Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [209]
Vis-à-vis New York City, the constitution expressly affirmed the municipal charter granted by Governor Montgomerie in 1730, with one technical adjustment: instead of being appointed by the royal governor and council, the city’s principal officials—mayor, recorder, clerk, and sheriff, among others—would henceforth be chosen by the Council of Appointment. New York would thus remain the “free City of itself”—an autonomous private corporation with absolute title to its own personal “estate.” Its day-to-day affairs would continue to rest in the hands of a private body legally protected from the will of the now sovereign people. Only freemen and freeholders—the “commonality” of the corporation—elected aldermen, assistants, collectors, and constables (and these “charter” elections remained viva voce for another two decades, in defiance of the trend toward secret ballots).
Just months after the constitution was ratified, George Clinton of Ulster County edged out General Philip Schuyler, John Jay, and John Morin Scott to win the state’s first gubernatorial election. Born to a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian family of modest circumstances, Clinton was a country lawyer who got into politics in the mid-1760s as an anti-De Lancey Whig. When the war began he wangled an appointment as a brigadier general in the militia. His ardent republicanism and plainspoken manner made him a hero to the small farmers and tenants who were the backbone of the Revolutionary movement in the Hudson Valley outside New York City. But to the great landowning families he remained an outsider, a “new man” thrust into public life by the press of events, and they regarded his elevation to the state’s highest office as a scandal. His “family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a predominance,” Schuyler protested. “A humiliation to the ruling classes,” declared Gouverneur Morris. It humiliated them further that over the next half-dozen years Clinton built a devoted following among other “new men” who found their way into the state legislature—radical Whig farmers, shopkeepers, schoolmasters, and exiled workingmen from the city like Daniel Dunscomb (the cooper and former chairman of the Mechanics Committee), Abraham Brasher (silversmith), Abraham P. Lott (a baker active in the Sons of Liberty), and Robert Boyd (blacksmith). Although “unimproved by education and unrefined by honor,” in Robert R. Livingston’s phrase, the Clintonians were ambitious, upwardly mobile men who saw in independence the promise of both republicanism and opportunity. Several, including Clinton himself, would go on to amass significant fortunes.
Their immediate objective, however, was the suppression of Toryism in the state, and in 1778 the Clintonian-dominated legislature established a permanent Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies. Dozens of subsequent laws gave the new commission virtually unlimited authority to ferret out “inimicals” and subjected them to increasingly harsh penalties. The Act to Regulate Elections (1778) deprived disloyal persons of the right to vote or hold office. The Banishing Act (also 1778) provided that even “Persons of equivocal and suspected Character” could be summarily expelled from the state. In 1777, moreover, the legislature created commissioners of sequestration for each of the counties not under British control, empowering them to seize but not sell livestock, tools, furniture, and other personal effects belonging to active Tories. The Forfeitures Act of 1779 confiscated all such property, adding houses, land, and slaves to the list. That same year an Act of Attainder declared fifty-nine leading Tories guilty of treason, seized their property, and ordered