Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [208]
Sir Guy Carleton, who replaced General Clinton as commander-in-chief in May of that year, won praise in the city for a long-overdue anticorruption drive, but his diligence couldn’t dispel the pall of gloom that enveloped New York as the loss of the war became more and more obvious. In August the London government accepted the principle of American independence. William Smith, his hand shaking, wrote that the news “shocks me as much as the Loss of all I had in the World & my Family with it.” “God d———n them,” ranted William Bayard, booking passage on the first ship back to England. “What is to become of me, sir? I am totally ruined, sir. I have not a guinea, sir.” Perhaps as many as eleven hundred other Tories would also leave town before the year was out. Local shops advertised china, glassware, and “Genteel furniture” at fire-sale prices.
Preliminary Articles of Peace were agreed to at the end of November 1782. A royal proclamation in February 1783 officially suspended hostilities; Congress quickly followed suit, clearing the way for the completion of a definitive peace treaty in Paris five months later. New York Tories were dumfounded. When an apprehensive throng gathered in early April to hear the royal proclamation read aloud from the steps of City Hall, they responded with “groans and hisses,” showering “bitter reproaches and curses upon their king, for having deserted them in the midst of their calamities.” Soldiers walked away from their units. Panicky civilians put their houses up for sale, gathered their belongings, and prepared to flee at a moment’s notice; a few, utterly overwhelmed, took their own lives.
THE STATE OF NEW YORK
The hopelessness and fear that engulfed the Tories in occupied New York arose not only from the trauma of defeat but also from the recognition that, while they were waiting for the victory that never came, their enemies had revolutionized the world around them. In 1777 the fourth Provincial Congress adopted a written constitution for the “State” of New York that signaled a break with the past more radical than most Tories would have believed possible only a year or two earlier. It required annual elections for the state assembly. It guaranteed trial by jury, due process of law, and freedom of religious worship. It disestablished the Anglican Church and drew a firm line between church and state by prohibiting any form of religious establishment. It opened all public qffices to freeholders of the state and halved the old forty-pound colonial property qualification: henceforth residents of the state owning twenty-pound freeholds, paying two pounds (forty shillings) a year in rent, or admitted as freemen of New York City or Albany could vote in elections for the Assembly. It eliminated representatives from corporations, manors, boroughs, and townships and doubled the number of seats in the Assembly—creating thereby a legislature more responsive to popular opinion. Finally, striking a blow against the old system of viva voce voting, the constitution also required the secret ballot in gubernatorial elections and gave the legislature discretion to experiment with ballots in the elections of its members.
Certain features of the new constitution were more conservative, to be sure. It vested executive authority in a governor elected every three years by male residents of the state owning freeholds worth at least a hundred pounds—a sum big enough to ensure that only men of property and standing would occupy the office. At the same time, the power of the Assembly was checked by creation of a Senate, a Council of Revision (empowered to review and veto all legislative action), and a Council of Appointment (which filled appointive