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Livingston defeated Watts by a margin of eighteen hundred to sixteen hundred—an upset that not only gave local Democratic-Republicans a voice in Congress but demonstrated the party’s increasing strength among the city’s middling and lower classes. Beau Ned did exceptionally well, it was noted, in the uptown wards that were home to the same working people who had so recently trooped out to work on the Governors Island fortifications. Once again, it was the Democratic Society that got them to the polls.

BROKEN HEADS

In an effort to avoid another conflict with the former mother country, President Washington dispatched Chief Justice John Jay to Britain to negotiate. It wasn’t a popular mission in Jay’s hometown. When he left for England in May 1794, only a couple of hundred well-wishers came to see him off. The militia, many of whose members belonged to the Democratic society, flatly refused to parade. As Jay’s ship weighed anchor, Governor Clinton, Chancellor Livingston, and the French consul stood together on the deck of a nearby French man-of-war, loudly singing French revolutionary anthems.

Democratic-Republicans worried because Jay, like other New York Federalists of his class, was an acknowledged Anglophile. Indeed, when Jay arrived in England and found his counterparts in a conciliatory mood, he quickly came to terms. By November 1794 Britain had agreed to evacuate the frontier forts, open British ports in the West Indies to American vessels, and submit disputed pre-Revolutionary debts to joint commissions.

But the United States paid a stiff price for these concessions. Jay tacitly abandoned the principle of freedom of the seas. He consented to give Britain most-favored-nation status in its trade with the United States. He promised that foreign (i.e., French) privateers would not be allowed to operate out of United States ports. He accepted a commercial accord in which American ships not exceeding seventy tons burden would be allowed to enter the British West Indies—providing the United States renounced the international carrying trade in cotton, sugar, and molasses. On the impressment of American seamen and compensation for slaves carried off during the war—two issues that had poisoned Anglo-American relations for years—Jay’s treaty said nothing.

In the uproar that followed, Jay and his party were very nearly destroyed. While still in England, and before his treaty’s terms were made known, Jay had been elected governor after George Clinton declined to stand for a seventh term. Soon after Jay returned at the end of May 1795, the U.S. Senate, after weeks of intense secret debate, narrowly ratified the treaty, except for the article limiting American trade with the West Indies. By July 1, when Jay was sworn in as governor, critics had begun a furious campaign in New York and elsewhere to dissuade President Washington from signing the pact. This opposition was bolstered by a new British crackdown on neutral vessels carrying provisions to France. Twenty-seven ships owned by New Yorkers were seized in the course of the summer, more even than in the 1793-94 crisis.

It was in this context that, in mid-July 1795, New York’s Democratic-Republicans scheduled a Saturday noon “Town Meeting” to express their “detestation” of the Jay Treaty. “Our demagogues always fix their meetings at the hour of twelve,” scowled one Federalist, “in order to take in all the Mechanics & Labourers—over whom they alone have influence and who in public meetings have a great advantage as they are not afraid of a black eye or broken head.”

It was by all reports the greatest such assemblage in twenty years and reminded everyone of the tumultuous popular rallies of the 1770s—except, that is, for the French tricolor flying alongside the American flag on the balcony of City Hall and the presence of numerous radical emigres and political fugitives from Ireland and Scotland, overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Democratic-Republicans. Grant Thorburn, an immigrant Scottish artisan whose