History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I, Part 65

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1354

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With those partisan catchwords and political maxims which, a very short time previously, had filled the air with their noisiness, before the reader, he will readily determine how much of even revo- lutionary consistency and propriety and integrity there was in those doings which are now under consideration ; but, among such as those by whom those doings were inaugurated and conducted -- among those whose aims were only personal and selfish and wholly regardless of every other principle whatever than that of self-aggrandizement; among whom the supremacy of the general good of the great body of the Colony or of the Continent-the "patriotism" of poets, of professional politicians, and of exuberant eulogists-was only a toy intended for nothing else than for the temporary amusement of their gaping, credulous auditory, while the political prestidigitator who presided over the show, bedizened

with the tinsel which was not what it seemed to be, was secretly perfecting the juggle which was intended to deceive all others than those who were participants in the performance and sharers in the profits to be de- rived from it,-neither consistency nor propriety nor integrity was regarded or even thought of, the cupid- ity of the end entirely justified the unrighteousness of the means; and new governing powers and new rules of conduct and new methods took their places in every Town, throughout the County ; and old obli- gations were disregarded, and old guaranties were ab- rogated, and the safety of persons and of properties rested on other foundations than those which were known to and depended on by those of an earlier period.

The American Revolution had finished its work and was ended : the long-established Government of Law had been crowded aside and, in fact if not en- tirely in form, had given place to a new Government of arbitrary, unbridled Force : thenceforth, the peace of the County and the rights of Individuals and of Property, within the County, sacredly respected even under a Monarchy, were held only by those who pos- sessed them, subject to the unrestrained will of the stronger.

The careful reader will not have failed to see, in what has been written in this narrative and in the testimony which has been adduced to sustain it, the stern fact that, as far as the Colony of New York was concerned, and we write of no other Colony, the opposition to the measures of the Home Goverment, from 1763 until the Spring of 1775, which, subsequent- ly, became more widely known as THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, was not, in the slightest degree, the outcome of a popular movement, in which the great body of the Colonists or any considerable portion of it arose in opposition to a wrong, inflicted or sought to be inflicted by the Parliament of Great Britain or by any other body, on the Colony or on any individ- ual member of it, as has been rhetorically pretended, by orators and poets and historians, from that day until the present ; but, on the contrary, that it origin- ated in the City of New York, among those of the commercial and mercantile classes, relatively few in number, whom, by reason of their greater wealth or of their higher social standing, we may properly re- gard, as tlicy were regarded by themselves, as the aristocracy of the Colony-with few, if any excep- tions, they were those wealthy and enterprising Merchants, of various names and families and parties and sects and nationalities, each of whom had sunk, for all the purposes of that particular movement, whatever of individual or family or partisan or sec- tarian or national animosity, against others, he pos- sessed, combined and acting in a common opposition to all those measures of the Home Government which had tended to break down the unblushing lawlessness of those confederated Merchants, in their entire dis- regard of the Navigation and Revenue Laws of the

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THIE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1774-1783.

Empire, and to enforce on each of those Merchants, in his individual business, that obedience to the Laws which would be no more than his reasonable duty, while it would also tend to the suppression of that corruption of the local Revenue-officers and of that general practise of Smuggling from which he was so complacently acquiring wealth and influence. Except wherein these aristocratic Smugglers employed their ships' crews and the habitués of the doeks and slums of the City, for purposes of intimidation and political effect, the unfranchised masses of the Colonists, in the country as well as iu the City, with very rare excep- tions, and the Freeholders of small estates and those Freeholders, of either large or small degree, who pos- sessed no pecuniary interest in the foreign commerce of the Port, whether inhabitants of the City or of the rural Counties, had no part nor lot in the inception or in the organization or in the promotion of that opposition to the Home Government which, subse- quently, in its more advanced stages, became known, at home and abroad, as THE AMERICAN REVOLU- TION.

In fact, while the aristocracy of the Colony was thus confederatiug and consolidating discordant ele- ments and plotting and breeding disaffection to the Mother Country, the unfranchised Mechanies and Working-men, residents of the City and toilers for their daily bread, with occasional exceptions, pur- sued their respective industrial vocations, peacefully and industriously, without taking any greater interest in the anxieties of their aristocratie neighbors than those "well-born " "Gentlemen in Trade" were taking in their welfare or iu that of their respective families ; while the great body of those who occupied the rural Counties of the Colony, also hard-working and peacefully inelined, knew little of and cared less for what was then disturbing the previously well- sustained quiet of the metropolitan counting-rooms.

It is, indeed, true, in this connection, that the aris- tocratic Merchants and Ship-owners, in the City of New York, had been, during many years, more or less reasonably aggrieved by reason of the govern- inental interference with their well-established and very profitable "illicit trade," to which reference has been made : it is also true that, for the purpose of in- fluencing and, if possible, of intimidating the Home Government, in their opposition to that Home Gov- ernment, because of those assumed grievances, those high-toned lawbreakers had repeatedly resorted to the desperate means of, first, appealing to the maximns and the teachings of the fundamental law ; of employ- ing the former for their partisan slogan, and the latter for the foundations of their passiouate appeals; and, sometimes, second, of employing, directly or indirectly, the floating and the less respectable portions of the population of the City, as superuu neraries on the stage on which they were acting their several parts in the drama of their seeming patriotism-means which were as unreal, in their hands, as their own " patrotism," so

called, was deceptive ; and, particularly, in the last- mentioned of the two means employed, as hazardous as it was fraudulent-but it is also true that, while the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law which they so freely bandied, were only words of convenience, meaning nothing beyond the end for securing which they had been thus employed, their auxiliaries, thus enlisted from among the unfranchised aud lowly, if not from among the vicious, were, by those who employed them, only regarded as temporary employees, engaged for the performance of particular services, of more or less danger and lawlessness ; and not as common heirs to a common inheritance for which both they and those who had thus employed them, as parties possessing an equal interest therein- as the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law, with which both the employers and the em- ployees, iu this instance, were familiar, had clearly indicated to both-were jointly contending.

The American Revolution, as we said in the begin- ning, originated, not in a popular movement of the great body of the Colonists, nor in any considerable number of those Colonists, in opposition to a wrong, inflicted or sought to be inflicted by the Parliament of Great Britain or by any other body, on the Colony or on any individual member of it, but the commercial and mercantile classes, in the City of New York, the aristocracy of the Colony, in their desperate efforts to shelter " the illicit Trade "-the Smuggling-in which they had been so long and so profitably employed, from the obstructions, more than ordin arily effective, which the Home Government had raised against it, subsequent to the establishment of the Peace, in 1763. As we have said, also, the elaborate essays on the "Rights of Man and of Englishmen," on the "consent " which was necessary in order to give validity to Laws, and, generally, on the assumed grievances to which the Colouists had been subjected, all of them the productions of well-paid Counsel or other interested writers, with which the newspapers of that period were filled to overflowing, were nothing else than means employed for the protection of that prolific, but corrupt, source of the wealth of the Mer- chants of the City of New York; and the yells and the outrages, inflicted on both persons and properties, of those who had been employed to give effect to those labored arguments of the press, by what were assumed to have been spontaneous outbursts of popu- Jar resentment against the usurpations of the Home Government-usurpations of individual rights, by the way, which were only the same as those which were subsequently inflicted, in every State, on those who were not Freeholders; and which the Constitu- tion for the United States has always inflicted and continues to inflict on the inhabitants of the several Territories, who have always been and who are, now, taxed without having consented to any such taxation, their Delegates in the federal Congress having had no right, at any time, to vote on any question whatever

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HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

-were no more than additional instrumentalities in the hands of wealthy and nnprincipled lawbreakers, Smugglers, employed for the purpose of sheltering those aristocratic culprits from the penalties which tlre Revenne-laws had imposed on them and, if possi- ble, of enabling them to continue, with impunity, those flagrant violations of morality and of Law which men of less wealth and influence conld not have committed without having been exposed to fine and imprisonment and confiscation of property. This, and nothing else, in fact, constituted the beginning of what has been, more recently, unduly elevated to the dignity of a popular patriotic uprising, in support of violated Rights and for the preservation of the Colo- nies from governmental devastatiou and ruin; and this, in its varions phases, was all there was of that notable Revolution, nntil the "fire-eaters" of Massa- chusetts and Virginia, members of the Continental Congress of 1774, seized the control of that body, which had been convened for nothing else than for the promotion of reconciliation and harmony and peace, and transformed it into an instrumentality of lawless violence, of interual strife, and of a disastrons Rebellion.

The careful reader will not have failed to see, also, in what has been written in this narrative and in the testimony which has been adduced to sustain it, that, while honesty and integrity and humanity and pa- triotism formed no portion of the motives which led the aristocratic Smugglers, in the City of New York, to inaugurate and to sustain a general disaffectiou against the Home Government; and while their aims, in thus creating and fostering a general discon- tent among the Colonists, were purely temporary and selfish, intended for nothing else than to perpetnate their own immediate opportunities to make gain at the expense of the Laws and the morals of the Colouy, the methods which those influential "Gen- "tlemen in Trade" employed for the promotion of those individual and unholy purposes, were better calculated for the production of permanent than for that of temporary results, since they were employed among those, no matter how homely they were, whose recognized leaders were already well-schooled in the theories of political science, which had been employed for the texts of every political essay and of every partisan harangue, for years past, and who, besides having been politically ambitions, were, also, very shrewd and very energetic men ; and, as wealth and a long and successful career in crime are frequently productive of that arrogance and of that recklessness in the selection and employment of means, either for the perpetnation of the opportunities for wrong-doing or for the protection of the offender from the penalties of an ontraged Law, which tend, more surely, to tlie production of disaster than to that of success, so the wealthy and aristocratic culprits, in the City of New York, to whom we have referred, in the instance now under consideration, through the means which they

had employed for the intimidation of the Home Government and by their owu persistent selfish- ness, gradnally produced a new and powerful politi- cal element, adverse to their own pretensions to exclusiveness, to which they had been, previously, strangers. Their want of abilities, as navigators on the tronbled waters of Colonial politics, was painfully evident to all others than to themselves ; and the ad- verse power of the new-formed political element was haughtily disregarded, until it had become so well established that it was enabled not only to assert bnt to maintain its standing.

The character and influence of that new factor in Colonial politics, during the revolutionary era, require a few words concerning its origin, beyond what we have already said of it.

The outlay of wealth can generally secure ingenious advocates for any cause, no matter how unsavory it may be; and, in that of the confederated aristocratic Smugglers of the City of New York, of which men- tion has been made, well-paid Counsel and ready writers for the newspapers, in their eagerness to sup- port their wealthy and liberal connections and clients, in their systematic violation of the written Law of the land and in their determined struggle to retain the "illicit trade " in which they were so profitably engaged, in the absence of better authorities for the support of their impassioncd rhetoric, were obliged to resort to the fundamental and ill-defined theories of political science, with which, through long-continued iteration, the entire body of the inhabitants, the un- franchised as well as the franchised, had already become well acquainted; and, iu their purposes to oppose the Home Government and to shelter their opnlent employers, those who were thus employed, speakers and writers, loudly spoke and glibly wrote of " the natural Rights of Man " and of "the Rights "of Englishmen," of " Magna Charta," and of "repre- "sentation," and of "consent," withont the slightest qualification, as if every man and every Colonist were intended to be included in those general and unqnali- fied terms; as if every man throughout the Colony were intended to be considered the equal of every other man, therein and elsewhere; as if every Colonist of every sect aud party and in every condi- tion of life were entitled, of right, to be recognized and received and entertained, as an equal, socially and politically and in every other relation, by every other Colonist, of high or of low degrec-and, without any qualification, those popular catchwords with which the City had echocd, year after year, meant all these, if they meant anything-all of which, however, in the spirit in which they had been uttered, were audacious fictions, spoken or written in the interest of those who had resorted to them, only for deceitful and illegal and immoral purposes, as would have been quickly seen had "the poor reptiles" who had con- stituted that lowly mass of unfranchised Working- men, directly and unreservedly, at any time, during

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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1774-1783.

that long period, presumed to have asserted, for themselves, their own manhood, and to have claimed, for themselves, those Rights which had been spe- ciously conceded as having properly belonged to them as much as to any others. In the progress of events, however, either on their own motion or on that of their ambitious leaders-the latter, generally of those who, before the confederation of all parties in an opposition to the Colonial policy of the Home Government, had been of the minority, among the Colonial politicians-these Working-men had com- menced to ineasure their own lowliness and their own political insignificance with the standards which had been placed in their hands, by their aristocratic neighbors, for other purposes; to assert their own political manhood ; and to demand a hearing in even the local politics of the day ; and in the efforts which were made by the confederated aristocracy of the City, to relegate that new-born and growing power- the growing power of the great body of the Mechanics and Working-men, throughout the Colony-back to its nornal obscurity and political insignificance, may be seeu the beginning of that ceaseless conflict between the aristocratic and the democratic ele- ments of this mighty Commonwealth, which, hav- ing been continued from father to son, is not yet ended.

As we have already intimated, the confederated aristocracy of New York witnessed the appearance of that new element in the politics of the Colouy, with anxiety and alarm; and it evidently noticed, also, the constituent parts of it, and duly measured its probable strength, and judiciously determined that, in opposing it, "art" would be better suited to ensure success ; than anything of a seemingly unfriendly character would be-in other words, that what ap- peared to be concessions to the working-classes should be inade, but with sufficient of modificatious, in reserve, to neutralize the effect of those seeming con- cessions; and to continue, without abatement, the · control of the confederated party of the Opposition to the Home Goverument, in the Colony, in those aris- tocratie hands which already possessed it. Indeed, the high-toned "Gentlemen in Trade," guided by their acute legal and political advisers, John Jay and James Duane, determined to continue the same sys- teni of contemptuous deceit and treachery which had characterized all their previous political intercourse with the Working-men of the Colony ; and, in doing so, they very clearly indicated, a second time, how ill-qualified they were to navigate the troubled waters of Colonial politics.

were not Merchants, but Lawyers-was really intended quite as much for the adoption of measures which should practically rebuke the evidently growing sense of their own political power which has been recently seen arising among the Working-men and the lowly, throughout the City, if for nothing else, as for the adoption of measures in further opposition to the Home Government, to which it was nominally de- voted ; and, by adroitness in their management of the movement-the master-spirits of that aristocratic as- semblage were not novices in political chicanery- while they really secured, more firmly than ever, the controlling authority in the confederated Opposition to the Home Government, in the aristocracy of the Colony, those master-spirits not only laid the founda- tions of their own and their family's further advance- ment, but they, also, so far placated the disaffected Working-men, by making the greater uumber of their leaders a helpless and powerless minority in the pro- posed Committee of Fifty-one, that peace and harmony of action, thoroughout the entire Opposition, were im- mediately restored-they had again deceived the masses of the people ; and, once more, a share of that confidence which those lowly masses had reposed in their aristocratie neighbors, was entirely forfeited. Although that new-born element was represented iu that Committee of Fifty-one, its representatives were in a powerless minority ; and whatever was done in that body, whether the representatives of the Work- ing-men assented or dissented, was, therefore, in fact, nothing else thau the act of the confederated aristoc- racy. It was not long, however, before that fraudu- lent treatment of the Working-men produced "the " great Meeting in the Fields," and the dissolution of that incongruous alliance, and the resumption of the antagonism of the masses ; and it was not long, also. before the confederation of the aristocracy itself, within as well as without the Committee of Fifty-one, was brokeu by the defection of those who liad been the master-spirits of the organization, who, for the advancement of their own and their family's aspira- tions for place and emolumeut, had become as un- faithful to their aristocratie associates in the Com- mittee and to the political principles which that Con- mittee had so resolutely maintained, as they and those whom they had controlled and guided, in the Com- mittee, a few weeks previously, had been, to the great body of the Inhabitants of the City, by whom that Committee had been really created and vested with authority to represent the entire body of the Opposi- tion, within the City of New York. There was 110 abatement of the previously united opposition to the demands of the Working-men, however; and in each of the new-formed factions of the confederated aristocratic Opposition to the Home Government and in all which they or either of them did, there was the same entire disregard of the political rights of tlie Working-men, thien withont leaders, which had been

The first formal organization of those who were in confederated opposition to the Home Government of that period, which was made within the City of New York and, probably, within the Colony-the Caucus of the confederated Merchants, at Sam. Francis's, in May, 1774, which had beeu evidently assembled under the inspiration of James Duane and Jolin Jay, who | so clearly conspicuous in all the actions of the aristoc-

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HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

racy, from the beginning of the political troubles, within the Colony.

The reader has been made acquainted with the successful opposition which the Committee of Fifty- one had made to the plan of operations which the Boston-men had proposed and insisted on ; and with the successful establishment, instead, of its own pro- iect to call a Congress of the several Colonies, for con- sultation and for the promotion of harmony, iu the party of the Opposition, throughout the Continent. He will remember, also, the narrative of the refusal of the Committee of Fifty-one to permit the Mechanics and Working-men to be represented on the ticket for Delegates to the Congress of the Colonies which it had proposed, and that of the consequent failure to elect its proposed Delegation, when its ticket was submitted to the body of the Freeholders and Free- men of the City, at the Polls. He will remember, also, what has been said of the various movements and counter-movements of the rival factions, after the defeat of the Committee's candidates ; of the treachery to the Committee who had nominated them and to their aristocratic associates, of four of the five candi- dates of the Committee; of the consequent election of those five candidates, in the absence of any other candidates, by the united support, at the Polls, of por- tions of both the aristocratic and democratic elements; of the assembling of the proposed Continental Con- gress, in which there was not a single representative who was in sympathy with or who honestly repre- sented the working masses of the Colonists; of the seizure of the control of that Congress by the " fire- " eaters" of Massachusetts and Virginia and South Carolina, and the consequent trausformation of it, from the instrument for the promotion of reconcilia- tion aud peace, for which it had been specifically created and put in motion, into one for the promotion of rebellion and bloodshed, which was utterly obuox- ious to all, except a very few, of the Colonists through- out the Continent; of the entire neglect, by that Con- gress, to seek that redress of the grievances of tlie Col- onists from those by whom, only, such a redress could have been made, notwithstanding it was for that par- ticular purpose the Congress had been convened, and notwithstanding such a reconciliation was what was most earnestly desired "by all good men ; " and of the readiness of that Congress to inaugurate a system of violence, in each of the Colouies, for which it af- forded ample warrants. He will remember, also, what has been stated concerning the General Assembly of the Colony ; its organization ; its bold and deter- miued opposition to the obnoxious Colonial policy of the Home Government ; its sturdy refusal to become auxiliary to or identified with the Continental Con- gress, notwithstanding it was not less determined in its opposition to the Ministry ; its measures for secur- ing from the Parliament of Great Britain, the only body from whom it could be obtained, a complete re- dress of what the Colonists regarded as grievances ;

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History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I, Part 65

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed Publication date: 1886 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co. Number of Pages: 1354

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1354