USA > New York > Westchester County > History of Westchester County, New York, from its earliest settlement to the year 1900 > Part 30
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Compared, however, with the general disposition of the masses of the people, the course of the assembly toward the crown and its offi- cial representatives was eminently respectful and amiable. The pro- vincial assembly of New York was always entirely loyal to the king in its professions, and also in its true spirit; and even to the last days of its last session, when the clouds of war were about to spread over the land, was averse from being otherwise regarded. It was a relatively small legislative bedy, never having more than thirty mem- bers; and it uniformly contained a large proportionate element of gentlemen of wealth, culture, and select social connections, who, while differing on public questions, and especially on the great ques- tion of colonial rights, had an abiding respect for the forms of attach- ment to the crown so long as those forms were not abrogated. In- deed, despite the characteristic stubbornness of the assembly toward the governors, it was not wholly unamenable to executive persua- sion, even upon critical occasions of popular feeling. Concerning the burning issue of supplies for the troops, which was coincident with the Stamp Act agitation, it first assumed a position of uncompro- mising resistance, refusing to furnish not only beer and cider, but such absolutely necessary articles as fnel, lights, bedding, cooking utensils, and salt as well. Yet from this radical stand it gradually receded, granting first one item and then another. The measure of parliament practically extinguishing the New York assembly-
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which was an act of diabolical tyranny if over there was one-was met not with scornful defiance, but with submission! li is true that the assembly continued to give sufficient trouble to the governor, but it cansed quite as much dissatisfaction to the revolutionary spirits among the citizens, who could not brook the thought that the representative body of the people should be in the least sub- servient to their assumed masters. In the vacillating record of the assembly is certainly to be found the explanation of the general impression which has always existed and probably never will be quite removed, that New York was comparatively a conservative and relnetaní factor in the movement of the thirteen colonies for inde- pendence-an impression which is most unjust, noi to be encouraged for a moment by any historical student who impartially examines the evi- dences of the true disposition of the people of New York Province through- ont colonial times.
The several conspicuous examples of this characteristic popular disposition which have been noted in the progress of our narrative need not be multi- plied here. A few words respecting its more important special relations are, however, necessary to a proper muider- standing of general conditions before resuming the thread of the story.
CADWALLADER COLDEN.
Lieutenant - Governor Cadwallader Colden, who occupied the chief magistracy of the province for most of the time from de Lancey's death until the Revolution-an able and well-intentioned man, but an extremist in the assertion of the prerogatives of the crown,-very instructively summed up the par- tisan situation in one of his official reports to the British ministry. Writing on the 21st of February, 1770, soon after the Golden Hill con- fliet, he said: " The persons who appear on these occasions are of in- ferior rank, but it is not doubted that they are directed by some per- sons of distinction in this place. It is likewise thought they are en- couraged by some persons of note in England. They consist chiefly of dissenters, who are very numerous, especially in the country, and have a great influence over the country members of the assembly. The most active among them are independents from New England, or educated there, and of republican principles." On the other hand, said Governor Colden, " the friends of goverment are of the Church
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of England, the Lutherans, and the old Dutch congregation, with several Presbyterians." From this classification the great prepon- derance of aggressive sentiment in the province is a very manifest fact. The " dissenters " were, indeed, overwhelmingly in the major- ity. Even in our County of Westchester, where powerful inthiences were arraved on the side of the Church of England, its adherents did not compare in numbers with those of other denominations. Accord- ing to a list compiled by the Rev. W. S. Coffey, of Mount Vernon, of the church edifices erected in this county previously to the Revolu- tion, only seven of those structures belonged to the Church of Eng- land, while nineteen were built by other congregations, including "Independents," Friends, Presbyterians, Huguenots, Reformed Dutch, and Reformed Protestant. Governor Colden's enumeration of the Lutherans, the old Dutch, and " several Presbyterians " among the " friends of government " is merely a recognition that Toryism did not wholly depend for support upon the aristocratie church. The Lutherans, or Germans, and the " old Dutch," belonging to an alien race, deliberate, slow, easily satisfied with moderately free institu- tions, accustomed by all their traditions to live under authority with- ont very jealously serutinizing its nature or limiting its bounds, had ways of thinking quite foreign to those of the restless propagandists of American liberty, whom, indeed, they neither understood nor de- sired to understand. It was not a quarrel of these German and Dutch aliens; as a rule, they felt only a languid interest in it, and held aloof from it until forced to choose sides, when, as a rule, fol- lowing the conservative instincts of their natures, they preferred the side of established order to that of revolutionary convulsion. They really constituted a passive element, and were loyalists mainly in the sense that they were not disturbers of the prevailing conditions. As for the " several Presbyterians " claimed by Governor Coblen as belonging to the anti-revolutionary party, his application of that diminutive numerical to them was well chosen. In earlier times the name " Presbyterians" was generic for all who were not of the "Court " party-that is, for all who arrayed themselves politically against the " Episcopalian," or arrogant ruling, class-the Church of England having been the institution of those who cherished pe- culiarly their British breeding and antecedents, holding themselves as a superior society amid a mixed citizenship of colonials, and, con- sistently with such pretensions, forming an always reliable prop for the crown and the crown's officers. To be a " Presbyterian " in the political meaning of the word in New York at that early period was to be identified with the factions populace, the populace of Smith and Alexander, Chief Justice Morris and Peter Zenger, al-
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though that populace was far too respectably led for the designa- tion ever to have been one of derision. Later, the party names Whig and Tory came into vogue. At the time when Governor Colden made the above quoted analysis of popular sentiment in the province the Presbyterian religious seet, like every other non-conformist Eng- lish-speaking denomination, was almost solidly against British op- pression, with only here and there an influential opponent of the popular cause.
Nor did the defenders of the crown at all hazards make up in relative influence and ability what they lacked so distressingly in numbers. With all their boasts of superiority, the Tories of New York have left few names remarkable for anything more meritorions than proud faithfulness to the British monarchy, which faithfulness, moreover-as, for example, in the lamenta- ble case of our Frederick Philipse,-was prompted quite as often by miseal- culating conceptions of the chances of the war as by nervous scorn for sordid self- interest. On the other hand, the contributions made by New York to the roll of Rey- olutionary patriots of the more eminent order are im- pressively numerous. From whatever aspect the state of KING GEORGE III. political society in New York on the eve of the Revolution is viewed, the advantage was with the friends of freedom.
The immediate causes of the Revolution were the enactments of parliament for taxing the colonies, the uncompromising resistance with which these measures were met in America, and the conse- quent resentment of Great Britain, leading to new manifestations of various kinds. The triumphant conclusion of the French and In- dian War, by which Canada was wrested from France and made a part of the colonial empire of England, was an mixed blessing for the people of The thirteen colonies. It put an end forever to a con-
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dition which had been a standing menace to their peace and pros- perity-the existence of a hostile neighbor at the north. The col- onists had cheerfully borne their part in the great achievement, and, if properly appealed to, would have discharged as cheerfully their share of the resulting indebtedness. But the British government had grown weary of submitting to the caprices of the colonial as- semblies in the matter of money grants, and, in looking to America after the close of the war for financial assistance on a substantial scale, resolved to make that necessity the occasion of some decided changes in the former order of things, The changes determined upon were, in their essential details, startling innovations. The assem- blies were required to abandon their old practice of limiting, in amount or as to time, the supplies demanded by the governors, and to obediently vote them without discussion. They were to vote the civil list first of all and without question, which meant that all the royal officers were to be made independent of any disfavor con- ceived toward them by the popular assemblies; and, as a logical sequel to this, tenure of office was to be in future at the royal pleasure, without reference to " good behavior." In order that the operation of these and other plans might not be interfered with by possibly conflicting provisions in existing colonial charters, all such charters were put to an end. The drastic navigation laws, which had always been a crying grievance, were to be rigidly enforced. Finally, the colonies were to be taxed directly by parliament, through the me- dium of stamped paper, whose use was to be obligatory in all mer- cantile transactions, and even for marriage licenses. And as a means for compelling acquiescence in the new regulations a stand- ing army of ten thousand men was to be sent over and quartered on the Americans, who were required to pay toward its maintenance some £100,000 annually, or one-third of the entire cost. There was a pretense that the purpose of the troops was to afford protec- tion to the colonists, but no one was deceived by it.
Early in the year 1765 the Stamp Act was introduced in parlia- ment, and on the 22d of March it received the signature of the king. The time appointed for its taking effect was the 1st of November. As soon as the news of its passage reached America, measures were set on foot for offering as effective an opposition as possible to its enforcement. Communications on the subject were exchanged by the various colonial assemblies; and it was decided to hold a gen- eral congress of the colonies to discuss the matter and to take steps for united action. This body came together on October 7 in the assembly chamber of the city hall in New York, twenty-eight dele- gates being in attendance, representing nine of the thirteen colonies.
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The delegates from New York were John Cruger, Robert R. Living- ston, Philip Livingston, William Bayard, and Leonard Lispenard. Strong resolutions were adopted, as well as petitions to the king, the house of lords, and the house of commons, for the repeal of the act. On October 23 the ship bearing New York's consignment of the stamped paper arrived in the harbor. This was the signal for aggressive popular demonstrations, which were so formidable and wore attended by such significant evidences of the determination of the people to prevent the enforcement of the art and of the gen- eral co-operation of the merchants in that purpose, that the govern- ment did not dare attempt its execution. Indeed, the first packages of stamped paper were, at the request of the citizens, turned over to the city corporation for " safe keeping," and upon the arrival of a second shipment from England the vessel bringing it was boarded by a deputation of the people and the packages were taken ashore and burned. But the most powerful weapon used by the inhabitants of New York against the Stamp Act was the celebrated "Non-Importa- tion Agreement." This was adopted on the evening of October 31, 1765, by some two hundred New York merchants, at a meeting held in Burns's coffee house. They pledged themselves to import no goods from England until the Stamp Act should be repealed. The merchants of Philadelphia adopted a like agreement on November 7, and those of Boston on December 1. The consequences were immediately felt by the shipping publie in England, and were so disastrous that pres- sure was brought to bear upon parliament, which resulted in the repeal of the act on February 22, 1766, less than a year after its pro- mulgation. The event caused great rejoicing in the City of New York. The king's birthday, the 4th of June, was made the occasion of a grand celebration, one of whose incidents was the erection of a liberty pole under the auspices of the Sons of Liberty. This organ- ization was a secret confraternity of the more radical element of the people, with ramifications throughout the colonies. It appears to have been full fledged at the time of the taking effect of the Stamp Act, since the thoroughly organized resistance to the act which was offered by the people at large was uniformly traceable to its members. The Sons of Liberty were the mainstay of the whole pop- ular agitation against British oppression and in favor of American independence from the time of the passage of the Stamp Act until the championship of their cause became the business of armies in the field.
The Stamp Act repeal was followed by a year of quiet. But in May, 1767, another parliamentary scheme for taxing the colonies was instituted, which imposed port duties on many articles of com-
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mon use, including glass, paper, lead, painters' colors, and tea. Al- though intense feeling was excited throughout the colonies by the new law, two years passed by before a systematic policy of effective opposition was entered upon. Then, in the spring of 1769, the mer- chants of New York again met and formulated a second Non-Impor- iation Agreement, under which no English goods, with but few ex- ceptions, were to be purchased so long as the duties should remain in force. The mercantile communities of Philadelphia and Boston were somewhat tardy in assenting to this instrument, but by the fall they gave in their adhesion. Again the British ministry, ap- palled at the falling off in American trade, was forced to yield, and in 1770 all the duties objected to, ex- cept that on tea, were annulled. Meantime New York, while obsery- ing to the letter the obligations of the Non-Importation Agreement, had great cause of complaint against Boston and Philadelphia, where it. was secretly violated on a large scale by the merchants. Exasperated at this lack of faith, the New Yorkers, after the abrogation of all the taxes except on tea, retired from the agree- ment, which thereafter fell to the ground in the other cities as well. It was, however, generally under- stood that no tea should be imported whilst the tax endured-an under- standing which, despite the greater historic fame in that connection en- WILLIAM PITT. joved by Boston on account of her so-called " Tea Party," was executed with equal determination and success in New York. For some three years practically all the tea bought in America was from England's European commercial rivals. Finally, in 1773, the Brit- ish cabinet attempted a master stroke. They rescinded the large export duty taxed on tea leaving British ports, retaining, however, the small import duty of three pence per pound on American impor- tations of the article. The Boston Tea Party occurred on the 16th of December, 1773. Up to that date no tea had arrived at Now York, but more than a month previously careful arrangements had been made by the Sons of Liberty and others to prevent the landing
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of any and all the packages that should be brought there. Two tea ships, the " Nancy " and the " London," came into port the next April. One of them was obliged to return to England without de- livering her cargo, and the other was boarded by the Sons of Lib- erty, who, breaking open the chests, threw the tea into the East River.
The rejection of the tea by Boston had already made it manifest to the king and his ministers thai no plan for taxing the colonies by direct action of parliament could succeed through the operation of the ordinary forms of law, and that the time had come to resori to extremities. Early in 1774 an act known as the Boston Port Bill was passed-a punitive measure, designed to coerce the city by closing her port. News of the proceedings reached New York on the 12th of May. It was instantly recognized that a like fate was undoubtedly in store for New York, and accordingly a great meeting was held, under the joint auspices of the Sons of Liberty and the more dig- nified classes of the community, presided over by Isaac Low, a prom- inent merchant, a leading member of the Church of England, and, although a sympathizer with the cause of liberty, well known for his comparatively moderate principles. Ont of this meeting re- sulted the formation of the New York " Committee of Correspond- once," consisting of fifty-one members, which assumed the direction of the popular movement throughout the province, and whence the measures taken for organizing the country districts in behalf of American liberties emanated. From the creation of the committee of correspondence dates the beginning of the first established means for bringing the patriotic sentiment of Westchester County into ac- tive co-operation with that of the American people at large.
In that truly astonishing production, the late Henry B. Dawson's " Westchester County During the American Revolution," 1 a labored attempt is made to establish the reasonableness of the author's fa- vorite dogma that the Revolution was a grievous offense to the good and loyal people of om county, and found little or no favor among them, at least in the formative state of things. Mr. Dawson regards it as scandalously improbable that the honest, discreet, humble, and virtuous inhabitants of this strictly rural county, fearing God and loving their lawful king, could have had anything in common with the greedy, smuggling merchants and unblushing political dema-
1 Although this performance of Dawson's is very elaborate, it is really but a fragment, terminating with the battle of White Plains. It was undertaken by its anthor as a contribu- tion to Scharf's History, and occupies two hundred and eighty pages of the first volume of
that work. Notwithstanding the enormons labor manifestly expended upon It, it possesses Utile interest for the general reader, being prodigiously formal in Its style and burdened with excessive redundancies. It is pro-eminent- ly one of the curlosities of historical Iterature.
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gogues of New York City, who stirred up the naughty rebellion and prepared woe and havoc for the poor, loyal countryman. "Such a community as that which constituted the County of Westchester," says he, " a community of well-situated, intelligent, and well-to-do farmers, diligently and discreetly attending to its own affairs, with- out the disturbing influences of any village or county coterie, has generally been distinguished for its rigid conservatism in all its relations; and such a community has always been more inclined to maintain those various long-continued, well-settled, and generally satisfactory relations with more than ordinary tenacity, preferring very often to continue an existing inconvenience or an intangible wrong, to which it had become accustomed, rather than to accept, in its stead, the possibility of an advantage, indefinitely promised, in an untried and uncertain change." This curions theory he sup- ports in his application of it to Westchester County by the single tangible statement that " there is not any known evidence of the existence, at any time, of any material excitement among these farm- ers, on any subject." It is of course unprofitable to discuss either the general proposition of Mr. Dawson concerning the uniform nat- ural conservatism of intelligent rural communities, or his claim that this county had always before the Revolution been exempt from po- litical excitement. In view, however, of Mr. Dawson's reputation as a minute and entirely well-meaning historical writer-a reputa- tion appreciated especially by his many surviving friends in West- chester County,-his study of our Revolutionary period can not, in a work on the general history of the county, escape the passing criti- cism which its spirit merits, as, on the other hand, the abundant his- torical data that we owe to his researches can not escape grateful recognition. It is greatly to be regretted that to an essay prepared with so much painstaking he should, on grounds not only the most unjustified but the most trivial, have given a general tendency of such extreme unacceptability to American readers. We have char- acterized his performance as astonishing, and we know of no other fitting term to be applied to a cynically pro-Tory account by an American historian, more than a century after the Revolutionary War, of the course of that struggle in a county distinguished for prompt acceptance and unfaltering and self-sacrificing support of the issue of liberty under the most difficult and menacing circumstances imaginable.
During the ten years from the passage of the Stamp Act, in 1765, to the end of the provincial assembly, in 1775, the county (including the Manor of Cortlandt and the borough Town of Westchester) was
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represented in the assembly, for longer or briefer periods, by Colonel Frederick Philipse (30), Peter de Lancey and John, his brother, Judge John Thomas, Philip Verplanck, Pierre Van Cortlandt, Isaac Wil- kins, and Colonel Lewis Morris (3d). Philipse and Thomas served continuously throughout that period, both sitting for the county. Van Cortlandt succeeded Verplanck as member from Cortlandt Manor. Morris was a delegate for only one year. The de Lanceys and Wil- kins were from Westchester Borough, Wilkins being assemblyman during the four closing years (1772-75). James de Lancey, son of Peter and a nephew of the chief justice, in addition to his duties as high sheriff of Westchester County, represented a New York City constituency during the period in question. With the names of Philipse, the de Lanceys, Van Cortlandt, and Morris the reader is already familiar. They will recur prominently in the succeeding pages. Philipse and James de Lancey were stanch opponents of the whole Revolutionary programme; Van Cortlandt and Morris were as stanch supporters of it. John Thomas was judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Westchester County in 1737-39, and again from 1765 to 1776. He was a son of the Rev. John Thomas, a missionary and rector of the Church of England. Judge Thomas was a very prominent citizen of Rye, and one of the most consistent and valu- able advocates of independence, dying a martyr to the cause in a prison in New York City in 1777. Isaac Wilkins, of Castle Hill Neck, in the Borough of Westchester, was a brother-in-law of Lewis and Gouverneur Morris, but was on the opposite side politically. He was one of the leaders of the conservative forces in the last pro- vincial assembly, and was suspected of being the author of the noted Tory tracts published over the signature of " A. W. Farmer." lle acted as spokesman for the motley adherents of " Great George, our King," at the county meeting at White Plains in April, 1775, and two months later fled to England. After a varied career, which com- prehended a prolonged residence (subsequently to the war) among the forlorn refugee Loyalists in Nova Scotia, he returned in 1798 to West- chester and became rector of Saint Peter's Church. In the historic assembly of 1775, when the issues for and against aggressive re- sistance to England were sharply drawn, Westchester County's rep- resentatives were Van Cortlandt, Thomas, Philipse, and Wilkins.
It is thus seen that, as concerns representation in the assembly, the opposing parties of liberty and loyalty were exactly balanced in this county. On the one side were Pierre Van Cortlandt and Judge Thomas; on the other, Frederick Philipse and Isaac Wilkins. Phil- ipse, of course, had at his back the whole of his great manor. Wilkins really represented the de Lancey interest, which controlled the Bor-
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