Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [225]
Clinton’s program dismayed Hamilton and his circle. For years moderate and conservative Whigs had urged federal assumption of all Revolutionary War debts on the theory that the surest way to strengthen the Confederation government was to get the resources and influence of the public creditors behind it. Now, at least in George Clinton’s New York, public creditors would be harnessed to the state government instead, and the idea of a stronger Confederation seemed suddenly more remote than ever. The city’s working people had their own reasons for repudiating the governor’s policy. His veiled threats of secession from the rest of the country were an affront to people who had for twenty years advocated both republicanism and national union.
In the 1785 Assembly elections, accordingly, conservative and moderate Whigs ran well ahead of the field, capturing the votes not only of former Tories but of many working people as well. Isaac Sears received the fewest votes of any winner, and only two mechanics were elected, shoemaker William Goforth and smith Robert Boyd, neither strongly identified with the radicals. Only James Duane’s defeat by Thomas Tredwell in a race for the state senate could have been construed as a radical victory. The Mechanics Committee, recently reorganized as the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, played a key role in swinging public opinion against radical candidates. It endorsed three conservative merchants known for their close ties to Hamilton: Robert Troup, William Duer, and Evert Bancker.
During the summer and fall of 1785, city newspapers were full of talk that merchants and artisans had begun to realize that each had an interest in the prosperity of the other. Popular hostility to Clinton mushroomed the following year, when the city stumbled into a mini-recession that was widely blamed on the governor’s paper-money and funding bills. Caught short by a sudden rise in the price of depreciated public securities, a number of prominent investors went under, dragging their creditors down too. Others dumped huge quantities of imported goods on the market to raise cash, driving down prices and, briefly, causing a spasm of unemployment in the city’s laboring population. Although timely loans from the Bank of New York saved a few of the better-connected casualties, among them the Sands brothers, petitions for bankruptcy inundated the legislature.
The almshouse, built to hold no more than four hundred people, became so overcrowded during the summer and fall of 1786 that the city government ran out of funds for public assistance and had to borrow nine hundred pounds from the bank. New commissioners of poor relief appointed by the City Council (which had only the year before scrapped the old system of elected vestrymen) struggled to rid the town of nonresident paupers. So many debtors were languishing in jail by the beginning of 1787 that a Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors was organized to provide them with bread, wood, clothing, and other essentials.
Against this background, Hamilton’s conservative alliance swept into power. Richard Varick, Nicholas Bayard, and Hamilton himself won seats in the Assembly in 1786 (this was the only elective office Hamilton would ever hold). Nicholas Bayard, Richard Harison, Comfort Sands, and Richard Varick followed suit in 1787 along with two former Tories, Gulian Verplanck and Nicholas Low. That year’s local elections confirmed that Clinton and the radicals had lost their grip on the city and its environs. Former Tories were voting openly throughout the region, and in Queens nearly one-fourth of the successful candidates had supported the crown during the Revolution.
THE RADICAL RETREAT
Though Governor Clinton won reelection in 1786—no conservative was even willing to run against him—the radicals were already too weak to prevent the reversal of nearly the entire body of anti-Tory laws for which they had been responsible