Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [216]
At least some radicals seem to have had a penchant, too, for the moral legislation that always lurked just beneath the surface of Anglo-American Whiggism. In March 1784, as a case in point, the Common Council enacted the city’s strictest Sabbath law to date, strictly prohibiting labor, public gatherings (except of course at church), sports, games, and even children making noise or playing in the streets on Sunday. Petitions were said to be circulating for “the annihilation of taverns, coffee-houses, billiard tables, ale-houses and theaters.” Next year, when Lewis Hallam’s Old American Company returned from exile and applied for license to reopen the John Street Theater, the Common Council turned them down with the stern rebuke that this was no time for frivolity. What was more—putting a new spin on an old complaint—the theater’s notorious tendency to corrupt manners and morals was a danger to the republic. “Attendance on public Stages intoxicates a populace and diverts their minds from what ought to be the grand object of their study, the public good,” asserted one newspaper writer.
NEW NEW YORKERS
Thousands of people had meanwhile continued to pour into New York, boosting its population from twelve thousand at the end of 1783 to twenty-four thousand two years later. Most were refugees hoping to pick up the pieces of their former lives in the city. Scattered among them, however, were wealthy and cosmopolitan newcomers from elsewhere in the state, from other parts of the United States, and even from abroad.
Preeminent among these newcomers—and soon to take the lead in organizing an opposition to the radical resurgence—was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Hamilton. Although he had lived briefly in the city while a student at King’s College, Hamilton spent the first four years of the war traveling the country as Washington’s confidential aide and secretary, then settled in Albany after marrying General Philip Schuyler’s daughter, Elizabeth. In the company of men like Washington and Schuyler, moreover, Hamilton had become convinced of the need for a strong national government to combat what he considered to be state parochialism and fiscal irresponsibility. His Continen-talist essays of 1781 called for a constitutional convention to replace the Articles of Confederation (adopted back in 1777) and lavished praise on his friend Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who served as superintendent of finance for Congress and was largely responsible for the creation of the Bank of North America. The following year, Hamilton appeared before a joint committee of the state legislature to urge “a solid arrangement of finance” for the state and drafted a plan for overhauling state taxes. New York’s “radically vicious” system of taxation, he confided to Morris, was a symptom of “the general disease which infects all our constitutions—an excess of popularity. The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people.”
Needing an occupation, Hamilton took a crash course in the law and was admitted to the New York bar in the summer of 1782. A year later he moved his family down to the city, opened a law office on Wall Street, and began to build a practice by representing Tories ensnared by the Trespass Act. “Legislative folly has afforded so plentiful a harvest to us lawyers that we have scarcely a moment to spare from the substantial business of reaping,” he gloated to Gouverneur Morris. Publicly, Hamilton professed to have no political ambitions and fended off attempts to nominate him for office. Privately, though, he made no secret of his alarm at the radical clamor for retribution against the