Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [256]
Alexander Hamilton was there too, surrounded by a small contingent of Federalists, who “looked on the multitude like affectionate parents beholding with sorrow the frantic tricks of their erring children.” Hamilton began to speak, Thorburn said, and although “his clear, full voice sounded like music over the heads of the rabble,” he was shouted down and pelted with stones. A large body of demonstrators, led by Peter R. Livingston, newly elected grand sachem of the Tammany Society, then marched off to Bowling Green, where they burned a copy of the treaty.
Later that day a group of Revolutionary War veterans paraded with French and American flags and burned a picture of Jay “holding a balance containing American independence and British gold, the latter predominating.” Hamilton, still full of fight, quarreled on the street with Commodore James Nicholson, head of the Democratic Society and honorary captain of the Federal Ship Hamilton in 1788. Nicholson accused his former ally of being “an abetter of Tories” and used “other harsh expressions.” Hamilton promptly challenged Nicholson to a duel, and Nicholson accepted. Moments later Hamilton had a second confrontation with prominent opponents of the treaty, shouting that he would “fight the whole party one by one . . . the whole detestable faction.” The former secretary of the treasury had become a mere “street Bully,” sneered Beau Ned Livingston.
The following Monday saw another and bigger crowd, perhaps as many as seven thousand people, return to City Hall and adopt a package of resolutions denouncing the Jay Treaty. As for Hamilton and Nicholson, their seconds worked out a face-saving settlement. Hamilton had nonetheless become so worried about the safety of his friends and himself in New York that he asked the federal government to station troops on Governors Island—a striking reversal of fortune for the man who eight years earlier had been the hero of New York’s working people.
Washington assented to the treaty in August, but despite his tremendous prestige, it continued to create controversy. In the city’s volatile, superheated atmosphere it became more and more difficult for organizations like the Tammany Society to maintain even an official political neutrality. Over the winter of 1794—95 Tammany Federalists pressed the membership to endorse President Washington’s criticism of “self-created” societies in the United States—above all the Democratic Societies, which Washington held responsible for the recent Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania. When Tammany Democratic-Republicans, many of whom belonged to the New York Democratic Society, refused, the Federalists pulled out en masse. By spring Tammany allied itself openly with the new Democratic-Republican party, which now began to use “Tammanial Hall”—the Long Room of Abraham (Bram) Martling’s Tavern on Chatham Street (now Park Row)—as a kind of campaign headquarters on election day.
“Gallomania” also gripped the Democratic-Republican wing of fashionable society. Ladies and gentlemen with advanced principles as well as advanced means acquired a taste for French expressions, French food, French waltzes, French opera, French books, and French mattresses. Fancy boardinghouses became pensions françaises; upscale taverns became “restaurants” and began serving dinner at three in the afternoon, in the French manner, instead of noon. Well-to-do Democratic-Republican wives adopted low-cut gowns and gauzed coifs a lafranfaise, spurning the buckram and brocades still favored by Federalist matrons. Similarly, their husbands rejected powdered wigs, knee britches, and shoe buckles as insignia of the