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By Root 7258 0

the city, scattered broadly through every ward and representing all but the very poorest classes, owned at least one slave. Two-thirds of the merchants kept slaves, mostly for use as domestic servants—cooks, butlers, gardeners, stable hands, and the like. (Females still significantly outnumbered males, constituting 57 percent of the total black population in 1786.) One of every eight artisans held slaves too; numerically, artisans remained the city’s largest group of slaveholders and continued to depend on slave labor for production in workshops, breweries, ropewalks, sail lofts, and shipyards. In the immediate hinterlands of Manhattan, the pervasiveness of slave labor was even more striking. Forty percent of the white households within a ten-mile radius of the city owned slaves—a higher proportion than in the whole of any southern state. In Kings County, still strongly Dutch and still heavily dependent on its servile work force to produce goods for the urban market, blacks comprised one-third of the forty-five hundred residents; in some parts of the county, two of every three white households owned slaves. Only in Westchester, two-thirds of whose slaves disappeared between 1776 and 1783, did it appear that the Revolution had inflicted any lasting damage on the institution of slavery.

19

The Grand Federal Procession

In May 1787 delegates from a narrow majority of the thirteen states met in Philadelphia to identify “defects” in the Articles of Confederation and propose such remedies “as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” To represent New York, the state legislature had chosen Alexander Hamilton and two veteran Clintonians, Robert Yates and John Lansing, declaring that the three would attend “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” But when the Philadelphia Convention got down to work at the end of the month, it became apparent at once that the delegates were ready to draw up a brand-new frame of government for the United States.

Hamilton treated the convention to a remarkable five-hour lecture in which he confessed his admiration for the British system and proposed his own plan for a “completely sovereign” national government, all but eliminating the states and stipulating the election of a president and senate for life. But he realized that such notions “went beyond the ideas of most members,” and at the end of June, bored and irritated, he returned to New York. Yates and Lansing followed in short order, protesting that their instructions didn’t “embrace an idea of such magnitude as to assent to a general constitution.” In their absence, the convention proceeded to draft a federal constitution. Congress (still sitting in New York) officially transmitted the resulting document to the states, ratification by nine of the thirteen being required for it to take effect.

In New York, the proposed government faced an uphill fight. Advocates of ratification, now called Federalists, looked very strong among the wealthiest classes throughout the state and among all segments of the population in the city—thanks in no small part to Hamilton, who finally signed the Constitution as better than “anarchy and Convulsion.” In the rural upriver counties, however, home to the bulk of the state’s population and the heartland of Clintonianism, it was the “Antifederalists” who seemed unassailable.

“WHAT ARE YOU, BOY, FEDERAL OR ANTI-FEDERAL?”

Both sides rehearsed their arguments in a heated newspaper and pamphlet war that began in the summer of 1787 and raged for the better part of a year. Hundreds of essays and pamphlets and broadsides, for as well as against ratification, would be published in the city, and no one, it seemed, could talk of anything else. Apologizing to readers who wanted “NEWS, as well as POLITICS,” Thomas Greenleaf of the New-York Journal explained that “the RAGE of the season is, Hallow, damme, Jack, what are you, boy, FEDERAL or ANTI-FEDERAL?” (There were now half a dozen papers published