Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [88]
While he waited for this grisly sentence to be approved back in London, Sloughter ordered elections for a new Common Council and provincial assembly. Both bodies began at once to apply pressure on the city’s working people and its large Dutch population, the two overlapping groups that had formed the mass base of the insurgency. The council imposed a licensing requirement on cartmen, made it more difficult to obtain the privileges of freemanship, and drew up the first municipal ordinances specifically regulating apprenticeship. The Assembly facilitated the suppression of future dissent with legislation providing that anyone who disturbed “the peace good and quiet of this their Majestyes Government” would be guilty of high treason. It also allocated public funds to compensate individuals for losses sustained during Leisler’s regime and encouraged punitively large private damage suits against dozens of leading Leislerians.
The Assembly’s most important thrust against the Leislerians, however, came in the form of the Judiciary Act of 1691. Designed to anglicize New York’s legal system once and for all, the Judiciary Act set up a centralized Supreme Court of Judicature, erased the remaining traces of Roman-Dutch law in the colony, and instituted a new, uniform legal system based on the English common law. (That this was the Assembly’s work underscores its vindictiveness: English courts traditionally derived their authority from the crown, not legislatures.) The act also empowered county sheriffs and justices of the peace to prosecute “moral” as well as civil and criminal offenses—a de facto license to homogenize local custom and culture. Under English law “moral offenses” were a matter for church courts. No such courts existed in New York, and by shifting their responsibilities to county justices and sheriffs, the Assembly made those officials more powerful than their English counterparts.
In response to public appeals for clemency and to a Huguenot riot on Staten Island, Sloughter paroled all the condemned rebels except Leisler and Milborne (who was now Leisler’s son-in-law, having married his daughter Mary just before their arrest). Bayard talked Sloughter into signing their death warrants; it was later alleged that he took advantage of the governor when he was drunk. The Assembly concurred, and on a rainy May 16, 1691, the two were taken “on a sledge” to the gallows on the eastern edge of what is now City Hall Park.
Leisler spoke briefly, begging forgiveness for the errors and excesses of his regime and insisting on the purity of his motives. “This confused City & Province,” he said, needed “more wise & Cunning powerful Pilotts than either of us ever was.” Milborne, always the more defiant, swore that he would have his day of reckoning with his enemies “before gods tribunal.” No carpenter would provide a ladder for the scaffold, so Dominie Selyns fetched one himself, and the executions proceeded while the crowd sang the Seventy-ninth Psalm: “Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name. For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.”
One eyewitness later recalled that “Milborne was not dead when the executioner took him down from the gallows, and lifted up his arm as if to parry the blow of the axe that was to cut his head off.” Another remembered that “the shrieks of the people were dreadful—especially the women—some fainted, some were taken in labor; the crowd cut off pieces of his [Leisler’s] garments as precious relics; also his hair was