Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [258]
Early in March, in an uncanny reenactment of Alexander McDougall’s experience twenty-five years before, the Assembly summoned Keteltas to explain himself. He showed up with two thousand supporters, admitted authorship of the offending newspaper articles, and refused to apologize (amid loud “clappings and shoutings”). When the Assembly then sentenced him to jail for “a breach of the privileges” of the house, the crowd hoisted him into a “handsome arm chair” and carried him off to the Bridewell, chanting, “THE SPIRIT OF SEVENTY-SIX! THE SPIRIT OF SEVENTY-SIX” After Keteltas got out a month later on a writ of habeas corpus, another crowd pulled him through the streets in a phaeton decked out with French and American flags, a liberty cap, and a large picture of a man being whipped, above which was the inscription “What, you rascal, insult your superiors?”
The Keteltas affair helped siphon away more of the Federalists’ popular constituency. A record four thousand residents of the city went to the polls in the spring 1796 legislative elections, and while the Democratic-Republicans failed to capture any of New York’s twelve Assembly seats, they pulled five hundred votes more than the year before. More important, two-thirds of the Democratic-Republican voters were men of little or no property, many of them the immigrants whose numbers had grown markedly in recent years. Six months later, in the September Common Council elections, two Democratic-Republican candidates, including a leader of the Democratic Society, won by substantial majorities.
New York’s Federalists fumbled the 1796 congressional and presidential elections too. Beau Ned Livingston easily beat back a Federalist attempt to capture New York City’s congressional seat, not only solidifying Democratic-Republican control of the wards “chiefly inhabited by the middling and poorer classes of the people” but mobilizing hundreds of new voters as well.
Washington’s decision not to seek a third term set off a scramble in both parties for acceptable candidates. Democratic-Republicans united around Thomas Jefferson but had trouble agreeing on a vice-presidential nominee. Aaron Burr was the front-runner. Many Democratic-Republicans didn’t trust him, however: too young, too pushy, too devious, they said. Some knew that Burr’s notorious love of fine clothes, luxurious household furnishings, expensive wines, fancy carriages, and big houses was driving him further and further into debt. Characteristically, when he acquired the lease for Richmond Hill, the estate in Greenwich built years before by Abraham Mortier, he borrowed huge sums—from friends, from family, from law clients—to refurbish it in the opulent style with which he wished to be identified; General John Lamb alone signed more than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of Burr’s notes, a gesture he came to regret many times over. Burr even dammed Minetta Creek to create a grand ornamental pool by the main gate (approximately the present junction of Spring Street, MacDougal Street, and Sixth Avenue).
The Federalists’ problem was their standard-bearer, John Adams. Because Adams had never quite approved of Hamilton’s financial program—he once described banking as “downright corruption”—Hamilton and a corps of New York Federalists labored behind the scenes to have a narrow majority of electoral ballots cast for Thomas Pinckney, a former U.S. envoy to the Court of St. James. Adams won anyway, leaving a residue of bitterness that would in time help destroy the party. Worse yet (owing to the fact that electors didn’t yet distinguish between presidential and vice-presidential candidates) Jefferson trailed Adams by only three votes and was therefore elected vicepresident. Nationwide, the Democratic-Republicans’ organizational sophistication, their mastery of electoral politics, and the mass appeal of their democratic credo had never been more obvious. Locally, their strength was underlined in the 1797 elections, when for the first time Democratic-Republicans