority. It called for the creation, where they didn’t already exist, of “county committees, and also sub-committees . . . to carry into execution the resolutions of the Continental and this Provincial Congress.” It instructed Queens and Richmond counties to send delegates at once. It warned everyone who hadn’t yet subscribed to the General Association to do so by July 15 or suffer the consequences. It also stepped up the pace of military preparations by creating a Military Association—in effect, a revolutionary militia—and launching a campaign to recruit five regiments. Alexander McDougall, the Wilkes of America, personally took charge of raising a regiment from the city; the First New York, as it would be known, consisted largely of workingmen.
Association militia were soon drilling in the Fields and patrolling the streets while gangs of laborers erected barricades, dug trenches, and threw up breastworks. The Committee of One Hundred, assuming the duties of municipal government, meanwhile began to grapple with such familiar problems as regulating wages and prices and providing relief for the poor.
The speed with which both the One Hundred and the Provincial Congress got to work reflected not only the quickening pace of events but also the continued concern among more cautious patriots that popular enthusiasm not be allowed to get out of control. “Good and well-ordered governments in all the colonies,” explained John Jay, would “exclude that anarchy which already too much prevails.” James Duane, who admitted that “licentiousness is the natural effect of a civil discord,” felt “it can only be guarded against by placing the command of the troops in the hands of men of property and rank.” Easier said than done, Gouverneur Morris reflected, inasmuch as “the soldiers from this Town [are] not the Cream of the Earth but the Scum” and are “officered by the vulgar.” Even Alexander McDougall felt apprehensive. “I fear liberty is in danger from the licentiousness of the people,” he confessed.
For many moderates, these fears were underscored on June 6, when the last of the Fort George garrison, a hundred or so soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment, were withdrawn from the city to the sixty-four-gun warship Asia (in part, according to one source, because too many of them had deserted to the patriots). Led by Marinus Willett, some Liberty Boys intercepted the column as it marched down Broad Street, commandeering its muskets, ammunition, and baggage. Escorts provided by the Provincial Congress and Committee of One Hundred endeavored to stop the outrage, without success. Shortly thereafter, a party of Liberty Boys raided a royal storehouse at Turtle Bay, likewise over the objections of representatives from the Provincial Congress. Knowing that a failure to respond might well explode its authority, the Congress ordered Willett to return everything he and his men had made off with. Independent “attempts to raise tumults, riots, or mobs” couldn’t be tolerated, it said sternly.
Willett backed down, but no one expected that to end the matter. When a crowd burned a supply barge from the Asia in July, the embarrassed Congress built a replacement; when that too was destroyed, Congress again condemned unauthorized attacks on persons and property and ordered the construction of another replacement, this time dispatching militia to guard it.
The rapidly escalating crisis between Britain and the colonies made it all the more difficult for the Provincial Congress to stay on top of the situation in New York. On June 25, 1775, General George Washington passed through town on his way to take command of the troops besieging Gage in Boston. Cheering crowds lined the streets and church bells pealed as a battalion of militia and members of the Provincial Congress escorted him down Broadway to Hull