Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [236]
Towering over every other display was the “Federal Ship Hamilton” in the Seventh Division. A scaled-down thirty-two-gun frigate, twenty-seven feet in length, it rumbled along behind a team of ten horses “with flowing sheets, and full sails .. . the canvass waves dashing against her sides, the wheels of the carriage concealed.” A “federal ship” had figured in similar processions elsewhere, but none honored a specific individual. Its preeminent role in the New York proceedings was dramatic testimony to Hamilton’s effectiveness in linking adoption of the Constitution to the city’s economic well-being. As the nearby banner of the Ship Joiners proclaimed: “This Federal Ship Will Our Commerce Revive / And Merchants and Shipwrights and Joiners Will Thrive.” There was even talk that day of renaming the city “Hamiltoniana” in his honor.
The marchers headed down Broadway to Great Dock Street, where the Hamilton exchanged salutes with a Spanish packet, then swung over to Hanover Square and moved through Queen, Chatham, and Arundel streets to Bayard’s Tavern on Bullock Street. The Committee of Arrangements, members of Congress, and “the Gentlemen on Horseback” reviewed the marchers outside the tavern, and the Hamilton changed pilots to guide it from the “Old Constitution” to the new. More cannon were fired. Everyone then sat down to a banquet at tables set up around a canvas pavilion designed by a French architect, Major Charles Pierre L’Enfant. After a feast of roast ham, bullock, and mutton, the day-long festivities concluded with a toast to “the Convention of the State of New York; may they soon add an eleventh pillar to the Federal Edifice.”
Artisans dominated the first eight “divisions” in the line of march, followed by lawyers, merchants, and clergy—testimony not only to the depth of support for the Constitution among working people, but also to the importance of the organized trades in the public life of the city after Independence. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Antifederalists scoffed and sneered, but the Grand Federal Procession was an event of almost transcendent significance in New York’s post-Revolutionary history. Nominally, it dramatized the breadth of local support for the Constitution and, by implication, the city’s determination not to be left out of the new federal union. No less important, arguably even more so, the massed presence of the trades also gave tangible expression to the organized artisanal presence that was already altering the course of municipal affairs. After two decades of upheaval and war, New York’s numerous mechanics had come to see themselves as equal citizens, actively engaged in the life of the community. Their best qualities—their respect for labor, their selfless interdependence, their usefulness to society, their unflinching patriotism—were the very essence of republican virtue.
Up in Poughkeepsie, the Antifederalists had already decided to surrender. That morning, even as the marchers were moving out of the Fields, Samuel Jones, the Queens Antifederalist, made a motion to ratify the Constitution “in full confidence” that a bill of rights would be forthcoming. Melancton Smith supported the motion, explaining that he feared the consequences if New York spurned the Union—“Convulsions in the Southern part, factions and discord in the rest.” Jones’s motion passed. The Federalists, in turn, accepted thirty-two “recommendatory” and twenty-three “explanatory” amendments to the Constitution and agreed to urge a second convention to consider them. A final vote next day produced a margin of thirty to