Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [92]
All told, according to one report, this boodling was worth a hundred thousand pounds a year to the city. Tavern keepers, whores, retailers, and others flourished as buccaneers swaggered through the streets with purses full of hard money—Arabian dinars, Hindustani mohurs, Greek byzants, French louis d’or, Spanish doubloons. Merchants reaped huge profits (as great as “200,300, yea sometimes 400” percent, according to the Rev. John Miller) on silk carpets, muslins, ivory fans, ebony and teakwood chairs, East India cabinets, looking-glasses, vases of hammered silver and brass, and other exotic merchandise whose provenance didn’t always bear close scrutiny. The most successful built fine new residences, prompting Dr. Bullivant to remark on the “multitudes of greate & Costly buildings” that went up in New York during Fletcher’s administration.
Few New Yorkers did better than Fletcher himself, however. In addition to the protection money he collected from pirates, he extorted bribes from licensed Indian traders, bilked the customs service, padded military payrolls, and embezzled funds raised to pay the provincial debt. “He takes a particular delight in having presents made to him,” wrote Peter Delanoy, the former Leislerian mayor, a trait that “has found employment for our silversmiths and furnish’d his Excellency with more plate (besides variety of other things) than all our former Governours ever received.” Altogether, his profiteering reportedly netted him thirty thousand pounds. His luxuriously appointed residence in the fort, staffed by nineteen servants, was the talk of the town.
THE ANGLICIZATION OF CITY LIFE
While working to attach the anti-Leislerian dominies and oligarchs ever more firmly to his government, Fletcher accelerated the process of anglicization begun by the Judiciary and Ministry acts. In 1693 he informed New Yorkers that Long Island would henceforth be called the Island of Nassau so that the memory of William III “may live forever amongst you” (prior to the Glorious Revolution the new king’s title had been Prince William of Nassau; it survives in Long Island’s Nassau County). That same year Fletcher tightened New York’s connections with other English colonies by reviving regular mail service to New England. Except in the dead of winter, a post rider left New York once every week, following the Post Road through New Haven to Saybrook, where he exchanged mailbags with the Boston rider, who had come down via Providence, Stonington, and New London. Service to Philadelphia was added shortly thereafter.
On November 4, 1694, likewise at Fletcher’s behest, the city celebrated the King’s Birthday with a bonfire—the first instance of what soon evolved into an elaborate annual civic ritual “essential,” in the words of a later royal governor, “to preserve and keep up in the minds of the People that respect which is due to His Majesty.” One day later, another bonfire was lit to commemorate the discovery of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a Catholic scheme to blow up Parliament. Also called Guy Fawkes Day (or Pope Day in New England), the fifth of November was a popular English holiday marked by fireworks, anti-Catholic effigy processions, and general rowdyism. As a spur to political loyalty and patriotism its value in post-Leislerian New York was self-evident, and it too would become a key element of an ever more anglicized municipal culture. At some point early in the eighteenth century, it also became customary for the