The Sons of Liberty in New York

In November 1763 the guns of Fort George in New York City fired a salute as Sir Jeffery Amherst, the general who had conquered Canada, embarked for home. Major General Thomas Gage came down from Montreal to take over the command of the British army in North America. Amherst sailed from Sandy Hook on November 19, leaving his successor a set of papers titled "Papers Delivered by Major General Sir Jeffery Amherst, on his giving up the Command of the Troops in North America, to Major General Gage." Among them was a report suggesting that the commander in chief keep his headquarters at New York or Philadelphia.^[1] Gage kept it at New York. For most of the next decade the city was the military capital of British America.^[2]

Twelve years later, on October 19, 1775, the royal governor of New York, William Tryon, left his residence and went aboard the Halifax packet in the harbor. He would govern, so far as he governed at all, from the deck of a ship.^[3] Gage had already sailed for England from Boston eight days earlier, recalled after Bunker Hill.^[4] It is easy to assume that royal government would hold firmest in the city where the army kept its headquarters. In New York it ended up floating offshore. The city answered instead to a committee its own inhabitants had elected and to a Provincial Congress. Many of the men on that committee had first learned to act together in the streets, as Sons of Liberty, facing soldiers who answered to Gage. They had burned the lieutenant governor's coach under the guns of the fort, raised five liberty poles while soldiers cut down four of them, and emptied a sea captain's tea into the harbor. This is the story of those twelve years.

A Garrison City

New York in 1763 was a busy port crowded into the lower end of Manhattan. The guns of Fort George stood at the Battery, and barracks for soldiers faced the common to the north, known simply as the Fields. The governor, Robert Monckton, delivered the seals of office to the lieutenant governor, Cadwallader Colden, and sailed for England on June 28, 1763. On July 8 Colden reported to the Board of Trade that he had taken over the administration.^[5] Colden, an elderly Scot and a stubborn defender of royal authority, would become the first target of the crowds in this story.

The quarrel arrived with the Stamp Act, which Parliament passed on March 22, 1765. The Sugar Act of the year before had taxed goods arriving in colonial ports. The Stamp Act taxed paper used inside the colonies, the first internal tax Parliament had ever laid on them directly. Newspapers, legal documents, ship's papers, and many other printed items now had to carry a stamp bought from a government distributor.^[6] The distributor named for New York, James McEvers, resigned at the end of August after hearing how a Boston crowd had wrecked the house of his Massachusetts counterpart, Andrew Oliver.^[7] Colden took the opposite course. He moved into his residence in the fort and asked Gage for a force large enough to prevent sedition and tumult, and Gage undertook to supply what the available quarters would hold. To Sir William Johnson, Colden wrote that McEvers was terrified but that he himself would not be intimidated.^[8]

In October the city became the meeting place of the continent's opposition. The Stamp Act Congress convened in City Hall on October 7, 1765, with delegates from nine colonies.^[9] On the evening of October 22 a ship carrying the stamped paper reached the harbor. The next day about two thousand New Yorkers gathered along the Battery expecting to see it landed, but it was not landed then. A few days later, by Colden's account, the packages came ashore from the Garland "at noonday without a Guard" and were carried into Fort George.^[10] On October 31, the day before the act took effect, the city's merchants agreed to stop importing British goods until it was repealed.^[11]

Under the Fort Guns

The night of October 31 brought a warning. A crowd in three squads went through the streets crying "Liberty," breaking lamps and windows and promising to pull down houses the next night. The real protest came after dark on November 1, 1765, the day the act took effect, and it had plainly been planned. In the Fields a gallows had been raised, and on it hung an effigy of Colden with a stamped paper in its hand, which "he seem'd to court the People to receive." A drum hung at its back, and a label on its breast was "supposed to allude to some former Circumstances of his Life." Beside it hung "the grand Deceiver of Mankind," with a boot in his hand, as the newspaper report put it. A second party carried another effigy of Colden through the streets in a chair, broke open his coach house at the fort, took out his coach, and set the effigy on top of it.^[12]

The two parties met and carried gallows, effigies, and coach in procession to the gate of Fort George. They knew the guns inside were loaded, and they could see soldiers lining the ramparts. Accounts describe men coming up to the walls and daring the garrison to fire. It held its fire.^[13] The crowd then tore away the fence around the Bowling Green and piled the wood around the gallows. There, "under the muzzles of the Fort guns," it burned the effigies and the coach, along with a chaise and two sleighs from Colden's coach house, and reduced "the Coach, Gallows, Man, Devil, and all to Ashes."^[14]

Part of the crowd then marched to Vauxhall, the house of Major Thomas James of the Royal Artillery, the officer in charge of the fort's guns. According to the New-York Gazette, James had "incurred the resentment of the public, by expressions imputed to him" during the dispute over the stamps. The crowd carried off or destroyed every article in the house.^[15] A week later Colden sent him to London with his dispatches, telling the secretary of state that James would "be able Sir to inform you of everything that has passed." James afterwards gave evidence in London about the fort and the temper of the town.^[16]

On November 2, Colden declared that he would "do nothing in relation to the Stamps" and would leave the matter to the new governor, Sir Henry Moore, on his arrival.^[17] His council then advised him that the city was "in perfect annarchy" and that defending the fort would mean destroying the town. Colden asked Gage for his advice, and Gage agreed. On the evening of November 5, Colden handed the seven packages of stamped paper to Mayor John Cruger and the Common Council. They signed a receipt and had the packages carried to City Hall while a crowd estimated at five thousand cheered.^[18] The act was never enforced in New York.

King Sears

The men who organized such crowds did not sit in the Assembly or on the council. The best known was Isaac Sears, a shipmaster who had made his name as a privateer during the Seven Years' War and afterwards traded out of New York to the West Indies. Colden told Sir William Johnson that the people of New York were "surprisingly excited to sedition by a few Men."^[19] Captain John Montresor of the army engineers, keeping his journal in the city, called Sears a ringleader and once recorded a mob of two or three thousand on the common "headed by Sears."^[20] No one in the city could bring a crowd into the street the way Sears could. His loyalist enemies came to call him "King Sears."

Two other men appear beside him again and again. John Lamb became the movement's most practiced writer and correspondent, and Alexander McDougall its most famous prisoner. None of the three sat among the families who expected to govern.^[21]

When the merchants' boycott brought the opposition into the open, these men began to call themselves the Sons of Liberty, a phrase taken from a speech in Parliament by Isaac Barré, one of the colonies' few defenders there.^[22] Montresor later recorded that the Sons called the pine post on the common, where they drilled daily, their Tree of Liberty.^[23] In January 1766, when more stamped paper arrived by sea, a crowd boarded the ship, took the stamps, and burned them.^[24] The rioting and threats went on until news of the act's repeal reached New York in May 1766.^[25]

A Piece of Wood

News of the repeal reached the city on May 20, 1766. Within a day or so the Sons had a tall pine mast standing on the common, in plain sight of the soldiers' barracks, inscribed to "his Majesty, Mr. Pitt, & Liberty." Many later accounts date it to the king's birthday on June 4, but Stokes, working from the newspapers, puts it on May 20 or 21. It was the first of five liberty poles the Sons would put up before the war. For the next four years the soldiers kept cutting them down.^[26]

The soldiers of the 28th Regiment, quartered in the barracks, took the pole as an insult, and on the night of August 10 they cut it down. The next day, by Montresor's count, two or three thousand people gathered on the common with Sears at their head. Insults gave way to thrown bricks, and the soldiers answered with bayonets.^[27] A second pole went up on August 12 and stood until September 23, when it too was cut down. A third rose the next day and lasted six months. On the morning of March 19, 1767, after the first anniversary of the repeal, it was found cut down. The Sons raised a fourth pole that same day and cased its lower part in iron. Soldiers tried to cut it, undermine it, and blow it up, and each attempt failed.^[28]

The poles stood for a larger quarrel. The Quartering Act of 1765 required the colonies to supply British troops stationed among them with quarters and other necessities, and New York's Assembly refused to comply in full. In June 1767 Parliament answered with the New York Restraining Act, which forbade the Assembly to pass any law after October 1 until it had provided for the troops.^[29] The Assembly gave enough ground that the suspension never took effect, but Parliament had claimed the power to silence a colonial legislature.^[30] At the end of 1768 the Assembly approved petitions to the king, the Lords, and the Commons protesting against "suspending the legislative power of this colony."^[31]

To the Betrayed Inhabitants

After two dissolutions, a new Assembly was elected in January 1769, and the faction of the De Lancey family controlled it. In December it voted two thousand pounds for the troops in the city, a grant the Sons of Liberty regarded as a surrender.^[32] On December 16, 1769, a broadside signed "A Son of Liberty" appeared in the streets under the heading "To the Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New-York." It warned that "the minions of tyranny and despotism in the mother country, and the colonies, are indefatigable in laying every snare that their malevolent and corrupt hearts can suggest, to enslave a free people." It went on to attack the De Lancey assemblymen and Colden himself.^[33] The Assembly declared it a seditious libel. On December 20 Colden, who was again acting governor, offered a reward of one hundred pounds for the discovery of its author.^[34]

The soldiers of the 16th Regiment of Foot answered in their own way. On the night of January 13, 1770, about forty of them tried to bore into the liberty pole and blow it up with powder. When they were discovered, they burst into Montanye's tavern, where the Sons met, "with drawn Swords and Bayonets." They beat the waiter and broke eighty-four panes of glass.^[35] Two days later a broadside signed "Brutus" called a meeting at the pole. It protested against paying for soldiers who were "not kept here to protect but to enslave us." In the early hours of January 17 the soldiers brought the pole down and left the pieces at Montanye's door. About three thousand people met on the common that day. They resolved that soldiers found out of their barracks after dark, armed or insulting, should be treated as enemies to the peace of the city.^[36]

Golden Hill

The soldiers replied in print. Their handbill mocked the Sons as men who "thought their freedom depended on a piece of wood."^[37] On the morning of January 19, soldiers were posting it near the Fly Market when Sears seized one of them. Another Son of Liberty, Walter Quackenbos, took hold of a second. When a soldier drew his bayonet, Sears threw a ram's horn that struck him in the head, and the two men took their prisoners toward the mayor. Some twenty soldiers came from the lower barracks with cutlasses and bayonets and drew them at the mayor's door, demanding their comrades. The mayor ordered them back to their barracks, and a crowd followed them up to a rise near the present corner of John and William Streets, known as Golden Hill, where more soldiers joined them. A man in silk stockings and buckskin breeches, "suspected to have been an Officer in Disguise," gave the order: "Soldiers draw your Bayonets and cut your Way through them." Only six or seven of the townsmen had clubs or sticks, and those few held their ground.^[38]

The New-York Gazette listed the injuries on February 5. Francis Field, a Quaker, was cut on the right cheek. A tea-water man, a fisherman, a sailor, a lamplighter, and a boy were cut. Another citizen lost two teeth in a second scuffle near the jail, and the next day a soldier ran his bayonet through a woman's cloak. One soldier took a bad cut to the shoulder, and the paper reported "Blood spilt on both Sides."^[39] A letter printed later in a London newspaper claimed that a sailor had died. The New York accounts record wounds and no deaths, and nothing has been found to support the claim.^[40] Because blood was drawn six weeks before the Boston Massacre, Golden Hill is often called the first bloodshed of the Revolution. The label came later, and it is not obvious it belongs here: Stokes, working from the newspapers, gave it to the fight at the first liberty pole on August 11, 1766, three and a half years earlier.

The Common Council refused, by nine votes to five, to allow another pole on either of the two public sites the Sons had asked for. Sears then bought a share of a private lot beside the old site, and on February 6, 1770, the Sons raised their last pole there. According to the New-York Journal, "a hole was dug 12 Feet deep, and a large Pitch Pine Mast erected." It was cased round with iron bars, riveted and hooped, and the wood between the bars driven as full of large nails as it would hold. Six horses drew it from the shipyards with three flags flying, the words on them Liberty and Property, and it went up while the French horns played God Save the King. It stood forty-six feet above ground, with a topmast of twenty-two more, and on that a gilt vane carrying the single word Liberty.^[41] Two days later, after the printer James Parker and his apprentices had been arrested and examined, the authorities arrested McDougall as the author of the "Betrayed Inhabitants" broadside.^[42] He refused to give bail and went to the new jail on the common. His supporters made him New York's John Wilkes, the London radical whose North Briton number 45 had made the number a symbol of liberty. On February 14, the forty-fifth day of the year, forty-five friends dined with him on forty-five pounds of beef steaks. On March 19, the anniversary of the repeal, a company celebrating in the city sent ten of its number to dine with him in the jail and drank forty-five toasts.^[43] The friction eased through that summer.^[44] When McDougall later refused to admit authorship before the Assembly, it committed him for breach of privilege, and in December 1770 he was still signing his letters from the "New-goal."^[45]

At a Proper Hour

The early 1770s were quieter. Then the Tea Act of 1773 let the East India Company ship its tea directly to American consignees, cheaply enough to undersell smuggled Dutch tea while still paying the duty. The Sons of Liberty organized again. A document headed "The Association of the Sons of Liberty of New-York," dated November 29, 1773, laid down five resolutions. The first declared that anyone who should "aid or abet, or in any manner assist, in the introduction of tea" while it was subject to a parliamentary duty "shall be deemed an enemy to the liberties of America." The last promised that whoever broke the resolutions would be shunned: "we will not deal with, or employ, or have any connection with him."^[46] Since the fall, New Yorkers had been speaking of "Mohawks" who would destroy any tea that came. According to the historian J. L. Bell, the name became regularly attached to the Boston Tea Party of December 16 only a century later.^[47]

The company's tea ship for New York, the Nancy, under Captain Benjamin Lockyer, was delayed by storms. She did not reach Sandy Hook until the night of April 18, 1774. The pilot would not bring Lockyer up to the city until the committee gave leave, and the company's consignees would not receive the tea, so Lockyer came up only to get supplies for the voyage home.^[48] That same day, word arrived from Philadelphia that Captain James Chambers of the London had taken eighteen boxes of tea aboard in London. The previous summer, in the words of the New-York Gazette, Chambers had been "one of the First who refused to take the India Company's Tea on Freight."^[49] When the London came up to the wharf on April 22, Chambers denied carrying tea, then admitted it and declared that he owned it himself. The Gazette reported that "the Mohawks were prepared to do their Duty at a proper Hour," but the crowd would not wait. At about eight that evening men boarded the ship and emptied the chests into the harbor while a large crowd watched.^[50] The next morning the city's bells rang, and a crowd gathered to see Lockyer off. "Where is he? where is he?" the people called for Chambers, who had barely escaped the crowd the night before. He left with Lockyer on the Nancy.^[51]

The tea crisis drew the merchants back into the movement. After Parliament closed the port of Boston, the city chose a Committee of Fifty-One in May 1774 to correspond with the other colonies, and in July it named delegates to a continental congress. Isaac Low chaired the committee, and Sears and McDougall sat on it beside merchants who had kept clear of the crowds.^[52] In November a Committee of Sixty was chosen to enforce the Congress's trade boycott, the Continental Association, in the city. The Assembly, meanwhile, refused to follow. On January 26, 1775, it rejected by eleven votes to ten a motion even to consider the proceedings of the Congress. On February 23 it refused, by seventeen votes to nine, to choose delegates to the second Congress. It met for the last time on April 3, 1775.^[53]

Four-and-Twenty Rounds

In the middle of April 1775, after Sears had moved at a meeting that "every man should provide himself with four-and-twenty rounds," the magistrates issued a warrant against him. He was carried before the mayor, bail was demanded and refused, and a mittimus was issued. On the way to the jail his friends took him from the officers and led him in triumph through the Fly, Wall Street, and Broadway to the liberty pole. There he mounted a rostrum in the Fields and put the question whether a Son of Liberty ought to give bail. It was carried in the negative, and Alexander McDougall, standing near him, joined the three huzzas.^[54] Eight days later, at about noon on Sunday, April 23, an express rider brought word that British troops had fired on the militia at Lexington four days earlier. Two vessels from Newport carried the same news, and printed copies soon went up about the city.^[55] Crowds stopped the mails and read the letters. They unloaded two sloops of flour meant for the soldiers at Boston. Toward evening they seized about half the city's arms at City Hall, and a guard of about a hundred men was posted there to secure the rest. Colden, again acting governor while Tryon was in England, called his council together. His council concluded the next day that it had "no Power" to act and could only try to dissuade the people from violence.^[56]

Within days armed men were parading the town and forming themselves into companies. On April 28, according to the diary of the lawyer William Smith, Sears and some 360 armed men called on the customs collector, Andrew Elliot, and took the keys of the Custom House. The port was closed to trade under Parliament's regulations. The merchants, Smith wrote, were amazed but so humbled that they could only "sigh or complain in whispers."^[57] The Committee of Sixty called for the election of a larger body. On May 1 the city elected a Committee of One Hundred, chaired by the merchant Isaac Low, and from then on the committee ran the city's affairs. It was a broader body than the Sons had ever been, with men like Low beside men like Sears. The city also chose deputies to a Provincial Congress, which first met on May 22.^[58]

Two Arrivals

On Sunday, June 25, 1775, New York had two arrivals. Tryon returned from his year in England, and George Washington passed through the city on his way to take command of the new Continental Army outside Boston. Washington told Philip Schuyler, the general he left in command at New York, to watch Tryon but to refer any arrest to Congress, since seizing a governor was "quite a new thing, and of exceeding great importance." Sears had no such scruples. Soon afterward he proposed to seize Tryon and carry him off to Hartford, and he backed down only when Schuyler told him he had written orders from Washington on the subject.^[59] The city corporation drew up the customary address of welcome, but the Provincial Congress objected, and on July 5 the corporation asked Tryon to excuse "their not waiting on him" to present it.^[60] Royal government still existed, and many New Yorkers were loyal to it, but it no longer commanded.

The line between the two authorities was the harbor, where the British warship Asia lay at anchor. The Provincial Congress resolved that the cannon on the Battery should be removed. Late on the night of August 23, while Lamb's artillery company stood guard, Sears and a party of volunteers began hauling them away. A barge from the Asia exchanged musket fire with the men on shore, and the warship then fired her cannon. Drums beat to arms across the town. By morning the volunteers had carried off all twenty-one guns mounted on the Battery.^[61] Tryon's position weakened through the autumn. Early in October he heard from Philadelphia that the Continental Congress had recommended that he be seized. On October 13 Tryon warned Mayor Whitehead Hicks that if he were seized, the commander of the warships in the harbor would demand him back and, if refused, "enforce the demand with their whole power." The city's assurances did not satisfy him. On October 19 he went aboard the Halifax, and later moved to the ship Duchess of Gordon. He governed from the water until the British army arrived the next summer.^[62]

A Government on the Water

When Gage took up his papers in New York in November 1763, the city held the headquarters of an army that had just won a continent. When Tryon went aboard the Halifax, that army's commander had been recalled. The regulars left in the city's barracks that spring had numbered barely a hundred, and the king's governor could not safely sleep on land.^[63] Between those two moments a waterfront crowd had become an organized movement and then something close to a government. The Sons quarreled among themselves and with the merchants and lawyers who joined the cause later, and many New Yorkers never accepted their authority. On November 23, 1775, a month after the window of this story closes, Sears and about seventy-five horsemen from Connecticut rode into the city and carried off the type of the loyalist printer James Rivington. The young Alexander Hamilton wrote that he could not help "disapproving and condemning this step."^[64] The man who had led crowds against the king's soldiers could also lead one to silence a printer.

What changed in those twelve years was the source of authority in the city. In 1765 the crowd could burn a coach and force the lieutenant governor to give up the stamps, but it could not govern. By 1775 the same men, joined by merchants and lawyers who had once kept clear of the crowds, held the keys to the Custom House, the arms from City Hall, and the guns from the Battery. The king's officers no longer decided what would be done with them. The city's elected committee and the Provincial Congress did. In 1770 the soldiers had mocked the Sons as men who thought their freedom depended on a piece of wood. The poles were small things in themselves, but each time the army cut one down and the Sons raised another, the two sides were arguing over who controlled the city's public ground. By the autumn of 1775 that argument was settled, and the losing side was watching from a ship in the harbor.