Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [214]
Clinton had in fact already given city radicals their cue to step up the pace of their anti-Tory campaign. Toward the end of January 1784 he opened the new session of the legislature—the first to be held in New York City since independence—with a lament on “the ruins of this once flourishing city” and an impassioned attack on the Tories for the “cruelty and rapine” with which they had opposed the cause of American freedom. Stirred by Clinton’s rhetoric, the Sons of Liberty—along with shadowy ad hoc radical groups like the Whig Society—organized a series of mass meetings, culminating in a huge demonstration in the Common at the end of March, to demand not only stricter penalties for former adherents to the crown but also their immediate expulsion from the city by the first of May. Particularly unpopular Tories were tarred and feathered or hamstrung. A party of visiting British officers was set upon and beaten.
With equal zeal, the legislature’s radical majority began to spin off anti-Tory legislation. One law barred Tories from holding public office. Another, enacted over the veto of the Council of Revision, authorized election officials to disfranchise any Tory on the testimony of a single witness. A subsequent law ordered the immediate sale of all confiscated property, though doing so plainly violated the Treaty of Paris. Still another imposed a punitive tax of one hundred thousand pounds on those residents of the five lower counties who had chosen to remain under the British occupation and thus hadn’t yet paid their fair share for “the blessing derived from freedom and independence.”
The state commissioners of forfeitures meanwhile proceeded to auction off confiscated property. James De Lancey’s huge Manhattan estate went on the block, the purchasers including some fifty butchers, gardeners, cartmen, grocers, carpenters, farmers, and assorted other working people—at least some of whom had been De Lancey’s tenants before independence. For fifty-eight pounds, a ropemaker named William Arnold bought a half interest in seven lots of De Lancey’s West Farm; John Buchanan, mariner, obtained four lots for £271; James Galloway, rigger, spent eighty pounds for a half interest in eight lots.
The radicalized Common Council now moved to enlarge the powers and responsibilities of the municipal corporation. For seven years now the assorted rents and fees that were the corporation’s sole sources of revenue had gone uncollected, leaving it no money with which to repair the ravages of war or pay its outstanding debts. Taxation was the obvious solution. But the mayor and council only had the authority to govern the estate of the municipal corporation: they couldn’t levy taxes on residents of the city generally.
At the corporation’s request, therefore, the legislature passed a law granting its officers the power to levy a tax on all inhabitants of the city. Although this was a onetime measure—if and when the corporation wanted to impose additional taxes, it would again need to seek legislative approval—it was nonetheless a momentous extension of the corporation’s power to govern. Ratifying the popular impulse to local self-determination expressed in the Revolutionary committee system, it began a gradual but inexorable metamorphosis of the corporation from a “private” into a “public” entity that governed as a surrogate of the legislature. Necessarily, too, it cast new doubt on the restrictiveness of the municipal suffrage. Who should now constitute the “commonality” of the corporation: merely those property-owning (male) residents formally admitted to the freemanship, or a broader cross-section of the city’s population?
Conservative Whigs protested the delegation of legislative power to the municipal corporation, all too aware that both corporation and