Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [227]
Big buyers, in fact, had an edge. State law gave preference in the purchase of confiscated estates to holders of soldiers’ pay certificates and allowed purchasers to pay for land with state securities. Speculators had been purchasing both kinds of government obligations at fire-sale prices from the original holders—who either needed cash or didn’t believe that the government would ever make good on its promise to pay off, or both. The gamble was that if the government did redeem the certificates and securities at or near par (face value), the current holders would pocket a very considerable profit. This so-called stockjobbing—buying and selling government notes to make money—had a very unsavory reputation. Nonetheless, by the mid-1780s millions of dollars’ worth of depreciated securities had already been engrossed by a handful of New York’s leading merchants and financiers.
Confiscated-estate sales gave the speculators a splendid opportunity to convert still-doubtful paper into solid land, overwhelming smaller buyers as they did so. Many then subdivided their new tracts for profitable resale, thus sustaining secondary speculation in forfeited Tory property well into the next decade. The legislature did little to deter any of this, since a number of radical as well as conservative Whigs were deeply implicated in the game. Indeed, Sears made such a poor showing in the 1784 Assembly elections partly because of revelations that he, Marinus Willett, John Lamb, John Morin Scott, and other sometime Sons of Liberty were using depreciated veterans’ pay certificates to speculate in confiscated Tory estates. In his two Phocion letters, Hamilton had warned the city’s mechanics that their heros had feet of clay. Who could deny it now?
ORDER OUT OF CONFUSION
Four or five years after Evacuation Day, radical and conservative Whigs had come to agreement on a number of fundamental political and social questions. This “Revolution Settlement,” to borrow a term from British history a century earlier, was unplanned, informal, tacit, unenforceable, and extremely fragile. It was nonetheless real, and its effect, as James Hardie would later recall in his Description of New York (1827), was that “the British had scarcely left our city, when order seemed to arise out of confusion.”
Key elements of New York’s Revolution Settlement read like an obituary for the radical resurgence of 1783-84. By 1786 or 1787 it was accepted on all sides that the rule of self-appointed committees should give way to the rule of law, that there were to be no further confiscatory assaults on private property, that former Tories should be admitted to the full privileges of citizenship, and that vital institutions—the municipal corporation itself, Columbia College, Trinity Church—would remain in the hands of the propertied classes.
Conservative Whigs knew, however, that the radical insurgency had been blunted, not defeated, and that the base lines of public discourse in the city would have to change. To avoid the taint of royalism, they could no longer dispute such principles as natural rights, government by consent of the governed, and popular sovereignty. Never again could they advocate religious establishments as essential for the preservation of order and property, and they raised no objection when the state legislature adopted a succession of laws between 1782 and 1787 that repealed primogeniture and entail, provided for the commutation of quitrents, and abolished all feudal obligations and tenures in the state—gutting, that is, the legal infrastructure set up in the wake of the 1664 conquest and Leisler’s Rebellion. They squirmed but didn’t resist when the legislature divided every county into townships, further weakening the power of the great upriver manor lords. They likewise accepted the fact that the legislature would henceforth determine the powers and privileges of banks, colleges, benevolent societies, and other chartered corporations. Even former Tories understood that from