Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [253]
Later that same month, a British frigate, the Boston, hove into port. Her crew fell to brawling with the crew of L’Embuscade and the pro-French regulars of waterfront grogshops. At one point, a large party of French sailors and sympathetic residents marched down to Bowling Green, where they dug up and demolished fragments of the statue of George III torn down some seventeen years earlier. The captain of the Boston then challenged his French counterpart to a naval duel. On August 1 both ships dropped down to positions off Sandy Hook, trailed by nine boatloads of excited spectators from the city. To their immense satisfaction, L’Embuscade claimed the victory after a fierce two-hour exchange of cannon fire and was escorted back to Manhattan by the French fleet, fifteen ships of the line that miraculously sailed into view just as the smoke was clearing. Thousands of cheering residents converged on the Battery to greet the French. Women collected old linen to make bandages for injured French sailors, and in an emotional ceremony, L’Embuscade’s colors were presented to the Tammany Society as a token of republican fraternalism.
Republican fraternalism had its limits, though. Only days later, Edmond Genet, the French ambassador, arrived on the scene, cockily predicting that New York would give him a hero’s welcome. “The whole city will fall before me!” he crowed. The problem was that “Citizen” Genet had repeatedly thumbed his nose at Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality by commissioning American privateers to prey on British and Spanish commerce in the West Indies. This undiplomatic behavior caused a furor around the country, and the cabinet had just voted to ask the French government to bring him home; even Secretary of State Jefferson admitted that Genet had become a political liability. His reception in the city was thus chillier than he had bargained on. White Matlack of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen escorted him to a banquet at the Tontine Coffee House, and over the next few months he dined with various opposition leaders—mostly, it was said, because he had tens of thousands of dollars to spend on refitting the French fleet. (Recalled by the Jacobin regime in early 1794, Genêt applied for asylum, took an oath of allegiance to the United States, and retired to a farm near Jamaica on Long Island. He later married Governor Clinton’s daughter, Cornelia, and settled down to dabble unsuccessfully in business and tinker with steam-propelled balloons and other mechanical gadgets.)
The French warship L’Embuscade off the Battery in 1798, drawn by John Drayton. Washington Irving said the flagstaff on the right looked like a giant butter chum, and the “churn” was a local landmark for years. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
THE DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICANS
Genêt notwithstanding, the French Revolution still commanded a broad following in New York. In mid-January 1794 boisterous celebrations erupted again over reports (subsequently proved false) that the French had captured the Duke of York. The “lower class of citizens,” Peter Livingston noted with satisfaction, still loved the French so much that they were “almost to a Man . . . Frenchmen.”
Consistent with Livingston’s judgment was the success of a new organization, the Democratic Society. One of forty similarly named groups around the United States—at least some of which seem to have been founded with Genet’s assistance—the New York Democratic Society made its debut in early February 1794, vowing “to