Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [226]
Tories not banished by name were restored to full citizenship in 1786, and the act disqualifying them from the practice of law was repealed. In 1787, led by Hamilton and Varick (now speaker), Assembly conservatives easily beat back an attempt to deny seats to a number of former Tories. They then removed all election laws denying Tories the vote and methodically revoked the Trespass Act, the Citation Act, and, early in 1788, all other statutes inconsistent with the Treaty of Paris. In 1792 the legislature would decide to allow even banished Tories to return, providing only that they recognized the state’s tide to confiscated property, including slaves.
Radical threats against Trinity Church and Columbia College were repelled as well. One of Hamilton’s law clerks dug up a long-lost deed that rescued Trinity’s Manhattan real estate from confiscation, and shortly thereafter the relieved vestry began construction on a new church building. The college was saved when Duane, Jay, and Hamilton convinced the legislature to let Columbia elect its own board of governors, leaving it within the state university yet well insulated from meddlesome radicals. The new board promptly offered the job of president to William Samuel Johnson, the Tory son of William Johnson, first president of King’s College.1
ESTATE SALES
Perhaps the most telling sign of the ebbing of anti-Tory radicalism came in 1788, when the state commissioners of forfeiture closed their books on the formerly occupied counties. Over the previous five years they had confiscated, broken up, and sold off the estates of more than two dozen prominent Tories in the New York area, including James De Lancey, Oliver De Lancey, William Bayard, Roger Morris, John Watts, Frederick Philipse, and Isaac Low. Their combined losses exceeded $1.2 million (claims for compensation they filed with the British government put the total closer to $10 million).
Yet given contemporary assertions that Tories owned two-thirds of the property in the city, this was a far cry from the leveling frenzy initially feared by moderate and conservative Whigs. Statewide, some 70 percent of all confiscations had occurred in Albany and Tryon counties. New York, Kings, and Queens counties together represented a mere 2 percent of the total, and the estates of some very conspicuous Tories survived more or less intact.
Nor had there been a serious shift in the class composition of landownership in the city. While some tradesmen and shopkeepers had purchased parts of confiscated estates, a substantial majority of buyers were well-to-do Whig lawyers, merchants, and established landowners. Nearly two hundred individuals acquired pieces of James De Lancey’s holdings on the east side of Manhattan. Yet fully half of the total sales can be attributed to no more than fifteen or so buyers, including William and James Beekman, four members of the Livingston clan, merchants John Delafield, Dominick Lynch, and John Delameter, and sugar refiner Isaac Roosevelt. Many of De Lancey’s former tenants, unable to compete against these high bidders, promptly found themselves thrown off land they had occupied for years, with no compensation for the often extensive improvements they had made at their own expense.2
It was much the same story in neighboring counties. In Kings, Colonel Aquila Giles, Esq., snared all of William Axtell’s Flatbush estate. The bulk of John Rapalje’s estate, the largest in Brooklyn, went to ex-Tories Comfort and Joshua Sands. In Queens, property belonging to the Ludlow and Golden families went to no more than a dozen purchasers. The Manor of Bentley, Christopher Billopp’s Staten Island estate, went to a single purchaser. North of the city there was a more democratic redistribution of confiscated Tory property, and many tenants of Frederick