Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [224]
Over the fall and winter of 1784-85, Hamilton broadened the scope of his alliance by wooing the great Hudson Valley landowning families—Livingstons, Schuylers, Van Cortlandts, and their ilk. Their incessant jockeying for precedence had always made it difficult for them to work together, but Hamilton’s message was brutally frank: cooperate or go under. As he told one of the redoubtable Livingstons, this was no time for men “concerned for the security of property or the prosperity of government” to quibble among themselves.
RAPPROCHEMENT
Hamilton’s bid for the support of New York City’s laboring population also began to get results. When elections were held for the state assembly in June 1784, defecting mechanic voters scuttled the radical ticket. Even Isaac Sears went down to defeat, running behind conservatives like Comfort Sands. (Among the new assemblymen that year was Aaron Burr, making his political debut with no principles to speak of—a development almost as noteworthy as the election of former Tories.) Several months later, the Tory merchant Nicholas Bayard drew enough votes in the balloting for City Council to defeat the incumbent Out Ward alderman Thomas Ivers. Stunned, Ivers protested that Bayard was ineligible because of his previous collaboration with the enemy. The council seated Bayard anyway, which must have struck even Hamilton as something of a miracle.
The movement of artisans and tradesmen into Hamilton’s camp gathered momentum over the next several years as Governor Clinton and his supporters appeared to lose interest in restoring the city’s trade and grew increasingly disdainful of Congress. Toward the end of 1784 the legislature’s radical majority slapped a 2.5 percent duty on goods imported into the state and a punitive 5 percent duty on British goods entering from the West Indies. Outside the city, Clinton’s impost was wildly popular, not least of all because the hundreds of thousands of dollars it soon funneled into the state treasury kept land taxes low.
Inside the city, however, the impost threatened disaster. New Jersey and Connecticut, over half of whose imports came through the port, objected vociferously to the New York impost and threatened an all-out trade war that could devastate the municipal economy. Britain not only kept its West Indian islands off limits to American shipping but began dumping its own products in the New York market. By 1786 almost twice as much tonnage had entered the port from the former mother country than from all other foreign nations combined. Local artisans and mechanics, confronted with an avalanche of cheap British manufactured goods—thirty thousand hats and ninetyseven thousand pairs of shoes between 1784 and 1786 alone—charged that Clinton had played into Britain’s hands with a policy “which tends in some degree to defeat the purposes of our late revolution.”
Nor were they happy with Clinton’s go-it-alone strategy for the state. In 1786, buoyed by revenues from the impost, the legislature enacted a financial program that was tantamount to a declaration of independence from the Confederation. The law provided for an issue of two hundred thousand pounds in paper money. It also set aside revenues sufficient to “fund” (i.e., pay off) the entire state debt as well as that portion of the federal debt represented by Continental Loan Office certificates and notes issued for supplies furnished to the Continental Army. Holders of Continental securities (worth around $2.3 million in all) could exchange them for state securities of equal value, at the same rate of interest. Some fifty thousand