Conceived in Liberty (84 page)

The sudden death of Lord Bellomont in March 1701 ended the liberal interlude in the Northern royal colonies just as it was getting under way. A power vacuum immediately followed in each of the colonies, and competing groups rushed in to try to fill it. In Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Stoughton happily prepared to reassume power. By this time, ordinary conditions were reversed in the colony: the Council was liberal while the House of Representatives had a majority for the royal oligarchy. Stoughton tried to dissolve the General Court and rule alone, but the Council was able to force him to call a special session quickly. In that session the Stoughton-dominated lower house voted to ask the king to promote Stoughton to governor, but the Council angrily defeated the plan.

By late spring 1701, the succession crisis was becoming ever more acute, for the venerable Stoughton was dying. Councillor Wait Winthrop, assuming leadership of the liberal camp, was appointed chairman of a joint committee of the General Court. Making a last try for resumption of self-government unencumbered by the Crown and its oligarchy, Winthrop’s committee recommended to the king a petition for restoration of an elected governor and other elected executive officials to the colony. The Council warmly approved, but again the House of Representatives rejected the plan.

When Stoughton died in July, Winthrop, as the senior councillor, functioned as the chief executive of the colony. The Council, moreover, elected him to succeed Stoughton as chief justice of the Superior Court. In the Council, Elisha Cooke was Winthrop’s chief supporter, while
former Speaker Nathaniel Byfield led the opposition. Massachusetts then decided to send Winthrop as its agent to England, but when he prepared to ask bluntly for resumption of the old Massachusetts charter, the House of Representatives again vetoed the plan.

Wait Winthrop’s little moment of glory disappeared all too quickly. A furious struggle raged in England. Massachusetts’ agent and friend of Winthrop, the liberal Sir Henry Ashurst, was trying desperately to block Joseph Dudley’s appointment as governor. Ashurst, who had helped Increase Mather try to restore the old charter a decade before, suggested that Winthrop be appointed to succeed Stoughton. Ashurst, however, was undercut by the unseemly haste of the General Court in dumping him as its agent and naming one of the Jacobite clique to succeed him. It is true that the court did this after hearing in September of Dudley’s appointment. Ashurst, though, would have had a good chance of having the appointment canceled. Furthermore, Winthrop ruined his chance for a royal appointment by repeating his old call for resumption of the old charter; even his friend Ashurst, a moderate liberal after all, would not go that far. As it was, Dudley, backed by the Board of Trade and letters from his Massachusetts supporters, including the Mathers—now apparently willing to bow to whoever was successfully in power—finally received the appointment as governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in December 1701.

The collapse of the liberal opposition, particularly in the democratically elected House of Representatives, and the supine acceptance of the same Dudley whom the colony had happily imprisoned a dozen years before, were signs of the new spirit that had come to rule over Massachusetts. It was a spirit of resignation to the royal oligarchy and placemen, and a shift from opposition to those attempting to get on the gravy train. No better sign of this shift was the action of Wait Winthrop. A would-be liberal crusader in 1701, the aging Winthrop was happy to become Dudley’s pliant henchman in 1708. But while Dudley was to rule Massachusetts—and New Hampshire—for over a decade, he did succeed at least in reinvigorating a liberal opposition in its traditional home, the lower house. The ever-despotic Dudley moved determinedly to crush the will of the Council and mold it as his creature. For example, the secret ballot was now prohibited in Council meetings. Dudley also tried to dictate to and bully the House, but the representatives, holding the purse, fought back; for example, they kept Dudley on an annual salary of less than 300 pounds. There was thus formed a liberal opposition to the depredations of the royal governor and his allied oligarchy. The pattern of eighteenth-century politics in the royal colonies in America had been woven in Massachusetts.

In New Hampshire the hated John Usher was appointed lieutenant governor under Dudley. The Assembly expressed its opposition to
Usher by failing to vote him a salary. The Allen proprietary claims were pushed in the courts by Usher. But not only did the juries rule against them; even Dudley threw his weight against the feudal proprietary. Dudley thought it better to throw in his lot with the leading merchant oligarchs of the province—with the Waldrons and the Hinckes. The proprietary claims were to be lost in the courts and the people of New Hampshire were finally able to get rid of Usher when he was removed as lieutenant governor in 1715.

The death of Lord Bellomont threw the colony of New York into a turmoil. His lieutenant governor was John Nanfan, a cousin of Bellomont’s wife, who would be expected to carry on the old governor’s policies. But Nanfan happened to be in Barbados at the time. The Council was now in charge and the Council had a Leislerian majority. But the senior councillor and therefore its president was William Smith, one of the most implacable of the anti-Leislerian oligarchy. Smith now claimed that all the governor’s powers devolved on him alone rather than on the Council as a body. But the Leislerian Council quickly overruled Smith and the latter had to bow to its decision, a decision that was later to be vindicated by the Crown.

Their first attempt to take power having failed, the counterrevolutionaries saw that their only hope for power lay in England. And so they began to pepper the Crown with requests and advice. The highly reactionary Nicholas Bayard tried to whip up nationalistic prejudices by complaining that Bellomont had favored the Dutch element. Livingston, Smith, and Schuyler wrote lengthy letters complaining of the regime.

When Lieutenant Governor Nanfan returned to New York in May, he effectively placed his prestige on the Leislerian side. The heated spring elections of 1701 strengthened Leislerian control of the Assembly, which was enhanced by the overthrow by the people of Albany of its local oligarchy. The Leislerians now passed a bill to compensate Jacob Leisler’s son, and moved against the landed monopolists by ordering the payment of taxes and quitrents on all unimproved (arbitrarily granted) land. However, the Leislerians alienated the merchants still further by financing compensations through raising duties on imports. Some Leislerian leaders also succumbed to the temptations of power by violating their own principles, and granted themselves substantial tracts of land; among such were DePeyster, Staats, and Delanoy. The degree of land plunder was, however, very small compared with that of previous grants. The Assembly also proceeded to confiscate the property of Livingston and part of the estate of Van Cortlandt for misappropriation of public funds while in power.

Nanfan cheered the Leislerian reformers on, and Chief Justice William Atwood, newly arrived from England, set himself squarely on the Leislerian
side. But this idyll of liberal reform was not to last. By the end of 1701 the New Yorkers heard with dismay of the appointment of Lord Cornbury as new governor. He was known to be partial to the Tory oligarchy, and was coming over with the hated Richard Ingoldesby and with the former private secretary of Benjamin Fletcher. Rumor had it that the newly appointed councillors were all to be hard-line anti-Leislerians.

The Tory reaction involved in the choices of Dudley, Usher, and Cornbury to succeed the liberal Bellomont was no coincidence. For in England, Toryism was again dominant by 1701 and the Tories were able to strengthen their dominance with the accession to the throne of Queen Anne, in 1702. As an English friend wrote jubilantly to Livingston toward the end of 1701: “Most or all of the knot of Lords whereof the Lord of Bellomont was one are removed and dead.”

But the Leislerians were determined that if they must go out, they would do so with a bang, not a whimper. They determined to leave in a blaze of revenge. The arch-reactionary Nicholas Bayard, on hearing of Cornbury’s appointment, was impudent enough not to conceal his jubilation; he promptly sent Cornbury a congratulatory address signed by eight hundred New Yorkers. Bayard’s address contained bitter indictments of the existing government, including charges of corruption, injustice, and, most serious of all, the willingness to grant the vote to nonfreeholders and to “attack the foundations of property” by annulling the privileged land grants.

Now the Leislerians had the chance to pay back Bayard with some of his own favorite coin. Noting that many soldiers had been induced to sign the petition, the Council indicted Bayard and his aid William Hutchins, New York city alderman and tavernkeeper, for treason and “conspiring to raise sedition and mutiny.” The indictment came under the very law of treason of 1691 that Bayard had helped frame and used so devastatingly against the Leislerians. It soon became known, by the way, that the soldiers knew little of the contents of the petition, but were attracted by free beer or promises provided by Alderman Hutchins.

The trial was arranged quickly, with Atwood as judge and the Leislerian leader, Councillor Thomas Weaver, as prosecutor. In imitation of the trial of Jacob Leisler, the jury was packed—this time against Bayard. The foreman, for example, was a brother of Abraham De-Peyster, a leading Leislerian. Bayard (a Dutchman himself) also protested because the jurors were Dutch and relatively poor. Judge Atwood concluded the trial by virtually demanding a verdict of guilty, which was duly obtained. Convicted of treason, Bayard was sentenced in March 1702 to death; his property was to be confiscated.

John Nanfan, however, did not wish to go too far. Having made his point forcefully, he reprieved Bayard in exchange for the prisoner’s
expressing sorrow for the crime for which he was convicted—a roundabout confession of guilt. Expecting Cornbury to arrive at any time, Bayard refused to make a direct confession. Hutchins was also tried and convicted for treason, and won his reprieve in the same way. Other leading anti-Leislerians, in a panic, fled the colony vowing vengeance against Atwood. Two of the emigres, Thomas Wenham and Philip French, had been indicted for complicity in treason and were now outlawed. They were joined in flight by the Reverend Mr. Vesey, who had propagandized widely against the regime, even though amnesty had been promised to all but one of the exiles. And even Bayard and Hutchins received the benefit of a letter to the Crown from Nanfan, asking for a royal pardon. The prosecutions were never to go beyond giving Bayard and the oligarchs a sampling of their own medicine.

The last great gesture of the Bellomont-Nanfan regime was Nanfan’s ouster of Robert Livingston from the Council at the end of April—the very least punishment, remarked Atwood, that Livingston deserved. But the shades of night were approaching fast. Cornbury was to arrive in early May. And the temper of the oligarchy was revealed in such signs as “God save the king and hang John Nanfan,” and a poem that warned the Leislerians to “wait the approaching change and then lament their fate.”

Lord Cornbury did not disappoint the expectations of either side. Indeed, historians most partial to the oligarchy blanch at Cornbury’s record. Even the arch-Tory historian William Smith, son of the anti-Leislerian leader, admitted, “We never had a governor so universally detested, nor one who so richly deserved the public abhorrence.” His guiding purpose was personal plunder, and “it was natural for him, just as it had previously been for Fletcher, to align himself with that party which needed the most favors and was in a position to pay the most for them.”
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Soon after assuming office, Cornbury ousted the Leislerians from the Council and filled Atwood’s chief justice post with William Smith. He attacked the Leislerians as “troublesome spirits,” and freed Bayard and Hutchins, who were cleared by the Privy Council. After packing the Council, Cornbury dissolved the Assembly, made many English soldiers freemen of New York City, and removed all Leislerian sheriffs from office. Having secured a pliant Assembly, Cornbury proceeded to persecute the Leislerians further. John Nanfan was clapped into jail for years under charge of false imprisonment and misuse of public funds, and was kept there despite repeated orders from England to release him. Nanfan finally escaped, but his property had all been confiscated. Lady Bellomont’s estate was confiscated for Cornbury’s
personal use. One mercy, though: Bayard was not allowed to wreak full revenge; his suits against leading Leislerians and his jurors for damages were disallowed by the Crown and his bill to prohibit any of his judges from holding any government office was too much even for Cornbury and the Assembly.

The new Cornbury-dominated Assembly promptly repealed all the acts of the Nanfan Assembly, and also repealed the Bellomont-secured annulment of the enormous land grants of the Fletcher administration. And while Queen Anne refused to allow this repeal to stand, Cornbury himself returned to the Fletcher policy of huge land grants to favorite oligarchs. Large tracts were granted to Rhinebeck, Livingston, Philipse, Schuyler, Smith, Van Rensselaer, and Heathcote, and the boundaries of the grants were defined so vaguely as to permit the grantees to stretch the tracts a hundredfold. The old feudal grant of Rensselaerswyck was reconfirmed by Cornbury, and a large tract was granted to Cornbury’s relative, George Clarke, the new secretary of the colony. Cornbury was more than able to compensate the landed oligarchy for the setback it had received under Bellomont.

Cornbury also tried to restore the flour monopoly to New York City merchants, and to overload the city’s representation in the Assembly. He also wanted restored the old power to prohibit the export of wheat (thus oppressing the farmers for the benefit of the flourmakers) by executive order.

By this time, however, Leislerians were able to bounce back in the new Assembly; the Assembly was in any case disgusted with Cornbury’s flagrant appropriation of tax funds for his personal use. By 1704 it was refusing to vote any more money unless it was allowed to appoint a treasurer in charge of the public funds. The Assembly was able to win its case in England for “extraordinary” expenses; naturally, it then tended to make all grants of money “extraordinary” ones. The Assembly also denounced Cornbury’s practice of charging ruinous fees to defendants being prosecuted at court.