Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [234]
When the votes were tallied at the end of April, Antifederalists came out well ahead statewide. Queens went Antifederalist by a five-to-four margin. Kings, Richmond, and Westchester came in solidly Federalist. Manhattan produced a Federalist landslide: all told, 2,836 men went to the polls there—the highest turnout thus far in the city’s history—and John Jay paced the Federalists with 2,735 votes, an impressive 96 percent of the total. Nicholas Low, who trailed the ticket, got 2,651. Governor Clinton received a paltry 134 votes, and Marinus Willett and William Denning garnered just 108 and 102 votes, respectively. Willett, chastened, was said to be coming round to the view that the Constitution “might be right—since it appears to be the sense of a vast majority.”
The convention thus promised a face-off between rural and urban forces, and between delegates whose backgrounds differed in other ways as well. Federalists were predominantly merchants, lawyers, former officers in the Continental Army, Anglicans, socially prominent, well-off, and college educated; most had had experience in high public office. Antifederalists were mostly older than their counterparts and had entered politics later in life. They were the “new men” associated with Governor George Clinton: farmers, rising entrepreneurs, sometime militia officers, Presbyterians, self-educated, self-made, radical Whig in outlook, and utterly lacking the social connections and graces that had been essential to political advancement before the Revolution.
On Saturday, June 14, 1788, while crowds cheered and cannon boomed, New York’s delegates to the ratifying convention boarded Hudson River sloops for the village of Poughkeepsie, seventy-five miles upriver. Governor Clinton and his party left later the same day, almost unnoticed. When the convention got underway in the village courthouse the following Tuesday, however, Clinton had a happier time of it. The Antifederalist majority, obviously in control, settled him in the chair and had two staunch opponents of the Constitution appointed secretaries.
The outnumbered Federalists weren’t without resources, even so. Alexander Hamilton, Robert R. Livingston, and John Jay were three of the foremost orators in the nation. Of them one observer remarked: “Hn’s harangues combine the poignancy of vinegar with the smoothness of oil: his manner wins attention; his matter proselytes the judgment. . . . L pours a stream of eloquence deep as the Ganges. . . . Mr. Jy’s reasoning is weighty as gold, polished as silver, and strong as steel.” Melancton Smith readily admitted that the Federalists had all the “advantages of Abilities and habit of public speaking.”
Time was now on the Federalists’ side too. Eight states had already ratified the Constitution, and conventions in two more, New Hampshire and Virginia, were in session. Ratification by either one would be sufficient to dissolve the old Confederation and launch the new federal union. All the Federalists in New York had to do was keep the opposition from bringing the issue to an early vote. They thus scored an important tactical victory of their own on the opening day when the convention agreed to discuss the Constitution clause by clause before deciding whether to ratify.
Six days later, on June 25, express riders reached New York City and Poughkeepsie with word that New Hampshire had ratified. In Poughkeepsie the Antifederalists insisted that the news didn’t upset their calculations—without Virginia, they reminded everyone, federal union remained highly problematic—but Virginia, it soon turned out, had ratified that very day. The news got to New York City at three o’clock in the morning of July 2. Bells began to peal and continued until dawn, when ten twenty-fourpounders fired