Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [254]
Resolutely pro-French, the Democratic Society clamored for war with Britain. Throughout the spring and summer of 1794 New York churned with rallies, demonstrations, and marches. When French forces recaptured Toulon, the Democratic Society organized eight hundred working people to parade through town in liberty caps, arm-in-arm with French officers, as thousands of cheering onlookers lined the sidewalks. At Corre’s Tavern the celebrants downed toasts to the armies and fleets of France (nine cheers) and to the destruction of Britain’s “venal and corrupt” government (nine cheers). That evening, republicans and Frenchmen gathered at the Tontine Coffee House to sing the “Marseillaise” and dance the carmagnole. The Tammany Museum exhibited a guillotine, complete “with a wax figure perfectly representing a man beheaded!”
New York’s Federalists were horrified, all the more so when residents of the city, anticipating a British attack, decided to build fortifications on Governors Island. Every morning for nearly a month, drums beating and banners flying, shipwrights, cordwainers, journeymen, tallow chandlers, sailmakers, and Columbia College students trooped down to the Battery, where boats waited to carry them over to the island. “To-day,” wrote an amazed English visitor, “the whole trade of carpenters and joiners; yesterday, the body of masons; before this, the grocers, school-masters, coopers, and barbers.” Never, however, was the demise of the merchant-mechanic alliance more apparent than at the city polling places, where a fledgling “Democratic-Republican party”—a confederation of Clintonians, Livingstons, and popular societies—whittled down big Federalist majorities with organization, discipline, and conscious appeals to the interests and sentiments of workingmen.
New York’s Democratic-Republicans didn’t invent their electioneering practices out of whole cloth. The genealogy of such tactics reached back through the ratification struggle of 1787-88 to the pre-Revolutionary committees, perhaps as far back as the Morrisite “party of the people” in the 1730s or even the Leislerian movement in the 1690s. Nor had political parties or “factions” suddenly acquired legitimacy: their presence continued to be widely regarded as prima facie evidence of corruption and conspiracy. But in the furious press of events, actions ran far ahead of ideas. Federalist foreign and domestic policies had united disparate opposition forces and prompted them to seek power, in concert, by means not yet considered entirely right or proper. Unlike any of their predecessors, moreover, the Democratic-Republicans of New York had already begun to establish close working relations with similar parties emerging in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere around the country—not yet a national party in the modern sense, but close.
In the spring 1794 legislative elections, thanks in great part to exertions by the Democratic Society, the Democratic-Republican ticket ran extremely well among small masters, tradesmen, mechanics, and apprentices, especially in the city’s poorer wards. It wasn’t enough to win, but it set the stage for the December congressional elections, in which Edward “Beau Ned” Livingston challenged the Federalist incumbent John Watts for the privilege of representing New York City. This was a race, said one excited Democratic-Republican, between “friends and enemies to the French or the swinish multitude and the better sort” (on the theory that Beau Ned,