Conceived in Liberty (217 page)

*
Edmund Cody Burnett,
The Continental Congress
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), p. 83.

If the colonies were to fight a war of any length or seriousness against Great Britain, they could obviously no longer rely upon the crown’s monopoly postal service for transmission of their mail. When the final crisis began at the beginning of 1774, and Britain got word of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin, already in hot water, was swiftly removed as the royally appointed deputy postmaster general for America. Franklin’s unceremonious removal reminded the Americans that the postal authorities were empowered to open letters and block delivery of what they thought of as “objectionable matter.” In addition to the threat of the royal post to the freedom of the press, they began to see that postal fees were equivalent to another tax levied on them without their consent.

Extension of the American boycott from British trade to the royal post was thought of first, but it was soon seen that a boycott of a tight monopoly could only be self-defeating, for then no mail would be carried. The solution was set forth by the eminent radical printer William Goddard, publisher of the
Maryland Journal
and the
Pennsylvania Chronicle.
In early February 1774, he proposed an illegal revolutionary “Constitutional Post,” organized and financed by local private sources operating at cost. The post would be built from the ground up, with local officers and provincial postal committees electing a postmaster general. Under Goddard’s leadership, the plan soon flourished, the radical Sam Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence being unsurprisingly enthusiastic about the venture. By the spring of 1775, the illegal, privately organized and financed Constitutional Post had a chain of successful post offices from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Williamsburg, Virginia, and the languishing
royal post in New York and Boston was being forced to discharge postriders for lack of work.

When the Revolutionary War began, the New England and New York provincial congresses removed the onus of illegality from the new postal system. But the Continental Congress, took a little noted step from liberty back to centralized statism in this vital area. In doing this, Congress had been prodded by a committee headed by Franklin who, since his disgrace in England, had been forced to throw in his lot with the American cause. A voluntary, efficient, grassroots postal service had aided the Revolution and replaced the royal post; but at the end of July Congress decided to nationalize the Constitutional Post. It was also decided to expand the postal system southward to Savannah, Georgia, and northward to Falmouth, Maine. Not fortuitously, Goddard, an ardent rebel and founder of the Constitutional Post, was deposed and shunted aside in favor of the old opportunist Franklin, who was chosen to be postmaster general of the new American post, operated by a newly created Postal Department. A colonies-wide governmental post, all too reminiscent of the old centralized royal post, had now replaced the grassroots private postal system.

In any event, under pressure of the growing American competition and its own increasing unpopularity, and further handicapped by being prohibited by the Maryland Provincial Convention, the royal post closed its American doors in December 1775, never to return.

The major weapon of American pressure on Great Britain at the time of Lexington and Concord had been the Continental Association, and after the shooting started, this boycott weapon continued its work with redoubled force. In mid-May 1775, Congress resolved on an absolute boycott of trade with those English colonies that had not joined the association: Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, St. John’s Island, the Floridas, and Georgia—with the exception of radical St. John’s Parish, which sent Dr. Lyman Hall as an accredited delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The boycott succeeding in injuring Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Floridas, but British exports soon made up the gap.

The news of Lexington and Concord sparked the local governments into circulating “defense associations,” a more radical extension of the Continental Association. In New York and New Jersey signers of these mass statements agreed to support any measures of the Continental Congress and the provincial conventions; in more radical Maryland and South Carolina they pledged their lives and fortunes to the rebel cause. Generally, the grassroots associations were soon adopted by the provincial conventions, which circulated the mass oaths to all adult males, taking the precaution of publicizing the names of any who refused to sign—especially in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and South Carolina. The new, more radical defense associations understandably superseded the Continental Association in the support of the public.

The New York associations responded to the electric news of Lexington and Concord on April 23 by immediately putting leadership into the
hands of the leaders of the radical forces, Isaac Sears and John Lamb. Organizing parades in the towns, Sears and Lamb called on the people of New York to arm themselves in defense of their “injured rights and liberties.” Shipments of provisions for General Gage’s forces in Boston were quickly stripped by a mob led by Sears, Lamb, and Peter Livingston. Sears and Lamb also broke into the City Hall Arsenal and seized and distributed the muskets and gunpowder inside. Armed citizens patrolled the streets, and Sears and Lamb hastily drilled their followers.

Revolutionary popular rule prevailed. Hated Tory printer James Rivington was forced to flee to the safety of a British warship; the Reverend Myles Cooper and other Tory Anglican clergymen of New York went into hiding; and an armed mob, led by Sears, forced the collector of customs to surrender the keys to the customs house, which was promptly shut down. Sears ordered no ships to be cleared for Halifax or British-occupied Boston, and even went so far as to close the Port of New York.

The old, predominantly radical Committee of Sixty, after failing in its bid to run the city, organized a city wide election for a “Committee of One Hundred” as the city’s government. Elections were also called for a provincial congress to unify the whole province. In the election of April 29, two slates contested for the twenty city delegate positions and for the Committee of One Hundred: Sears, Lamb, the artisans, and the Sons of Liberty on the one hand, and a conservative group on the other.

The election was a victory for the conservative Whigs of Robert R. Livingston’s wing of the landed oligarchy and a blow to the Sears-Lamb radicals, who had been weakened by the growing conservatization of the third member of the once great radical triumvirate, Alexander McDougall. The conservatives swiftly moved to tame and bowdlerize the revolutionary movement in New York City. At a conservative-run mass meeting immediately following the election, headed by Isaac Low and Robert Livingston, a defense association drafted by the highly conservative James Duane, John Jay, and Peter Van Schaack pledged to carry out the measures of the Continental and provincial congresses. This was a seemingly bold and sturdy step, but actually, it channeled the revolutionary movement in New York into passive, legal measures and shunted aside the extralegal activities of Sears and Lamb.
*

The newly elected Committee of One Hundred quickly resolved to offer this defense association to every citizen of the city and to record the names of those refusing to sign. Within a month, 1,800 citizens of New York City had signed. The Committee of One Hundred also mobilized and drilled the militia of the city, and sale of arms to Tories was prohibited.
The swift military mobilization performed two functions, one revolutionary, the other repressive. On the one hand, the militia prepared against an expected British invasion of New York City; on the other, its actual concrete function was the centrist one of keeping the Sears-Lamb radicals under wraps.

The meeting of the first New York Provincial Congress on May 22 marked the first highly significant expansion of the revolutionary movement from the city to the whole province, which had until then been conspicuously lacking in revolutionary fervor. The congress expanded the defense association of April 29 to the entire province, and county committees were selected to offer the association to every inhabitant. Although no penalties except public obloquy were attached to nonsigners, by September the patience of the Provincial Congress had worn thin. It resolved on September 1 that “although this Congress have a tender regard for freedom of speech, the rights of conscience, and personal liberty,” the public safety required a stern crackdown upon those withholding allegiance not only from the provincial and Continental congresses, but even from county and district committees, all of which were extralegal and spontaneously created bodies. In two weeks the Provincial Committee of Safety, the Provincial Congress’ executive arm, pressed further to force the disarming of all nonsigners of the association, who were presumed to be ipso facto rejectors of the authority of the revolutionary bodies. While this step was too radical for the Congress that autumn, the following spring it agreed to the forced disarming of all nonsigners, who were then jailed at their own expense.

Whig rule in New York was beset by many problems not encountered so virulently elsewhere. Most important was the highly conservative tinge of New York opinion; a growing and active minority of Tories faced a Whig majority shot through with conservative, neo-Tory sentiment, thereby playing into Tory hands. Outright Tory were the DeLancey wing of the landed oligarchy, the Anglicans (concentrated in New York City), and oppressed tenants whose landlords were Whigs (e.g., Livingston) and who hoped to gain by opposing their masters. Thus the inner contradictions of New York’s drive for liberty that acquiesced in oppression of tenants arose to plague the revolutionary cause.

When the association was circulated throughout New York, it was found that Tories were in a majority on Long Island, overwhelmingly so in Queens and Richmond counties, where they prevented the election of deputies, and very strong in parts of Westchester, Albany, and Dutchess counties, and in New York City. The military effort of New York was thereby gravely crippled, and few men or supplies, and no money, could be furnished by New York for the crucially important invasion of Canada.

While outright Tories were unusually strong in New York, even the dominant conservative Livingston Whigs were eager for reconciliation with England. Only in New York was it credible that as late as the end of May 1775, the Provincial Congress should adopt the reconciliation report of the highly conservative Gouverneur Morris. Morris’ principles, obsolete elsewhere in the colonies, approved Britain’s right to regulate American foreign commerce but not domestic affairs and moved along the lines of Galloway’s old defeated plan of union with Great Britain.

So timorous were the Livingston Whigs, that at the end of August when Lamb, under Provincial Congress authority, attempted to strip the Battery port of royal authority and a British ship opened fire, the Whigs totally succumbed to Gov. William Tryon’s demand and left the cannon alone, even continuing to supply the British ships. When the Continental Congress recommended jailing all persons inimical to the American cause, and especially royal officials, the Whig rulers of New York City hastened to assure Royal Governor Tryon of his permanent safety. Further, in early November, when the Continental Congress urged New York to seize all British military stores in the city, the Whigs flatly refused. What sort of a revolutionary war was this? New York was clearly a pesthole for revolutionary activities.

Rendered desperate by the dead hand of the ruling Whigs, the New York radicals decided they had to carry on the Revolution by themselves. In early June, before Montgomery and Schuyler marched for Montreal, Marinus Willett defied the Provincial Congress and raided the baggage train of the royal governor embarking for England. An ordnance warehouse was looted and a royal barge burned. Sears, backed by Montgomery, decided to seize Tryon and take him to Connecticut in the summer of 1775, but he was overruled by the oligarchs, Schuyler and Washington. Finally, the defiance by New York of the Continental Congress on seizing crown military stores and royal officials was too much for Sears; it was obvious to him that he could not fight a revolution in New York, and he left for Connecticut in early November.

As for the other radical leader, John Lamb, he joined the army and participated in the invasion of Canada, falling wounded and captured, like so many other American leaders, at the battle of Quebec. Meanwhile, the third radical triumvir, Alexander McDougall, the last remaining in New York, continued to shift ever more steadily rightward into the Livingston camp. Thus, with their great leaders gone or recreant, New York radicalism and the Sons of Liberty were dealt a staggering and decisive blow, a blow which such new leaders as Daniel Dunscomb and William Goforth could not hope to repair. New York was now deprived of a Left; and remained only with a strong Tory Right and a conservative, fainthearted, Livingston Center-Right.

*
Cf. Roger J. Champagne, “New York’s Radicals and the Coming of Independence,”
Journal of American History
(June 1964), p. 24.

Throughout the rebellious colonies developed the pattern of governmental authority, largely devoted to fighting the war of the Revolution and exercised by illegal representative bodies, provincial congresses, or conventions. Realizing that the executive function should be inherently subordinate to the lawmaking function, the rebels created a highly democratic system: making committees of safety—operating committees of the legislature—the major executive arms of the provinces, which could function when the legislatures were not in session. On the local level, the old committees of inspection, observation, and correspondence, which had enforced the Continental Association, naturally evolved into new city and rural committees to run the war, specifically to raise and operate the militia and especially to crush dissenting Tories.