Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [220]
In January 1784 Hamilton published a little pamphlet entitled A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New-York. (Phocion was the Athenian general who helped defeat the Macedonians in 339 B.C. and then, over the objections of Demosthenes, advocated conciliation with his former enemies. When the democrats came to power, they forced Phocion to drink hemlock.) Hamilton’s Letter, the first sustained appeal for forbearance toward the Tories, “excited a general sensation” by saying openly what the propertied classes had been saying privately for months: that radical Whig attacks on the rights and property of men and women who had ended up on the wrong side of the Revolution were ruining the city’s chances of recovery from years of war and military occupation.
Besides putting at risk the rights and liberties for which the Revolution had been fought, Hamilton argued, such attacks violated the Treaty of Paris. This made the United States look irresponsible in the eyes of other nations and destroyed the climate of confidence essential to international trade. It infringed, too, upon the power of Congress to determine how, and upon what conditions, the war would end—diminishing in turn the ability of that body to lead the nation in time of peace. Finally, persecution of the Tories drove away the very men whose wealth and abilities were essential to the prosperity of a commercial society.
That last point was vital, and key passages in Phocion warned the city’s radical mechanics to take heed. Driving away Tory merchants and craftsmen, Hamilton wrote, will not raise your wages: the former are essential to the city’s economic health; the latter do you no harm. Wages in town have risen “sufficiently high” as it is, and “those classes of the community who are to employ you” will not in any case go on paying “exorbitant prices” for labor even if its supply dwindles. Besides, if you disturb “the economy of the political machine” by trying to elevate any of the “departments of industry” above its “natural height,” then “society at large suffers.” Indeed, “the only object of concern with an industrious artisan, as such, ought to be, that there may be plenty of money in the community, and a brisk commerce to give it circulation and activity.”
The Revolution is over, Hamilton continued. Direct popular intervention may have freed the nation from tyranny, but the liberty of the people—meaning “their right to a share in the government”—is now secure. The citizens of New York should return to their shops and countinghouses, leaving public affairs in the hands of those persons most fit to rule.
Just as dangerous as popular interference in government was the corporatist ethos that had in the past gone virtually hand in hand with radical Whig demands for economic and social justice. The truth was, Hamilton wrote, “that all monopolies, exclusions and discriminations in matters of traffick, are pernicious and absurd.” This applied not only to repeated attempts by local and state authorities to regulate wages and prices during the war but also to their continuing vendetta against the Tories. It didn’t necessarily apply to the central government. Unlike his mentor Robert Morris, Hamilton always saw a role for vigorous government intervention at the national level, now to promote trade, now to mitigate the competitive “jealousy” between states that could shatter the republic. Municipal laissez-faire and federal activism, in other words, were opposite sides of the same coin. New York’s future prosperity depended on both. And both, Hamilton repeated, had been gravely impaired by local and state abuse of the Tories.
Phocion, together with a Second Letter from Phocion that appeared in April 1784, underscored what many people in New York already suspected: Colonel Hamilton, as he was generally known, was the only moderate or conservative Whig gifted with a coherent vision of the city