Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [281]
Beneath this apparent stability, however, lay an ongoing metamorphosis in the city’s relationship to the state. In colonial days, all council actions had to be approved by the governor, who could veto them at will. Now there was much more give and take. The city often asked the state legislature—the acknowledged font of sovereign authority—for explicit grants of power to undertake actions not authorized under the Montgomerie Charter. Almost always the legislators approved these ad hoc requests for specific delegations of authority to raise money or undertake particular public projects. At other times, however, the legislature intervened in municipal affairs on its own initiative, overriding the city on matters that were clearly within its competence under the charter. The state was particularly active where patronage was concerned, and the first decades after independence witnessed a considerable transfer of appointing power from the mayor and Common Council to the statewide Council of Appointment (which appointed the mayor).
By increments, without anyone expressly intending it to happen, the corporation gradually came to be recognized as primarily an agent of the state, with its “private” personality, so jealously guarded by earlier generations, remembered, if at all, as a relic of the rapidly receding colonial past. New York City did not, however, become a puppet of New York State: politically, the municipality remained active in shaping its own destiny, with the state acting in tandem rather than in opposition to its initiatives.
As the city-state association grew ever closer, the two governing bodies drew physically farther apart. Before 1796 the state Legislature and Common Council often cohabited in the Broad Street Exchange. In January 1797 however the state government moved north to Albany. A variety of reasons were advanced for the change of venue: epidemics, threats of war, the high cost of living, and proximity to the state’s developing hinterland. Also a factor was the already well advanced rivalry between upstate and downstate interests. Perhaps not coincidentally, the decision to relocate came shortly after John Jay became the first Manhattanite in state history to win the governorship.
Whether together or at opposite ends of the Hudson River, however, the two jurisdictions agreed in continuing many colonial-era mercantilist policies in the new republican world. While the state relinquished control of customs-related matters to the national government—after 1789 the Port of New York’s collector, gaugers, weighmasters, land and tide waiters, surveyors, and searchers became federal officers—it was the Council of Appointment that chose the seaport’s harbormasters, wardens, and pilots.
The state also took control of monitoring exports, even though its charter specifically authorized the corporation to do so. The state gave the Council of Appointment the right to name the surveyors and packers of bread, flour, beef, and other inspectors of commodities being shipped out from the port, and a series of laws between 1785 and 1799 laid down elaborate specifications regarding the quality and packing of flour and meal and the dressing, grading, branding, casking, and storing of beef and pork. Staves, lumber, flaxseed, pot and pearl ashes, butter and lard—all were examined and certified by state inspectors.
When it came to examining products brought to the city for local consumption, an army of municipal measurers, weighmasters, gaugers, and inspectors took over. Stationed at markets, slips, and wharves, they measured, weighed, gauged, and inspected timber, planks, grain, salt, hay, lime, charcoal, coal, hemp, flax, hides, anchors, and cables—for a fee, half paid by the buyer, half by the seller. By 1800 there were at least sixty-four public measurers, five weighmasters, four weighers of hay, twenty-two inspectors of hay, two gaugers of liquor,