Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [252]
Under the spur of revolutionary events abroad, however, Tammany became increasingly involved in local politics. New York’s laboring population was showing signs of restlessness with Hamilton and the Federalists. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, irate because it had failed to pry a charter of incorporation out of the legislature, had run its own ticket in the 1791 elections, four of its nominees capturing seats in the Assembly. Artisans grew even more disaffected—and drew closer to the rival Clintonians—during the national furor over the Federalist financial program. Though Hamilton’s handiwork remained more popular in New York than elsewhere in the country, its less savory consequences—rampant speculation in public stocks, followed by the unnerving Panic of 1792—raised troubling questions about privilege, greed, corruption, and other antirepublican tendencies in Washington’s administration. The General Society, increasingly vocal on this point, warned city residents against an “overgrown monied importance” and “the baneful growth of aristocratic weeds among us.” Philip Freneau, poet-editor of the antiadministration Daily Advertiser, complained in verse that “some have grown prodigious fat / And some prodigious lean!”
The Tammany Society celebrating the Fourth of July, 1812, by William Chappel. Line of march up Park Row, with the Brick Presbyterian church in the rear and Tammany headquarters on the left. This was one of the last occasions on which the braves and sachems appeared in their original Indian costumes. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Governor George Clinton, joined by the disaffected Livingston clan, had meanwhile opened lines of communication with Madison and Jefferson. The two Virginians came up for a tour of the state in 1791, saying they intended only to “botanize.” Yet there was enough political talk thrown in along the way to justify the later belief that their trip founded the Virginia-New York axis of a new national opposition party.
The 1792 gubernatorial elections confirmed that the Federalist chokehold on New York was weakening. Clinton survived a tough contest with John Jay to capture his sixth three-year term, drawing 603 votes in the city to Jay’s 739—a substantial broadening of support for the governor, who had received only a hundred or so votes in the city as an Antifederalist candidate for the Poughkeepsie convention.
The spirit of opposition ripened during 1793 as the tempo of the French Revolution quickened. Mechanics, laborers, and some smaller merchants began to believe that international republicanism was in mortal danger—here from the machinations of Tory-loving “moneyed-men” like Hamilton and Duer, there from the armies of reactionary despots, and on both sides of the Atlantic from the malevolent influence of British agents, British arms, and British gold. Did not American neutrality at such a moment smack of political heresy and betrayal?
New York Federalists, on the other hand, shocked by the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of the radical Jacobins, concluded that the revolution had gone off the rails. The upheaval in France was being “conducted with so much barbarity & ignorance,” said Rufus King, that sensible people could no longer countenance it. American neutrality was more imperative than ever, Federalists argued, and the Chamber of Commerce, a Federalist stronghold garrisoned by the city’s principal merchants, reiterated that American involvement in the war would mean economic disaster.
While remaining officially nonpartisan, the Tammany Society began to mobilize popular support for the French Republic. Tammany braves and their friends greeted every scrap of good news from France with noisy parades and raucous banquets. After its Anniversary Day festivities in May 1793, four hundred participants trained through the streets in red liberty caps. When the French warship L’Embuscade (Ambush)