Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [223]
Prominent merchants also revived the Chamber of Commerce, the bulk of whose pre-Revolutionary members had sided with the British. Like the bank, the chamber heeded Hamilton’s plea for reconciliation. Many Tories gained admission at its first meeting in April, and one of them, John Alsop, was elected president. More Tories joined up over the next few years, along with Whigs of every description, including William Duer, John Lamb, Alexander McDougall, and Isaac Sears, who became the chamber’s vice-president. This was a signal that the town’s principal men of business were welcome regardless of their opinions (allegiance to money being the only really reliable test of character) and that at least some radical Whigs too were eager to advance the city’s trade and commerce.
Hamilton’s program for rehabilitating Tories moved into the courts in the summer of 1784 with the case of Rutgers v. Waddington. Widow Elizabeth Rutgers had fled New York in 1776, leaving behind the family’s brewery on Maiden Lane. Joshua Waddington, a very rich and highly unpopular Tory merchant, became the agent for two British brewers who took over the Rutgers brewery and operated it under license of the British commissary-general and, later, the commander-in-chief. When Rutgers pressed Waddington for eight thousand pounds in damages and back rent under the 1783 Trespass Act, Waddington refused to pay. Rutgers sued, and the case went before the Mayor’s Court in June. To represent her, Rutgers hired a team of distinguished attorneys that included John Laurence, Robert Troup, and Attorney General Egbert Benson. Hamilton appeared for Waddington.
Hamilton took the position, as he had in his Phocion letters, that the Trespass Act was null and void. It violated a maxim of international law that citizens could not be held liable for actions, otherwise illegal, committed at the order of military forces. It also specifically violated the Treaty of Paris. Congress had negotiated and approved the treaty in the name of the Confederation, Hamilton reminded the court: it was the law of the land and couldn’t be repealed at the whim of one or another state. Benson and Troup responded that the Trespass Act was a proper exercise of legislative power and couldn’t be set aside or repealed except by the legislature.
Duane’s ruling, handed down in August, was a split decision. Rutgers could recover for the period when Waddington held the property under license from the commissary-general; she couldn’t recover for the time Waddington held it by authority of the British commander-in-chief, who was acting in accordance with the law of nations. As for the validity of the Trespass Act itself, Duane found no legislative intent to overrule international law. He did allow, on the other hand, that when a legislature failed to anticipate all the consequences of a statute, courts were obliged to interpret or even disregard it altogether.
Radical Whigs were appalled. The Assembly hauled in Duane to explain himself, censured his decision as a violation of legislative autonomy and a threat to law and order, then reaffirmed the Trespass Act. Hamilton was savaged in the papers for giving aid and comfort to “the most abandoned and flagitious scoundrels in the Universe,” and there were rumors of a plot to have him killed. Waddington, worried that the case might be lost on appeal (if not that his attorney would go down in a blaze of pistol fire), negotiated a compromise settlement with Mrs. Rutgers.
As the first anniversary of Evacuation Day approached, New York’s Tories, reassured by Hamilton’s exertions on their behalf, had begun to make their peace with independence and republicanism. This in turn facilitated the growth of an alliance with conservative Whigs that would, in Hamilton’s words, confront the radicals with “all the mercantile and monied influence” of the city—old Anglo-Dutch merchant families, newly arrived exporters and importers,