Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [260]
Galvanized by this sea-change in the public mood, Hamilton dashed off a series of newspaper essays called “The Stand,” urging Congress to step up preparations for war, and more or less accusing the Democratic-Republican opposition of cowardice and treason. He soon got a chance to take up sword as well as pen. Washington came out of retirement to head a new fifty-thousand-man Provisional Army and tapped Hamilton for his second in command. Hamilton immediately began preparing a list of “Jacobins” for the army to round up once the shooting started.
Over the next year or so, the demoralized Democratic-Republicans assembled bravely now and then to sing the “Marseillaise.” A liberty pole or two went up in westside neighborhoods that remained strongholds of Democratic-Republicanism and “Gallomania.” From time to time, too, Democratic-Republicans held their own in street brawls with Federalists (during one melee on the Battery somebody even beat up the president’s personal secretary). Every election nonetheless showed the party losing ground at an alarming rate.
Democratic-Republican gloom was lifted somewhat by a spunky young Irish immigrant named John Daly Burk. Expelled from the University of Dublin as a deist and republican, Burk fled to America. He arrived in New York in 1797 and made a modest name for himself with the production of two patriotic, passionately anti-British plays: Bunker Hill and Female Patriotism, or the Death of Joan d’Arc, In June of the following year, probably with the help of Aaron Burr, Burk became part owner and editor of a small weekly paper called the Time Piece and quickly turned it into one of the hottest, most widely read antiadministration papers in the country. Federalists up and down the continent soon demanded something be done to shut him up. The Time Piece, declared Abigail Adams, was a “daring outrage which called for the Arm of Government,” and quotations from Burk’s inflammatory essays helped speed passage of the Sedition Act through Congress.
Burk vigorously defended freedom of the press, winning the admiration of Democratic-Republicans in every state. They admired him all the more when, as head of the New York lodge of the United Irishmen, he repeatedly expressed his hopes for the success of an Irish rebellion against England and for a French invasion of the British Isles. But Burk’s career as a New York journalist proved short-lived. In July 1798, following the appearance of two provocative articles in the Time Piece—one intimating that President Adams had falsified a diplomatic communique, the other that Secretary of State Timothy Pickering was a murderer—Burk was arrested on charges of sedition and libel. Federal district judge Robert Troup, Hamilton’s right-hand man in the city, applauded the arrest as an opportunity to find out “whether we have strength enough to cause the constituted authorities to be respected.”
Prominent New York Democratic-Republicans, led by Aaron Burr and Tammany sachem Peter R. Livingston, stood bail for Burk. He promptly went back to hammering the administration and denouncing the charges against him as an attempt to muzzle the press. Disputes among the owners of the Time Piece caused them to suspend publication in September 1798, however, and, suspecting that the legal odds were stacked against him, Burk now offered to settle out of court. He would voluntarily leave the country, he said, if the government dismissed the case against him. Adams and Pickering agreed. When Burk boarded a ship for France six months later, British secret agents tried to grab him—or so he charged afterward—at which point “some of the best men in America” persuaded him to go instead to Virginia. He lived there under