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By Root 7445 0

coal, and flour. From the Workingmen’s perspective, licenses sheltered their privileged holders from competition that could lower prices. Regulations and fees indirectly taxed food and drink, as vendors passed on the costs they accrued in obtaining licenses, buying market stalls, paying fines, and bribing corrupt city inspectors. (Grocers, in particular, complained that inspectors had “a long Pocket for themselves.”) The whole system was kept in place, Workies suspected, less for the public’s convenience than to provide the government with revenue, which it could then share out with cronies and patronage recipients.

In an 1830 petition to the City Council, the Workingmen demanded an end to privileged monopolies in the local economy. They called for abolition of market laws and chartered licenses, the sale of all city-owned property in markets, an enhanced reliance on property taxes for revenue, the granting of permission to butchers and hucksters to sell anywhere in the city, the establishment of tax-free country markets (with adjacent taverns) that would entice farmers to the city, and the exemption of market produce from ferry or bridge tolls.

The closely watched trades—some of them well represented in the new party—were ambivalent about deregulation. Butchers, grocers, and tavern keepers were enticed by free enterprise but nervous about it. Some butchers came out for economic freedom: in 1829 one rebel, refusing to rent a market stall, opened New York City’s first private meat shop. But city protection had served butchers well, and most demanded more of it, not less, asking the city to clamp down on unlicensed (and overhead-free) hucksters. Grocers complained of being pestered by inspectors, yet griped that the city didn’t protect them from black, Irish, and female peddlers. Tavern keepers sought the freedom to sell alcohol on Sunday but also wanted authorities to crack down on unlicensed Irish groggeries. Bakers, after wobbling on the issue earlier in the century, had come out definitively against regulation in 1821. Calling themselves the “slave of corporation dictation,” they demanded that buyers and sellers be allowed to bargain freely and that bakers be freed from special responsibility for feeding the poor. The Common Council repealed the assize in 1821, abdicating its authority over prices, but continued to require that bread be sold in standard-weight loaves, to lessen the possibility of fraud.

Cartmen, on the other hand, definitely favored regulation. American-born carters complained to the city fathers that Irish immigrants, who had been licensed during the war while Anglo-Dutchmen were off soldiering, were undercutting established rates and stealing customers. Mayor Colden limited future alien licensing to dirt carting, a field the Irish quickly dominated. When they continued to challenge the Anglo-Americans in other areas, the Society of Cartmen petitioned the Common Council to reaffirm their “ancient privileges.” The municipal government agreed, rejecting calls for the decontrol of carting, as the business and trade of the city depended on it, and in 1826 the council banned aliens from carting, pawnbroking, and hackney-coach driving; soon all licensed trades were closed to them.

One deregulatory demand that nearly all Workingmen supported was abolition of imprisonment for debt. Attacks on the practice, which the Humane Society had begun making in the 1790s, had accelerated in New York just after the war, winning passage of an 1817 law ending incarceration for debtors owing less than twenty-five dollars. In 1828, nevertheless, more than a thousand defaulters served time in city jail, without bed, fuel, or food, other than a quart of soup every twenty-four hours. Most debtors, to be sure, spent only brief periods in actual custody, as “gaol limits” had been extended to the lower wards of the city. The Workingmen’s first demand was only that these prison boundaries be extended to the whole city, because most of those affected by the law lived and worked in the upper wards. By 1830, however, they (along with